e Mississippi, there were eager groups of
settlers pressing against the frontier which the Spanish guarded so
jealously against all comers. The Louisiana Purchase met the momentary
demand, but beyond the Louisiana Purchase, and between the settlers and
the rich lands of Texas lay the Mexican boundary. The tide of migration
into this new field hurled itself against the Mexican border in the same
way that an earlier generation had rolled against the frontier of
Louisiana.

The attitude of these early settlers is described with sympathetic
accuracy by Theodore Roosevelt. "Louisiana was added to the United
States because the hardy backwoods settlers had swarmed into the valleys
of the Tennessee, the Cumberland and the Ohio by hundreds of
thousands.... Restless, adventurous, hardy, they looked eagerly across
the Mississippi to the fertile solitudes where the Spaniard was the
nominal, and the Indian the real master; and with a more immediate
longing they fiercely coveted the Creole provinces at the mouth of the
river."[27] This fierce coveting could have only one possible
outcome--the colonists got what they wanted.

The speed with which the Southwest rushed into prominence as a factor
in national affairs is indicated by its contribution to the cotton-crop.
In 1811 the states and territories from Alabama and Tennessee westward
produced one-sixteenth of the cotton grown in the United States. In 1820
they produced a third; in 1830, a half; and by 1860, three-quarters of
the cotton raised. At the same time, the population of the
Alabama-Mississippi territory was:--

200,000 in 1810.
445,000 in 1820.
965,000 in 1830.
1,377,000 in 1840.

Thus thirty years saw an increase of nearly seven-fold in the population
of this region.[28]

Meanwhile, slavery had become the issue of the day. The slave power was
in control of the Federal Government, and in order to maintain its
authority, it needed new slave states to offset the free states that
were being carved out of the Northwest.

Here were three forces--first the desire of the frontiersmen for "elbow
room"; second the demand of King Cotton for unused land from which the
extravagant plantation system might draw virgin fertility and third, the
necessity that was pressing the South to add territory in order to hold
its power. All three forces impelled towards the Southwest, and it was
thither that population pressed in the years following 1820.

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