ily the tide of foreign immigration at this time
was stayed, and the church had opportunity to gather strength for the
immense task that was presently to be devolved upon it. But the westward
movement of our own population was now beginning to pour down the
western slope of the Alleghanies into the great Mississippi basin. It
was observed by the Methodist preachers that the members of their
societies who had, through fear, necessity, or choice, moved into the
back settlements and into new parts of the country, as soon as peace was
settled and the way was open solicited the preachers to come among them,
and so the work followed them to the west.[219:1] In the years
1791-1810 occurred the great movement of population from Virginia to
Kentucky and from Carolina to Tennessee. It was reckoned that one fourth
of the Baptists of Virginia had removed to Kentucky, and yet they hardly
leavened the lump of early frontier barbarism. The Presbyterian Church,
working in its favorite methods, devised campaigns of home missionary
enterprise in its presbyteries and synods, detailing pastors from their
parishes for temporary mission service in following the movement of the
Scotch-Irish migration into the hill-country in which it seemed to find
its congenial habitat, and from which its powerful influences were to
flow in all directions. The Congregationalists of New England in like
manner followed with Christian teaching and pastoral care their sons
moving westward to occupy the rich lands of western New York and of
Ohio. The General Association of the pastors of Connecticut, solicitous
that the work of missions to the frontier should be carried forward
without loss of power through division of forces, entered, in 1801, into
the compact with the General Assembly of the Presbyterians known as the
"Plan of Union," by which Christians of both polities might cooeperate in
the founding of churches and in maintaining the work of the gospel.

In the year 1803 the most important political event since the adoption
of the Constitution, the purchase of Louisiana by President Jefferson,
opened to the American church a new and immense field for missionary
activity. This vast territory, stretching from the Mississippi westward
to the summits of the Rocky Mountains and nearly doubling the domain of
the United States, was the last remainder of the great projected French
Catholic empire that had fallen in 1763. Passed back and forth with the
vicissitudes o