406,511
Ohio 45,365 230,760
Indiana 2,517 24,520
Illinois 2,458 12,282

These figures show how conspicuously small was the immigration to
Illinois. Enough has already been said to show some of the reasons for
this sluggish settlement. When, in 1793, Governor St. Clair wrote to
Alexander Hamilton, "In compassion to a poor devil banished to another
planet, tell me what is doing in yours, if you can snatch a moment from
the weighty cares of your office,"(206) he doubtless felt that the
language was not too strong, and voiced a feeling of loneliness that was
common to the settlers. Nor was there a lack of land in the East to make
westward movement imperative. Massachusetts was much opposed to her people
emigrating to Ohio, because she wished them to settle on her own eastern
frontier (Maine), and Vermont and New York had vacant lands.(207)

One who settled in Illinois at this period came through danger to danger,
for Indians lurked in the woods and malaria waited in the lowlands. The
journey made by the immigrants was tedious and difficult, and was often
rendered dangerous by precipitous and rough hills and swollen streams, if
the journey was overland, or by snags, shoals and rapids, if by water. A
large proportion of the settlers came from Maryland, Virginia, or the
Carolinas. Those from Virginia and Maryland were induced to emigrate by
the glowing descriptions of the Illinois country given by the soldiers of
George Rogers Clark, and these soldiers sometimes led the first
contingent. A typical Virginia settlement in Illinois was that called New
Design, located in what is now Monroe county, between Kaskaskia and
Cahokia. Founded about 1786 by a native of Berkeley county, the settlement
received important additions in 1793, and four years later a party of more
than one hundred and fifty arrived from near the headwaters of the south
branch of the Potomac, this last contingent led by a Baptist minister, who
had organized a church on a previous visit.(208) In general, persons
Scotch-Irish by birth were opposed to slavery, as were also the members of
the Quaker church. This caused a considerable emigration from the
Carolinas. Another motive for people from all sections was that expressed
by settlers of Illinois, in 1806, when they said that they came west in
order to secure "such an establishment in land as they despaired of ever
being able to procure in the old settlemen