A history of the English Language

240.
The Middle West.
The country from the Alleghenies to the Mississippi is divided into a northern and a 
southern half by the Ohio River. South of the Ohio this territory belonged originally to 
the colonies along the Atlantic, whose boundary in theory extended west to the 
Mississippi. North of the Ohio was the Old Northwest Territory. The settlement of this 
whole region illustrates strikingly the spread and intermingling of elements in the 
population of the original thirteen colonies. Kentucky was an offspring of Virginia with 
many additions from Pennsylvania and North Carolina. Tennessee was an extension of 
western North Carolina with the same strongly Scots-Irish coloring that we have seen in 
this part of the parent colony. Alabama and Mississippi were settled from the districts 
around them, from Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia, and Tennessee. Nearly half the 
population, however, was African American. Louisiana, through being so long a French 
colony, had a population largely French, but even before the Louisiana Purchase there 
were numerous Scottish and English settlers from the mountainous parts of the southern 
colonies, and after 1803 this migration greatly increased. Missouri likewise had many 
French, especially in St. Louis, but as a territory in which slavery was permitted it had 
numerous settlers from its neighbors to the east, Kentucky and Tennessee, and even 
Virginia and North Carolina. These soon outnumbered the French in this region. 
The Old Northwest Territory began to be opened up shortly after the Revolution by 
settlers coming from three different directions. One path began in New England and 
upper New York, earlier colonized from western New England. The movement from this 
region was greatly stimulated by the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825. A second route 
brought colonists from Pennsylvania and from other states who came through 
Pennsylvania. The third crossed the Ohio from Kentucky and West Virginia and accounts 
for the large number of southerners who migrated into the territory.
3
In 1850 the 
southerners in Indiana outnumbered those from New England and the Middle States two 
to one. Michigan and Wisconsin were the only states in this territory with a population 
predominantly of New England origin. In the latter part of the nineteenth century the Old 
A history of the english language 334

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Northwest Territory and the upper Mississippi valley received large numbers of German 
and Scandinavian immigrants whose coming has been mentioned above.