Washington, with a ring of pride, said in 1796 that the native
population of America was "filling the western part of the State of
New York and the country on the Ohio with their own surplusage." And
James Madison in 1821 wrote that New England, "which has sent out such
a continued swarm to other parts of the Union for a number of years,
has continued at the same time, as the census shows, to increase in
population although it is well known that it has received but
comparatively few emigrants from any quarter." Beyond the Mississippi,
Louisiana, with its Creole population, was feeling the effect of
American migration.

A strange restlessness, of the race rather than of the individual,
possessed the American frontiers-man. He moved from one locality to
another, but always westward, like some new migratory species that
had willingly discarded the instinct for returning. He never took the
back trail. A traveler, writing in 1791 from the Ohio Valley, rather
superficially observed that "the Americans are lazy and bored, often
moving from place to place for the sake of change; in the thirty years
that the [western] Pennsylvania neighborhood has been settled, it has
changed owners two or three times. The sight of money will tempt any
American to sell and off he goes to a new country." Foreign observers
of that time constantly allude to this universal and inexplicable
restiveness. It was obviously not laziness, for pioneering was a man's
task; nor boredom, for the frontier was lonely and neighbors were far
apart It was an ever-present dissatisfaction that drove this perpetual
conqueror onward--a mysterious impulse, the urge of vague and
unfulfilled desires. He went forward with a conquering ambition in his
heart; he believed he was the forerunner of a great National Destiny.
Crude rhymes of the day voice this feeling: