Baltimore, New York City, and Philadelphia for the rising commerce
of the interior was a potent factor in the development of the middle
region. In the south the spread of the cotton-plant and the new form
which slavery took were phases of the westward movement of the
plantation. The discontent of the old south is partly explained by
the migration of her citizens to the west and by the competition of
her colonists in the lands beyond the Alleghenies. The future of the
south lay in its affiliation to the Cotton Kingdom of the lower
states which were rising on the plains of the Gulf of Mexico.

Rightly to understand the power which the new west was to exert upon
the economic and political life of the nation in the years between
1820 and 1830, it is necessary to consider somewhat fully the
statistics of growth in western population and industry.

The western states ranked with the middle region and the south in
respect to population. Between 1812 and 1821 six new western
commonwealths were added to the Union: Louisiana (1812), Indiana
(1816), Mississippi (1817), Illinois (1818), Alabama (1819), and
Missouri (1821). In the decade from 1820 to 1830, these states, with
their older sisters, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Ohio, increased their
population from 2,217,000 to nearly 3,700,000, a gain of about a
million and a half in the decade. The percentages of increase in
these new communities tell a striking story. Even the older states
of the group grew steadily. Kentucky, with 22 per cent., Louisiana,
with 41, and Tennessee and Ohio, each with 61, were increasing much
faster than New England and the south, outside of Maine and Georgia.
But for the newer communities the percentages of gain are still more
significant: Mississippi, 81 per cent.; Alabama, 142; Indiana, 133;
and Illinois, 185. The population of Ohio, which hardly more than a