Factors Driving Early Expansionism

Early territorial expansion was largely driven by population growth. Americans had large families in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and mortality was rela­tively low compared to Europe.

Pressure from Southern planters intent on growing staple crops with slave labor was a key factor driving expansion into the Old Southwest from the eight­eenth century forward. Louisiana quickly became an empire for slavery as settlers realized the vast fortunes to be made on cotton plantations. Slaveholders in the upper South also pushed for expansion since it would increase the value of their slave property.^[2329]

The United States was an overwhelmingly rural nation in the first half of the nineteenth century, and the individual ownership of family farms was a cherished ideal to which most Americans aspired. Settlers in British North America and their offspring were unusually mobile compared to populations elsewhere and proved willing to move repeatedly for better lands and increased opportunity. Federal land policies also encouraged the settlement of new territories by offering newly surveyed land at low prices—although often with minimum purchase requirements that left most of the territory in the hands of land speculators, individuals who bought and sold lands for the purpose of profit rather than settlement.

Speculation became a major factor in western expansion. In the boom years after the War of 1812, a frenzy of speculative land fever transformed the trans­Appalachian West. Settlers in the Old Northwest (northwest of the Ohio River and east of the Mississippi) wrote home about the “Ohio feever” and “Missouri and Illinois feever” that drew them ever further west. Immense profits through land speculation on credit seemed within reach of ordinary farmers. In 1815 alone, 831,000 acres of Ohio land were transferred to private ownership. By 1820 there were virtually no public lands left for sale in Ohio, and settlers set their sights on Illinois, Missouri, and Indiana.^[2330]

Those who could not afford land simply occupied it. These squatters, as they were known, repeatedly infringed on the property rights of Indian people. The federal government sometimes evicted squatters from Indian lands, but for the most part turned a blind eye to squatter transgressions. When squatters displaced Indians it saved the government work. In this way, settler colonialism enabled US territorial expansion.