The War of 1812 had been a product of the Napoleonic Wars in Europe. After Napoleon was defeated in 1814, neither the Americans nor the British cared to keep on fighting. In the treaty, the British abandoned their Native American allies, and the Americans dropped their complaints about maritime rights. Both assumed that peace would eliminate issues that had been created by war in Europe. The year 1815 marks a watershed in American history. Before that date American history was closely tied to European history-particularly to the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars.
With Napoleon's defeat and the success of the Congress of Vienna in 1815, a long period of peace began in Europe. American leaders paid less attention to European trade and European war, and more to the internal development of the United States. This was bad news for Native Americans east of the Mississippi River, who had lost their last European ally, Britain, in 1815. Now they faced only land-hungry Americans who were determined to turn Native American hunting lands into farms. By the 1830s the federal government was moving the eastern Native Americans to new lands beyond the Mississippi, while whites filled their old lands with farms and plantations and began eyeing more lands to the west. BExpansion: Northwest Territory In the 1780s there were few white settlers in the Northwest Territory . By 1860 more than one in five Americans lived in the Northwest, and the geographic center of the population of the United States was near Chillicothe, Ohio. Nearly all white migrants were farmers, and they reached the area in two streams. Before 1830 most migrants were Southerners, mainly poor and middling farmers from Kentucky, Tennessee, and western Virginia. In the southern regions of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, they settled near rivers that empty into the Ohio River, providing access to the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico. Southern migrants in the Northwest worked their land Southern style. They planted cornfields but left most of their land wooded, allowing hogs to roam freely and fend for themselves. In this way farmers subsisted with relatively little labor or reliance on outside markets. Trade down the Mississippi became safe only after Jefferson purchased the Louisiana Territory in 1803 and the army ended Native American resistance in the Northwest and Southwest in the War of 1812.
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