Studies in American History 
389 
mature, western, slaveholding* states were sending forth many 
colonists, not to Kansas but to competing frontier areas. For 
them, the beckoning opportunities and cheap vacant lands 
were in Missouri, Arkansas, and Texas. The aggregate in- 
crease in the number of persons born in Tennessee and living 
in these three states, between 1850 and 1860, was more than 
85,000. Living in Kansas in 1860 were only 2,569 persons 
who had been born in Tennessee.^® Kentucky did more for 
Kansas and less for Arkansas and Texas than did Tennessee, 
but her story is in general the same. The number of Ken- 
tuckians in. Kansas in 1860 was 6,556, but the total increase 
between 1850 and 1860 in the number of persons giving 
Kentucky as their birthplace and living in Missouri, Arkansas, 
and Texas was over 40,000. Kentucky and Tennessee each 
furnished about twice as many people to Illinois as to Kansas 
during the decade.^® 
Of all the states in the Union, Missouri seemed to be the 
one with the best opportunities for throwing colonists into 
Kansas. No other state was so strategically situated. No 
other seemed to have such vital interests at stake. It was 
widely believed, that, with reasonable support from the re- 
mainder of the South, Missouri could furnish enough settlers 
to thwart the designs of the Abolitionists. The number of 
Missourians in Kansas in 1860 was 11,356. This very small 
showing demands explanation. 
The process of peopling Missouri was only well begun at 
the time of her admission to the Union. Except for a portion 
of the lands along the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, the 
state was still an extensive area of undeveloped resources and 
unoccupied land. For some years after admission to the 
Union, colonists continued to come mainly from Virginia, 
North Carolina, Kentucky, and Tennessee, the sources of the 
greater portion of the colonists of the territorial period. As 
Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois became more mature, a consid- 
erable portion of the migrating elements of these states found 
its way to Missouri. At the same time the number of foreign- 
ers arriving in the state increased from year to year. More 
and more the southern stream was paralleled by northern 
The number of persons born in Tennessee and living in Arkansas in 1860 was 
greater than in 1850 by 32,802 ; in Missouri, by 28,624 ; in Texas, by 24,579. 
Kentucky was represented in Kansas by a contingent of 6,556 in 1860 ; the increase 
of her citizens in Illinois between 1850 and 1860 was 10,605. The corresponding figures 
for Tennessee, in Kansas and Illinois, respectively, were 2,569 and 6,709. 
26—34488 
