Migration movement

Migration Movement
During the first half of the Eighteenth Century, the United States saw a huge rise in emigration, the movement from one area of the country to another region. First, there was a rise in emigration from the North to the Southern states in hope of taking advantage of the rising demand of cotton. The migration to the west for new opportunities on the frontier soon followed, yetthe journey was much more difficult than anticipated. These migrations were filled with optimism and grand hopes of a new life. However, there was also negative migration during this period. For the white men to move south with their slaves, for the settlers to move to the Midwest and for the cheap land to be available, there was a need to rid all of these areas of the Native Americans who hadbeen there for generations before the first European Settlers came to America.
During the Market Revolution in the seventeenth century, the United State’s economy grew immensely due to the high demand of cotton in England. When cotton became more widely available, clothing industry grew with the new textiles. Those textiles were cheaper, easier to create and more comfortable to wear in warmweather than those made from wool or linen. The early industrial revolution centered factories among the rivers that made it possible to transport the cotton to other places. Factories located in the South produced cotton textiles in water-powered mills. These mills used the energy harnessed from the water to power the pinning and weaving machinery. The cotton age opened up opportunities to those inNew England to buy cheap land in the South and make a good living. This opportunity led to an increase in the migration movement of small farmers, slave owners and planters to move to Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and western Tennessee. Hundreds of slaves were forced to migrate to the South as the demand for inexpensive manual labor rose. Some moved with their owners to new plantations, whileothers were sold individually to slave traders to work clearing land for new fields.
While the North and South’s economy blossomed, with the cotton mills and factories, other men and women were looking west for new opportunities. Men were highly optimistic about the chances of starting a new life. As in the South, northern migrants wove their way to the west. New Englanders and New Yorkersfollowed a northerly path, while other people traveled among the rivers, canals and major roads. Some of the wives were not enthusiastic about moving to the Midwest area because they were leaving their aristocratic social lives behind for an uncertain future. The migration movement was extremely difficult but the land they would settle on was cheap. In the primary source of Harriet L. Noble, shedescribes the journey to the west as harsh when she says “We traveled from our house in Geneva to Buffalo in Wagons. The roads were bad and we were obliged to wait in Buffalo for four days for a boat, as the steamboat “Michigan” was the only one on the lake.” The steamboat was a new technology that was developed, before the War of 1812, to facilitate trading by transporting the products throughwaterways, but this technology was the only one during this period. Harriet’s description of traveling by wagon and the following wait for passage on the steamboat explains the delay in arriving to the new frontier. During the journey the steamboat had a problem, so the steamboat made a stop in Lake Erie for repair that lasted seven days. Family members became ill, especially the children, which includedthe baby of three months and the little three years old girl. This family was used to comfort and had never endured such harsh conditions, making this voyage was difficult for them. When the family reached land again, they continued the voyage to Detroit with a pair of oxen and a wagon. During the evenings, the women would become frightened that they would encounter a beast or some other harm...