Indiana Territory

“ By the close of the year 1808, the Indiana Territory east of the Wabash had received such an increase in numbers that it was desirable to assume the second grade of territorial government. Having a population of 5,000 free white males, Congress, with a view to a future state government, by an act approved February 3d, 1809, restricted its limits, and authorized a territorial Legislature. ”

“ Indiana, a typical American State, owes nothing worth mentioning to the original French population. In early days it must be considered little more than an extension of Kentucky. Virginia had set aside a large tract for rewarding the men of George Rogers Clark's expedition and these were the original land agents, so to speak, for the territory. But all along the border a frontier population drifted there across the Ohio River. As late as 1850 there were twice as many Southern people in Indiana as there were from the Middle States and New England put together. ”

“ The Indiana Territory was organized by the act of Congress of the 7th of May, 1800, with the powers to legislate given by the ordinance of 1787. On the 26th of March, 1804, an act of Congress was passed, for the survey and disposal of the public lands, by which three land districts were established, and an entire township in each was reserved for the use of a seminary of learning, to be located by the Secretary of the Treasury. The boundaries of the Vincennes land district were the same as designated in a late treaty with the Wabash Indians. ”

“ Indiana Territory was erected, with General William Henry Harrison—who had been secretary of the North-West Territory since 1798—as its first governor, and with Vincennes as the seat of government. Harrison made many treaties with the Indians, the most important being that signed at Fort Wayne on the 7th of June 1803, defining the Vincennes tract transferred to the United States by the Treaty of Greenville; those signed at Vincennes on the 18th and the 27th of August 1804, transferring to the United States a strip north of the Ohio river and south of the Vincennes tract ”

“ Since then, the States of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and the long strip of country known as the Territory of Wisconsin, have been carved out of it. Indiana, which numbers but twenty years since the commencement of her political existence, contains a population of six hundred thousand, equal to the population of Massachusetts, a State of two hundred years’ duration. In age she is an infant; in strength and resources a giant. Her appearance indicates the 402 full vigor of maturity, while, measured by her years, she is yet in the cradle. ”

“ Indiana Historical Society Publications, II, 469 We the People of Indiana Territory inhabiting the middle and western Divisions of the Country Northwest of the Ohio, do by our Representatives in general Convention assembled, hereby agree that the operation of the Sixth Article of Compact between the United States and the people of the Territory [Ordinance of 1787] should be suspended for the space of ten years from the Day that a law may be passed by Congress giving their Consent to the Suspension of the said Article. ”

“ Population.—The population of Indiana, according to the Federal Census of 1910, was 2,700,876, and the rank of the state in the Union as regards population was ninth. In 1810, the year following the erection of the western part of Indiana into Illinois Territory, the population was 24,520, in 1820 it had increased to 147,178, in 1850 to 988,416, in 1870 to 1,680,637, in 1890 to 2,192,404, and in 1900 to 2,516,462. ”

“ The career of William Henry Harrison, ninth president of the United States, belongs to general history. Harrison was appointed governor of Indiana Territory upon its erection in 1800, and took much interest in its development. While making his home at Vincennes, he became interested in the Blue River settlement, which was begun about 1802 by Squire Boone (brother of Daniel) and his son Moses. The settlement and Harrison’s mills were at a place now called Wilson’s Springs in Harrison County, Indiana.—Ed. ”

“ Meanwhile the equilibrium between the white man and the red again became unstable. In the Treaty of 1795 the natives had ceded only southern Ohio, southeastern Indiana, and a few other small and scattered areas. Northward and westward, their country stretched to the Lakes and the Mississippi, unbroken except by military posts and widely scattered settlements; and title to all of this territory had been solemnly guaranteed. As late as 1800 the white population of what is now Indiana was practically confined to Clark's Grant, near the falls of the Ohio, and a small region around Vincennes. ”

“ The artistic impulse appeared naturally in later generations. The value of the literature produced in the State may be debatable, but there is no just occasion for surprise that attention to literary expression has been so general.
Indiana has always lain near the currents of national life, and her beginnings were joined to the larger fortunes of the national destiny. Three flags have been emblems of government in her territory, and wars whose principal incidents occurred far from the western wilderness played an important part in her history. ”

“ In 1908, when the Republican party had declared in favour of county option and the Democratic party favoured township and ward option, a special session of the legislature, called by the Republican governor, passed the Cox Bill for county options.
Education.—Indiana has a well-organized free public school system. Provision was made for such a system in the first state constitution, to utilize the school lands set aside in all the North-West Territory by the Ordinance of 1787, but the existing system is of late growth. ”

“ Numbers of Germans, French, and Irish, are scattered in the towns, and over the country, carrying on the business of bakers, grocers, store, grog shops, and tavern keepers. In time, these people will become steady from necessity, and consequently prosperous. The number of the inhabitants of Indiana amounts to 215,000. Its admission into the Union as a sovereign state, dates from the year 1815 to 1816; its constitution differs in some points from that of Ohio, and its governor is elected for the term of three years. ”

“ General Remarks.—The importance of Indiana, as a desirable State for the attention of the emigrant to the West, has been too much overlooked. Though not possessing quite equal advantages with Illinois, especially in the quality and amount of prairie soil, it is far superior to Ohio, and fully equal,—nay, in our estimation, rather superior to Michigan. Almost every part is easy of access, and in a very few years the liberal system of internal improvements, adopted and in progress, will make almost every county accessible to public conveyances, and furnish abundant facilities to market. ”

“ Indiana is famous as a literary center, and that gives tone to the advertisement, to say nothing of the fact that we're honoring with our presence almost the only state in the Union where we've never been indicted. ”

“ Indianapolis is only twenty years old, having been, upon its site, a dense forest in 1820; now it has several public buildings, churches, schools, court-house, etc., and two thousand inhabitants. The amount of tolls taken upon the canals and railroads of Indiana amount to twenty-eight thousand five hundred dollars. Salt of a very fine kind is made in Fountain county. Its population is six hundred and eighty-three thousand three hundred and fourteen. ”

“ From Chicago, or Colorado, or San Francisco one may expect a giant labor war or social upheaval of any kind; from Boston or Pennsylvania or New Mexico new religious movements may come—and have; New York, Pennsylvania, Kansas, Nebraska and Illinois can and have contributed vast political upheavals. This is even true of Ohio, its next door neighbor.
But Indiana lies in between all this—simple, unpretentious, not indifferent but quiescent,—a happy land of farms and simple industries which can scarcely be said to have worked any harm to any man. ”

“ I believe you can do nothing that will more greatly enhance the estimation in which the State of Indiana is held by her sister States than to see to it that a suitable, well-regulated, and strict civil service is provided for the administration of the benevolent and penal institutions of the State of Indiana. ”

“ From 1820, the date of the founding of Indianap [Pg 170] olis, to 1860, Indiana had twice quadrupled her population and from almost purely American stock. During these forty years, it is calculated that a million people came to the Northwest from the slave States of the South. At the outbreak of the Civil War, Indiana had a population of 1,350,000 of which only about one in eleven was foreign-born. More than half of the aliens were from Germany, and Indiana seems to have attracted particularly the Nordic element, since Prussia contributed the largest quota. ”

“ The rise of Indiana as an enlightened commonwealth has been accompanied by phenomena of unusual interest and variety, and whatever contributions the State may make to the total of national achievement in any department of endeavor are to be appraised in the light of her history and development. ”

“ The charitable and correctional institutions of Indiana are well administered in accordance with the most improved modern methods, and form one of the most complete and adequate systems possessed by any state in the Union. ”

“ It cannot be doubted that such a character possessed by any State or county attracts immigration and capital, advances its material development, and enhances the value of its farms. There has been much in the history of Indiana that is exceedingly creditable. There have been some things—there are some things to-day—that are exceedingly discreditable to us as a political community; things that I believe retard the advancement of our State and affect its material prosperity by degrading it in the estimation of right-thinking men. ”

“ No person shall be eligible to the office of Governor or Lieutenant Governor, who shall not have been five years a citizen of the United States, and also a resident of the State of Indiana during the five years next preceding his election ”

“ In the Northwest, where interstate migration has been so continuous and widespread, the lack of typical State peculiarities is obvious, and the student of society, like the traveler, is tempted, in his effort to distinguish the community from its neighbors, to exaggerate the odd and exceptional elements which give a particular flavor to the State. Indiana has suffered somewhat from this tendency ”

“ Well, to me Indiana is noteworthy in having done and in still doing just that sort of thing. It stands unique in having produced a great many celebrated men and women in all departments of work, not only those who have departed from the state but those who have remained and gained a publicity for their achievements far outside its boundaries. ”

“ The first governors and law-givers were distinctly not of the bucolic type; and it is an interesting fact of Indiana history that in an agricultural State, where the “farmer’s vote” has been essential to the winning party, farmers have rarely found their way to the governor’s chair. ”

“ One reason assigned for the passing of emigrants through Indiana to Illinois was that the latter was a prairie country, more easily subdued than the more wooded region of Indiana. But it is also true that the sluggish, illiterate character of its early occupants turned aside the stream of Western emigration from its borders. There has been a great deal of philosophic speculation upon the acknowledged backwardness of civilization in Indiana, its slow development in institutions of education, and its slow change in rural life, compared with its sister States. ”

“ For finance of education and charitable and penal institutions, see paragraphs under those headings.
Population. In one or two respects Indiana differs much from other Northern States in point of population. It has been less affected by immigration, the native-born population being proportionally greater than that of any other Northern State. Furthermore, the population is peculiar in that a large per cent. ”

“ Any gradual accretion of land, then, on the Indiana side of the Ohio, would belong to Indiana, and it is not very easy to distinguish between land thus formed, and land formed by the receding of the water. ”

“ There is a lot of bologna in this War, like all others, and I am told on good authority that it takes a political set-up to get the best. . . Honestly, when I heard you were trying Pennsylvania, I rather thought you would not be in the running. It just don't make sense for an Indiana girl to get a job like you wanted in the face of women (natives) in the second most populous State in the Union. ”

“ But thereafter immigration from the seaboard States, and from the nearer lands of Kentucky and Tennessee, set in on a new scale. By 1810 Indiana had a white population of twenty-five thousand, and the cabins of the energetic settlers dotted river valleys and hillsides never before trodden by white man.
In this new rush of pioneers the rights of the Indians received scant consideration. Hardy and well-armed Virginians and Kentuckians broke across treaty boundaries and possessed themselves of fertile lands to which they had no valid claim. ”

“ The centre of population in the United States, which lay just east of Baltimore in the first decade of the century, moved gradually westward, until, in the last decade, it lay in Indiana at a point sixty-five miles south of Indianapolis.
The older Indiana towns enjoyed in their beginnings all the benefits that may be bestowed upon new communities by a people of good social antecedents. Many of these towns have lost their prestige, owing to changed political or commercial [11] conditions; the departed glory of some of them is only a tradition among the elders ”