For a long time Southerners determined the course of history in the Old Northwest. They occupied the field first, and they had the great advantage of geographical proximity to their old homes. Furthermore, they lived more compactly; the New Englanders were not only spread over the broader prairie stretches of the north, but scattered to some extent throughout the entire region between the Lakes and the Ohio. ¹ But by the middle of the century not only had the score of northern counties been inundated by the "Yankees" but the waves were pushing far into the interior, where they met and mingled with the counter-current. Both Illinois and Indiana became, in a preëminent degree, melting-pots in which was fused by slow and sometimes painful processes an amalgam which Bryce and other keen observers have pronounced the most American thing in America. ¹ In 1820 the population of Indiana was confined almost entirely to the southern third of the State, although the removal of the capital, in 1825, from Corydon to Indianapolis was carried out in the confidence that eventually that point would become the State's populational as it was its geographical center. When, in 1818, Illinois was admitted to the Union its population was computed at 40,000. The figure was probably excessive; at all events, contemporaries testify that so eager were the people for statehood that many were counted twice, and even emigrants were counted as they passed through the Territory. But the census of 1820 showed a population of 55,000, settled almost wholly in the southern third of the State, with narrow tongues of inhabited land stretching up the river valleys toward the north. Two slave States flanked the southern end of the commonwealth; almost half of its area lay south of a westward prolongation of Mason and Dixon's line. Save for a few Pennsylvanians, the people were Southern; the State was for all practical purposes a Southern State. As late as 1833 the Legislature numbered fifty-eight members from the South, nineteen from the Middle States, and only four from New England. Of the great national issues in the quarter-century following the War of 1812 there were some upon which people of the Northwest, in spite of their differing points of view, could very well agree. Internal improvement was one of these. Roads and canals were necessary outlets to southern and eastern markets, and any reasonable proposal on this subject could be assured of the Northwest's solid support. The thirty-four successive appropriations to 1844 for the Cumberland Road, Calhoun's "Bonus Bill" of 1816, the bill of 1822 authorizing a continuous national jurisdiction over the Cumberland Road, the comprehensive "Survey Bill" of 1824, the Maysville Road Bill of 1830--all were backed by the united strength of the Northwestern senators and representatives.