To this emigration all sections of the Union contributed. In the back-country of New England--in Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and western Massachusetts--was a restive population little loved by the governing class. President Timothy Dwight, of Yale College, described these people as "impatient of the restraints of law, religion, and morality," contentious, always complaining, and always indebted. They were likely to be Baptists or Methodists, by persuasion, and Democrats in politics. As small farmers their lot was a hard one. They needed only the incentive of cheap lands in the West to sever the slender ties which bound them to the stony hillsides of New England. Yet the older towns of New England also complained of the Western fever which was carrying off the available labor supply. Fearon found "the small and middling tradesmen" always ready to sell out when business got bad and "pack up for the back-country." The immediate destination of these New Englanders was western New York. Within a decade what had been a frontier area was filled with an industrious population eager to secure markets for the surplus products of their farms. [Map: Land Sales and Land Offices to 1821] Before a very large number of New Englanders passed beyond western New York, emigrants from the Middle States were pushing into the Ohio country, where Harrison's victories had opened vast tracts to the white settlers. The earliest settlers in Indiana and Illinois, however, were of Southern extraction. Tennessee and Kentucky, having no longer a supply of good land at low prices, sent the younger generation on to a new frontier. In the year 1816 the father of Abraham Lincoln took his family across the Ohio on a raft and hewed his way into the timber lands along the river bottoms of Indiana. With these migratory Kentuckians went also descendants of the Germans and the Scotch-Irish who had peopled the Great Valley in the previous century. Even from the Carolinas came all sorts and conditions of men,--poor whites, Quakers, Baptists,--small farmers whom the advancing plantation system was driving from the uplands. Even more significant than this advance of population into the region north of the Ohio was the contemporaneous movement from the Southern Seaboard States into the cotton lands of the Gulf plains. The way had been prepared by Andrew Jackson's conquest of the Creeks. Alabama was the immediate goal of the migrating Southerner. From Kentucky, also, but more particularly from Tennessee, stalwart pioneers entered this new El Dorado. The father of Jefferson Davis was one of those who tried their luck in the alluvial plains of the lower Mississippi. By the year 1820, the area of settlement had extended from southern Tennessee to Mobile, and from Mobile to the Mississippi along the Gulf.