Mockingbird Song

There was much, indeed, for committed easterners to feel gloomy about.
Their kin and friends were departing for faraway places not to be served by
railroads for years. Immigrants faced a hard fact that they would never see
the Old Country again, and vice versa. Immigrants and those left behind
also rightly feared that westering would lead to serious illnesses and pre-
mature death. This was probably truer among southern migrants, whose
destinations were more likely to be malarial wetlands. But perhaps as much
as mourning and sympathy, easterners’ rhetoric gave vent to resentment.
Old states seemed to stagnate and to lose representation in the national
House, absolutely or at least relative to astounding gains by new states. Ruf-
fin and other Virginians were preoccupied with federal census data that
revealed the enormous numbers of the Old Dominion–born in Ohio, Indi-
ana, but especially in the Gulf states. He and other easterners seem to have
assumed that migrants represented loss—of good farmers, engaged citi-
zens, and potential statesmen. And there was good reason, of course. Recall
that Andrew Jackson was born in South Carolina and buried in Tennessee.
Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri was born in North Carolina, so-
journed in Tennessee, and so on. Virginia-born men were prominent in the
founding of the Texas Republic.
Westering was a ‘‘fever’’—the descriptor recurs with both despair and
enthusiasm. Eastern reformers who would have everyone—at least ‘‘good’’
people—stay home and improve soils were helpless to stop it. So roads
south and west, such as they were, and every navigable river were clogged
with migrants. In the South, many of these were planter families and their
slaves. The great Scottish geologist Sir Charles Lyell observed the fever and
the flowing crowds during his second fossil-hunting trip to Alabama, in
. Traveling from the coast of Georgia inland, Lyell and his wife shared
roads, boats, accommodations (such as they were), and campgrounds with
South Carolinians and especially Georgians heading west. Travelers were
ever merry, it seemed, even on a rainy night, when one group kept a fire of
pine roaring despite the wet. Once inside Alabama, Lyell discovered that
people who had just come, a few years before when he first visited, were al-
ready about to move farther on, this time probably to Texas. The correspon-
dence and diaries of planter migrants themselves affirm the ambitions and
the conflicts that propelled so many to new countries: To make one’s own
economic way, and grandly, of course, but also to escape a family patriarch’s
tyranny back east or to find political opportunity in a state not yet domi-
nated by an entrenched elite.
Such hopes ever compel migrants to separate themselves from the se-
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