Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
rants a direct route to this new land. By 1835, 60,000 eager settlers were pushing through
the Erie Canal each year, and most were aiming for what the following year became the
Wisconsin Territory. Two years later, in 1838, when the chunk of Wisconsin Territory west
of the Mississippi was lopped off, more than half of the 225,000 settlers were in Wisconsin
proper.Withtheenforcement ofIndianlandcessionsafterBlackHawk'sdefeat,uptothree
billion
acres became available for government surveyors; the first land title sales started in
1834. Wisconsin had fully arrived—and it still wasn't even a state.
Wisconsin's entrance into the Union as the flag's 30th star was a bit anticlimactic; there
wasn'tevenaskirmishwithCanadaoverit.Infact,thepopulacevotedontheissueofstate-
hood in 1841, and every year thereafter for nearly the entire decade, but distinctly disinter-
ested voters rejected the idea until 1848, when stratospheric levels of immigration impelled
the legislature to more animated attempts and the first measures passed.
Incessant immigration continued after statehood. Most newcomers arrived from New
England or Europe—Ireland, England, Germany, and Scandinavia. The influx of Poles was
stilldecadesaway.Milwaukee,adiminutivevillageof1,500atthetimeofterritorialstatus,
burgeoned into a rollicking town of 46,000 by the start of the Civil War, by which time the
population of the state as a whole was up to 706,000 people.
During the period leading up to the Civil War, Wisconsin was dominated by political
(and some social) wrangling over what, exactly, the state was to be. With the influence of
Yankee immigrants and the Erie Canal access, much of Wisconsin's cultural, political, and
socialmakeupfinallyresembledNewEngland.Infact,NewYorklegislationwasthemodel
for many early Wisconsin laws. The first university was incorporated almost immediately
after statehood, and school codes for primary and secondary education soon followed—a
bit ahead of the Union as a whole.
Abolition was a hot issue in Wisconsin's early years. It reached top-level status after
the annexation of Texas and the Mexican-American War; as a result of this and many other
contentious issues, Ripon, Wisconsin, became the founding spot of the Republican Party,
which soon took hold of the legislature and held fast until the Civil War.
DuringtheCivilWar,despitebeingamongthefirststatestonearenlistmentquotas,Wis-
consin suffered some of the fiercest draft rioting in the nation. Many new immigrants had
decamped from their European homelands for precisely the reasons for which the govern-
ment was now pursuing them. Eventually, 96,000 Wisconsinites would serve.
