In 1780, about three and a half million Americans lived in the area east of the Mississippi River. By 1820, the population had swelled to nearly ten million people, many of them surging westward in unprecedented numbers. Beckoned by seemingly boundless opportunities and fertile land, Americans at the turn of the nineteenth century were, above all, a restless people. Europeans used to seeing men and women live for generations in the same village witnessed with amazement a nation on the move. Before the American Revolution, Americans had looked to Western Europe for models of genteel behavior and civilization. In the decades following the war, Americans acted upon what they felt had been the promises of the Revolution. In so doing, they rejected forever the hierarchical, patriarchal society of the eighteenth century. In its place rose new, voluntary forms of association. Americans, observed the French traveler Alexis de Tocqueville, “are forever forming associations…of a thousand different types …Americans combine to give fetes, found seminaries, build churches, distribute books, and send missionaries”. Foreign observers remarked with amazement on America’s leveling spirit, the democratic impulses that swept away old customs and usages for the new belief that one white man was as good as another, regardless of his birth. Inequalities of wealth abounded but what mattered most to Americans in this period was the perception that all men could succeed on their own merit. Voting requirements based on property and other measures of wealth fell by the wayside as the right to vote expanded to include virtually all white males. This radical vision of equality was for the most part confined to white men, however. Blacks, Native Americans, women and many other Americans in this period continued to suffer under political exclusion and economic exploitation and in some cases lost suffrage and other rights of citizenship. At the same time, some abolitionists and utopian dreamers of the antebellum period and beyond insisted upon equality of opportunity for all Americans, regardless of economic status, race or gender.