pipes had in a similar way carried water to lower New York up to 1842, when the aqueducts were finished and Croton water brought to the city.

The old and inefficient night watch which lit the lamps, cried out the hours of the night, and gave the alarm for fires was superseded in 1845 by an organization of day and night watchmen more nearly approximating our police force of to-day. As a matter of fact, the modern police system extends back hardly more than seventy years. The problems of urban transportation were attacked first in New York City, where an omnibus line was established before 1828, running between Wall Street and Greenwich Village. In Philadelphia the first omnibus appeared in 1831.

Very influential in stimulating the higher life of the people was the act of 1845 which introduced cheap postage. The charge on letters of not over a half ounce in weight going less than three hundred miles was now five cents, over that limit ten cents, with additional charge for extra weight. Further reductions were made in 1851, when a half-ounce letter prepaid would be carried 3,000 miles for three cents, or, if not prepaid, for five cents; for 3,000 miles and over the rate was six and twelve cents. By 1840 the penny newspaper had made its appearance upon the streets, competing newspapers had commenced their keen rivalry for news, and the mass of Americans, from the unskilled laborer to the powerful capitalist, became the slave of the daily papers—an institution purporting to exist to carry news, but usually spreading propaganda for some interest political or economic. The news-spreading function of the papers and their ability to keep the citizens cognizant of what was happening in the world at large were made possible by the invention of the telegraph and its introduction after 1844. The effect of the invention of the steamboat and the steam railway was also considerable in promoting travel, in breaking up the intellectual isolation, and in eliminating to a slight extent intellectual provincialism.

As a whole the American people during these early decades were not given to spending much for amusements. De Tocque ville remarked that people who spent every weekday making

money and every Sunday in going to church "have nothing to invite the muse of comedy."1 Other European visitors spoke of the haste and intense application of Americans to business, to the neglect of amusements. Possibly the Puritan antecedents of many may have accounted for the neglect in some cases, but the conquest of a continent in less than a century left little time for else than work. Quilting parties, husking bees, house raisings, and church affairs continued to afford opportunities in the rural districts for social life, while occasionally in the east a traveling group of actors gave a performance. On the frontier the social and economic life of colonial days was duplicated again and again as the line advanced. In the south the social life had changed little since colonial days. Visits back and forth on the plantations and occasionally a winter season in the city provided a change for the women, while hunting parties and horse racing gave amusement to the men. In the cities the period from the 'thirties to the 'fifties was the golden age of the lyceum. Public lectures on all kinds of subjects were very popular; it was a time when curiosity in anything unusual was highly developed, and exhibitions in phrenology, mesmerism, and the like, drew great crowds. The theater, however, in America was in its infancy, and an American school of actors had not yet risen. Foreign artists appeared and were welcomed in New York and Philadelphia, the centers of what drama there was; but the crowds were apparently drawn by curiosity rather than by understanding of the dramatic art.

NOTES FOR FURTHER REFERENCE

L. B. Schmidt, Topical Studies and References on the Economic History of American Agriculture (rev. ed., 1923), contains a bibliography on "Pioneer Life and Ideals, 1830-1860." Source material with special reference to labor is available in the Documentary History of American Industrial Society (10 vols., 1910-11), edited by J. R. Commons and associates. Some of the most interesting material on American life during this period is furnished by foreign travelers. See S. J. Buck, Travels and Descriptions (Illinois), 1765-1865 (1914). Selections from the work of several of these are given in the Readings of Bogart and Thompson. The work of J. B. McMaster, History of the People of the United States, is a mine of information in which the social and 1 De Tocqueville, Alexis, Democracy in America, vol. ii, chap. xix.

economic are kept continually in mind. Edward Channing in the fifth volume (1921) of his History of the United States gets away to a considerable extent from the political and devotes valuable chapters to the social and economic as well as helpful footnotes and bibliographies. In Chapter II of this volume there is a fine study of the westward movement of population. A brilliant contribution to the study of the development of metropolitan economy in America is the last chapter of N. S. B. Gras, An Introduction to Economic History (1922). H. C. Emery in Vol. VII of the Cambridge Modern History gives a short survey of American economic and social history.

On immigration consult the Preliminary Report on the Eighth Census (1862), partially reproduced in Bogart and Thompson; and such books as R. MayoSmith, Emigration and Immigration (1912); J. R. Commons, Races and Immigrants in America (1907), and I. A. Hourwich, Immigration and Labor (1922). On the growth of democracy, Vol. II, Chap. 17 and Vol. V, Chap. 50 of McMaster are helpful, as is the excellent summary of C. E, Merriam, A History of American Political Theories (1903). Short chapters on the communistic experiments are included in E. E. Sparks, Expansion of the American People (1900), and in Morris Hillquit, History of Socialism in the United States (1910). More detailed studies are those of J. H. Noyes, History of American Socialisms (1870), and of Albert Shaw, Coöperation in a Western City, American Economic Association Publications, Vol. 1, No. 4 (1886); Icaria: A Chapter in the History of Com:nunism (1884), Coöperation in the Northwest, Johns Hopkins Studies (1888). See also Charles Nordhoff, The Communistic Societies of the United States from Personal Visit and Observation (1875). A picture of Brook Farm is given in O. B. Frothingham, George Ripley (1882). On the most famous of the American communists see G. W. Noyes (ed.), Religious Experiences of John Humphrey Noyes, Founder of the Oneida Community (1923).

Brief résumés of education during this period are contained in C. F. Thwing, A History of Higher Education in America (1906); E. G. Dexter, History of Education in the United States (1911); S. C. Parker, History of Modern Elementary Education (1912), and E. P. Cubberley, Public Education in the United States (1919).

A picture of frontier religion and the life of the greatest of the circuit riders is in E. S. Tipple, Francis Asbury, the Prophet of the Long Road (1916), and in Edward Eggleston, The Circuit Rider (1874), remarkably true to life.

SELECTED READINGS

CHANNING, E., A History of the United States, Vol. V, Chaps. II, VI-VIII. MCMASTER, J. B., History of the People of the United States, Vol. II, Chap. XVII; Vol. V, Chaps. XLIII, XLIX, L; Vol. VI, Chap. LVI; Vol. VII. Chaps. LXXIII, LXXIV.

MERRIAM, C. E., American Political Theories, Chaps. III-V.

CUBBERLEY, E. P., Public Education in the United States, Chaps. IV-VII. BOGART, E. L., and THOMPSON, C. M., Readings in the Economic History of the United States, pp. 537-558.

1

The Development of Slavery.-From whatever angle the study of the Civil War is approached, the causes relate themselves in varying degrees to the system of slavery. This is distinctly evident when we approach it from the standpoint of economic history. One of our great historians has said, "of the American Civil War it may safely be asserted that there was a single cause, slavery." The economic order of the south became so intertwined with the system that eventual withdrawal from the Union seemed to southern leaders the only means of preserving an institution believed to be necessary to the prosperity of that section. Slavery, which had flourished in the colonial south, was on the defensive at the close of the Revolution. Losses incurred by the planters in the War of Independence, the exhaustion of the soil in the coast states, the influx of white settlers from the north into the mountainous regions, all tended to make the system less profitable. These influences, augmented by the Revolutionary theories unfavorable to slavery, had led many southerners to question its economic and moral basis, but it was still firmly intrenched in 1781 in the rice and indigo fields of the Carolinas and Georgia, although its hold on the tobacco plantations was weakened.

The factors which contributed beyond all others to revive an apparently dying institution were the introduction of sea-island cotton and the invention of the cotton gin (1793). The first gave the planters of the coast regions an opportunity to recoup their waning fortunes; the latter made it possible to raise profitably the inland short-fibered variety, and both led to the rapid extension of cotton culture into the uplands and westward.

In cotton the south found a crop that apparently paid with slave labor, for the requisite conditions necessary to make it prof1 Rhodes, James Ford, Lectures on the American Civil War, p. 2.

itable seemed ideally combined. The first of these was simplicity of operation; slavery thrives under a one-crop system of agriculture, the methods of which may be learned and mechanically repeated year after year. To cotton, a comparatively easy plant to raise, the labor of the negro could be adapted. Few tools and little equipment were needed, so that small loss was sustained even from inefficient labor. At the same time, the owner could invest almost his entire capital in slaves, and thus invested, it returned a higher profit when the slaves were employed on cotton plantations. Cotton culture extends over threefourths of the year, and in its production, more than that of many other staples, it was possible to give employment to women and children, thus obtaining the maximum return from the whole family.

Still another advantage was that the slaves could be more compactly massed in the raising of cotton than in that of many other products. A single laborer could handle only three acres of rice and only five to ten acres of cotton, while he might cultivate thirty or forty acres of corn, a significant fact when it is appreciated that the labor of slaves is given only under fear of punishment and that constant supervision is necessary. The supervision, moreover, was expensive. "To diminish the inducement for overdriving," says Professor Phillips, "the method of paying the overseers by crop shares, which commonly prevailed in the colonial period, was generally replaced in the nineteenth century by that of fixed salaries." An overseer's salary in 1863 was about $1,300, a considerable amount in cash. The comparatively high cost of white overseers contributed as much as anything in shifting slave labor largely to cotton plantations.

1

A further condition necessary to the profitable employment of slave labor is cheapness and ease of subsistence. The expenditure for shelter, fuel, and clothing was naturally not great in the warm climate of the cotton belt. The chief food of the slave was bacon and corn; consequently some corn was usually raised on the plantation to provide food for slaves and hogs, although in later

1 Ulrich B. Phillips, American Negro Slavery (1918), p. 281,