and put on the market in practicable form in 1845, was steadily improved, and was soon followed by grain reapers on the same principle. The manufacture of cloth was im- 370. Great proved, all the way from the farm to the wearer's back,

inventions

in carding, spinning, weaving, dyeing. In 1846 Elias Howe made his first practicable sewing machine, clumsy enough, but provided with a needle with the eye near the point, a device which has revolutionized sewing. In 1844 Goodyear discovered a means of "vulcanizing" rubber, so as to make it up into shoes, garments, and hard articles.

The French inventor Daguerre in 1839 announced a method of taking self-recording sun pictures called daguerreotypes. They required an exposure of about twenty minutes, and the result was a single picture on a silver plate. An American, Dr. Draper, at once discovered that the process could be applied to portraits; a few years later an Englishman named Archer found that a negative developed from a collodion film could be fixed on a glass plate, from which any number of prints could be made: thus photography sprang into being. In 1841 two men, Dr. Morton and Dr. Jackson, working separately, discovered that by inhaling the vapor of ether, a person could be made completely insensible to pain, and then could return to consciousness without permanent ill effects.

The greatest new discovery in methods of communication of intelligence was the electric telegraph, first discovered in 1835, and worked out and applied by Samuel F. B. Morse and Alfred Vail in 1844. It carried the news of the nomination of James K. Polk from Baltimore to Washington. Telegraph lines rapidly spread through the country, and in 1851 an electric fire-alarm telegraph was set up. Machinery began to be applied to many new purposes. The first steam fire engine was constructed about 1853. In 1847 Richard Hoe invented a rotary printing press, run at great speed and delivering a continuous stream of newspapers.

The South had little use for these inventions: factories and workshops were few; most manufactures were imported. Mowers and reapers were of no use, as there was little hay or grain. The only widely distributed labor-saving machine was the cotton gin, and of the southern cotton not a fortieth part was manufactured in the South.

Railroads as yet gained little from the inventions of the period. Nearly the whole of the railroad system was single 371. Trans- track, the trains slow, the stations (as many are to-day) portation small and dirty. From New York to Chicago the fastest

schedule time in 1860 was thirty-eight hours—nearly twice the time now required. The cars were small and comfortless, but sleeping cars had been introduced for the long routes. Railroad accidents were frequent and destructive: the iron rails broke, the wooden bridges and trestles failed, and there was no system of running trains by telegraph. The South fell behind. the North in transportation; the railroads were lighter in construction, ran less regularly, and charged higher fares. The tributaries of the Mississippi were provided with lightdraft steamers, but the South built very few vessels, and the seagoing coasters were mostly northern property.

The railroad and steamboat quickened the carrying of the mails; and other reforms were made in the postal service. Official adhesive stamps were introduced (1847); the postage was reduced to five cents (1845), and then to three cents (1851). Unfortunately neither the post office nor the railroad undertook the plain duty of carrying parcels. In 1839 a young man named Harnden conceived the idea of carrying packages back and forth between Boston and New York, and he thus began the express business in the United States. The Adams Express Company was formed in 1854. In the fifties Wells, Fargo and Company organized an express system on the Pacific coast; and Butterfield and Company introduced a "pony express" for letters and valuables, which covered the

nineteen hundred miles from St. Joseph on the Missouri to Sacramento in ten days (map, p. 516).

mary

Rich, busy, populous, energetic, and advancing was the United States of America in 1861; the 27,000,000 white people were fairly employed and content; their government was 372. Sumthe most democratic in the world, and, with many defects, yet answered their wants. They began to understand the natural wealth of their country, in timber, oil, metals, and coal; they had an excellent and constantly improving commercial organization; and their inventive minds were pushing forward new labor-saving discoveries and inventions. Foreign and interior transportation were developing, so that the United States already had more railroads in proportion to the population than any other country. A national literature expressed the national character and pride.

The natural advantages of the country were as great in the South as in the North; the southerners had great seaports, rivers, forests, and mines; the people came of about the same stock: yet in most of the marks of civilization the South was far behind the North; it had fewer and poorer cities, factories, railroads, schools, magazines, writers, and readers. For this disparity, which told heavily against the South during the Civil War, the main cause would seem to be slavery, a system under which a great laboring class nearly one third of the

southern population was systematically cut off from knowl edge, education, and the opportunity to rise.

TOPICS

(3) What topics

(4) Was

(1) Why did so few immigrants go to the South? (2) Why did Suggestive West Virginia and East Tennessee stand by the Union? made northern farmers more prosperous than southern? the cultivation of cotton a good thing for the South? slavery a good thing for the poor whites? (6) How far were the southern slaves useful to the South in carrying on the Civil War?

(5) Was

Search topics

Geography

Secondary authorities

Sources

Illustrative works

(7) Why did not the South allow discussion on the slavery question? (8) Why were the colored people so frequently attacked by mobs in the North? (9) Why did not the southern educated class make the South prosperous? (10) Why is Ralph Waldo Emerson famous? (11) What makes Nathaniel Hawthorne the greatest of all American writers?

(12) The city of Washington before the Civil War. (13) The building of the Croton waterworks for New York. (14) Antinegro mobs in Philadelphia. (15) Burning of the Catholic convent in Charlestown, 1838. (16) District schools before the war. (17) College life before the war. (18) James Russell Lowell's antislavery utterances. (19) Funny things from Artemus Ward. (20) A trip from New York to Chicago before 1860. (21) Whittier's antislavery poems. (22) Longfellow's home life. (23) Jokes of Oliver Wendell Holmes. (24) Henry Ward Beecher as a pulpit orator. (25) Bishop Meade as a churchman. (26) Discovery of oil in Pennsylvania. (27) Discovery of gold in the Rocky Mountains. (28) McCormick's inventions.

See map, p. 390.

REFERENCES

Wilson, Division and Reunion, § 119; Schouler, United States, V. 260–269, VI. 318–341; Cambridge Modern History, VII. 692, 696, 744-747; Rhodes, United States, III. 1-114; Chadwick, Causes of the Civil War; Hart, Practical Essays, 258-298; Cable, Creoles of Louisiana, 232-260; Hale, J. R. Lowell; Carpenter, H. W. Longfellow; Linn, Horace Greeley, 56-109; Raymond, Peter Cooper, 52-95; Gould, Louis Agassiz. See also references to chapter xxii.

Cairnes, Slave Power; Olmsted, Cotton Kingdom; S. D. Smedes, Southern Planter; Helper, Impending Crisis. See also references to chapters xvi. xxvi. xxviii.

H. W. Beecher, Norwood (N.E.); F. H. Smith, Fortunes of Oliver Horn (Md. and N.Y.); A. W. Tourgée, Royal Gentleman (slavery); T. N. Page, In Ole Virginia; L. G. Moore, Rachel Stanwood (South); G. W. Cable, Dr. Sevier (New Orleans); Epes Sargent, Peculiar (slavery, Missouri); Alice Cary, The Great Doctor (Middle West); Edward Eggleston, Mystery of Metropolisville (Minn.); C. H. Roberts, Down the O-hi-o; Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi, - Huckleberry Finn; "Edmund Kirke" (J. R. Gilmore), Among the Pines; W. M. Baker, The New Timothy See also references to chapter xxii.

CHAPTER XXVIII.

PERIOD OF UNCERTAINTIES (APRIL, 1861-DECEMBER, 1862)

373. The purpose of the war

THE Civil War practically began April 12, 1861, when the Confederates fired on Fort Sumter, although the official Confederate point of view was that the attempt to relieve Fort Sumter was an act of "war between the states"; an unrighteous attempt by a "foreign government" to conquer independent and sovereign communities. The northern point of view was at first that the war was only a big riot of individuals; that although the southerners might try to excuse themselves because they were following the orders of "sovereign states" and a "Confederacy," really the states were still in the Union; and that every individual still owed "paramount allegiance" to the United States, and was liable to execution for treason if he made armed resistance to the authority of the federal government.

In practice it was impossible to treat southerners in uniform, acting under orders of their superiors, as anything but soldiers, and, if captured, as prisoners of war; and by a proclamation of April 19, 1861, for the blockade of the southern ports, President Lincoln virtually admitted that there was a government on the other side, carrying on civilized war. White flags were recognized, and, after a year, the exchange of prisoners began.

To emphasize the issue of preserving the Union, and to make it clear that the war was not inaugurated to free the slaves, the national House of Representatives, with only two negative votes, voted, July 22, 1861, "That this war is not