in the center of a rich farming country, had 25,000 people and took to itself the name "Queen City of the West"; but it was the only place in the oldest Northwestern State with more than 3000 people. St. Louis, the point of exchange between the fur trade of the upper Mississippi and Missouri, on the north, and the steamboat trade from New Orleans, boasted 6000. CHICAGO (FORT DEARBORN) IN 1831. From a lithograph, based on a drawing of that year. Through the courtesy of the Chicago Historical Society. New Orleans remained without much change. The rest of the people dwelt in villages or on farms. Outside the aristocratic black belt, most of them lived in log cabins with homemade tables and beds and with rough benches or blocks of wood for chairs. 524. Caution. The student must beware of classing Mississippi in 1830 as "Southern," or Illinois as "Northern." "South" and "North" then applied only to the divisions of the Atlantic States. The country had three sections, - North, South, and West. During the next twenty years, however, the difference between the two systems of labor, free and slave, in its northern and southern portions split the West also into two sections, which then merged with the corresponding Atlantic sections. In 1850 there were only two sections to the Union,- a North and a South. § 526] DEMOCRATIC AND SELF-CONFIDENT 445 525. The Westerners of 1830 had developed a new American type- to remain the dominant one for two generations: talì, gaunt men, adventurous and resolute, of masterful temper, daunted by no emergency, impatient of authority, but with a leaven of high idealism. The West believed in the worth of the common man. Already it had become "the most American part of America." Here the new nation showed best its raw youth, unpolished, but sound at heart; crude, ungainly, lacking the poise and repose and dignity of older societies; but buoyantly self-confident, throbbing with rude vigor, grappling unconcernedly with impossible tasks, getting them done somehow, and dreaming overnight of vaster ones for the morrow. Some small embarrassment it felt for its temporary ignorance of books and art; but it exulted boastfully in its mastery of nature and its daring social experiments, and it appealed, with sure faith, to the future to add the refinements and graces of life. 526. This "American propensity to look forward to the future' for whatever it lacked in the present, particularly amused the many supercilious and superficial English travelers of the day. These prejudice-blinded gentlemen delighted in portraying with microscopic detail, skin-deep blemishes of American society. Even Charles Dickens, whom America loved, saw little but the spittoons and the hurry at the lunch counters. No one of these critics saw at all the most amazing spectacle of all history spread before their eyes: a nation in the making, occupying and subduing a rebellious continent; felling forests, plowing prairies, clearing the rivers, hewing out roads; founding farms and towns and commonwealths; solving offhand grave economic problems, wastefully sometimes, but effectively; and inventing and working out, on a gigantic scale, new, progressive principles of society and government. "You can't write books," carped the visitor. "We're busy just now," shouted the West carelessly over its shoulder, "but just wait till we get this bridge built, these prairies farmed, that new constitution framed " In 1820 Sydney Smith closed his tirade in the Edinburgh Review with the famous passage: "Who, in the four quarters of the globe, reads an American book? or goes to an American play ? or looks at an American painting or statue ? Who drinks out of American glasses? . . . or sleeps in American blankets?" To this charge (which the next twenty years were to make stupendously ridiculous) the North American Review replied with the customary defense, the appeal to the future. This resulted in more ridicule from the English Review: “Others claim honor because of things done by a long line of ancestors: an American glories in the achievements of a distant posterity. Others appeal to history; an American appeals to prophecy. If a traveller complains of the inns, and hints a dislike for sleeping four in a bed, he . . . is told to wait a hundred years and see the superiority of American inns over British. If Shakspere, Milton, Newton, are mentioned, he is told again, Wait till we have cleared our land, till we have idle time, wait till 1900, and then see how much nobler our poets and profounder our philosophers and longer our telescopes, than any your decrepit old hemisphere will produce.'" That the retort might not seem so amusing "in 1900" never occurred to the English humorist, or that there was quite as much sense in taking pride in descendants (whom we will have some share in fashioning) as in ancestors, who have only fashioned us. Englishmen paid dearly for this flippant blindness by the rancor stirred in American hearts, which unhappily persisted long after England had frankly confessed her error. CHAPTER XLVIII THE AWAKENING OF LABOR, 1825-1837 Laborin' man an' laborin' woman Hev one glory an' one shame: Injers all on 'em the same. - LOWELL, in the Biglow Papers. 527. The democratic upheaval of the thirties, revealed first in the election of Jackson, was due, first of all, to the growth of the West (ch. xlvii). Next to that, it was due to the awakening of the labor class in Eastern cities. In large degree, this labor class was a new class, due to the recent introduction of new machinery, and new methods of manufacturing, from England. In the last quarter of the eighteenth century, while America was waging her War of Independence, and while France was giving the world her great social revolution, obscure craftsmen in England - busied in homely toil, puzzling day after day over wheels and belts and levers, and seeking some way to save time had been working out the Industrial Revolution which was to change the daily life of the masses of men and women and children over all the world. 528. In colonial times, each housewife spent all spare moments at the spinning wheel, drawing out the fiber of flax or wool into thread or yarn, one thread at a time. This thread was woven into cloth on the primitive hand loom, older than history. In America this weaving also was usually done in each farm home. In England it was done commonly by a distinct class of skilled weavers. 529. The spinning was the slower work. One weaver could use all the thread that eight spinning wheels could supply. The weavers could not get thread fast enough; and in 1761 prizes began to be offered for inventions for swifter spinning. Three years later - just when parliament was blundering into the Stamp Act - James Hargreaves, an English weaver, noticed that his wife's spinning wheel, tipped over on the floor, kept on whirling for a surprising time. Taking a hint from this position, he invented a machine where one wheel turned eight spindles, and spun eight threads at a time. Hargreaves called the new machine the Jenny, for his wife. Soon it was improved so as to spin sixteen threads at a time. Then in 1771 (two years after Lord North had provoked the "Boston Massacre," and two years before he provoked the Boston Tea Party) Richard Arkwright, an English peddler, devised a new sort of spinner without spindles. He ran his wool or cotton through a series of rollers, turning at different rates, to draw out the thread; and he drove his machine by water power, and so called it the Water Frame. The year after Burgoyne's Surrender, or in 1779, Samuel Crompton, an English weaver, ingeniously combined the best features of the Jenny and the Water Frame in a machine which he called the Mule, in honor of this mixed parentage. With the Mule, one spinner could spin two hundred threads at a time. 530. Two hundred threads seem few to us, familiar as we are to-day with machinery such that a man with one or two boys winds 12,000 spools at once; but at the time the Mule made a revolution in cloth manufacturing. Now the weavers could not keep up with the spinners; and it was needful to improve the loom. On the hand loom, threads were first drawn out lengthwise on a frame, making the warp. The weaver then passed his shuttle by hand back and forth between those threads to form the woof. But in 1784 Edmund Cartwright, an English clergyman, patented a power loom, in which the shuttle threw itself back and forth automatically. 531. The next need was more cotton to spin and weave. Whitney's Cotton Gin (§ 436) soon made it easy for America to |