hideous results that would have followed a successful attempt. He planned to establish a camp in the mountains to which Negro fugitives might rally; and his little force of twenty-two men seized the arsenal at Harper's Ferry, to get arms for slave recruits. The neighboring slaves did not rise, as he had hoped they would, and he was captured after a gallant defense. Virginia gave him a fair trial; and he was convicted of murder and of treason against that commonwealth. His death made him more formidable to slavery than ever he had been living. The North in general condemned his action; but its condemnation was tempered by a note of sympathy and admiration ominous to Southern ears. Emerson declared that Brown's execution made" the scaffold glorious — like the Cross."

b. In 1852 Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe had written Uncle Tom's Cabin, one of the greatest moral forces ever contained between book covers. The volume undoubtedly misrepresented slavery, -as though exceptional incidents had been the rule; but it did its great work in making the people of the North realize that the slave was a fellow man for whom

any slavery was hateful. The tremendous influence of the book, however, was not really felt for some years. The boys of fourteen who read it in 1852 were just ready to give their vote to Abraham Lincoln in 1860. This explains, too, in part, why the college youth who had been generally proslavery in 1850 left college halls vacant in 1861-1865 to join the Northern armies.

EXERCISE. -a. Topical reviews: (1) territorial expansion; (2) population, immigration, distribution, etc.; (3) attempts to restrict slavery in the Territories; (4) tariff legislation, to the War.

It

b. Prepare a table of admission of States for reference. FOR FURTHER READING. The stirring story of the Compromise of 1850 and of the struggle for Kansas should be read in larger histories. is told brilliantly, and quite briefly, in MacDonald's From Jefferson to Lincoln, 124-207. There are many readable and valuable biographies for the period: among them, Hart's Chase, Morse's Lincoln, Meigs' Benton, Davis' Jefferson Davis, and the admirable sketches in Trent's Southern Statesmen, besides those mentioned in previous lists.

CHAPTER LVI

ON THE EVE OF THE FINAL STRUGGLE

I. AMERICA IN 1860

643. WE have treated the period 1845-1860 only in regard to the slavery question. To most men of the time, however, these years had a more engrossing aspect. The era was one of wonderful material prosperity. Wealth increased fourfold, for the first time in our history faster than population. Men were absorbed in a mad race to seize the new opportunities. They had to stop, in some degree, for the slavery discussion; but the majority looked upon that as an annoying interruption to the real business of life.

Between 1850 and 1857, railway mileage multiplied enor mously; and in the North the map took on its modern gridiron look. Lines reached the Mississippi at ten points; and some projected themselves into the unsettled plains beyond. With the railway, or ahead of it, spread the telegraph. Mail routes, too, took advantage of rail transportation; and in 1850 postage was lowered from 5 cents for 300 miles to 3 cents for 3000 miles. With cheap and swift transportation and communication, the era of commercial combinations began, and great fortunes piled up beyond all previous dreams. The new money kings, railway barons, and merchant princes of the North, it was noted, joined hands with the great planters of the South in trying to stifle opposition to slavery - because all such agitation "hurt business."

For labor, too, the period was a golden age. Between 1840 and 1860, wages rose twenty per cent, and prices only two per cent. Pauperism was unobtrusive, and, to foreign observers, amazingly rare. Inventions had multiplied comforts and

luxuries. Pianos from Germany were seen in Western villages, and French silks sometimes found their way to the counter of a cross-roads store. Western farmers moved from their old log cabins into two-story frame houses, painted white, with green blinds. That same rather bare sort of building was the common "town" house also in the West- varied, however, by an occasional more pretentious and often more ugly "mansion" of brick or stone.

New England and New York had learned the lesson of conservative banking; but in the West most banks were still managed recklessly. In 1857, accordingly, came another "panic," due, like that of 1837, to speculation, wild inflation of credit, and premature investment of borrowed capital in enterprises that could give no immediate return. This time, however, the country recovered quickly from the disorder.

644. The twenty years preceding the Civil War saw an industrial transformation due to the development of farm machinery. One farm laborer in 1860 could produce more than three in 1840.1 Until 1850, the dominant agricultural interest of the United States had been the cotton and tobacco of the South. After that date, it became the grain of the Northwest. For that section, McCormick's reaper worked a revolution akin to that worked for the South a half-century earlier by Whitney's cotton gin. Until 1850, too, the more distant parts of the West, Wisconsin, Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, southern Illinois, had remained tributary commercially to New Orleans, by the river. Now this Northwest suddenly changed front. Farm machinery and the railway made it possible for it to feed the growing Eastern cities and even to export the surplus to Europe from Eastern ports.

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This change in trade routes was more than economic. pleted the break in the old political alliance of South and West already begun by the moral awakening on slaveryand foreshadowed a new political alliance of East and West.

1 Cf. cuts on pages 472, 473.