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8 645]

GROWTH AND PROSPERITY

543

The merit of the Compromise of 1850 in our history is that it put off the war until this alliance was cemented and the Northwest was, body and soul, on the side of the Union.

In yet another way the improved reapers and threshers may be said to have won the Civil War. Without such machinery, Northern grain fields could never have spared the men who marched with Grant and Sherman. As it was, with half its men under arms, the Northwest increased its farm output.

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With permission, from Dodd's Expansion and Conflict (" Riverside History of the United States "), published by the Houghton Mifflin Company.

645. The acquisition of California had been followed by a swift expansion of trade with Asia. Hawaii had been brought under American influence previously by American missionaries and traders; and in 1844 China was persuaded to open up five

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treaty ports" to American trade. Japan continued to exclude foreigners until 1854, when Commodore Perry, in pursuance of orders from Washington, entered Japanese ports with his fleet of warships and secured a commercial treaty.

After the discovery of gold in California (and with the opening of these prospects of Oriental trade) the question of transportation across the Isthmus of Panama arose. Great Britain and the United States each tried to secure routes for a canal

from ocean to ocean; but in 1850 the Clayton-Bulwer treaty agreed that any canal across those narrow lands should be neutral, and subject to common control by the two countries. In 1855 a railway was opened across the Isthmus.

The ambitious project of an American railway from the Mississippi to the Pacific was agitated constantly after 1850; and in 1861, encouraged by prospects of a government subsidy, the Western Union carried a telegraph line across the mountains to San Francisco. Travel from St. Louis to San Francisco, by relays of armed stage coaches, took four weeks; but mail was carried in ten days by the daring riders of the "Pony Express."

646. Population had continued to increase at about the old rate of 100 per cent in twenty-five years, besides the added volume of immigration in the fifties. Between 1850 and 1860 our numbers had risen from twenty-three million to thirty-one and a half; and the cities (eight thousand people and upwards) counted now 158. This was four times as many as twenty years earlier; and the cities now contained one man in every six of the entire population, instead of one in twelve, as in 1840, or one in twenty, as in 1800. The westward movement of population, too, continued unabated.

The map (page 358) makes that movement appear even greater than in earlier decades; but the westward leap of the "center of population" between 1850 and 1860 is deceptive. Before 1850, the position of that point had been a roughly correct indication, because, on the whole, except for a temporary gap at the Appalachians (§ 180), settlement had been fairly contiguous. But between 1849 and 1860 half a million people had crossed to the Pacific Coast, leaving more than half the continent unsettled behind them, - so that in determining this artificial "center of gravity," three men at San Francisco had as much weight as ten in New York. cf. map opposite with those on pages 269 and 418.)

But

The cities of 1860 were still large towns gone to seed from rapid growth. They were unplanned, ugly, filthy, poorly policed; and the larger ones were run by corrupt "rings" of politicians, who maintained their power by unblushing fraud. New York introduced a uniformed and disciplined "Metropolitan police just before the War; and the invention of the steam fire engine, in 1853, promised somewhat better protection against the common devastating fires. (Cf. § 432.)

§ 647]

NORTH AND SOUTH

545

The foreign-born inhabitants now numbered nearly one in eight of the total population. They were massed almost wholly in the North, making more than half the people of some States.

647. The North contained nineteen million of the thirty-one and a half million people of the Union, a ratio of 19 to 12; and of the twelve and a half million in the South, four million were slaves. Moreover, when the war line was finally drawn, four

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slave-holding States (Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky, and Missouri) remained with the North. These States contained a fourth of the "Southern" population; and the recruits which these divided districts sent to the South were about offset by recruits to the North from "West" Virginia and Eastern Tennessee. Thus, for totals, secession was to be supported by less than five and a half million Whites (with three and a half million slaves) against more than twenty-two million for the Union. The area of Secession contained one White man of military age to four in the North. The North had three fourths the railway mileage and six sevenths of the cities of the Union.

648. The South too was less able to feed and clothe armies. She furnished seven eighths of the world's raw cotton; but she did not raise her own full supply of food, and manufactures and mechanical skill were almost totally lacking. Minerals and waterpower were abundant, but unused. Said a Charleston paper to its people: "Whence come your axes, hoes, scythes? Yes, even your plows, harrows, rakes, ax and auger handles? Your furniture, carpets, calicoes, and muslins? The cradle that rocks your infant, the top your boy spins, the doll your girl caresses, the clothes your children wear, the books from which they are educated . . . all are imported into South Carolina.” "The North," says Rhodes, "combined the resources of farm, shop, and factory; the South was but a farm"-and a farm which received from outside much of its bread and meat.

Even so, only half as much of the land was cultivated South as North. The value of Southern farm land, too, was less than that of similar land in the North, while the value of farm machinery to each cultivated acre was not half that in the North. Slaves could not be trusted with machinery.

The difference was due not to climate, but to labor. It showed instantly upon crossing a State line. In 1796 George Washington noted the higher prices of land in Pennsylvania than in Maryland "though not of superior quality”; and added his opinion, on that ground, that Virginia must follow Pennsylvania's example of emancipation "at a period

§ 650]

NORTH AND SOUTH

547 not far remote." Tocqueville (p. 282) noted the contrast between the north and south banks of the Ohio: thinly scattered population, with occasional gangs of indolent slaves in the few, "half-desert" fields, as over against "the busy hum of industry fields rich with harvest . . . comfortable homes. prosperity on all sides." In 1859 Frederick Law Olmsted made a journey through the Southern States; and his acute observations (summed up in his Cotton Kingdom) proved that the industrial retardation of the South had been steadily increasing up to the final catastrophe.

649. In other respects, also, slavery was avenged upon the masters. The poorer Whites were degraded by it, and the slave-owning class were unduly passionate, imperious, and willful.

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The 9,000,000 Whites of the slaveholding States composed some 1,800,000 families. One fifth of these owned slaves; but only eight or ten thousand families owned more than fifty apiece. This small aristocracy had a peculiar charm if only the ugly substructure could be forgotten. The men were leisured and cultivated, with a natural gift for leadership and a high sense of public duty. They were courageous, honorable, generous, with easy bearing and a chivalrous courtesy. Visitors from the Old World complained that Northern men were absorbed in business cares, and lacking in ease of manner; but they were always charmed by the aristocratic manners and cultivated taste of the gentry of the South.

It must be added, however, not only that the great body of small slaveowners were destitute of this charm, but that they were often uneducated. The South produced relatively little literature, except political speeches, and little art; and (except for North Carolina's educational revival under Calvin H. Wiley, after 1853) it had few public schools. On the other hand, Southern politics had absolutely no taint of that corruption which had appeared in the North.

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650. Man for man, in marching and fighting, the Southerner was far more than a match for the man of the North, especially for the man of the Eastern cities. Southern outdoor life and familiarity with firearms counted for much in the early cam

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