§ 434]

ROADS AND TRAVEL

359

433. The westward march of our population had barely begun. In 1800 the "center of population" was eighteen miles west of Baltimore. Ten years before, it had been forty-one miles farther east. The half million people west of the mountains dwelt still in four or five isolated groups, all included in a broad, irregular wedge of territory with its apex reaching not quite to the Mississippi (map, facing p. 269). The greater part of our own half of the great valley was yet unknown even to the frontiersman. In his inaugural, Jefferson, enthusiast that he was regarding his country's future, asserted that we then had room enough for our descendants to the hundredth and even thousandth generation." Before his next inaugural, he was to double that territory.

434. Communication remained much as before the Revolution. The States had little more intercourse with one another, as yet, than the colonies had enjoyed. The lowest letter postage was eight cents from New York to Boston it was twenty cents. In 1790 there were only 75 post offices in the country1-for a territory and population which under modern conditions would have some 6000. A traveler could jolt by clumsy and cramped stagecoach, at four miles an hour, from Boston to New York in three days, and on to Philadelphia in two days more -longer than it now takes to go from Boston to San Francisco. Such travel, too, cost from three to four times as much as modern travel by rail. South of the Potomac, traveling was possible only on horseback with frequent embarrassments from absence of bridges or ferries. Between 1790 and 1800, a few canals were constructed, and attention was turning to the possibilities in that means of communication. Freights by land averaged, it is computed, ten cents a mile per ton, even in the settled areas, or ten times the rates our railroads charge. Merely to move sugar from the coast to any point 300 miles inland cost more than sugar sells for to-day anywhere in the country.

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1 This was three times the number at the opening of the Revolution. England had introduced a postal system into the colonies, but it was very crude.

435. Occupations had changed little since 1775 (§§ 203 ff.). The year after the peace with England saw the first American voyage to China; and shipmasters began at once to reach out for the attractive profits of that Oriental trade. The European wars were favoring our carrying trade with the Old World. John Jacob Astor was organizing the great American Fur Company, to follow the furs into the far Northwest. Manufactures were making a little progress. A few iron mills were at work; and, between 1790 and 1812, some of the machinery recently invented in England for spinning and weaving cotton was introduced. In England, by 1800, such machinery had worked an

1

"Industrial Revolution"; but it did not come into use extensively here until nearly 1830 (528 ff.).

436. For America the chief result of the Industrial Revolution at this time was England's increased demand for raw cotton for her new factories. Cotton had been costly because the seed had always had to be separated from the fiber by hand.

1 Modern Progress, chs. xxiii-xxv, or Modern World, chs. xlii-xliv.

But

§ 437]

WAGES AND FRUGALITY

361

in 1793 Eli Whitney, a Connecticut schoolmaster in Georgia, invented an "engine" for this work. This cotton gin was simple énough to be run by a slave; and with it one man could "clean" as much cotton as 300 men could by hand. Southern

planters at once gave their attention to meeting the new English demand. In 1791 we exported only 200,000 pounds: in 1800 the amount was 100 times that; and this was doubled the third year after. Soon the South could boast, "Cotton is King." 437. Farming tools and methods had improved little in four thousand years. The American farmer with strenuous toil

scratched the soil with a clumsy wooden homemade bull plow. He had no other machines for horses to draw, except a rude harrow and a cart. He sowed his grain by hand, cut it with the sickle of primitive times, and thrashed it out on the barn floor with the flail-older than history - if he did not tread it out by cattle, as the ancient Egyptians did. The first threshing machine had been invented in 1785, but it had not yet come into use. The cradle-scythe-a hand tool, but a vast improvement over the old sickle- was patented in 1803. The first improvements on the plow date from experiments on

different shapes of mold boards by Thomas Jefferson. Soon after 1800 appeared the cast-iron wheeled plow. This was soon to work a revolution-permitting deeper and more rapid tillage; but for some years farmers refused to use it, asserting that the iron "poisoned" the ground. Drills, seeders, mowers, reapers, binders, were still in the future.

438. In the cities a small class of merchants imitated in a quiet way the luxury of the corresponding class in England,— with spacious homes, silver-laden tables, and, on occasion, crimson-velvet attire. The great planters of the South, too, lived in open-handed wastefulness, though with little real comfort. Otherwise American society was simple and frugal, with a standard of living far below that of to-day. Necessities of life cost more (so far as they were not produced in the home), and wages were lower. Hodcarrier and skilled mason received about half the wage (in purchasing value) paid for corresponding labor to-day, and for a labor day lasting from sunrise to sunset.1 The unskilled laborers who toiled on the public buildings and streets of Washington from 1793 to 1800 received seventy dollars a year" and found"— which did not include clothing. And the income of the professional classes was insignificant by later standards.

Says Henry Adams (I, 21): "Many a country clergyman, eminent for piety and even for hospitality, brought up a family and laid aside some savings on a salary of five hundred dollars a year. President Dwight [of Yale] . . . eulogizing the life of Abijah Weld, pastor of Attleborough, declared that on a salary of $250 Mr. Weld brought up eleven children, besides keeping a hospitable house and maintaining charity to the poor." Such ministers usually eked out their salaries by tilling small farms with their own hands.

The homes of farmers and mechanics found clean sand a substitute for carpets, and pewter or wooden dishes sufficient for tableware. There was no linen on the table; nor prints on the

1 These wages were fifty per cent better than before the Revolution, so that John Jay, high-minded gentleman that he was, complains bitterly about the "exorbitant" wages demanded by artisans, much as John Winthrop did in

1632.