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 enormously; 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.

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

1 Cf. cuts on pages 472, 473.

§ 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.

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 "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. But cf. map opposite with those on pages 269 and 418.)

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.)