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THE AMERICAN CONFLICT.

OUR

I.

COUNTRY.

THE United States of America, whose independence, won on the battle-fields of the Revolution, was tardily and reluctantly conceded by Great Britain on the 30th of November, 1782, contained at that time a population of a little less than Three Millions, of whom half a million were slaves. This population was mainly settled upon and around the bays, harbors, and inlets, which irregularly indent the western shore of the Atlantic Ocean, for a distance of about a thousand miles, from the mouth of the Penobscot to that of the Altamaha. The extent of the settlements inland from the coast may have averaged a hundred miles, although there were many points at which the primitive forest still looked off upon the broad expanse of the ocean. Nominally, and as distinguished from those of other civilized nations, the territories of the Confederation stretched westward to the Mississippi, and northward, as now, to the Great Lakes, giving a total area of a little more than eight hundred thousand square miles. At several inviting localities, the “clearings" were push

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ed two or three hundred miles westward, to the bases and more fertile valleys of the eastern slope of the Alleghanies; and there were three or four settlements quite beyond that formidable but not impassable barrier, mainly in that portion of Virginia which is now the State of Kentucky. But, in the absence of steam, of canals, and even of tolerable highways, and with the mouth of the Mississippi held and sealed by a jealous and not very friendly foreign power, the fertile valleys of the Illinois, the Wabash, and even of the Ohio itself, were scarcely habitable for civilized communities. No staple that their pioneer population would be likely, for many years, to produce, could be sold on the sea-board for the cost of its transportation, even from the site whereon Cincinnati has since been founded and built, much less from that of Indianapolis or Chicago. The delicate, costly fabrics of Europe, and even of Asia, could be transferred to the newest and most inland settlement for a small fraction of the price at which they would there be eagerly bought; but when the few

coins which the settlers had taken | ed, desolating Revolutionary strug

with them in their journey of emi-
gration had been exhausted, there
was nothing left wherewith to pay
for these costly luxuries; and debt,
embarrassment, bankruptcy, were the
inevitable results. A people clothed
in skins, living on the products of the
chase and the spontaneous abund-
ance of nature, might maintain ex-
istence and a rude social organization
amid the forests and on the prairies
of the Great Valley; any other must
have experienced striking alterna-
tions of factitious prosperity and uni-
versal distress; seeing its villages and
commercial depots rise, flourish, and
decay, after the manner of Jonah's
gourd, and its rural population con-
stantly hunted by debt and disaster
to new and still newer locations.
The Great West of to-day owes its
unequaled growth and progress,
its population, productiveness, and
wealth, primarily, to the framers of
the Federal Constitution, by which
its development was rendered possi-
ble; but more immediately and pal-
pably to the sagacity and statesman-
ship of Jefferson, the purchaser of
Louisiana; to the genius of Fitch and
Fulton, the projector and achiever,
respectively, of steam-navigation; to
De Witt Clinton, the early, unswerv-
ing, and successful champion of artifi-
cial inland navigation; and to Henry
Clay, the eminent, eloquent, and effec-
tive champion of the diversification
of our National Industry through the
Protection of Home Manufactures.

The difficulties which surrounded the infancy and impeded the growth of the thirteen original or Atlantic States, were less formidable, but kindred, and not less real. Our fathers emerged from their arduous, protract

gle, rich, indeed, in hope, but poor in
worldly goods. Their country had,
for seven years, been traversed and
wasted by contending armies, almost
from end to end. Cities and villages
had been laid in ashes. Habitations
had been deserted and left to decay.
Farms, stripped of their fences, and
deserted by their owners, had for
years produced only weeds. Camp
fevers, with the hardships and pri-
vations of war, had destroyed many
more than the sword; and all alike
had been subtracted from the most
effective and valuable part of a pop-
ulation, always, as yet, quite inade-
quate. Cripples and invalids, melan-
choly mementoes of the yet recent
struggle, abounded in every village
and township. Habits of industry
had been unsettled and destroyed by
the anxieties and uncertainties of
war. The gold and silver of ante-
revolutionary days had crossed the
ocean in exchange for arms and
munitions. The Continental paper,
which for a time more than supplied
(in volume) its place, had become
utterly worthless. In the absence of
a tariff, which the Confederate Con-
gress lacked power to impose, our
ports, immediately after peace, were
glutted with foreign luxuries-gew-
gaws which our people were eager
enough to buy, but for which they
soon found themselves utterly unable
to pay. They were almost exclusively
an agricultural people, and their
products, save only Tobacco and In-
digo, were not wanted by the Old
World, and found but a very restrict-
ed and inconsiderable market even
in the West Indies, whose trade was
closely monopolized by the nations
to which they respectively belonged.

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OUR COUNTRY AFTER THE REVOLUTION.

19

Indian Corn and Potatoes, the two | fashionable, even in high quarters;

principal edibles for which the poor of the Old World are largely indebted to America, were consumed to a very limited extent, and not at all imported, by the people of the eastern hemisphere. The wheat-producing capacity of our soil, at first unsurpassed, was soon exhausted by the unskillful and thriftless cultivation of the Eighteenth Century. Though one-third of the labor of the country was probably devoted to the cutting of timber, the axe-helve was but a pudding-stick; while the plow was a rude structure of wood, clumsily pointed and shielded with iron. A thousand bushels of corn (maize) are now grown on our western prairies at a cost of fewer days' labor than were required for the production of a hundred in New York or New England eighty years ago. And, though the settlements of that day were nearly all within a hundred miles of tidewater, the cost of transporting bulky staples, for even that distance, over the execrable roads that then existed, was about equal to the present charge for transportation from Illinois to New York. Industry was paralyzed by the absence or uncertainty of markets. Idleness tempted to dissipation, of which the tumult and excitement of civil war had long been the school. Unquestionably, the moral condition of our people had sadly deteriorated through the course of the Revolution. Intemperance had extended its ravages; profanity and licentiousness had overspread the land; a coarse and scoffing infidelity had become

"That spirit of freedom, which, at the commencement of this contest, would have gladly sacrificed every thing to the attainment of its object, has long since subsided, and every selfish passion has taken its place. It is not the

and the letters of Washington' and his compatriots bear testimony to the wide-spread prevalence of venality and corruption, even while the great issue of independence or subjugation was still undecided.

The return of peace, though it arrested the calamities, the miseries, and the desolations of war, was far from ushering in that halcyon state of universal prosperity and happiness which had been fondly and sanguinely anticipated. Thousands were suddenly deprived by it of their accustomed employment and means of subsistence, and were unable at once to replace them. Those accepted though precarious avenues to fame and fortune, in which they had found at least competence, were instantly closed, and no new ones seemed to open before them. In the absence of aught that could, with justice, be termed a currency, Trade and Business were even more depressed than Industry. Commerce and Navigation, unfettered by legislative restriction, ought to have been, or ought soon to have become, most flourishing, if the dicta of the world's accepted political economists had been sound; but the facts were deplorably at variance with their inculcations. Trade, emancipated from the vexatious trammels of the custom-house marker and gauger, fell tangled and prostrate in the toils of the usurer and the sheriff. The common people, writhing under the intolerable pressure of debt, for which no means of payment. existed, were continually prompting

public, but private interest, which influences the generality of mankind, nor can the Americans any longer boast of an exception."- Washington's Letter to Henry Laurens, July 10 (1782). Shoddy," it seems, dates away back of 1861.

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their legislators to authorize and direct those baseless issues of irredeemable paper money, by which a temporary relief is achieved, at the cost of more pervading and less curable disorders. In the year 1786, the legislature of New Hampshire, then sitting at Exeter, was surrounded, evidently by preconcert, by a gathering of angry and desperate men, intent on overawing it into an authorization of such an issue. In 1786, the famous Shays's Insurrection occurred in western Massachusetts, wherein fifteen hundred men, stung to madness by the snow-shower of writs to which they could not respond, and executions which they had no means of satisfying, undertook to relieve themselves from intolerable infestation, and save their families from being turned into the highways, by dispersing the courts and arresting the enforcement of legal process altogether. That the sea-board cities, depending entirely on foreign commerce, neither manufacturing themselves, nor having any other than foreign fabrics to dispose of, should participate in the general suffering, and earnestly scan the political and social horizon in quest of sources and conditions of comprehensive and enduring relief, was inevitable. And thus industrial paralysis, commercial embarrassment, and political disorder, combined to overbear inveterate prejudice, sectional jealousy, and the ambition of local magnates, in creating that more perfect UNION, whereof the foundations were laid and the pillars erected by Washington, Hamilton, Franklin, Madison, and their compeers, in the Convention which framed the Federal Constitution.

Yet it would not be just to close

this hasty and casual glance at our country, under the old federation, without noting some features which tend to relieve the darkness of the picture. The abundance and excellence of the timber, which still covered at least two-thirds of the area of the then States, enabled the common people to supply themselves with habitations, which, however rude and uncomely, were more substantial and comfortable than those possessed by the masses of any other country on earth. The luxuriant and omnipresent forests were likewise the sources of cheap and ample supplies of fuel, whereby the severity of our northern winters was mitigated, and the warm, bright fireside of even the humblest family, in the long winter evenings of our latitude, rendered a center of cheer and enjoyment. Social intercourse was more general, less formal, more hearty, more valued, than at present. Friendships were warmer and deeper. Relationship, by blood or by marriage, was more profoundly regarded. Men were not ashamed to own that they loved their cousins better than their other neighbors, and their neighbors better than the rest of mankind. To spend a month, in the dead of winter, in a visit to the dear old homestead, and in interchanges of affectionate greetings with brothers and sisters, married and settled at distances of twenty to fifty miles apart, was not deemed an absolute waste of time, nor even an experiment on fraternal civility and hospitality. And, though cultivation was far less effective than now, it must not be inferred that food was scanty or hunger predominant. The woods were alive with game, and nearly every boy and man be

OUR COUNTRY AFTER THE REVOLUTION.

21

tween fifteen and sixty years of age | merchant's for his groceries and was a hunter. The larger and smaller wares. A few bushels of corn, a few rivers, as yet unobstructed by the sheep, a fattened steer, with, perhaps, dams and wheels of the cotton-spin- a few saw-logs, or loads of hoop-poles, ner and power-loom weaver, abound- made up the annual surplus of the ed in excellent fish, and at seasons husbandman's products, helping to fairly swarmed with them. The square accounts with the blacksmith, potato, usually planted in the vege- the wheelwright, the minister, and table mold left by recently extermi- the lawyer, if the farmer were so unnated forests, yielded its edible tubers fortunate as to have any dealings with a bounteous profusion unknown with the latter personage. His life, to the husbandry of our day. Hills during peace, was passed in a narthe most granitic and apparently rower round than ours, and may well sterile, from which the wood was seem to us tame, limited, monotburned one season, would, the next onous; but the sun which warmed year, produce any grain in ample him was identical with ours; the measure, and at a moderate cost of breezes which refreshed him were labor and care. Almost every farm-like those we gladly welcome; and, er's house was a hive, wherein the great wheel' and the 'little wheel' -the former kept in motion by the hands and feet of all the daughters ten years old and upward, the latter plied by their not less industrious mother-hummed and whirled from morning till night. In the back room, or some convenient appendage, the loom responded day by day to the movements of the busy shuttle, whereby the fleeces of the farmer's flock and the flax of his field were slowly but steadily converted into substantial though homely cloth, sufficient for the annual wear of the family, and often with something over to exchange at the neighboring

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2" Vagabonds, without visible property or vocation, are placed in workhouses, where they are well clothed, fed, lodged, and made to labor. Nearly the same method of providing for the poor prevails through all the States; and, from Savannah to Portsmouth, you will seldom meet a beggar. In the larger towns, indeed, they sometimes present themselves. These are usually foreigners who have never obtained a settlement in any parish. I never saw a native American begging in the streets or highways.| A subsistence is easily gained here: and if, by misfortunes, they are thrown on the charities of the world, those provided by their own country

while his road to mill and to meeting was longer and rougher than those we daily traverse, he doubtless passed them unvexed by apprehensions of a snorting locomotive, at least as contented as we, and with small suspicion of his ill-fortune in having been born in the Eighteenth instead of the Nineteenth Century."

The illusion that the times that were are better than those that are, has probably pervaded all ages. Yet a passionately earnest assertion, which many of us have heard from the lips of the old men of thirty to fifty years ago, that the days of their youth were sweeter and happier than those we have known, will doubtless justify

are so comfortable and so certain, that they never think of relinquishing them to become strolling beggars. Their situation, too, when sick, in the family of a good farmer, where every member is anxious to do them kind offices, where they are visited by all the neighbors, who bring them little rarities which their sickly appetites may crave, and who take by rotation the nightly watch over them, when their condition requires it, is, without comparison, better than in a general hospital, where the sick, the dying, and the dead, are crammed together in the same rooms, and often in the same beds."-Jefferson's Notes on Virginia, p. 196.

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