As the farmers from the Northwest and planters from the Southwest poured in upon the floor of Congress,the party of Jefferson,christened anew by Jackson,grew stronger year by year.Opponents there were,no doubt,disgruntled critics and Whigs by conviction;but in 1852Franklin Pierce,the Democratic candidate for President,carried every state in the union except Massachusetts,Vermont,Kentucky,and Tennessee.This victory,a triumph under ordinary circumstances,was all the more significant in that Pierce was pitted against a hero of the Mexican War,General Scott,whom the Whigs,hoping to win by rousing the martial ardor of the voters,had nominated.On looking at the election returns,the new President calmly assured the planters that "the general principle of reduction of duties with a view to revenue may now be regarded as the settled policy of the country."With equal confidence,he waved aside those agitators who devoted themselves "to the supposed interests of the relatively few Africans in the United States."Like a watchman in the night he called to the country:"All's well."
The party of Hamilton and Clay lay in the dust.
The Industrial Revolution
As pride often goeth before a fall,so sanguine expectation is sometimes the symbol of defeat.Jackson destroyed the bank.Polk signed the tariff bill of 1846striking an effective blow at the principle of protection for manufactures.Pierce promised to silence the abolitionists.His successor was to approve a drastic step in the direction of free trade.Nevertheless all these things left untouched the springs of power that were in due time to make America the greatest industrial nation on the earth;namely,vast national resources,business enterprise,inventive genius,and the free labor supply of Europe.Unseen by the thoughtless,unrecorded in the diaries of wiseacres,rarely mentioned in the speeches of statesmen,there was swiftly rising such a tide in the affairs of America as Jefferson and Hamilton never dreamed of in their little philosophies.
The Inventors.-Watt and Boulton experimenting with steam in England,Whitney combining wood and steel into a cotton gin,Fulton and Fitch applying the steam engine to navigation,Stevens and Peter Cooper trying out the "iron horse"on "iron highways,"Slater building spinning mills in Pawtucket,Howe attaching the needle to the flying wheel,Morse spanning a continent with the telegraph,Cyrus Field linking the markets of the new world with the old along the bed of the Atlantic,McCormick breaking the sickle under the reaper-these men and a thousand more were destroying in a mighty revolution of indus-try the world of the stagecoach and the tallow candle which Washington and Franklin had inherited little changed from the age of C?sar.Whitney was to make cotton king.Watt and Fulton were to make steel and steam masters of the world.Agriculture was to fall behind in the race for supremacy.
Industry Outstrips Planting.-The story of invention,that tribute to the triumph of mind over matter,fascinating as a romance,need not be treated in detail here.The effects of invention on social and political life,multitudinous and never-ending,form the very warp and woof of American progress from the days of Andrew Jackson to the latest hour.Neither the great civil conflict-the clash of two systems-nor the problems of the modern age can be approached without an understanding of the striking phases of industrialism.
Lowell,Massachusetts,in 1838,an Early Industrial TownFirst and foremost among them was the uprush of mills managed by captains of industry and manned by labor drawn from farms,cities,and foreign lands.For every planter who cleared a domain in the Southwest and gathered his army of bondmen about him,there rose in the North a magician of steam and steel who collected under his roof an army of free workers.
In seven league boots this new giant strode ahead of the Southern giant.Between 1850and 1859,to use dollars and cents as the measure of progress,the value of domestic manufactures including mines and fisheries rose from$1,019,106,616to $1,900,000,000,an increase of eighty-six per cent in ten years.In this same period the total production of naval stores,rice,sugar,tobacco,and cotton,the staples of the South,went only from $165,000,000,in round figures,to $204,000,000.At the halfway point of the century,the capital invested in industry,commerce,and cities far exceeded the value of all the farm land between the Atlantic and the Pacific;thus the course of economy had been reversed in fifty years.Tested by figures of production,King Cotton had shriveled by 1860to a petty prince in comparison,for each year the captains of industry turned out goods worth nearly twenty times all the bales of cotton picked on Southern plantations.Iron,boots and shoes,and leather goods pouring from Northern mills surpassed in value the entire cotton output.