=The Agrarian West Turns to Industry.=—­Nor was this vast enterprise confined to the old Northeast where, as Madison had sagely remarked, commerce was early dominant.  “Cincinnati,” runs an official report in 1854, “appears to be a great central depot for ready-made clothing and its manufacture for the Western markets may be said to be one of the great trades of that city.”  There, wrote another traveler, “I heard the crack of the cattle driver’s whip and the hum of the factory:  the West and the East meeting.”  Louisville and St. Louis were already famous for their clothing trades and the manufacture of cotton bagging.  Five hundred of the two thousand woolen mills in the country in 1860 were in the Western states.  Of the output of flour and grist mills, which almost reached in value the cotton crop of 1850, the Ohio Valley furnished a rapidly growing share.  The old home of Jacksonian democracy, where Federalists had been almost as scarce as monarchists, turned slowly backward, as the needle to the pole, toward the principle of protection for domestic industry, espoused by Hamilton and defended by Clay.

=The Extension of Canals and Railways.=—­As necessary to mechanical industry as steel and steam power was the great market, spread over a wide and diversified area and knit together by efficient means of transportation.  This service was supplied to industry by the steamship, which began its career on the Hudson in 1807; by the canals, of which the Erie opened in 1825 was the most noteworthy; and by the railways, which came into practical operation about 1830.

[Illustration:  From an old print

AN EARLY RAILWAY]

With sure instinct the Eastern manufacturer reached out for the markets of the Northwest territory where free farmers were producing annually staggering crops of corn, wheat, bacon, and wool.  The two great canal systems—­the Erie connecting New York City with the waterways of the Great Lakes and the Pennsylvania chain linking Philadelphia with the headwaters of the Ohio—­gradually turned the tide of trade from New Orleans to the Eastern seaboard.  The railways followed the same paths.  By 1860, New York had rail connections with Chicago and St. Louis, one of the routes running through the Hudson and Mohawk valleys and along the Great Lakes, the other through Philadelphia and Pennsylvania and across the rich wheat fields of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois.  Baltimore, not to be outdone by her two rivals, reached out over the mountains for the Western trade and in 1857 had trains running into St. Louis.

In railway enterprise the South took more interest than in canals, and the friends of that section came to its aid.  To offset the magnet drawing trade away from the Mississippi Valley, lines were built from the Gulf to Chicago, the Illinois Central part of the project being a monument to the zeal and industry of a Democrat, better known in politics than in business, Stephen A. Douglas.  The swift movement of cotton