River and its tributaries formed the natural channel for the transportation of heavy produce southward to the plantations and outward to Europe.  Therefore, ran their political reasoning, the interests of the two sections were one.  By standing together in favor of low tariffs, they could buy their manufactures cheaply in Europe and pay for them in cotton, tobacco, and grain.  The union of the two sections under Jackson’s management seemed perfect.

=The East Forms Ties with the West.=—­Eastern leaders were not blind to the ambitions of Southern statesmen.  On the contrary, they also recognized the importance of forming strong ties with the agrarian West and drawing the produce of the Ohio Valley to Philadelphia and New York.  The canals and railways were the physical signs of this economic union, and the results, commercial and political, were soon evident.  By the middle of the century, Southern economists noted the change, one of them, De Bow, lamenting that “the great cities of the North have severally penetrated the interior with artificial lines until they have taken from the open and untaxed current of the Mississippi the commerce produced on its borders.”  To this writer it was an astounding thing to behold “the number of steamers that now descend the upper Mississippi River, loaded to the guards with produce, as far as the mouth of the Illinois River and then turn up that stream with their cargoes to be shipped to New York via Chicago.  The Illinois canal has not only swept the whole produce along the line of the Illinois River to the East, but it is drawing the products of the upper Mississippi through the same channel; thus depriving New Orleans and St. Louis of a rich portion of their former trade.”

If to any shippers the broad current of the great river sweeping down to New Orleans offered easier means of physical communication to the sea than the canals and railways, the difference could be overcome by the credit which Eastern bankers were able to extend to the grain and produce buyers, in the first instance, and through them to the farmers on the soil.  The acute Southern observer just quoted, De Bow, admitted with evident regret, in 1852, that “last autumn, the rich regions of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois were flooded with the local bank notes of the Eastern States, advanced by the New York houses on produce to be shipped by way of the canals in the spring....  These moneyed facilities enable the packer, miller, and speculator to hold on to their produce until the opening of navigation in the spring and they are no longer obliged, as formerly, to hurry off their shipments during the winter by the way of New Orleans in order to realize funds by drafts on their shipments.  The banking facilities at the East are doing as much to draw trade from us as the canals and railways which Eastern capital is constructing.”  Thus canals, railways, and financial credit were swiftly forging bonds of union between the old home of Jacksonian Democracy in the West and the older home of Federalism in the East.  The nationalism to which Webster paid eloquent tribute became more and more real with the passing of time.  The self-sufficiency of the pioneer was broken down as he began to watch the produce markets of New York and Philadelphia where the prices of corn and hogs fixed his earnings for the year.