CHAPTER II

PRESENT CONDITIONS

Up to the Civil War and for some years after, our people were almost wholly agricultural.  National activity contented itself with settling and developing the vast areas of the public lands, whose virgin richness cried aloud in the wilderness for men.

The policy of the government, framed to stimulate rapid occupation of the public lands, had attracted hordes of settlers over the mountains from the older states, and immigration flowed in a steady stream into the valleys of the Ohio and the Mississippi.

A system had grown up in the South almost patriarchal, based upon cultivation by slave labor of enormous areas devoted exclusively to cotton.  In the North, New England had developed some few centers of industry, drawing their support from the manufacture of the great Southern staple.  New York, Boston, and Philadelphia were growing as outlets for foreign commerce, but as yet manufacturing flourished but feebly and in few localities.

Such manufacturing and commercial enterprises as existed had been laboriously built up by long years of honest working.  The free lands of the government, by giving laborers an alternative, kept up wages, forcing employers to bid against each other for labor; and monopoly thus being checked, individual equality was possible.

The mineral resources of Pennsylvania and Ohio were all but unsuspected, and the calm of a people devoted to the peaceful pursuits of agriculture rested over the country.

Railroads were few and inefficient:  telegraph lines but in their infancy.  Intercourse among the people, outside of a narrow fringe on the Atlantic coast, was cumbersome, and impeded by many obstacles.  Primitive conditions everywhere prevailed, and communities brooded in silence, growing stragglingly in sluggish indifference, content with coarse food and coarser living.

Such, in general, were the conditions up to 1861.  Then came the storm of shot and shell, the rain of blood, the elemental rage of passion called the Civil War.  There was a total upset of business.  Such periods of hard times as had occurred prior to that time had been caused by the tinkering of untrained minds with the money system or by land speculation, and not by lack of access to the riches of nature.  After four years our people awoke, as from a nightmare, to find the old life swept away forever.  In the South, the Confederates, bitter and sullen, groping amid the ruins of their institutions, sought to find some substitute for the agricultural despotism exercised for generations by their slaveholding families.  In the East, the first families of the Revolution, secure in their preeminence, assumed again the manufacturing-banking-social prestige.  The far West was still almost unknown, and remained in possession of the buffalo and the Indian.  Settlers poured, in increasing numbers on to the unappropriated lands still left in the states of the central West, and the center of political power shifted rapidly to this fertile region.