circulated widely and no town of any size was without its own newspaper, or rival ones. The native literature, the arts, music, theater, and other amusements were recognized elements of national life. The people were learning to live; and the accumulation of wealth was developing a leisure class and culture. IMMIGRATION THE GREAT growth of population was not the result of natural increase only. Beginning about 1820, each year saw the arrival of a host of immigrants. In 1854 there were 428,000 of them. The number varied widely from year to year, but in 1860 4,000,000 of the population, being 13 percent of the whole, were of foreign birth. These were for the most part up to 1860 of the British, Irish, and German stock which had formed the most appreciable elements of the colonial people, and they did not make any marked ethnic change in the character of the population as a whole. INDUSTRIAL TREND THE CONTRAST between conditions in 1790 and 1860 has been noticed because it was at the end of this period that the nation entered upon its great struggle for continued existence as a whole, and the localism that had hindered and almost prevented the formation of the Union had still to bear the burden of the blame. The manifestation was the same, but the underlying causes had now become distinctly economic, whereas the differences inherited from colonial times were more social and directly political. The spread of the nation and the unparalleled development of industry were of necessity accompanied by an increasing unevenness in their economic effects. The sterile soil of New England could not long compete with the deep fertility of the prairies, especially when the development of transportation brought grain that was cheap to grow, cheap to even distant markets; and more than ever that region turned to its fisheries and foreign trade and also to manufactures. Throughout the Middle States there was this same trend toward industrialism. The West was still essentially agricultural; but even here there were 10 cities of 25,000 inhabitants or more, and a sufficient beginning of manufacturing to warrant the belief that the Old Northwest at least would become diversified in its economic foundations. THE SOUTH AND SLAVERY BUT THE South, which now included the states of the Southwest, was not only distinctly agricultural, but was confined to two crops, tobacco and cotton. After the invention of the cotton gin, which made it easy to extract the seeds from the lint, the growing of cotton received an enormous impulse, and spread over all the newer lands where climate and soil made its growth profitable. The South became cotton grower for the industrial world; not only did it furnish the supply for the northern mills, but the value of the export of cotton in 1860 was $192,000,000, or 57 percent of the whole export. And the cultivation of cotton was by slave labor; as also, though with much less importance, was the cultivation of tobacco; so that as slavery died out in the rest of the Union it became a chief factor in the economic well-being of the South. In 1790 there were 700,000 slaves in a total population of 3,900,000, which was 18 percent. In 1860 there were 4,000,000 in a population of 31,000,000, or less than 13 percent; but in the eleven states that seceded from the Union to form the Confederate States, there were 3,500,000 slaves in a total population of 8,900,000, which was 89 percent of all the slaves and 40 percent of the population of these seceding states. SECESSION AND WAR SUCH an enormous mass of servile laborers concentrated in one portion of the Union and bound up with the economic development of that region could not but have an influence upon social aspects and also upon the political point of view. Moreover, the conditions set the slave-holding section, a region that was a third in size and 40 percent of the population of the whole, apart from the rest, where slavery was forbidden or unprofitable; and checked the participation of that region in the general development described above. The political effect of this divergence was to keep alive in the South the spirit of localism and belief that the nation was under the new Constitution, as it had been under the Articles of Confederation, a Union of sovereign states, each of which retained the right to withdraw from the government, of which, through its ratification or later admission as a state, it had become a member. It is not necessary here to consider the legality of such action. Secession was not a new theory in 1860; the idea was as old as the government and movements for state action in disobedience to national measures had appeared several times in the history of the United States since 1789, and in various sections. But by 1860 the rest of the nation, developed as described above during the 70 years of life under the Constitution, had arrived at a disbelief in this theory. The result was war; and the effect of the defeat of the Confederate States, which the seceding states had formed, was to abolish forever the idea that the states had any rights except such as they possessed under the Constitution of the United States-the Constitution of an indestructible Union as well as one of indestructible states. THE NATION OF 1937 THE THIRD of the maps which accompany this sketch shows how the tale of the forty-eight states has been completed since 1860. During this period there has been also an addition of outlying dependencies, including Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Canal Zone, and the Philippines, the last being held in preparation for independence. The number of inhabitants in the continental region increased from 31,000,000 to 130,000,000. The continuance of the change in relative density of population and the shifting of political balance is shown. on the maps by the number of electoral votes in each state at the different periods. CHARACTER OF DEVELOPMENT, 1865-1937 THE NATIONAL growth after the end of the Civil War in 1865 accentuated the development of industrialism, with all its problems of capital and labor, of individual rights and rights of combination, of working conditions and the steadily increasing substitution of machines for human toil. Agriculture, still the most important element in our economic life, but hard pressed to hold its position, has also changed greatly. The regions of chief production have altered with the development of the frontier; products have become more varied, and more attention has been given to horticulture and fresh vegetables. Machines have multiplied and increased the possible area of cultivation, while diminishing the need of hand labor and relative employment. Agricultural schools and state and national bureaus have introduced science to agriculture; while the Grange and similar organizations, the gasoline engines, automobiles, telephones, rural delivery, electric light, and radio have wrought against the isolation and social dreariness that formerly surrounded rural life. While the population has grown and become more and more urban, its character as a whole has been much influenced by postbellum immigration. This has included vast numbers of Latin and Slavic people, not previously an influential factor, and having in many respects behind them generations of habits and culture quite different from those of the earlier growth of the country. Of great importance in postbellum development has been the effect in the South of the abolition of slavery and the consequent growth there of industrialism and share in the new principles of agriculture. MODERN PROBLEMS THE CROSS-HATCHING of the whole country with railroad lines, the universality of the telegraph and later of the telephone and radio, the unparalleled development of automobiles and the paved roads they require, and the introduction of aviation have all added to the complexity of American life, keyed it to the idea of haste, whether in the rush of business or the pursuit of pleasure, and tended also toward the elimination of localism and the prejudices of its ignorance, and toward the primacy of nationalism. Public supervision and control over private affairs, sharp consideration of the rights of the individual and the welfare of the many or the whole, of the claims of property and of humanity, of material and human conservation and reclamation, of the right and requirement of education, of representation and more direct control by the people, of the right to a healthful life and sufficient leisure, of the justifiable place of amusements, indoors and out-these also are phases of our present life. The youthful pioneer spirit died down with the disappearance of the frontier and the end of free land. The nation approached maturity; took on dignity and international responsibility as it became a world power, and faced the teeming problems of greatness, of many aspects of which the Framers had no conception. |