... neighborhood. I was thus exposed to perpetual, and most vexatious interruptions from people whom I had often never seen, and whose names still oftener were unknown to me. . . . If it was a female, she took off her hat; if a male, he kept it on, and then taking possession of the first chair in their way, they would retain it for an hour together, without uttering another word; at length, rising abruptly, they would again shake hands, with, Well, now I must be going, I guess," and so take themselves off, apparently well contented with their reception. . . . ९९ There was one man whose progress in wealth I watched with much interest and pleasure. When I first became his neighbor, himself, his wife, and four children were living in one room, with plenty of beef-steaks and onions for breakfast, dinner, and supper, but with very few other comforts. He was one of the finest men I ever saw, full of natural intelligence and activity of mind and body, but he could neither read nor write. . .. I have no doubt that every sun that sets sees him a richer man than when it rose. He hopes to make his son a lawyer; and I have little doubt that he will live to see him sit in Congress. When this time arrives, the wood-cutter's son will rank with any other member of Congress, not of courtesy, but of right. . . . This is the only feature in American society that I recognize as indicative of the equality they profess. Any man's son may become the equal of any other man's son; and the consciousness of this is certainly a spur to exertion: on the other hand it is also a spur to that coarse familiarity, untempered by any shadow of respect, which is assumed by the grossest and the lowest in their intercourse with the highest and most refined. This is a positive evil, and, I think, more than balances its advantages. ... ... In reading Capt. Hall's volumes on America,1 the observation which, I think, struck me the most forcibly . . . was the following: "In all my travels both amongst Heathens, and amongst Christians, I never encountered any people by whom I found it nearly so difficult to make myself understood as by the Americans.". . . It is less necessary, I imagine, for the mutual understanding of persons conversing together, that the language should 1 Captain Basil Hall, Travels in North America in the Years 1827 and 1828, 3 vols. Edinburgh, 1829. be the same, than that their ordinary mode of thinking, and habits of life, should, in some degree, assimilate; whereas, in point of fact, there is hardly a single point of sympathy between the Americans and us.... Herein, I think, rests the only apology for the preposterous and undignified anger felt and expressed against Capt. Hall's work. They really cannot, even if they wished it, enter into any of his views or comprehend his most ordinary feelings; and therefore they cannot believe in the sincerity of the impressions he describes. A more sympathetic, if not much more favorable, view of Americans is presented by the indefatigable traveler and novelist, Captain Marryat, who visited us in 1837: The Americans are often themselves the cause of their being misrepresented; there is no country perhaps in which the habit of deceiving for amusement, or what is termed hoaxing, is so common. Indeed this and hyperbole constitute the major part of American humor. If they have the slightest suspicion that a foreigner is about to write a book, nothing appears to give them so much pleasure as to try to mislead him. . . . When I was at Boston, a gentleman of my acquaintance brought me Miss Martineau's work, and was excessively delighted when he pointed out to me two pages of fallacies, which he had told her with a grave face and which she had duly recorded and printed.... Another difficulty and cause of misrepresentation is, that travellers are not aware of the jealousy existing between the inhabitants of the different states and cities. The eastern states 1 Harriet Martineau, Society in America, 3 vols. London, 1837. Capt. Marryat cut from a New York newspaper in 1837 this notice: "That old deaf English maiden lady, Miss Martineau, who travelled through some of the States a few years since, gives a full account of Mr. Poindexter's death; unfortunately for her veracity, the gentleman still lives; but this is about as near the truth as the majority of her statements. The Loafing English men and women who visit America, as penny-a-liners, are perfectly understood here, and Jonathan amuses himself whenever he meets them, by imposing upon their credulity the most absurd stories which he can invent, which they swallow whole, go home with their eyes sticking out of their heads with wonder, and print all they have heard for the benefit of John Bull's calves." pronounce the southerners to be choleric, reckless, regardless of law and indifferent to religion; while the southerners designate the eastern states as a nursery of overreaching pedlars, selling clocks and wooden nutmegs. . . . Boston turns up her erudite nose at New York; Philadelphia in her pride looks down on both New York and Boston; while New York, chinking her dollars, swears the Bostonians are a parcel of puritanical prigs, and the Philadelphians a would-be aristocracy. A western man from Kentucky, when at the Tremont House in Boston, begged me particularly not to pay attention to what they said of his state in that quarter. Both a Virginian and Tennesseean, when I was at New York, did the same. . . . America is a wonderful country, endowed by the Omnipotent with natural advantages which no other can boast of; and the mind can hardly calculate upon the degree of perfection and power to which, whether the States are eventually separated or not, it may in the course of two centuries arrive. At present all is energy and enterprise.... If I were to draw a comparison between the English and the Americans, I should say that there is almost as much difference between the two nations at this present time, as there has long been between the English and the Dutch. The latter are considered by us as phlegmatic and slow; and we may be considered the same compared with our energetic descendants. Time to an American is everything, and space he attempts to reduce to a mere nothing. . . . "Go ahead!" is the real motto of the country. ... The American lives twice as long as others; for he does twice the work during the time that he lives.... He rises early, eats his meals with the rapidity of a wolf, and is the whole day at his business. If he be a merchant, his money, whatever it amount to, is seldom invested; it is all floating his accumulations remain active; and when he dies, his wealth has to be collected from the four quarters of the globe. ... Each man would surpass his neighbour; and the only great avenue open to all, and into which thousands may press without much jostling of each other, is that which leads to the shrine of Mammon. ... There is no more accurate gauge of the prosperity of our Middle West in the period under consideration than the trade of New statistics of commerce on the great Mississippi River system. 60. The river During the first half of the nineteenth century, when trans- Orleans, portation in America was based on the waterways, and the 1816–1840 few short stretches of railway served chiefly to connect [192] points of navigation on the rivers, New Orleans became the queen city of commerce in the South, as New York did in the North. The report of 1887 on the internal commerce of the United States thus reviews the trade of New Orleans: The receipts of New Orleans during the first year of successful steam navigation, 1816, amounted in value to $8,062,540.... This is independent of the produce raised in Louisiana, such as cotton, corn, indigo, molasses, rice, sugar, tafia or rum, and lumber. These were brought to the market in the planters' crafts, and often taken from the plantation direct in foreign-bound vessels. . . . The value of the receipts shows to what extent the produce of the West passed through New Orleans. Cotton, which in later days rose to be 60 or even 75 per cent. in value of all the receipts, was then barely 12 per cent. At least 80 per cent. of the articles came from the West, that is from the Ohio, and the Upper Mississippi, above the Ohio. They represented the surplus products of the Mississippi Valley, for but little found any other exit to market. Much of the product shipped from the West to New Orleans was lost en route. A rough estimate places the loss from disasters, snags, etc. at 20 per cent. Many boats, moreover, stopped along the river on their way down to sell supplies to the planters. Thus at Natchez flour, grain, and pork were purchased from the Kentucky boats. From these losses the sales and shipments down the river in 1816, including the products of Louisiana, may be estimated at $13,875,000. The river traffic required 6 steam-boats, 594 barges, and 1287 flat-boats, of an actual tonnage of 87,670. . . ... During all this period [1816-1840], and despite all these difficulties, the number of arrivals at New Orleans and the amount of river business on the Lower Mississippi continued to steadily increase. The growth of the river traffic is well shown in this table: In regard to the steam-boats, it should be remembered that the steady increase in arrivals each year does not fully express the increase in tonnage, because the boats were not only growing more numerous, but were increasing in size each year, and thus while they doubled in number between 1825 and 1833, they more than trebled in their carrying capacity. ... As the first two decades of the century showed the settlement of the Ohio basin, and a rapid increase in population and production, so the next two resulted in the settlement of the Lower Mississippi region from Louisiana to the mouth of the Ohio. The removal of the Indian tribes to the Indian Territory, the building of levees and the immense increase in the demand for cotton, hastened the development of West Tennessee, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Northern Louisiana. It was during this period that the South first began to insist on the sovereignty of King Cotton, and New Orleans claimed, like Mahomet, to be its prophet. The rapid development of the cotton manufacturing industries in Europe incited the planters to devote more and more acres to it, and it became highly profitable to cultivate cotton even on credit. New Orleans was overflowing with money in those flush times, and lent it readily. . . . When the big collapse of 1837 came, the banks of New Orleans, with a circulation of $7,000,000, purported to have a capital of $34,000,000, a great majority of them being wrecked in the storm. Within a few years, however, New Orleans had recovered from the shock and strengthened its hold on the planters. That eminent statistical and economical authority, De Bow's Review, declared that no city of the world has ever advanced as a mart of commerce with such gigantic and rapid strides as |