Page:Cambridge Modern History Volume 7.djvu/720

688 Contrast between North and South. [ivss- discount its future wealth before production takes place. And for this purpose, if it be a country of great extent, it must first grow up to its task of exploitation. For many years the chief economic character- istic of the United States was the possession of an excess of natural resources with an inadequate supply of labour and capital. It resembled a great ship undermanned and poorly equipped. Consequently economic progress, instead of being rapid in the early years, was, viewed from our present knowledge of the possibilities of the country, surprisingly slow. The very immensity of the undertaking required a period of prepara- tion before that strong and complex economic organisation could be developed which was necessary to the successful utilisation of American resources. The economic conditions prevalent in the first half of the nineteenth century have already been described, and may be very briefly summarised here. At the beginning of that century nine-tenths of the population of the country lived along the narrow strip of territory between the sea-coast and the Alleghanies. As yet the dominant section, politically and socially, was the group of Southern States with Virginia at their head. Here the economic system was patriarchal in form. Slavery was firmly established, and the land was held in large estates. The plantation system had been the natural outcome of the characters of the ruling class and the enslaved negroes, and of the nature of the soil, which was especially adapted to the production of tobacco, indigo, and cotton. Little attempt was made at diversity of agriculture; and, even at this period, the South was largely dependent on other districts for its food supplies as well as its manufactures. Tobacco had been the chief crop in the colonial period, and was just beginning to give way before that extension of cotton culture which was destined to play so great a part in the social and political as well as the economic history of the country. The invention of the cotton-gin by Eli Whitney had occurred a few years before; and this remarkable improvement, coming at a time when the new processes of manufacture were just making themselves felt in England, determined the course of Southern develop- ment for sixty years to come, and gave a firm economic foundation to the slave system a remarkable instance of a beneficent invention of the human mind affording the chief reason for the maintenance of an inhuman institution. The Northern States were agricultural and commercial. Here the conditions of agriculture were exactly the reverse of those in the South. Small holdings, with considerable diversity of products, were the rule. Food-products were grown, both for the home market and for export. The flourishing condition of West Indian commerce at this time furnished the chief foreign market for American provisions, and also for the products of the New England fisheries. The greatest commercial activity was found in the shipping business, which had been greatly