Tyler's plans.

Sources.

this great reform. . . . My congressional task, in short, is done. . . . It rests with the people to say, whether I shall be selected to finish the work, which has been carried forward to where it now is." He was opposed to party organization and the tyranny exerted by state conventions, and favored the choice of delegates to the national convention by districts. In a word, he wished to run as Democratic candidate on a platform which was chiefly made up of southern demands; his weakness lay in his lack of an issue distinctly appealing to the frontier and northern democracies.

The fourth candidate was the President. His hope of securing the Whig nomination had vanished, but he had other plans. With his natural suavity of manner he found it easy to keep on agreeable terms with the Democratic leaders in Congress, and he had some thought that he might be the choice of that party. In the meantime he actively employed the patronage in rewarding and enheartening his own personal following, and was determined to run independently if rejected by both parties. He too, like Calhoun, needed a fresh issue, and he was planning to associate with his name the question of Texan annexation, which had proved distasteful to those in control of both party organizations.

In order to understand the circumstances that shaped the fortunes of these rivals, and determined the campaign of 1844, it is necessary to review the situation of the country at large, and note the development of certain new factors that, while playing small part in politics before 1843, were to dominate them for the next twenty years.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES

The Papers of J. C. Calhoun (letters to and from him), published in Am. Hist. Assoc., Report, 1899, vol. II, are especially illuminating for this period. The sources mentioned at the close of the last chapter, also, continue to be of use. See also National Monetary Commission, Laws Concerning Money.

accounts.

Dewey, D. R., Financial History, §§ 102, 103. Garrison, Historical Westward Extension, 43-84. Lodge, H. C., Webster, ch. VIII. Schurz, Clay, chs. XXII, XXIII. Stanwood, E., Tariff Controversies, II, ch. XI. Tyler, L. G., Letters and Lives of the Tylers, II, chs. I-VI. Von Holst, H., Constitutional History, II, chs. V, VI.

matic.

Moore, J. B., Arbitrations, I, chs. I-VI; International Law DiploDigest, II, 24-29. Reeves, J. S., American Diplomacy under Tyler and Polk. Webster, D., Works, V, 116-135; VI, 247-269.

Canals.

CHAPTER XVII

NEW ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL CONDITIONS, 1830 TO 1860

THE period of the thirties, forties, and fifties was one of unusually stimulating activity affecting the whole life of the people. Many of the new tendencies and developments which first attract attention soon after the War of 1812 now attain full stature and become dominating forces, and many new factors appear which were destined to vie with them in significance. The changes of this period were not perhaps of so deep and underlying importance as those between 1815 and 1830, but they were more widespread and some of them more striking.

Most significant of the economic changes was the improvement in the means of transportation. Washington had seen the importance of that problem to the future of the country and had grappled with it, but hardly anything had been done before his death except the building of not very good toll roads and bridges. The invention of the steamboat had suddenly opened up the immense stretches of navigable water in the interior, and made it possible to live and do business on almost every river bank. Then came the lock canal, clearing away many of the obstacles which rapids and falls offered to the steamboat, and, by connecting the heads of rivers, joining one river basin to another. Many seaports by such constructions brought to their wharves the products of all the surrounding country, and the Erie Canal and the Pennsylvania Canal and inclined planes afforded cheap means of connection between the East and the West. In Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, canals connected rivers flowing into the Lakes with branches of the Ohio, and plans were made to

utilize the portage between the Fox and the Wisconsin. The twenties and the thirties were preeminently the period of the canal. Already, however, another method had been devised which was to supersede water transit, for a time at least.

The railroad was introduced in 1825, and after a few years Railroads. the steam engine came to be used in connection with it. Railroad construction was cheaper than that of canals, railroads could be built over many routes where canals were impossible, and at first the abundance of firewood and later the use of coal made the cost of operation seem small. At first they were built largely to carry passengers, and to supplement canals. Very few miles were built before 1830; but by 1840, 2302 miles were in operation between important centers of population, and extending from Wilmington in North Carolina, with small break, to New York. From 1840 to 1850, 5043 miles were built, supplementing those of the previous decade and stretching over several distances inconvenient for canal construction, as from Detroit to New Buffalo on Lake Michigan, from Sandusky to Cincinnati, and from Chattanooga to Charleston and Savannah. Up to this time little had been accomplished in the West, where the Mississippi on the one hand and the Lakes with the Erie Canal on the other afforded such easy access. Moreover, the experiences of the thirties had made the holders of capital more cautious, and they preferred local enterprises. Even in the East, where there was the most surplus capital, several of the states were obliged to lend their credit in aid of such enterprises. During the fifties the situation changed. It had been proved that the railroads paid, which canals had rarely done; capital was at the same time more abundant and more accessible to the promoters of new projects; the spirit of speculation revived.

Private corporations were formed on a larger scale than Corporations before, and investors became willing to venture their money farther away from home.

In the West railroads were desired to build up the country. Regions untouched by navigable waterways had been left unsettled, though surrounded by occupied territory. If railroads could be built through them, settlement would follow, but such enterprises could not be expected to pay for some years, and private capital needed special inducements to undertake the work. Under these circumstances Congress reinaugurated the system of national aid, but indirectly. Land grants were made to several states in order that they in turn might give them to companies engaging to Land grants. Construct roads. The system was to grant alternate sections of land to the railroad, and the government was expected to reimburse itself by the enhanced value of the land remaining. The first grant was to the Illinois Central, and it was largely owing to this policy that in the fifties 21,424 miles were built, and that the West, which was almost bare of railroads at the beginning, was by 1860 crisscrossed with them, from Oshkosh and La Crosse on the north, down the whole east side of the Mississippi, with short lines in Iowa and Missouri.

Strategic problem of communication.

This network of roads built in the ten years before the Civil War had a far-reaching importance. There was a southern system which, connecting with the southern rivers, answered fairly well the needs of that agricultural region, but connected with the northern system only at Washington and Bowling Green, Kentucky. This system served the Gulf States and Tennessee and Arkansas for both export and import. Many products of the upper Mississippi, the Ohio, and the Missouri still sought an outlet downstream, and New Orleans was still an important port for the middle region; but a constantly increasing amount was sent from these valleys over the Erie Railroad to New York, over the Pennsylvania to Philadelphia, and over the Baltimore and Ohio to Baltimore. Sectionalism The Lake region was entirely tributary to New York, using the Erie Canal and the Erie and the New York Central railroads.

in the West.