Page:Cambridge Modern History Volume 7.djvu/383

 1792-1815J Growth of trade and manufactures. 351 the indigo plant in the South by insects led to the attempt to supplant indigo by cotton. The venture was successful ; but the cost of cleaning the fibre of seeds by hand made it impossible to sell at a profit. At this juncture Eli Whitney invented the gin; and from that moment the prosperity of a new branch of industry was assured. In 1792, before the gin was invented, 192,000 Ibs. of hand-cleaned cotton was exported. In 1795, after the invention of the machine, 6,000,000 Ibs. found a foreign market. Year after year the acreage and the crop increased with astonishing rapidity, till, in 1894, one hundred years after Whitney received his patent, cotton amounting to nearly 7,000,000 bales of 500 Ibs. each was grown in the planting States. As the country grew in wealth and population, great improvements were made in the means of inter-State communication. The large rivers were bridged; thousands of miles of turnpike were constructed; and the great cities of the country were brought nearer together. When Washington was inaugurated at New York, the traveller spent two days in going from Philadelphia to New York and a week on the journey from New York to Boston. In 1815 such trips could easily be made in half the time. In 1807 Robert Fulton placed on the Hudson river the first practical steamboat the world ever saw. In 1815 steamboats were plying up and down the Hudson, the Delaware, the Ohio, the Mississippi, and on many of the bays along the Atlantic coast. In 1780 there were no banks in America ; in 1791 only four were in existence ; in 1815 they were to be found in every State. In the Eastern and Middle States manufactures had sprung up; and new means of earning a livelihood had been opened to tens of thousands of people. Whatever tended to abridge distance, facilitate communication, spread information, unite the country, had been so developed that the United States which fought the second war with Great Britain formed a nation very unlike the thirteen little republics that fought the War of Independence. At the close of the second war the issue which pressed most urgently for settlement was the state of the currency. Under the Articles of Confederation and before the adoption of the Constitution, the currency of the country was made up of very heterogeneous elements foreign coins which had come in through the channels of trade, or had been introduced by the troops sent over by France during the War of Independence; thirteen kinds of paper money or bills of credit issued by the thirteen States; some small change coined by a few of the States; and tickets of small denominations issued to meet a serious public need by churches, town treasurers, stage companies, ferry companies, and merchants. Under the Constitution the States were deprived of the power to coin money, or to issue bills of credit, or to make anything else than gold and silver legal tenders for debt. The duty of furnishing a uniform circulating medium now rested solely on Congress, and was performed in three ways by authorising the Bank of the United States, CH. XI.