Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 23.djvu/787

1789-1801.] party entered upon its career weighted with the theory of State sovereignty; and a civil war was necessary before this dogma, put to use again in the service of slavery, could be banished from the American system. But the democratic development never was checked. From that time the interpretation of the Federal constitution has generally favoured individual rights at the expense of governmental power. As the Republicans obtained control of the States they altered the State constitutions so as to cut out all the arrangements that favoured property or class interests, and reduced political power to the dead level of manhood suffrage. In most of the States outside of New England this process was completed before 1815; but New England tenacity was proof against the advancing revolution until about 1820. For twenty years after its downfall of 1800 the Federal party maintained its hopeless struggle, and then it faded away into nothing, leaving as its permanent memorial the excellent organization of the Federal Government, which its successful rival hardly changed. Its two successors—the Whig and the second Republican party—have been broad-constructionist parties, like the Federal party, but they have admitted democracy as well; the Whig party adopted popular methods at least, and the Republican party grew into a theory of individual rights even higher than Jefferson's,—the emancipation of enslaved labour.

160. The disputed election of 1800 was decided in the new capital city of Washington, to which the Government had just been removed. Its streets and parks existed only on paper. The Capitol had been begun; the White House was unfinished, and its audience room was used by Mrs Adams as a drying room for clothes; and the Congressmen could hardly find lodgings. The inconveniences were only an exaggeration of the condition of other American cities. Their sanitary conditions were so bad that yellow fever from time to time reduced them almost to depopulation. Again and again, during this decade, the fever visited Philadelphia and New York, drove out the people, and

left the grass growing in the streets. The communication between the cities was still as bad as could be. The traveller was subject to every danger or annoyance that bad roads, bad carriages, bad horses, bad inns, and bad police protection could combine to inflict upon him. But the rising spirit of migration seemed to urge the people to conquer these difficulties. The first attempts were made to introduce turnpike roads and canals; and proposals were advanced for greater improvements. The war with natural obstacles had fairly begun, though it had little prospect of success until steam was brought into use as the ally of man.

161. About this time the term “the West” appears. It meant then the western part of New York State, the new territory north of the Ohio, and Kentucky and Tennessee. In settling land boundaries New York had transferred to Massachusetts, whose claims crossed her territory, the right to a large tract of land in central New York. The sale of this had carried population considerably west of the Hudson. After several American expeditions against the Ohio Indians had been defeated, another under General Anthony Wayne (1794) had compelled them to give up all the territory now in the State of Ohio. Settlement received a new impetus with increased security, and the new state of affairs added to the population of Kentucky, whose growth had been seriously checked by periodical attacks from the Indians across the Ohio. Between 1790 and 1800 the population of Ohio had risen from almost nothing to 45,000, that of Tennessee from 36,000 to 106,000, and that of Kentucky from 74,000 to 221,000,—the last-named State now exceeding five of the “old thirteen” in population. The difficulties of the western

emigrant, however, were still enormous. He obtained land of his own, fertile land and plenty of it, but little else. The produce of the soil had to be consumed at home, or near it; ready money was scarce and distant products scarcer; and comforts, except the very rudest substitutes of home manufacture, were unobtainable. The new life bore most hardly upon women; and, if the record of woman's share in the work of American colonization could be fully made up, the price paid for the final success would seem very great.

162. The number of post-offices rose during these ten years from 75 to 903, the miles of post-routes from 1900 to 21,000, and the revenue from $38,000 to $231,000. These figures seem small in comparison with the 55,000 post-offices, 375,000 miles of post-routes, and $45,000,000 of revenue of 1887, but the comparison with the figures of 1790 shows a development in which the new constitution, with its increased security, must have been a factor.

163. The power of Congress to regulate patents was already bearing fruit. Until 1789 this power was in the hands of the States, and the privileges of the inventor were restricted to the territory of the patenting State. Now he had a vast and growing territory within which all the profits of the invention were his own, and that development began by which human invention has been urged to its highest point, as a factor in the struggle against natural forces. Twenty patents were issued in 1793, and 22,000 ninety years afterwards; but one of the inventions of 1793, Whitney's cotton gin, has affected the history of the United States more than most of its wars or treaties.

164. When the constitution was adopted it was not known that the cultivation of cotton could be made profitable in the Southern States. The “roller gin” could clean only a half dozen pounds a day by slave labour. In 1784 eight bags of cotton, landed in Liverpool from an American ship, were seized on the ground that so much cotton could not be the produce of the United States. Eli Whitney, a Connecticut school-teacher residing in Georgia, invented the saw-gin, by which the cotton was dragged through parallel wires with openings too narrow to allow the seeds to pass; and one slave could now clean a thousand pounds a day. The exports of cotton leaped from 189,000 pounds in 1791 to 21,000,000 pounds in 1801, and doubled in three years more. The influence of this one invention, combined with the wonderful series of British inventions which had paved the way for it, can hardly be estimated in its commercial aspects. Its political influences were even wider, but more unhappy. The introduction of the commercial element into the slave system of the South robbed it at once of the patriarchal features which had made it tolerable; but, at the same time, it developed in slave-holders a new disposition to uphold and defend a system of slave labour as a “positive good.” The abolition societies of the South began to dwindle as soon as the results of Whitney's invention began to be manifest.

165. The development of a class whose profits were merely the extorted natural wages of the black labourer was certain; and its political power was as certain, though it never showed itself clearly until after 1830. And this class was to have a peculiarly distorting effect on the political history of the United States. Aristocratic in every sense but one, it was ultra-Democratic (in a purely party sense) in its devotion to State sovereignty, for the legal basis of the slave system was in the laws of the several States. In time, the aristocratic element got control of the party which had originally looked to State rights as a bulwark of individual rights; and the party was finally committed to the employment of its original