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 the agricultural products of the fertile valley of the Tennessee, and the whole coasts of the northern lakes. The introduction of steam-navigation, to which I shall fully refer hereafter, affording greatly increased facilities for the conveyance of merchandise to and from New York by means of the numerous navigable rivers which intersected that and the neighbouring States, naturally gave an enormous impulse to its navigation, while the coal from the great Pennsylvania coal basin contributed essentially to its prosperity.

Nor was the prosperity confined to New York. It extended for many years to all the ports of the Union. Boston, which, twenty years before the Declaration of Independence, was only a village containing about twenty houses, and, so late as 1822, was still governed by a body of "select men," according to the custom of New England [the people, till then, declining to adopt a municipal government], vied with New York in the Foreign Trade which had arisen, and early in the present century despatched