PAGE II. THE PROCESS OF PIONEERING IN NEW ENGLAND. Imlay, A Topographical Description of the Western Territory of Flint, Recollections of the Last Ten Years [1826]. IV. THE SETTLEMENT OF THE PRAIRIE REGION. Stirling, Letters from the Slave States [1856] V. PIONEERING WITH SLAVES IN THE Southwest. Smedes, Memorials of a Southern Planter Martineau, Society in America [1834-1836] Mill, Principles of Political Economy. Porter, Speech on Internal Improvements, Annals of Congress, 1810 665 Chevalier, Society, Manners and Politics in the United States [1836] 703 Poussin, The United States; its Power and Progress [1851] I. THE ORIGIN OF SLAVERY IN THE NEW World. Wakefield, A View of the Art of Colonization [1851] Weston, The Progress of Slavery [1857] Olmsted, A Journey in the Back Country [1860] IV. INFLUENCE OF SLAVERY ON SOUTHERN SOCIETY. Olmsted, The Cotton Kingdom [1861] Olmsted, A Journey through Texas [1857]. Mrs. Stowe, Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin [1853] Hundley, Social Relations in our Southern States [1860] De Bow, Manufactures in the South and West, in Industrial Resources OF THE UNIVERSITY CF CALIFORNIA ECONOMIC HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES CHAPTER I THE UNITED STATES IN THE ECONOMIC HISTORY OF THE WORLD 1 This country is not a second edition of the Greek and Roman republics; it is a gigantic commercial house, which owns its wheatfields in the Northwest, its cotton, rice and tobacco plantations in the South, which maintains its sugar works, its establishments for salting provisions, and some beginnings of manufactures, which has its harbours in the Northeast thronged with fine ships, well built and better manned, by means of which it undertakes to carry for the world, and to speculate on the wants of all nations. . . . 2 When we come to inquire what part our own country has taken, and what contribution it has made in building up this science [political economy], we are struck at the outset by the fact that the growth of the United States has been a circumstance of prime importance in the economic history of the world during the century. It must be placed in the same rank with the brilliant succession of discoveries in the industrial arts, or with the extensive improvement of government and social organizations, as one of the halfdozen great influences which have changed the face of the civilized world. Without entering into the details of a comparison, to which every reader is likely to have his attention sufficiently drawn during the present year [1876], we may here note a few of the facts which 1 Chevalier, Society, Manners and Politics in the United States. 2 Dunbar," Economic Science in America, 1776-1876,” North American Review, January, 1876; reprinted in Economic Essays. I have given to the development of this country so great an influence upon that of the rest of the world. Beginning with the statement of mere area, the organized states of the Union now occupy a territory larger than the whole of Europe, outside of the Russian Empire. The improved land of these states, measuring two hundred and ninety-five thousand square miles in 1870, cannot be much less than the total improved surface of England and Ireland, France and Prussia, together. Of this vast field of production, we may fairly say that the whole has been brought into the circle of international exchanges and added to the available resources of mankind within this century, so insignificant were its relations with the rest of the world a hundred years ago. Moreover, the products to which this territory is adapted by nature are such as have a singularly direct and important bearing on the welfare of other countries. How great an industrial revolution has been wrought by cotton, and what the nineteenth century would be without that fibre, of which we produce more than half of all that comes to the markets of Europe and America, it would be hard to say; but the memory of our Civil War is still fresh enough to tell us what universal disaster must follow the interruption of our supply, and what a chain of consequences, involving the well-being, the peace, the institutions, and even liberty of millions of men, have followed from the addition of the cotton-plant to the agricultural products of the South. Of different but hardly inferior significance in the economy of the world is our supply of gold. The astonishing expansion of industry and commerce for which the close of the wars of Napoleon seems to have given the signal, which has stimulated and been stimulated by our growth, is one of the great phenomena in the history of mankind. This expansion, however, must have been checked at the most critical period, had not fresh discoveries of gold supplied the enlarged medium of exchange required by the new scale of transactions; and of this series of discoveries, the second in importance in recorded history, California made one of the chief and also the earliest. From that time the United States have continued to be the first in importance of the sources of gold; and were this our only economic relation to the rest of the world, the influence of |