settling and developing the vast areas of the public lands, whose
virgin richness cried aloud in the wilderness for men.

The policy of the government, framed to stimulate rapid occupation
of the public lands, had attracted hordes of settlers over the
mountains from the older states, and immigration flowed in a steady
stream into the valleys of the Ohio and the Mississippi.

A system had grown up in the South almost patriarchal, based upon
cultivation by slave labor of enormous areas devoted exclusively to
cotton. In the North, New England had developed some few centers of
industry, drawing their support from the manufacture of the great
Southern staple. New York, Boston, and Philadelphia were growing as
outlets for foreign commerce, but as yet manufacturing flourished
but feebly and in few localities.

Such manufacturing and commercial enterprises as existed had been
laboriously built up by long years of honest working. The free lands
of the government, by giving laborers an alternative, kept up wages,
forcing employers to bid against each other for labor; and monopoly
thus being checked, individual equality was possible.

The mineral resources of Pennsylvania and Ohio were all but
unsuspected, and the calm of a people devoted to the peaceful
pursuits of agriculture rested over the country.

Railroads were few and inefficient: telegraph lines but in their
infancy. Intercourse among the people, outside of a narrow fringe on
the Atlantic coast, was cumbersome, and impeded by many obstacles.
Primitive conditions everywhere prevailed, and communities brooded