under private auspices, but in 1806-1807 the directors appealed to Congress for aid, arguing that such a waterway would have national importance. The appropriation recommended by Secretary Gallatin was not made until 1825, when the United States subscribed to $300,000 stock in the company. The total cost was $3,730,230.

A transportation system built through a populous section, or along a well-defined trade route, is assured from the start; but when a canal is carried through a thinly settled country, dividends must wait till business develops. Bondholders are likely to lose both interest and principal. Private capital was therefore shy of such investments in the new West, but the state legislatures did not hesitate to appropriate considerable sums of public money in aid of canal projects. Thus the Miami Canal was built (1829) from Cincinnati to Dayton, and the Ohio Canal provided water communication between Lake Erie and the Ohio River along the route first suggested by Washington, up the Cuyahoga and down the Tuscarawas to the Muskingum and the Scioto. Such enterprises proved too heavy a tax on the resources of a pioneer community, and the states appealed for national aid. Congress had already provided for the building of a post road through the western territory out of proceeds from the sale of public lands. This inexpensive method of meeting the cost of construction was now applied to canals. A percentage of land sales, or the lands themselves, were made over to the state authorities and by them applied to transportation projects. Under this plan the Western states undertook a vast network of internal improvements. The post roads from Columbus to Sandusky, and from Lake Michigan to the Ohio River, were built from the proceeds of land grants; and, so aided, Ohio, in coöperation with Indiana, constructed the Wabash and Erie Canal. The surplus revenue distributed in 1837 was applied by the Western states to transportation facilities. Anticipating great commercial gains, municipalities made extravagant contributions to canal stock. Speculators subscribed far beyond their

P

Writings of

X, 381-384.

means, and bank credits were strained to the danger point in the zeal for industrial development. The financial crisis of 1837 called a sudden halt to a score of promising schemes. One hundred million dollars had been sunk in canals. The investors found that they had buried their money in locks and water works, and that no adequate return could be expected until the country had grown up to the transportation system.

The Southern states undertook far less in the way of Washington, internal movements. Virginia in 1828 completed the Dismal Swamp Canal, an enterprise set on foot in Washington's day, and began a waterway along the James River through the Gap of the Blue Ridge into the Great Valley. South Carolina opened communication from the Santee River to Charleston Harbor by a canal twenty-one miles in length, and New Orleans cut a channel between Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi. Enterprising citizens of Kentucky undertook a canal around the Falls of the Ohio. It was only three miles in length, but wide and deep enough to admit boats of one hundred tons burthen.

Hulbert,
Great Am.
Canals,

I, Ch. II, III.

Washington's contention that Virginia should maintain direct communication with the West by way of the Potomac and the Monongahela had borne fruit in the Potomac Company, which spent $729,380 in forty years on improving the river bed, but accomplished nothing of permanent utility. The success of the Erie Canal determined the state to charter (1825) the Chesapeake and Ohio Company, authorized to raise a capital of $6,000,000 for the building of a canal from Georgetown to Cumberland and thence by tunnel across the range to the Youghiogheny. The canal was not completed until 1850, and its ultimate cost was $11,000,000, of which $7,000,000 was contributed by the state of Maryland, $1,500,000 by the terminal cities, and $1,000,000 by the United States government. The route beyond Harpers Ferry was very difficult, raising the average cost of construction to $59,618 per mile. The progress of this enterprise was delayed by the appearance

of a dangerous rival, the steam railway. Baltimore gave her support to the new transportation agency, and her citizens subscribed liberally to the stock of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. Railway and canal were built contemporaneously along the same general route as far as Cumberland, and there the canal stopped; but the railroad easily mounted the divide and made it possible to carry freight and passengers directly to the Ohio and beyond.

CHAPTER VII

THE EPOCH OF EXPANSION

Growth in Wealth and Population

Statistics. The twenty years' interval between the crisis of 1837 and that of 1857 witnessed the most remarkable industrial development yet achieved in the United States. The wealth of the country was quadrupled in this "golden age." Riches multiplied more rapidly than population. Our per capita wealth in 1860 was more than double that of 1840, more than three times that of 1790. At the beginning of the epoch, the accumulation of property was greatest in the older and more industrial sections of the Atlantic seaboard, but the agricultural communities of the Mississippi Valley made rapid gains and in the second decade doubled the amount of wealth per inhabitant.

PER CAPITA WEALTH IN THE SEVERAL SECTIONS OF THE UNITED
STATES

The growth of population, while not so phenomenal as during the colonial and pioneer periods of our history, was still more rapid than in any Old World country.

212

PER CENT OF INCREASE OF TOTAL AND URBAN POPULATION BY DECADES

By far

1900,

I, ciii.

Smith, Emigration and Immigration,

Ch. II, III.

The figures indicate a general westward movement of the population from the overcrowded districts of the Atlantic coast to the new lands of the North and South Central divisions. The relatively rapid increase in the northern as compared with the southern sections is due to immigra- U.S. Census, tion. In 1860 there were 4,138,000 foreign born in the United States, the greater part of whom had come into the country since 1840. Famine had driven 781,000 Irish peasants to our shores in the first decade and 914,000 in the second. Political disturbances combined with industrial depressions induced 1,386,000 Germans to migrate to America during this same twenty years. the greater part of the European immigrants came to the Northern states. The chance to earn good wages in the factory towns of New England, in the mines and foundries of Pennsylvania, attracted hundreds of thousands of English, Welsh, and Irish thither. The native American operatives were superseded by foreigners whose standard of living did not require so high a wage. The German immigrants usually pushed on into the new West in search of government land. The Preëmption Act of 1841 finally assured to Sato, the squatter the privilege of buying the land he had brought 422-428 under cultivation at the government price of $1.25, no matter what the competitive price might be at the time the tract was offered for sale. Cash payment might thus be postponed until the settler had earned the sum required.