Sidelights, Ingle estimates that in 1850 there were 2,500,000 slaves Ingle, on the plantations of the South, of whom 350,000 were Southern employed in growing tobacco, 125,000 rice, 150,000 sugar, Ch. VIII. 60,000 hemp. The remainder, 1,815,000 men, women, and children, were at work in the cotton fields of the "black belt." This vast army of cotton growers represents wellnigh the total increase in the slave population in the seventy years from 1790 to 1860. I, lxxx lxxxiii. The Growth of Cities. The drift of population cityward U.S. Census, became marked after 1840. The number of towns with 1900, a population of more than 8000, but 44 in 1840, was 141 in 1860. New York City grew in this twenty years from 313,000 to 806,000. The chief reasons for this increasing concentration must be sought in the growth of manufac- Chart, tures and commerce. Cities played but a small part in Population our industrial development until textile machinery and States, steam transportation called for the massing of labor and p.340. capital. Wherever water power determined a factory site or a lake or navigable river furnished the means of cheap transportation, entrepreneurs and wage earners gathered to profit by the business opening. There were four times as many towns of over eight thousand inhabitants in the North as in the South. Of cities boasting more than fifty thousand there were eleven in the North and but five in the South. Of these five, Washington, Baltimore, Louisville, and St. Louis were hardly to be reckoned as Southern from the industrial point of view, and New Orleans owed its development to peculiar commercial advantages. The prosperity of Southern cities was largely conditioned on the cotton trade. Charleston, Savannah, Hamburg, Natchez, New Orleans, were situated on harbors or navigable rivers that gave access to the plantations. Not factories and workshops, but cotton presses and warehouses filled the business quarters. The entrepreneurs were cotton factors who bought the cotton sent down river by the planters, and sold on commission to the brokers of New York and London. of the United |