upper Mississippi
River, loaded to the guards with produce, as far as the mouth of the
Illinois River and then turn up that stream with their cargoes to be
shipped to New York _via_ Chicago. The Illinois canal has not only swept
the whole produce along the line of the Illinois River to the East, but
it is drawing the products of the upper Mississippi through the same
channel; thus depriving New Orleans and St. Louis of a rich portion of
their former trade."

If to any shippers the broad current of the great river sweeping down to
New Orleans offered easier means of physical communication to the sea
than the canals and railways, the difference could be overcome by the
credit which Eastern bankers were able to extend to the grain and
produce buyers, in the first instance, and through them to the farmers
on the soil. The acute Southern observer just quoted, De Bow, admitted
with evident regret, in 1852, that "last autumn, the rich regions of
Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois were flooded with the local bank notes of
the Eastern States, advanced by the New York houses on produce to be
shipped by way of the canals in the spring.... These moneyed facilities
enable the packer, miller, and speculator to hold on to their produce
until the opening of navigation in the spring and they are no longer
obliged, as formerly, to hurry off their shipments during the winter by
the way of New Orleans in order to realize funds by drafts on their
shipments. The banking facilities at the East are doing as much to draw
trade from us as the canals and railways which Eastern capital is
constructing." Thus canals, railways, and financial credit were swiftly
forging bonds of union between the old home of Jacksonian Democracy in
the West and the older home of Federalism in the East. The nationalism
to which Webster paid eloquent tribute became more and more real with
the passing of time. The self-sufficiency of the pioneer was broken down
as he began to watch the produce markets of New York and Philadelphia
where the prices of corn and hogs fixed his earnings for the year.

=The West and Manufactures.=--In addition to the commercial bonds
between the East and the West there was growing up a common interest in
manufactures. As skilled white labor increased in the Ohio Valley, the
industries springing up in the new cities made Western life more like
that of the industrial East than like that of the planting South.
Moreover, the Western states produced so