which
Nature had herself created and had distinguished as a sea-faring race.
To the south had begun the raising of cotton. As the great period of
shipbuilding went on--greatest during the twenty years or more ending
in 1860; as the great period of cotton-raising and cotton-baling went
on--never so great before as that in that same year--the two parts of
the nation looked equally to the one border plateau lying between them,
to several counties of Kentucky, for most of the nation's hemp. It was
in those days of the North that the CONSTITUTION was rigged with
Russian hemp on one side, with American hemp on the other, for a
patriotic test of the superiority of home-grown, home-prepared fibre;
and thanks to the latter, before those days ended with the outbreak of
the Civil War, the country had become second to Great Britain alone in
her ocean craft, and but little behind that mistress of the seas. So
that in response to this double demand for hemp on the American ship
and hemp on the southern plantation, at the close of that period of
national history on land and sea, from those few counties of Kentucky,
in the year 1859, were taken well-nigh forty thousand tons of the
well-cleaned bast.

What history it wrought in those years, directly for the republic,
indirectly for the world! What ineffaceable marks it left on Kentucky
itself, land, land-owners! To make way for it, a forest the like of
which no human eye will ever see again was felled; and with the forest
went its pastures, its waters. The roads of Kentucky, those long
limestone turnpikes connecting the towns and villages with the
farms--they were early made necessary by the hauling of the hemp. For
the sake of it slaves were perpetually being trained, hired, bartered;
lands perpetually rented and sold; fortunes made or lost. The advancing
price of farms, the westward movement of poor families and consequent
dispersion of the Kentuckians over cheaper territory, whither they
carried the same passion for the cultivation of the same plant,--thus
making Missouri the second hemp-producing state in the Union,--the
regulation of the hours in the Kentucky cabin, in the house, at the
rope-walk, in the factory,--what phase of life went unaffected by the
pursuit and fascination of it. Thought, care, hope of the farmer
oftentimes throughout the entire year! Upon it depending, it may be,
the college of his son, the accomplishments of his daughter, the
luxuries of his wife, the hous