the same
period from 4,009,000 to 7,748,000, a growth of ninety per cent; while
the West, as a whole, including Tennessee, Kentucky, and Missouri, had
grown from less than 1,000,000 to nearly 4,000,000. These facts were
significant and really distressing to conservative politicians; they
explain the jealous rivalry of the sections, and the alliance of the
South and West foreboded the day when the more cultivated and the
better settled region of the young nation, if it may be called a nation,
would find itself in a hopeless minority.

If we add to this the fact that the lands of the East were the poorest
in the Union and that their total area was less than 175,000 square
miles, while those of the South were counted rich and embraced an area
of 880,000 square miles, we shall understand how statesmen who listened
to the jubilations of the Jackson men felt and envisaged the future--a
future which the South alone might command; but which she would
certainly dominate if she could only succeed in keeping the West true to
her present allegiance.

But economic and social changes were taking place which gave the
darkening cloud a silver lining. On an irregular but narrow belt of land
stretching from southeastern Maine to the Chesapeake Bay manufacturing
establishments had been erected, towns and cities had sprung into
existence as if by magic, and migration from the poor farms and the hard
conditions of New England country life was also turning to the mill
centers, and thus giving promise of a new East, whose life should be
industrial and urban like that of smoky, grimy Lancashire, England. The
older commercial and seafaring interests, which had given the
Federalists their power and made the American flag known on every sea,
were now giving way to the vigorous young captains of industry whose
mills at Lowell, Providence, New Haven, New York, Philadelphia, and
Baltimore gave employment to thousands of people. Much of the money
which had made the New Englanders go down to the sea in ships was now
invested in manufactures. The woolen mills of the East produced in 1820
a little more than $4,000,000 worth of cloth, the cotton mills,
$4,834,000; but in 1830 the yearly manufactures of wool, cotton, and
iron were estimated by the Government as worth $58,500,000. Yet the
total investment in these enterprises was not much in excess of
$100,000,000. In Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, and Pennsylvania
the growth had been miraculous,