d, and notes in circulation were $61,000,000, there were
still just $17,000,000 of gold and silver in all the banks.

The business of the East naturally tended to the concentration of the
financial resources of the country within her towns, but the location of
414 of the 502 banks of the country in the narrow section under
consideration would seem to indicate something more than a natural
tendency. The six million people of the East enjoyed three times as many
banking facilities, when we consider the amount of money in circulation,
as the seven million Southerners and Westerners. New York alone had a
banking capital of $28,000,000, Massachusetts $21,000,000, and the _per
capita_ circulation of money in the East was nearly $9, while that of
the West was $2. To him that hath shall be given is a familiar axiom
which seemed doubly true of the United States at the time of Jackson's
accession to power.

All signs pointed to a congestion of the financial resources of the
whole country in Philadelphia, New York, and Boston. The great National
Bank, with its $35,000,000 capital and loans of $40,000,000, was
located in Philadelphia; New York City had not so strong a banking
system, but the growth of her real estate values was $40,000,000 in the
five years preceding 1831; and the tax valuation of the property of
Suffolk County, Massachusetts, in which Boston was located, was
$86,000,000 as against $208,000,000 for the whole State.

The masters of this region were reaching out for the commerce of the
West through the Erie Canal, which made northern and central Ohio the
hinterland of New York; through the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad and the
Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, which were aimed at western Virginia and the
Ohio Valley. The shipping interests of New England and New York did the
same for the South, whose millions of bales of cotton all went north or
to Europe in eastern-made and eastern-owned vessels. And while these
enterprising leaders sought to control the commerce of the country, they
also knitted together their own towns and river valleys by canals and
turnpikes. Boston and New Haven were almost united by canals and
railroads in 1830; the Delaware and the Susquehanna were paralleled far
into the interior in order to bring the produce of the country to the
manufacturing centers. And a railway connected Philadelphia with the
rich Susquehanna Basin, whose commerce had hitherto been controlled by
Baltimore. Pittsburg was actua