conflicted
as they did when a part of New England became manufacturing centers and
favored a high protective tariff in opposition to the importing trades,
the plantation owners and the agricultural class in general. Then the
vested class would divide, and each side would appeal with passionate
and patriotic exhortations to the voting elements of the people to
sustain it, or the country would go to ruin. But when the working class
made demands for better laws, the propertied class, as a whole, united
to oppose the workers bitterly. However it differed on the tariff, or
the question of state or national banks, substantially the whole trading
class solidly combated the principle of manhood suffrage and the
movements for the wiping out of laws for imprisonment for debt, for
mechanic's liens and for the establishment of shorter hours of work.

Political institutions and their offspring in the form of laws being
generally in the control of the trading class, the conditions were
extraordinarily favorable for the accumulation of large fortunes,
especially on the part of the shipowners, the dominant class. The grand
climax of the galaxy of American fortunes during the period from 1800 to
1831--the greatest of all the fortunes up to the beginning of the third
decade of that century--was that of Girard. He built up what was looked
up to as the gigantic fortune of about ten millions of dollars and far
overtopped every other strainer for money except Astor, who survived him
seventeen years, and whose wealth increased during that time to double
the amount that Girard left.

FOOTNOTES:

[49] "The Astor Fortune," McClure's Magazine, April, 1905.

[50] Innumerable were the sermons and addresses poured forth, all to the
same end. To cite one: The Rev. Daniel Sharp of the Third Baptist
Meeting House, Boston, delivered a sermon in 1828 on "The Tendency of
Evil Speaking Against Rulers." It was considered so powerful an argument
in favor of obedience that it was printed in pamphlet form (Beals, Homer
& Co., Printers), and was widely distributed to press and public.

[51] Various writers assert that twenty dollars was the average minimum.
In many places, however, the great majority of debts were for less than
ten dollars. Thus, for the year ending November 26, 1831, nearly one
thousand citizens had been imprisoned for debt in Baltimore. Of this
number more than half owed less than ten dollars, and of the whole
number, only thirty-four i