New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, and third in point of commerce of the ports of the world, exceeded only by London, Liverpool, and New York, being, indeed, but a short distance behind the latter city, and ahead of it in the export of domestic products. Unfortunately, its imports were out of all proportion with its exports. It shipped coffee, hardware, and other heavy articles like this up the river, but it left the West dependent on New York and the other Atlantic cities for nearly all the finer class of manufactured goods they needed.

Later on, when the West began to go into manufacturing itself, and Cincinnati and Pittsburgh became important manufacturing centers, New Orleans imported their goods and reshipped them to the plantations. Of these shipments up-stream over 75 per cent., strange to say, were articles which had previously been sent down-stream. Cincinnati sent its lard, candles, pork, et cetera, to New Orleans to be carried up by the coast packets to Bayou Sara and Baton Rouge. From these latter towns were shipped so many hogsheads of sugar and barrels of molasses to New Orleans to be thence sent by the Cincinnati boats to the Ohio metropolis. There was no trade between the Western cities and the Southern plantations, very little even with the towns; it all paid tribute to New Orleans. . . .

The extent of the commercial area covered by the river traffic of New Orleans in 1860 will show what was lost in the four years of war that followed, and never fully regained. New Orleans then absolutely controlled the entire river trade, commerce, and crops of the State of Louisiana. In Texas, through the Red River, it secured the crops of the northern half of the State; through the Arkansas and the Red it secured the products of the greater portion of the Indian Territory. It controlled the trade of the southern two-thirds of Arkansas, all the Ouachita and Arkansas valleys, all the river front, and a portion of the White River trade running up into Mis

souri. It controlled Mississippi with the exception of the eastern portion of the State, through which ran the Mobile and Ohio Railroad and the tributaries of the Alabama. All the produce of western Tennessee and half that of middle Tennessee went to New Orleans; and in Kentucky a large proportion of the business went to the Crescent City. The bulk of the produce of the Ohio Valley had been diverted to the lakes and Atlantic seaboard, but probably one-fifth of it found its way to New Orleans direct or by way of the Cincinnati and Louisville packets. . . .

Yet it was admitted at the time that New Orleans and the river route were losing some trade, and it was felt that the railroads were diverting traffic away from it. They had tapped the river at various points. The tributaries running into the Upper Tennessee, had formerly sent down their produce by flatboats to New Orleans, the boats reaching the city in fleets of thirty and forty. Railroads had diverted much of this traffic to Charleston, Savannah, and the Atlantic cities. The trade of northern Alabama had formerly come via the Tennessee to New Orleans. It was almost gone and the receipts from North Alabama were actually less in 1860 than in 1845, although the crops had grown manifold larger. The lead trade of the Upper Mississippi had been diverted from the river by the railroads. At Cincinnati a large portion of the flour and grain that had been formerly sent down the river traveled either up it to Pittsburgh or went direct by rail to New York, or by canal to Cleveland, Buffalo, and thence by the Hudson. In the twenty years between 1840 and 1860, during which the competition of river and rail had been inaugurated, the production of the Mississippi Valley had increased far more rapidly than the receipts at New Orleans. The river traffic had increased in the aggregate, but lost relatively.

The Mississippi carried a much larger tonnage, but a far smaller percentage of the total traffic of the valley. The loss was most marked in Western products. Forty years

before, these had constituted 58 per cent. of the total receipts at New Orleans. In 1859-60 they had fallen to 23 per cent., although in that period the West had made the greatest increase in population and production. What was lost here, however, was more than made good in the cotton and sugar crops, and the river trade of New Orleans therefore showed no decline but a steady, active, and positive advance.

During all this period "the levee" of New Orleans, as the river landing of that city was called, was the wonder of every visitor. It was beyond doubt the most active commercial center of the world. Here, side by side, lay the steamboats and flatboats of the river, the steamers, ships, and numerous ocean vessels. Here the entire business of New Orleans and of the greater portion of the valley was transacted. The levee was the landing, warehouse, com- . mercial exchange of half a continent, and the freight handled there exceeded that to be seen on any single dockyard of London or Liverpool.

Report on Internal Commerce of the United States, 1887, pp. 199, 205, 214-15. 50th Congress, Ist Session, House Executive Documents, No. 6, Part II, Vol. 20.

QUESTIONS

What place did the flatboats hold in Mississippi commerce after the steamboat had absorbed a large portion of the traffic? (See, also, Selection, XXIII.) How did the increase of cotton-growing in the valley increase the prosperity of New Orleans? Show how New Orleans became the distributing and financial center of the cotton country. How did manufacturing in the Ohio Valley give more business to New Orleans? What prophecies were made of the growth of New Orleans? What was her commercial position in the Valley in 1860? How did the railroads affect the carrying of produce to New Orleans from Alabama? From the Ohio Valley? Why is not New Orleans a more important market for the railroad-carried produce of the old Northwest? In answering consider the comparative advantages of proximity to Europe of New Orleans and New York. What position should you think New Orleans should hold to-day in our trade with South America? How will the Panama Canal increase her opportunities for development?

XXVI

THE REAPER

The marvelous development of the great West and especially its agricultural development has been made possible by the use of machinery. When men first moved into the Mississippi Valley there was plenty of fertile inviting land; but without a plentiful supply of laborers to do the work of harvesting, it was useless for one farmer to sow many acres. The invention of the reaper, which could do the work of many men, was therefore an event of immense significance in the expansion of American agriculture. It had, moreover, other effects; the farmer could dispense with the laborers which he might otherwise have needed and they could turn to the villages and cities and help in the development of manufacturing and trade. Cyrus Hall McCormick is a typical example of those inventive, clever men, to whom the needs and the spirit of a new country offered stimulus and opportunity.

As early as 1809 he (Robert McCormick) began to devote much time in efforts to devise a reaping machine, and appears to have spasmodically worked upon his plan through upwards of a score of years 1816 being generally ascribed as the year in which the attention of his neighbors first became attracted to the enterprise. Various cutting mechanisms were tried by Robert McCormick. . . . But none of these schemes was found to be practical, and after a final discouraging test in the early harvest of 1831 he concluded to abandon the project as an unsuccessful experiment.

Cyrus Hall McCormick, Robert's eldest son in a family of eight children, was born at Walnut Grove, February 15, 1809, the very year to which is commonly assigned the latter's first attempt at a mechanical reaper. The boy was carefully reared to be a practical farmer; but it was evident that in his case, as in his father's, the carpenter and blacksmith shops were more attractive to him than the

open fields. He had clearly inherited his parent's inventive qualities, and was destined far to surpass him — indeed, to become one of the greatest figures in the industrial history of the world.

In

When but fifteen years of age this ingenious Scotch-Irish lad made a distinct improvement in the grain cradle. the same year he, like his father, invented a hillside plow; a few seasons later supplanting it with a self-sharpening, horizontal plow, claimed to be the first of this character to be introduced.

But Cyrus McCormick's greatest contribution to agricultural economics was yet to come. The father's reaping machine, standing outside the blacksmith shop on the home farm, had from the year of his birth been to him a familiar and alluring spectacle. His imagination was early fired with a desire to conquer the great practical difficulties of mechanical reaping. When the father finally acknowledged himself defeated, Cyrus took up the problem on his own account. Later in that same summer of 1831, when but twenty-two years of age, young McCormick constructed a machine essentially unlike any mechanism proposed by his father or any others who had before undertaken the task. He immediately demonstrated by practical tests that the successful type had thus been created; and he never departed from that type, in conformity wherewith all success in this art has since proceeded.

The immense significance of this event may be realized when we remember that since man began to practice the arts of agriculture, the grain harvest has been one of his chiefest concerns. There is nearly always abundant time in which to plant and to cultivate; but from its having to be cut when in a certain stage of ripeness, at the risk of losing the crop, the harvesting of grain is confined to a few days generally not to exceed ten. The amount of grain, therefore, which a husbandman may successfully raise, obviously is dependent on the quantity which he may garner with the means available during this brief season.