orth, which had materially checked the
distillation of grain.

The West, which had long looked to the East for a market, had its
attention now turned to the South, as the most certain and convenient
mart for the sale of its products--the planters affording to the farmers
the markets they had in vain sought from the manufacturers. In the
meantime, steamboat navigation was acquiring perfection on the Western
rivers--the great natural outlets for Western products--and became a
means of communication between the Northwest and the Southwest, as well
as with the trade and commerce of the Atlantic cities. This gave an
impulse to industry and enterprise, west of the Alleghanies,
unparalleled in the history of the country. While, then, the bounds of
slave labor were extending from Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia,
Westward, over Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi and Arkansas, the area of
free labor was enlarging, with equal rapidity, in the Northwest,
throughout Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and Michigan. Thus, within these
provision and cotton regions, were the forests cleared away, or the
prairies broken up, simultaneously by those old antagonistic forces,
opponents no longer, but harmonized by the fusion of their
interests--the connecting link between them being the steamboat. Thus,
also, was a _tripartite alliance_ formed, by which the Western Farmer,
the Southern Planter, and the English Manufacturer, became united in a
common bond of interest: the whole giving their support to the doctrine
of Free Trade.

This active commerce between the West and South, however, soon caused a
rivalry in the East, that pushed forward improvements, by States or
Corporations, to gain a share in the Western trade. These improvements,
as completed, gave to the West a choice of markets, so that its Farmers
could elect whether to feed the slave who grows the cotton, or the
operatives who are engaged in its manufacture. But this rivalry did
more. The competition for Western products enhanced their price, and
stimulated their more extended cultivation. This required an enlargement
of the markets; and the extension of slavery became essential to Western
prosperity.

We have not reached the end of the alliance between the Western Farmer
and Southern Planter. The emigration which has been filling Iowa and
Minnesota, and is now rolling like a flood into Kansas and Nebraska, is
but a repetition of what has occurred in the other Western States and
Territ