m over the
mountains and over the ocean to feed mankind. Cincinnati imported or
made nearly all that the people of three or four States could afford to
buy, and received from them nearly all that they could spare in return,
and made a profit on both transactions. This business, upon the whole,
was done honestly and well. Immense fortunes were made. Nicholas
Longworth died worth twelve millions, and there are now in that young
city sixty-four persons whose estate is rated at a million dollars or
more. But, with all this wealth and this talent for business, the people
of Cincinnati displayed little of that spirit of improvement which has
converted Chicago, in thirty years, from a quagmire into a beautiful
city, and made it accessible to all the people of the prairies. There
was too much ballast, as it were, for so little sail. People were intent
on their own affairs, and were satisfied if their own business
prospered. Such a thing even as a popular lecture was rare, and a
well-sustained course of lectures was felt to be out of the question.
Books of the higher kind were in little demand (that is, little,
considering the size and great wealth of the place); there was little
taste for art; few concerts were given, and there was no drama fit to
entertain intellectual persons. Cincinnati was the Old Hunkers'
paradise. Separated from a Slave State only by a river one third of a
mile wide, with her leading families connected by marriage with those of
Virginia, Kentucky, and Maryland, and her business men having important
relations with the South, there was no city--not even Baltimore--that
was more saturated with the spirit of Hunkerism,--that horrid blending
of vanity and avarice which made the Northern people equal sharers in
the guilt of slavery, while taking the lion's share of the profit. It
was at Cincinnati, in 1836, that a mob of most respectable citizens,
having first "resolved" in public meeting that "Abolition papers" should
neither be "published nor distributed" in the town, broke into the
office of James G. Birney's "Philanthropist," and scattered the types,
and threw the press into the river. It was at Cincinnati, in 1841, that
the authorities were compelled to fill the prisons with negroes to
protect them from massacre. Similar scenes have occurred in other
cities, but violence of this kind meant more at Cincinnati than in most
places, for the people here have always been noted for their orderly
habits and their r