.. they [merchants] did not contemplate a period of
general peace, when each nation will carry its own productions, when
discriminations will be made in favour of domestic tonnage, when foreign
commerce will be limited to enumerated articles, and when much
circumspection will be necessary in all our commercial transactions."

It cannot be said, either, that the American farmer studied the
philosophy of agriculture. He owed his crops less to intelligent
cultivation of the soil than to provident Nature in a new and untilled
country. Both his methods and his implements were bad, and resulted in
that land spoliation which has been the bane of American industry.
"Agriculture in the South," said John Taylor, of Caroline, "does not
consist so much in cultivating land as in killing it"; and the statement
was scarcely less true when applied to the Northern farmer. The soil was
rapidly exhausted by planting the same crop year after year, for it was
easier to take up fresh land than to restore productivity to the old.
Indeed, the comments of foreign travelers at the close of the century
suggest doubts as to whether the American farmer understood the
importance of rotating his crops and of fertilizing his fields. The
farming implements in use showed little of that mechanical ingenuity
which is now characteristic of the American people. The plough was still
a clumsy affair with heavy beam and handles, and wooden mould-board. The
scythe, the sickle, and the flail were the same as their forbears had
used for centuries.

The demand of Europe for the food products of the Northern and Middle
States obscured for a time the importance of cotton as an article of
export. In 1790, South Carolina and Georgia, then the only
cotton-growing States, produced less than two million pounds of inferior
quality, none of which was exported. A decade later thirty-five million
pounds were raised, one half of which was exported; and Virginia, North
Carolina, and Tennessee had begun the cultivation. This sudden
development was due to the invention of the cotton gin by Eli Whitney,
in 1793. This machine facilitated the separation of the seed from the
fiber of the short-staple variety of cotton, which alone could be
profitably cultivated in the uplands, and thus made possible a vast
extension of the area of cotton culture.

The cotton gin came at an opportune moment for the Southern planters,
since rice and indigo were declining in importance as exports, an