existence, but it appeared in marked strength in the
American of this time. While the shipbuilders of New England were laying
the keels of these privateers, Robert Fulton was perfecting his
steamboat on the Delaware and Hudson rivers. In the year before the war,
the first steamboat appeared on the Ohio, and before the end of the war
fourteen were plying on Western waters, and opening up a new era in the
American colonization of the continent.

This instinctive adaptation of means to ends was less successful in the
realm of American politics. No celerity could compensate for want of
prevision on the part of the authorities at Washington. The lesson of
the war was not lost upon James Madison, at least. "Experience has
taught us," said he in a message to Congress,--and the words amounted to
a confession of error,--"that neither the pacific dispositions of the
American people nor the pacific character of their political
institutions, can altogether exempt them from that strife which appears,
beyond the ordinary lot of nations, to be incident to the actual period
of the world; and the same faithful monitor demonstrates that a certain
degree of preparation for war is not only indispensable to avert
disaster in the onset, but affords also the best security for the
continuance of peace."

The indirect effects of war were more widely felt. The blockade affected
adversely all the extractive industries upon which the vast majority of
the people in all the States depended. Only New England escaped
unscathed--and the circumstance was not creditable to the section. In
the latter months of 1814 ruin stared the Southern planter in the face.
The lifting of the blockade wrought a transformation. Planters in the
Old Dominion, who could find no market for their tobacco and wheat on
February 13, sold their produce on February 14 at prices which made them
rich again. Flour which had found almost no purchasers at seven and a
half dollars a barrel sold readily at ten. Imported commodities fell in
price correspondingly. Ships put to sea at once laden with the
accumulated produce of two long years. The export trade, which had
fallen to less than $7,000,000, leaped to $46,000,000 between March and
October. Fully two thirds of this wealth accrued to the Southern
planters who raised the three great staples, tobacco, cotton, and rice.
The people of the Middle States shared only moderately in this
prosperity. The value of the wheat and corn which th