pi Valley
had twenty-two senators, double those of the Middle States and New
England combined, and nearly three times as many as the Old South; while
in the House of Representatives the Mississippi Valley outweighed any
one of the old sections. In 1810 it had less than one-third the power of
New England and the South together in the House. In 1840 it outweighed
them both combined and because of its special circumstances it held the
balance of power.

While the Mississippi Valley thus rose to superior political power as
compared with any of the old sections, its economic development made it
the inciting factor in the industrial life of the nation. After the War
of 1812 the steamboat revolutionized the transportation facilities of
the Mississippi Valley. In each economic area a surplus formed,
demanding an outlet and demanding returns in manufactures. The spread of
cotton into the lower Mississippi Valley and the Gulf Plains had a
double significance. This transfer of the center of cotton production
away from the Atlantic South not only brought increasing hardship and
increasing unrest to the East as the competition of the virgin soils
depressed Atlantic land values and made Eastern labor increasingly dear,
but the price of cotton fell also in due proportion to the increase in
production by the Mississippi Valley. While the transfer of economic
power from the Seaboard South to the Cotton Kingdom of the lower
Mississippi Valley was in progress, the upper Mississippi Valley was
leaping forward, partly under the stimulus of a market for its surplus
in the plantations of the South, where almost exclusive cultivation of
the great staples resulted in a lack of foodstuffs and livestock.

At the same time the great river and its affluents became the highway of
a commerce that reached to the West Indies, the Atlantic Coast, Europe,
and South America. The Mississippi Valley was an industrial entity, from
Pittsburgh and Santa Fe to New Orleans. It became the most important
influence in American politics and industry. Washington had declared in
1784 that it was the part of wisdom for Virginia to bind the West to the
East by ties of interest through internal improvement thereby taking
advantage of the extensive and valuable trade of a rising empire.

This realization of the fact that an economic empire was growing up
beyond the mountains stimulated rival cities, New York, Philadelphia,
and Baltimore, to engage in a struggle to suppl