y the West with goods
and receive its products. This resulted in an attempt to break down the
barrier of the Alleghanies by internal improvements. The movement became
especially active after the War of 1812, when New York carried out De
Witt Clinton's vast conception of making by the Erie Canal a greater
Hudson which should drain to the port of New York all the basin of the
Great Lakes, and by means of other canals even divert the traffic from
the tributaries of the Mississippi. New York City's commercial
ascendancy dates from this connection with interior New York and the
Mississippi Valley. A writer in Hunt's _Merchants' Magazine_ in 1869
makes the significance of this clearer by these words:

There was a period in the history of the seaboard cities when
there was no West; and when the Alleghany Mountains formed the
frontier of settlement and agricultural production. During
that epoch the seaboard cities, North and South, grew in
proportion to the extent and fertility of the country in their
rear; and as Maryland, Virginia, the Carolinas and Georgia
were more productive in staples valuable to commerce than the
colonies north of them, the cities of Baltimore, Norfolk,
Charleston, and Savannah enjoyed a greater trade and
experienced a larger growth than those on the northern
seaboard.

He, then, classifies the periods of city development into three: (1) the
provincial, limited to the Atlantic seaboard; (2) that of canal and
turnpike connected with the Mississippi Valley; and (3) that of railroad
connection. Thus he was able to show how Norfolk, for example, was shut
off from the enriching currents of interior trade and was outstripped
by New York. The efforts of Philadelphia, Baltimore, Charleston, and
Savannah to divert the trade of the Mississippi system to their own
ports on the Atlantic, and the rise or fall of these cities in
proportion as they succeeded are a sufficient indication of the meaning
of the Mississippi Valley in American industrial life. What colonial
empire has been for London that the Mississippi Valley is to the
seaboard cities of the United States, awakening visions of industrial
empire, systematic control of vast spaces, producing the American type
of the captain of industry.

It was not alone city rivalry that converged upon the Mississippi Valley
and sought its alliance. Sectional rivalry likewise saw that the balance
of power possessed