as
worth in 1860 $330,393,000 as compared to the $58,000,000 of 1830.
Perhaps the meaning of these figures may become clearer if we note that
the total investments in these industries was considerably less than the
yearly product. Nor was the East less prosperous in other lines. Her
tonnage had increased from a little more than 500,000 in 1830 to nearly
5,000,000 in 1860. The freight and passenger ships, built of iron, and
encouraged by liberal subsidies from the Federal Government, employed
12,000 sailors and paid their owners $70,000,000 a year. They carried
the manufactures of the East to the Southern plantations, to South
America, and to the Far East. This great fleet of commercial vessels was
owned almost exclusively in Massachusetts, New York, and Pennsylvania,
and its owners were at the end of the decade about to wrest from Great
Britain her monopoly of the carrying trade of the world.

[Illustration: The Industrial Belt of 1860]

In spite of the efforts of President Jackson and of the purposes of the
sub-treasury system, the concentration of capital in the Eastern towns
and cities continued. Only New York, instead of Philadelphia, was the
new center. The merchants of that city imported three fourths of the
European goods consumed in the country, and they in turn exported nearly
all of the great crops with which the balance of trade was maintained.
New York was also a distributing center for the manufactures of the East
which were sent to the South, the West, or the outside world. Thus the
exchanges of all the sections were made there, and before 1860 its
banks, with a capital of $130,000,000 and specie reserves of only
$20,000,000, did a business of $7,000,000,000 a year. And while New York
became the American London, the whole of the East was likewise securing
the lion's share of the banking profits of the country. Although the
assessed wealth of the section counted only one fourth of the total
$16,000,000,000 for the country in 1860, the East had nearly two thirds
of the banking capital; and the money in circulation there was $16.5
_per capita_ as against $6.6 for the country as a whole.[8] Industry,
commerce, shipping, and banking concentrated in the narrow area of less
than 200,000 square miles, earned yearly returns equal as a rule to the
total of the capital invested. Money changed hands rapidly, credits did
the work of capital, and the rapid growth of population added large
unearned increments to the for