ike. A new era had begun. Big business
interests and great railway schemes had developed the corporation in its
modern connotation; large harvests and a most enterprising industry were
producing the capital for a new economic era; and all the social
tendencies seemed to be working out a national life which was no longer
parochial. It was the business of politics so to guide and regulate the
varying activities of the people that sectional hatreds should pass away
and that the resources of the country should not be squandered. Such was
the task of Franklin Pierce, the new leader, who had not known
personally the fears and dislikes of earlier days. But a country so rich
and prosperous as the United States in 1850-60 had other interests, a
social and intellectual life which must engage our attention before we
take up the political evolution of the period.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

James Ford Rhodes's _History of the United Slates_, vols. _I_ and _II_,
already mentioned, remains the best treatment of the period of 1850-60.
T. C. Smith's _Parties and Slavery_, in _American Nation_ series (1906),
and McMaster's _History of the United States_, vol. _VIII_, are very
valuable. T. P. Kettell's _Southern Wealth and Northern Profits_ (New
York, 1860), is a suggestive study in sectionalism not too well known to
scholars. But the _Census Reports_ of 1850 and 1860; J. E. B. DeBow's
_Industrial Resources of the South and West_ (1857); and U.S. Senate
_Executive Documents_, no. 38, part 1, 52d Cong., 1st Sess., supply the
needful statistics on population, crops, manufactures, and finance.
Freeman Hunt's _Lives of American Merchants_, 2 vols. (New York, 1858),
gives some interesting information about leading _ante-bellum_ merchants
and manufacturers. And the volumes of _Hunt's Merchant's Magazine_,
1839-60, _DeBow's Review_, 1846-60, and the _American Banker's Magazine_
for the same period are storehouses of the economic history of the time,
K. Coman's _Industrial History of the United States_ (1910); E. L.
Bogart's _The Economic History of the United States_ (1908); and Horace
White's _Money and Banking Illustrated by American History_ (1911), are
the best special works in their several lines.

CHAPTER XI

AMERICAN CULTURE

Four fifths of the people of the United States of 1860 lived in the
country, and it is perhaps fair to say that half of these dwelt in log
h