lly tied to the East before 1835 by water
and railroad routes. Trade, manufactures, and finance; railways, canals,
and home markets were the great subjects of conversation in the East,
just as cotton, slaves, and land formed the trinity of Southern
thinking.

The men who owned the industrial plants and managed the large banks and
projected the ambitious railway and canal systems, the stockholders and
the officers, the factors and storekeepers, were drawn from the same
sturdy New England and Middle States stock, the small farmers and little
merchants who had composed the democracy which had fought the
Revolution. Retired sea-captains and owners of sailing-vessels joined
the new regime as profits came in and the art of watering stock was
understood. Throughout the East, from Chesapeake Bay to Augusta, Maine,
wherever there were good waterfalls, great brick buildings were rising
story upon story, proclaiming the new prosperity and enticing the hordes
of workers so necessary to the new system. The old-fashioned mansions of
retired traders or prosperous shipbuilders, which had so long adorned
the hills of the coast towns, were giving way to the larger houses of
the captains of industry who built up the inland towns or created the
suburbs of the greater cities.

Like the planters of the South, with their two million slaves, these
able and prosperous makers of a new era in the East had their two
million operatives, and as in the planting districts, the working day
was from sun to sun. Carrying the comparison further, the industrial and
financial region was relatively small, embracing much less of the area
of the country than did that of the black belt.[3]

[Footnote 3: See maps of tobacco and cotton belts on pp. 133, 134.]

From southeastern Maine to Boston, Providence, New Haven, New York City,
and on to Baltimore, with a Western extension to Pittsburg, this
irregular, now widening, now contracting, strip of country extended. It
embraced the strategic positions, the falls of the rivers, the places
whence ships could sail laden with the products of the industries or
return with the raw materials necessary to their operation; it included
the old commercial towns where the surplus capital of the East had been
collected and where now gathered the populations which composed the
districts whose spokesmen exerted the real strength of the North in the
National Congress. It was this articulate East, the growing power of
industry a