nd finance, the promise of greater prosperity to come, which
drew to it, like iron filings to a magnet, the talented and the
ambitious men of the time, just as the black belt was the articulate
part of the South for which men of ability and influence spoke in the
national assemblies which gathered from year to year in Washington.

But the older mercantile and seafaring interests sometimes resisted the
industrial movement and made precarious alliances with the South on the
basis of a national free-trade policy. The great Boston merchants
actually turned to Hayne, of South Carolina, in 1827, to represent them
and their cause in Congress. The Winslows, Goddards, and Lees who thus
appealed to a Southern Senator were representatives of the older order,
of the same declining class in New York and Philadelphia which had in
years past controlled affairs in the East and made alliances with the
aristocratic leaders of the South. In a hopeless minority in their own
States before 1830, they looked to the South for relief, and at least
understood the politics of the planters. Their successors composed the
nucleus of the party of Cushing, Everett, and Winthrop in 1860. It is
difficult for us in our day of great things to understand the industrial
and social revolution of the decade which preceded the inauguration of
the first Western President, and it was difficult for men to make the
transition from the small farmer system of Jefferson's day to the
industrial regime of 1830; many good people were broken in the process,
while whole classes of the population exchanged the life of the open
country for that of the crowded and unsanitary towns, exchanged a rude
and hard independence for a semi-servile subjection.

[Illustration: The Distribution of Industrial Plants in 1833

Miss Maud Hulse drew this map from data in House Documents, 22nd. Cong.,
1st. Sess. No. 303.]

The new Eastern regime readily enlisted the support of the old
professional classes. The clergy and the votaries of the law, always
doing the bidding of the strongest in society, promptly took their
places in the system. When dignitaries of an Eastern town gradually laid
aside their rough farmers' clothes and put on the smooth garbs of
directors of corporations or financial magnates, the legal briefs and
sermons underwent a similar change. Social amenities displaced
Calvinistic theology; dancing, which had been a crime against the
Church, became mere frivolity and finall