208. The president had already asked Congress to reduce the duties; and many Democratic members of Congress, who had yielded to the popular clamour for Protection, were very glad to use “the crisis” as an excuse for Tariff of 1833. now voting against it, A compromise Tariff Act, scaling down all duties over 20 per cent. by one-tenth of the surplus each year, so as to bring duties to a uniform rate of 20 per cent. in 1843, was introduced by Clay and became law. Calhoun and his followers claimed this as all that the nullification ordinance had aimed at; and the ordinance was formally repealed. But nullification had received its death-blow; even those Southern leaders who maintained the right of secession refused to recognize the right of a State to remain in the Union while nullifying its laws; and, when protection was reintroduced by the tariff of 1842, nullification was hardly thought of.
The locomotive engine.209. All the internal conditions of the United States were completely altered by the introduction of railways. For twenty years past the Americans had been pushing in every direction which offered a hope of the means of reconciling vast territory with enormous population. Stephenson's invention of the locomotive came just in time, and Jackson's two terms of office marked the outburst of modern American life. English engines were brought over in 1829, and served as models for a year or two; and then the lighter forms of locomotives, better suited to American conditions, were introduced. The miles of railroad were 23 in 1830, 1098 in 1835, nearly 2000 in 1840, and thereafter they about doubled every five years until 1860.
Railways of 1840. 210. A railway map of 1840 shows a fragmentary system, designed mainly to fill the gaps left by the means of communication in use in 1830. One or two short lines run back into the country from Savannah and Charleston; another runs north along the coast from Wilmington to Baltimore; several lines connect New York with Washington and other points; and short lines elsewhere mark the openings which needed to be filled at once a number in New England and the middle States, three in Ohio and Michigan, and three in Louisiana. Year after year new inventions came in to increase and aid this development. Anthracite. The anthracite coal of the middle States had been known since 1790 (§ 19), but no means had been devised to put the refractory agent to work. It was now successfully Iron. applied to railroads (1836), and to the manufacture of iron (1837). Hitherto wood had been the best fuel for iron-making; now the States which relied on wood were driven out of competition, and production was restricted to the States in which nature had placed coal alongside of iron. Ocean navigation. Steam navigation across the Atlantic was established in 1838. The telegraph came next, Morse's line being erected in 1844. The spread of the railway system brought with The telegraph. it, as a natural development, the rise of the American system of express companies, whose first phases of individual enterprise appeared in 1839. No similar period in American history is so extraordinary for material development as the decade 1830-40. At its beginning the country was an overgrown type of colonial life; at its end American life had been shifted to entirely new lines, which it has since followed. Modern American history had burst in with the explosiveness of an Arctic summer.
Western settlement.211. If the steamboat had aided Western development, the railway made it a freshet. Cities and States grew as if the oxygen of their surroundings had been suddenly increased. The steamboat influenced the railway, and the railway gave the steamboat new powers. Vacant places in the States east of the Mississippi were filling up; the long lines of emigrant waggons gave way to the new and better methods of transport; and new grades of land were made accessible. Chicago was but a frontier fort in 1832; within a half-dozen years it was a flourishing town, with eight steamers connecting it with Buffalo, and dawning ideas of its future development of railway connexions. The maps change from decade to decade, as map-makers hasten to insert new cities which have sprung up. Admission of Arkansas and Michigan. Two new States, Arkansas and Michigan, were admitted (1836 and 1837). The population of Ohio leaps from 900,000 to 1,500,000, that of Michigan from 30,000 to 212,000, and that of the country from 13,000,000 to 17,000,000, between 1830 and 1840.
Social conditions.212. With the change of material surroundings and possibilities came a steady amelioration of social conditions and a development of social ideals. Such features of the past as imprisonment for debt and the cruel indifference of old methods of dealing with crime began to disappear; the time was past when a State could use an abandoned copper-mine as its State prison. The domestic use of gas and anthracite coal, the introduction of expensive aqueducts for pure water, and the changing life of the people forced changes in the interior and exterior of American dwellings. Wood was still the common building material; imitations of Greek architecture still retained their vogue; but the interiors were models of comfort in comparison with the houses even of 1810. In the “new” regions this was not yet the case, and here social restraints were still so few that society seemed to be reduced almost to its primitive elements. Western steamers reeked with gambling, swindling, duelling, and every variety of vice. Public law was almost suspended in some regions; and organized associations of counterfeiters and horse-thieves terrorized whole sections of country. But this state of affairs was altogether temporary, as well as limited in its area; the older and more densely settled States had been well prepared for the change and had never lost command of the social forces, and the process of settling down went on, even in the newer States, with far more rapidity than could reasonably have been expected. Those who took part in the movements of population in 1830-40 had been trained under the rigid forms of the previous American life; and these soon re-asserted themselves. The rebound was over before 1847, and the Western States were then as well prepared to receive and digest the great immigration which followed as the older States would have been in 1830.
Literature.213. A distinct American literature dates from this period. Most of the publications in the United States were still cheap reprints of foreign works; but native productions no longer followed foreign models with servility. Between 1830 and 1840 Whittier, Longfellow, Holmes, Poe, Hawthorne, Emerson, Bancroft, and Prescott joined the advance-guard of American writers Bryant, Dana, Halleck, Drake, Irving, and Cooper; and even those writers who had already made their place in literature showed the influence of new conditions by their growing tendency to look less to foreign models and methods than before 1830. Popular education was improved. The new States had from the first endeavoured to secure the best possible system of common schools. The attempt came naturally from the political instincts of the class from which the migration came; but the system which resulted was to be of incalculable service during the years to come. Common school system. Their absolute democracy and their universal use of the English language have made the common schools most successful machines for converting the raw material of immigration into American citizens. This supreme benefit is the basis of the system and the reason for its existence and development, but its incidental benefit of educating Newspapers. the people has been beyond calculation. It was an odd symptom of the general change that American newspapers took a new form during these ten years. The old “blanket-sheet” newspaper, cumbrous to handle and slow in all its ways, met its first rival in the type of newspaper which
