Horace Greeley, The American Conflict: A History of the Great Rebellion in the United States of America, 1860-65: its Causes, Incidents, and Results: Intended to exhibit especially its moral and political phases with the drift and progress of American opinion respecting human slavery from 1776 to the close of the War for the Union. Volume I.

[22] us in believing that they were by no means intolerable. It is not to assume that the men by whose valor and virtue American independence was achieved, and who lived to enjoy, for half a century thereafter, the gratitude of their country, and the honest pride of their children, saw wealth as fairly distributed, and the labor of freemen as adequately rewarded, as those of almost any other country or of any previous generation.

Eighty years had not passed since the acknowledgment of our independence, when the returns of the Eighth Decennial Census afforded us the means of measuring our country's growth and physical progress during nearly its whole national history. The retrospect and the prospect might well minister to the pride (though that were needless) of a patriotic apostle of “manifest destiny.” During those eighty years, or within the memory of many still living, the area of our country had been expanded, by successive and, in good part, peaceful acquisitions, from Eight Hundred Thousand to about Three Millions of square miles. Its population, excluding the Aboriginal savages, had increased from Three to more than Thirty Millions. Of its two thousand millions of acres of dry land, about five hundred millions had been divided into farms; leaving three-fourths of its surface as yet unimproved, though but in part unappropriated. Its farms were officially estimated as worth six thousand six hundred and fifty millions of dollars, and were doubtless actually worth not less than Ten Thousand Millions of dollars. On these farms were over eleven hundred millions' worth of live stock, and nearly two hundred and fifty millions' worth of implements and machinery. The value of animals annually slaughtered was returned at over two hundred millions of dollars. The annual product of Wheat was more than one hundred and seventy millions of bushels, with an equal quantity of Oats, and more than eight hundred millions of busels of Indian Corn. Of Tobacco, our annual product was more than four hundred millions of pounds; and of Rice, nearly two millions. Of Wool, our annual clip was over sixty millions of pounds, and our consumption probably double that amount. Of ginned Cotton, ready for market, our product was about one million of tuns, or more than Five Millions of bales of four hundred pounds each. Four hundred and sixty millions of pounds of Butter, and one hundred and five millions of pounds of Cheese, were likewise returned as our aggregate product for the year 1859. We made in that year three hundred and forty millions of pounds of Sugar, and more than twenty-five millions of gallons of Molasses. And, beside consuming all this, with twenty-five millions of pounds of home-made Honey, we imported from abroad to the value of over thirty-six millions of dollars. We dragged from our forests, not including fuel, Timber valued at more than Ninety-three Millions of dollars. We made Flour to the value of Two Hundred Millions. We manufactured over fifty-five millions' worth of Cotton into fabrics, worth one hundred and fifteen millions of dollars, beside importing largely from abroad. We fabricated over eighty millions of pounds of Wool, costing forty millions