Who is the started party.
--No part of the late
United States feels the war more severely than the great Northwest.
It is almost exclusively agricultural; and its productions are the cereals alone, those which yield the smallest profit to the farmer.
By means of the cheap navigation of the
Ohio,
Mississippi, and
Missouri rivers, its farmers could deliver their grain at New Orleans for exportation at a very small cost; and the immense quantity sent thither was indicated by the fact that next to New York, itself exporting more grain than anything else, New Orleans was the largest exporting city in the
Union.
The cheap transportation they enjoyed for their grain enabled them to pocket very fair not prices from the sale of it; and the same great avenues of navigation brought merchandise in return to them very nearly at manufacturers' prices.
Thus, the farmers of the
Northwest enjoyed the two essential advantages for a profitable agriculture, that of receiving nearly last prices for their grain, and of obtaining their merchandise at nearly first prices.
It is true that they enjoyed several lines of railway for reaching the
Eastern markets; but these, by multiplying the means of transportation, served only to cheapen it, while totally inadequate of themselves to accommodate the mighty bulk of Western trade.
They sold, moreover, a great deal of grain, in the form of flour or most, to the
Southern States.
The culture of cotton, in these last, paid four or five hundred dollars per annum for each hand; while that of grain paid only about one-third that sum. The case was similar as to sugar.
Of course the tendency of this circumstance was to throw the whole force of the planter upon the profitable staples, and to produce a demand throughout the cotton and sugar States for Northwestern farm products.
It is said that seventy-five millions of pounds of bacon alone were thus supplied from this quarter to the
South, and of course we are to infer that the grain furnished was in commensurate amount.
The war has put a stop to this vast demand from the
South, and cut off the
Northwest from its, largest and most profitable market.
It can only export produce now by way of the lakes and by railroads through New York, over routes doubly as expensive as the natural channels of great rivers, the lake routes closed in winter, and the railways inadequate to the business, and charging their own prices.
The South, instead of starving, is simply raising less cotton and sugar, and growing more corn, hogs, and cattle.
It was the silliest and shallowest experimenter embarked upon by a sensible people; that of starving their own best customers by depriving themselves of their own best market.
They find to their confusion that they are the greatest sufferers.
The delusion that we are to be starved has at last been given up; and the
Northwest at least are sighing in their secret hearts for peace.
They are the starved party, starving for want of that remuneration for labor, which brings thrift, wealth and prosperity, and the want of which brings poverty and distress.
The experiment has completely failed; so far as the expected exhaustion of the
South is concerned.
Our land teems with all articles of native production; there is scarcity in nothing except in things that were imported, among which the only necessary of life is salt.
There is no article which the
Yankees have in surplus that we ourselves cannot also produce in equal superabundance; and, so far from the war teaching us our dependence upon that race, it has demonstrated to us precisely the opposite truth.
In a little while we shall have supplied all deficiencies which our long habits of trade had led us to derive from the
North; and the war is the only measure which could have produced that complete self-dependence which is to be its most happy consequence to the
South.
The experience of the
Northwest is only an aggravation of what is felt all over the
North at the loss of Southern trade.
Where two communities are so extensively and multifariously engaged in mutual trade, as were these two sections; the cessation of that trade cannot operate exclusively to the prejudice of one of the parties only.
On the contrary, where one community are producers and the other merely manufacturers and carriers, the latter are sure to feel the effect most severely.
