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UNION NAVAL OFFICERS.

59. Rear-Adm'l ANDREW H. FOOTE 60865. Commodore CHARLES WILKES . 608

DAVID G. FARRAGUT

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CHARLES H. DAVIS
HENRY W. MORRIS
68. Captain JAMES H. WARD
69. " JOHN L. WORDEN
CHARLES S. BOGGS.

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ILLUSTRATIONS-CONTINUED.

TEXAS AS SHE WAS, AND AS SHE CLAIMED TO BE

VIEW OF HARPER'S FERRY.

VIEW IN THE SHENANDOAH VALLEY.

FORT SUMTER

THE APPROACHES TO CHARLESTON

NORFOLK, PORTSMOUTH, AND THE NAVY YARD

WEST VIRGINIA

TEN MILES AROUND FORTRESS MONROE

WASHINGTON CITY AND VICINITY

BULL RUN BATTLE-FIELD AND CENTERVILLE

MISSOURI .

BATTLE-FIELD OF WILSON'S CREEK, NEAR SPRINGFIELD, Mo.

LEXINGTON (MISSOURI) DEFENDED BY MULLIGAN
BATTLE-FIELD OF BELMONT, MISSOURI

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HATTERAS INLET-FORTS HATTERAS AND CLARK
SINKING OF THE PETREL BY THE ST. LAWRENCE
FORT PICKENS-SANTA ROSA ISLAND-PENSACOLA .
HILTON HEAD-REDUCTION OF FORT Beauregard
BATTLE-FIELD OF BALL'S BLUFF-HARRISON ISLAND, ETC.
BATTLE-FIELD OF DRANESVILLE, VIRGINIA

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THE AMERICAN CONFLICT,

I.

OUR COUNTRY.

THE United States of America, whose independence, won on the battle-fields of the Revolution, was tardily and reluctantly conceded by Great Britain on the 30th of November, 1782, contained at that time a population of a little less than Three Millions, of whom half a million were slaves. This population was mainly settled upon and around the bays, harbors, and inlets, which irregularly indent the western shore of the Atlantic Ocean, for a distance of about a thousand miles, from the mouth of the Penobscot to that of the Altamaha. The extent of the settlements inland from the coast may have averaged a hundred miles, although there were many points at which the primitive forest still looked off upon the broad expanse of the ocean. Nominally, and as distinguished from those of other civilized nations, the territories of the Confederation stretched westward to the Mississippi, and northward, as now, to the Great Lakes, giving a total area of a little more than eight hundred thousand square miles. At several inviting localities, the “clearings" were push

ed two or three hundred miles westward, to the bases and more fertile valleys of the eastern slope of the Alleghanies; and there were three or four settlements quite beyond that formidable but not impassable barrier, mainly in that portion of Virginia which is now the State of Kentucky. But, in the absence of steam, of canals, and even of tolerable highways, and with the mouth of the Mississippi held and sealed by a jealous. and not very friendly foreign power, the fertile valleys of the Illinois, the Wabash, and even of the Ohio itself, were scarcely habitable for civilized communities. No staple that their pioneer population would be likely, for many years, to produce, could be sold on the sea-board for the cost of its transportation, even from the site whereon Cincinnati has since been founded and built, much less from that of Indianapolis or Chicago. The delicate, costly fabrics of Europe,, and even of Asia, could be transferred to the newest and most inland settlement for a small fraction of the price at which they would there be eagerly bought; but when the few

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coins which the settlers had taken | ed, desolating Revolutionary strug

with them in their journey of emigration had been exhausted, there was nothing left wherewith to pay for these costly luxuries; and debt, embarrassment, bankruptcy, were the inevitable results. A people clothed in skins, living on the products of the chase and the spontaneous abundance of nature, might maintain existence and a rude social organization amid the forests and on the prairies of the Great Valley; any other must have experienced striking alternations of factitious prosperity and universal distress; seeing its villages and commercial depots rise, flourish, and decay, after the manner of Jonah's gourd, and its rural population constantly hunted by debt and disaster to new and still newer locations. The Great West of to-day owes its unequaled growth and progress, its population, productiveness, and wealth, primarily, to the framers of the Federal Constitution, by which its development was rendered possible; but more immediately and palpably to the sagacity and statesmanship of Jefferson, the purchaser of Louisiana; to the genius of Fitch and Fulton, the projector and achiever, respectively, of steam-navigation; to De Witt Clinton, the early, unswerving, and successful champion of artificial inland navigation; and to Henry Clay, the eminent, eloquent, and effective champion of the diversification of our National Industry through the Protection of Home Manufactures.

The difficulties which surrounded the infancy and impeded the growth of the thirteen original or Atlantic States, were less formidable, but kindred, and not less real. Our fathers emerged from their arduous, protract

gle, rich, indeed, in hope, but poor in worldly goods. Their country had, for seven years, been traversed and wasted by contending armies, almost from end to end. Cities and villages had been laid in ashes. Habitations had been deserted and left to decay. Farms, stripped of their fences, and deserted by their owners, had for years produced only weeds. Camp fevers, with the hardships and privations of war, had destroyed many more than the sword; and all alike. had been subtracted from the most effective and valuable part of a population, always, as yet, quite inadequate. Cripples and invalids, melancholy mementoes of the yet recent struggle, abounded in every village and township. Habits of industry had been unsettled and destroyed by the anxieties and uncertainties of war. The gold and silver of anterevolutionary days had crossed the ocean in exchange for arms and munitions. The Continental paper, which for a time more than supplied (in volume) its place, had become utterly worthless. In the absence of a tariff, which the Confederate Congress lacked power to impose, our ports, immediately after peace, were glutted with foreign luxuries-gewgaws which our people were eager enough to buy, but for which they soon found themselves utterly unable to pay. They were almost exclusively an agricultural people, and their products, save only Tobacco and Indigo, were not wanted by the Old World, and found but a very restricted and inconsiderable market even in the West Indies, whose trade was closely monopolized by the nations to which they respectively belonged.

OUR COUNTRY AFTER THE REVOLUTION.

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Indian Corn and Potatoes, the two | fashionable, even in high quarters;

principal edibles for which the poor of the Old World are largely indebted to America, were consumed to a very limited extent, and not at all imported, by the people of the eastern hemisphere. The wheat-producing capacity of our soil, at first unsurpassed, was soon exhausted by the unskillful and thriftless cultivation of the Eighteenth Century. Though one-third of the labor of the country was probably devoted to the cutting of timber, the axe-helve was but a pudding-stick; while the plow was a rude structure of wood, clumsily pointed and shielded with iron. A thousand bushels of corn (maize) are now grown on our western prairies at a cost of fewer days' labor than were required for the production of a hundred in New York or New England eighty years ago. And, though the settlements of that day were nearly all within a hundred miles of tidewater, the cost of transporting bulky staples, for even that distance, over the execrable roads that then existed, was about equal to the present charge for transportation from Illinois to New York. Industry was paralyzed by the absence or uncertainty of markets. Idleness tempted to dissipation, of which the tumult and excitement of civil war had long been the school. Unquestionably, the moral condition of our people had sadly deteriorated through the course of the Revolution. Intemperance had extended its ravages; profanity and licentiousness had overspread the land; a coarse and scoffing infidelity had become

1 "That spirit of freedom, which, at the commencement of this contest, would have gladly sacrificed every thing to the attainment of its object, has long since subsided, and every selfish passion has taken its place. It is not the

and the letters of Washington1 and his compatriots bear testimony to the wide-spread prevalence of venality and corruption, even while the great issue of independence or subjugation was still undecided.

The return of peace, though it arrested the calamities, the miseries, and the desolations of war, was far from ushering in that halcyon state of universal prosperity and happiness which had been fondly and sanguinely anticipated. Thousands were suddenly deprived by it of their accustomed employment and means of subsistence, and were unable at once to replace them. Those accepted though precarious avenues to fame and fortune, in which they had found at least competence, were instantly closed, and no new ones seemed to open before them. In the absence of aught that could, with justice, be termed a currency, Trade and Business were even more depressed than Industry. Commerce and Navigation, unfettered by legislative restriction, ought to have been, or ought soon to have become, most flourishing, if the dicta of the world's accepted political economists had been sound; but the facts were deplorably at variance with their inculcations. Trade, emancipated from the vexatious trammels of the custom-house marker and gauger, fell tangled and prostrate in the toils of the usurer and the sheriff. The common people, writhing under the intolerable pressure of debt, for which no means of payment existed, were continually prompting

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public, but private interest, which influences the generality of mankind, nor can the Americans any longer boast of an exception."- Washington's Letter to Henry Laurens, July 10 (1782).

Shoddy," it seems, dates away back of 1861.

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