Four great movements are discernible in the rush of minor events which fill this period. The first and most important is the development of our national unity. The war with the Barbary States, which first made our flag respected, and the naval victories of 1812 vastly increased our confidence and solidarity as a nation. Thereafter we were not a mere confederation of states, as in the Revolution, but a united people animated by a national spirit. One reason for our earlier lack of unity was that the states were divided by vast stretches of forest, through which travel was both difficult and dangerous. Now invention set to work to break down the barriers. First came the national road, stretching from the Chesapeake to the Ohio; and as we think of the multitudes that passed over it we are reminded of Isaiah's magnificent prophecy of a highway in the wilderness, over which should come a free people, redeemed from all oppression, "with songs, and everlasting joy upon their heads." Next appeared Fulton's steamboat (1807), the first of a thousand craft that soon went up and down the American rivers, binding the north to the south and the east to the west. Then followed the Baltimore and Ohio Railway (1828), and within a few years three thousand miles of road were spread like a web of steel over the country.

The effect of this new national unity is shown clearly in Monroe's famous "era of good feeling," when the world saw the astonishing spectacle of a nation of ten millions of freemen electing their president by a practically unanimous vote. Fifteen years later, in 1835, the world was treated to another spectacle, a nation without a debt; for the country had prospered greatly, had paid all its obligations, and, to avoid the danger of an immense surplus, had distributed a part of its revenue among the states for internal improvements.

A second notable movement is the rapid growth of America in territory and population. The Louisiana Purchase and the acquisition of Florida doubled our territory, and the population increased from five to seventeen millions in the space of forty years. The vast Louisiana territory was cleared of hostile savages and settled with almost bewildering rapidity. It was a second era of colonization, and it differed in two important respects from the first. The earlier colonists were all foreigners, men who knew nothing of America, who had to win their slow way by experiment and failure. The later colonists were mostly Americans, men born and bred in the spirit of the New World, who carried their ideals of democracy, as they carried their long rifles, wherever they went. The first colonists stood in awe of the vast, mysterious forests that stood between them and the unknown West; they dreaded its hunger, its solitude, its wild beasts and savages. The second colonists loved it; they rejoiced in its freedom, its teeming game, its wide, untrodden spaces; they saw in imagination a home by every spring where they quenched their thirst, a field of wheat or corn in every fertile glade, a town and a busy mill wherever a waterfall thundered its invitation. So they passed westward, ever westward, with the keen eye and confident step of men who were lords of the wilderness. The splendid states which they gave to the nation are the best witnesses of the character and ideals of this new generation of colonizers.

A third unmistakable movement is the growth of the democratic spirit over the whole country. In the days of Washington there had been a decidedly aristocratic tendency among our political leaders,—and we may not now question their patriotism or sincerity. All governments had always been in the hands of the privileged classes, and there was a widespread feeling, even in America, that a government of common people was a mere dream or, at best, a very doubtful experiment. Long before the end of this period such doubts and fears had been swept aside as by a tempest. The labors and triumph of Jefferson; the common-school education of the masses; the French Revolution, which shook the whole aristocratic world as by an earthquake; the electric influence of the English Reform Bill and of the liberation of all slaves in the English colonies; the steadily growing conviction that the brave American experiment of popular government was destined to success,—all these undoubtedly contributed to the spread of democracy. First on the list of causes, however, we are inclined to place the mighty westward movement and the building of new states by common men on the common principles of humanity. The wilderness, the farm, the forest, the prairie,—all these were levelers of false or artificial distinctions. Here every man had his chance and his vote; every executive was first of all a natural leader, chosen for his proved ability and for his sympathy with men who do the daily work of the world. And when from the very heart of this newer America came Andrew Jackson, a rough, primitive, original kind of man, with the petty faults and the big virtues of his kind, there was no longer any doubt that this whole country was irretrievably committed to the plain principles of democracy.

The fourth historic movement is the social and industrial development of the new land. At the beginning of the nineteenth century we were a nation of farmers and small traders, having no settled currency, bartering most of our products as in the days of the patriarchs. In the few large centers, by courtesy called cities, there was a pleasant, neighborly kind of social life; but just outside the town limits stretched an immense country of field and forest. A boy could leave the center of Richmond or New York and in a few hours' walk find good hunting or fishing, and perchance see a bear or hear a wolf howl as he turned homeward in the twilight. Within half a lifetime the whole Eastern country had changed its face and its ways. Towns sprang up as if by magic; cities overflowed their borders; hundreds of mills and factories were busy as beehives; money circulated freely, and fleets of our own ships were carrying our merchandise on every sea. inventions,—the jenny of Samuel Slater (1790) and the gin of Eli Whitney (1793).") ?>

We need not go into the subject of manufactures, or attempt to express the boundless enthusiasm of the new nation when our natural wealth of coal and iron was at last exposed, and our soil began to yield its increase of cotton and grain for the nations. We note only that with the increase of wealth came the growth of cities and the mental stimulus of social intercourse; that the common-school system of the Pilgrims became a national policy; and that the forty years which saw the growth of eight hundred mills saw also the establishment of unnumbered high schools, and of more than fifty colleges, seminaries and higher institutions of learning.

With the growth of nationality and democracy, the increase of wealth and education, and the unexampled development of our industrial life, we would gladly end our summary of this period; but another factor enters, like the ghost of Banquo, to disturb the feast. The panic of 1837, brought on by speculation and by the poor financial policy of Jackson's administration, checked for a time our industrial progress. At the same time the tariff, the slave problem and the unsettled question of state rights began to separate a united country into two hostile sections. In the midst of great peace came a sudden tremor, faint yet unmistakable as the rumble of distant cannon; and again the storm cloud, this time larger than a man's hand and black as the pit, appeared on our national horizon.