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Such manufacturing and commercial enterprises as existed had been
laboriously built up by long years of honest working. The free lands
of the government, by giving laborers an alternative, kept up wages,
forcing employers to bid against each other for labor; and monopoly
thus being checked, individual equality was possible.
The mineral resources of Pennsylvania and Ohio were all but
unsuspected, and the calm of a people devoted to the peaceful
pursuits of agriculture rested over the country.
Railroads were few and inefficient: telegraph lines but in their
infancy. Intercourse among the people, outside of a narrow fringe on
the Atlantic coast, was cumbersome, and impeded by many obstacles.
Primitive conditions everywhere prevailed, and communities brooded
in silence, growing stragglingly in sluggish indifference, content
with coarse food and coarser living.
Such, in general, were the conditions up to 1861. Then came the
storm of shot and shell, the rain of blood, the elemental rage of
passion called the Civil War. There was a total upset of business.


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