The comparative wealth of the two sections thus becomes a matter of the highest moment. With the exception of the Banks of New Orleans, all the Banks of the Gulf States, of North Carolina, and of Virginia, and many of those of Tennessee and Kentucky, are insolvent, have suspended specie payments, and issue notes which are uncurrent except at an enormous discount. Notes of Western Banks, secured by deposits of Slave State stocks are greatly depreciated. But the currency of Pennsylvania, New York, and New England is at par. If, therefore, money be the sinew of war, as historians assure us, a very brief campaign must settle the question in favor of the North.
Mechanical appliances are as essential in war as men and money.
In these the pre-eminence of the North is unquestionable. The Southern States are a purely agricultural region. Mechanical arts can not thrive side by side with slavery. There is a foundery at Richmond, Virginia, at which arms and munitions of war are manufactured, and there are one or two other small shops in other Southern States where Northern mechanics make a few guns. But, with sparse exceptions, every pistol, rifle, musket, cannon, bayonet, sword, and bowie-knife, and every pound of powder, every box of caps, every cartridge, every shell, every fuse, and every bullet or ball that is used by the Southern troops was made at the North, and can not be replaced at the South.