Year: 1862

No part of the late. United States feels
the war more greatly than the great North
west. 1t 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 riv-
ers, its farmers could deliver their grain to
New Orleans for expectation at very small
cost, and the immense quantity sent thither
was indicated by the fact that next to New
York, itself exporting more grain than any
thing else, New Orleans was the largest ex-
porting city in the Union. The cheap
transportation they enjoyed for their grain
enabled them to pocket very fair net prices
from the sale of it; and the same great ave-
nues of navigation brought merchandise in
return to them very nearly at manufacture
ers prices Thus the farmers of the North
west enjoyed the. two essential advantages
for a profitable agriculture, that of re-
eeiving nearly last prices for their grain,
and of obtaining their merchandise at near
ly first prices. 1t is true that they enjoyed
several lines of railway fer reaching the
Eastern markets, but these, by multiplying
the means of transportation, served only to
cheaper it, while totally inadequate of them
selves to accommodate the mighty bulk of
Western trade.


They sold, moreover, great deal of grain
in the form of -four or meat, to the South
ern 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 vas similar as to sugar. Of course the
tendency of this circumstance was to throw
the whole force of the planter upon the pro-
ftable staples, and to produce a demand
throughout the cotton and sugar States for
Northwestern farm products. It is said
that seventy-fVe millions of pounds of ba-
con alone were thus supplied from this quar-
ter 10 the South, and of course we are to in
fer that the grain furnished was in commen-
surate amount. The war has put stop to
this vast demand from the South, and cut
off the Northwest from its largest and most
profitable market. Tt can only export pro-
duce now by way of the lakes and the rail-
roads through New York, over routes dou-
bly, as expensive as the natural channels of
great rivers, the lake routes closed in win
ter, and the railways inadequate to the
business, and charging their own prices.


Tue South, instead of starving, is simply
raising less cotton and sugar, and growing
more corn, hogs and cattle 1t was the
silliest and shallowest experiment ever en-
barked upon by a sensible people-that of
starving
ing 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 signing
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 teens with all ar
ticles of native production there is scarcity
in nothing except iu things that were i'm
ported, among these the only necessary of life
is salt. There is no article which the Yam
KEGS have in surplus that we ourselves can
not also produce in abundance, and, so far
from the war teaching as 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 produc-
ed 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 as 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 the
producers and sthe other merely manufac-
lures and carriers, the latter are sure to feel
the effect most severely.