The sharp contrast between 1789 and 1914 indicates clearly the importance of the subject which will be treated in the following chapters of the book, the history of the commerce of the United States. The student is asked to give his attention first to a detailed study of conditions existing about the year 1789. A survey of conditions at that date will furnish a summary of the development of the colonial period, and a basis for appreciating the national progress of more recent times.
561. Chief exports in 1790.—Following the plan pursued in earlier chapters we shall attend first to the exports of the country, composed of those wares which could be produced to such advantage that the people could sell a surplus of them abroad, and so secure the imports of which they stood in need. The following table gives the chief items for the first year of our national existence:
| Exports, 1790, in Millions of Dollars | ||
|---|---|---|
| Northern products.— | Flour | 4.5 |
| Wheat | 1.3 | |
| Lumber | 1.2 | |
| Corn | 1.0 | |
| Fish | .9 | |
| Potash | .8 | |
| Southern products.— | Tobacco | 4.3 |
| Rice | 1.7 | |
| Indigo | .5 | |
| Total (including decimals omitted) | 16.6 | |
| Total exports, including items omitted | 20.2 | |
One characteristic of this table is noteworthy because it has marked the exports of the country from this early time to the present. The exports of the United States have always consisted not of a great many articles sold in small quantities, but of a few great staples sold in large quantities. Nine items, it will be observed, comprised over three fourths of the total value, and the two items, breadstuffs and tobacco, made up over half.
562. Predominance of agriculture; experiments with crops.—The table shows clearly that the strength of the United States at this time lay in what the economists call extractive industries, devoted to the production of raw materials. Some of the wares, it is true, had undergone the first stages of manufacture (flour, lumber, potash, indigo), but their chief value consisted still in the original material. In contrast with present conditions it was estimated at this time that nine tenths of the people were engaged in agricultural pursuits, and that even in New England, where industrial pursuits were most diversified, only one eighth were employed in manufactures, trade, or other occupations besides agriculture. Of twenty-one presidents of the United States (to 1880) fifteen were farmers or the sons of farmers.
The agricultural products of the table above represent the results of nearly two centuries of experiment in the search for profitable crops. It is not easy to determine what cultures will pay under the conditions of a new country. Early settlers had extravagant hopes of supplying the European market with silk, wine, olive oil, drugs, dyes, etc., and learned only by bitter experience that the conditions of nature and man destined America to a commercial career different from that of southern Europe or Asia. Most of the important crops and grasses were introduced to this country from other continents, Indian corn being, of course, the notable exception; and so thoroughly had the process of experiment been carried out that in the hundred years following the Revolution only one species of cultivated plant (sorghum) was introduced, of sufficient importance to be enumerated in the census.
563. Breadstuffs.—The crop of greatest importance to the people of the American colonies was, without question, maize or Indian corn. This crop, of native origin, flourished in all parts of the colonies, and yielded, under the conditions of a primitive agriculture, far richer returns than could be secured from any of the European grains. To the domestic food supply it was indispensable. For export purposes, however, it was less desirable, and though moderate quantities were shipped abroad every year, the demand of foreign markets, as appears in the table, was chiefly for wheat and wheat flour. Wheat was at this time a costly luxury in New England, but it could be grown to advantage in the middle colonies and in Virginia; and in the particular period which we are studying it assumed a leading position among the exports. European countries had formerly been unwilling to receive a product which competed with their own agriculture, but the failure of crops in Europe, the outbreak of the French Revolution (1789), and the long wars following, caused a great increase in the demand for our food products, and gave rich returns to the wheat farmers who had been suffering from the lack of a market.
564. Other products of northern agriculture.—Aside from the cereals the agricultural exports of the middle and northern colonies were unimportant. Many attempts had been made to grow flax and hemp, to sell in competition with the produce of Russia and other Baltic countries. The seed of the flax was exported, but the preparation of the fiber was too troublesome to pay the producer, and though coarse fabrics for home wear were made of it and it was used for sewing shoes until the invention of the wooden shoe peg, the export of flax and hemp fiber remained insignificant.
The second place among exports of northern agriculture, after breadstuffs, was taken by stock and meat products. The abundance of pasture land encouraged farmers to raise a surplus of live stock for sale, though as yet they paid but little attention to breeding or to the proper care and fattening of the animals. Horses were shipped to Canada and to the West Indies, while salt beef and salt pork had a ready sale for provisioning ships, and for export to the West Indies. The export of live animals and provisions amounted, however, to less than one million dollars.
565. Southern staples; tobacco.—Many of the export products above mentioned could be raised in the southern colonies, and all of them were, in fact, produced there to some extent. The people of the South, however, were fortunate in finding conditions suited to the production of some special crops, which, unlike those of the North, could not be produced to advantage in Europe, and which therefore were more readily taken in trade. The Southerners followed their interests, therefore, by raising of foodstuffs only what they absolutely needed, and by applying themselves to their special staples. Of these tobacco was by far the most important throughout the colonial period. It was asserted at one time that a man could provide grain for five men and clothes for two, by the sale of the tobacco which he could grow unassisted. Until the rise of the cotton culture tobacco was king among the southern staples, and had no rival export at the North of equal importance; through the eighteenth century it formed about half of the total exports of the colonies to England, and only just before the close of the century did it yield the leading place to wheat. Disadvantages of a one-crop system, entailing sharp fluctuations in price and periods of dearth, the rapid exhaustion of the soil under tobacco, and the encouragement of negro slavery,—all these evils could not turn the planters of Maryland and Virginia from a crop which, on the whole, yielded rich returns.