Also, in 1809, the chronic quantity of misery had been terribly augmented by the Embargo,—that most ruinous invention of President Jefferson, whereby American ships were swept from the sea, with a loss to capital of twelve millions a year, and a loss to labor of thirty thousand places of employment. According to this amazing act of political folly, every market-boat sailing from New Jersey to New York—every sailboat or canoe—had to give bail to the federal government before it dared to leave the dock.
Whatever flimsy little structure of industry had been built up in thirty years of independence, was thrown prostrate by this Embargo. A hundred thousand men stood on the streets with helpless hands, begging for work or bread. The jails were jammed with debtors,—1,300 in New York alone. The newspapers were overrun by bankruptcy notices. The coffee-houses were empty. The ships lay mouldering at the docks. In those hand-to-mouth days there was no piled-up reserve of food or wealth,—no range of towering wheat-banks at every port; and the seaboard cities lay for a time as desolate as though they had been ravaged by a pestilence.
In that darkest year the hardscrabble little republic learned and remembered one of its most important lessons,—the fact that liberty and independence are not enough. Here it was, an absolutely free nation,—the only free civilized country in the world,—and yet as miserable and poor and hungry as though it were a mere province of a European empire. So, by degrees, there came a change in the American point of view,—a swing from politicalism to industrialism. The mass of the people were now surfeited with oratory and politics and war. They began to settle down to hard facts and hard work. Instead of declaiming about the rights of man, they began to build roads and weave cloth and organize stock companies. Slowly they came to realize that a second Revolution must be wrought,—a Revolution that would enable them to write a Declaration of Independence against Hunger and Hardship and Hand Labor.
Up to the year 1809 the chief topics of interest in American legislatures and grocery stores were the blockades, the Embargo, the treaties, the badness of Napoleon, the blunders of Jefferson, and the rudeness of England and France. But after that year the chief topics of interest came to be of a wholly different sort. They were such as the tariff, the currency, the building of factories and canals, the opening of public lands, the problem of slavery, and the development of the West. The hardy, victorious little nation began to talk less and work more; and so by a natural evolution of thought the era of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson came to an end, and the era of Robert Fulton and Peter Cooper and Cyrus Hall McCormick was in its dawn.
From 1810 to 1820 there was a rush to the land. Twenty million acres were sold, in most cases for two dollars an acre. Thousands of men who had been sailors turned their backs on the sea and learned to till the soil. Town laborers, too, whose wages had been fifty cents a day, tramped westward along the Indian trails and seized upon scraps of land that lay ownerless. Nine out of ten Americans began to farm with the utmost energy and perseverance,—but with what tools? With the wooden plow, the sickle, the scythe, and the flail, the same rude hand-labor tools that the nations of antiquity had tried to farm with,—the tools of failure and slavery and famine.
Such was the predicament of this republic for the first seventy-five years of its life. It could not develop beyond the struggle for food. It was chained to the bread-line. It could not feed itself. Not even nine-tenths of its people could produce enough grain to satisfy its hunger. Again and again, until 1858, wheat had to be imported by this nation of farmers. So, as we now look back over those basic years, from the summit of the twentieth century, we can see how timely an event it was that in the dark year 1809 the inventor of the Reaper was born.
[CHAPTER II]
THE McCORMICK HOME
IF we wish to solve the riddle of the Reaper,—to know why it was not invented in any of the older nations that rose to greatness and perished in so many instances for lack of bread,—we can find the key to the answer in the home and the ancestry of the McCormicks. We shall see that the family into which he was born represented in the highest degree that new species of farmer,—self-reliant, studious, enterprising, and inventive,—which was developed in the pioneer period of American history.