In the second place, these societies for the encouragement of domestic manufactures, "infant manufactures," as they were called, offered prizes for the best piece of homemade linen, homemade cotton cloth, or woolen cloth.
In the third place, they started "exchanges," or shops, in the cities and large towns, to which anybody who could knit mittens or socks, or make boots and shoes or straw bonnets, or spin flax or wool, or make anything else that the people needed, could send them to be sold.
In the fourth place, men who had money came forward and formed companies to erect mills and factories for the manufacture of all sorts of things. If you were to see the acts passed by the legislatures of the states between 1808 and 1812, you would find that very many of them were charters for iron works, paper mills, thread works, factories for making cotton and woolen cloth, oilcloth, boots, shoes, rope.
In the fifth place, the legislatures of the states passed resolutions asking their members to wear clothes made of material produced in the United States,[1] offered bounties for the best wool, and exempted the factories from taxation and the mill hands from militia and jury duty.
[Footnote 1: McMaster's History of the People of the United States,
Vol. III., pp. 496-509.]
Thus encouraged, manufactures sprang up in the North, and became so numerous that in 1810, when the census of population was taken, Congress ordered that statistics of manufactures should be collected at the same time. It was then found that the value of the goods manufactured in the United States in 1810 was $173,000,000.
%283. Internal Improvements: Roads; Canals; Steamboats.%—But there was yet another great change for the better which took place between 1790 and 1815. We have seen how during this quarter of a century our country grew in area, how the people increased in number, how new states and territories were made, how agriculture and commerce prospered, and how manufactures arose. It is now time to see how the people improved the means of interstate commerce and communication.
You will remember that in 1790 there were no bridges over the great rivers of the country, that the roads were very bad, that all journeys were made on horseback or in stagecoaches or in boats, and that it was not then possible to go as far in ten hours as we can now go in one. You will remember, also, that the people were moving westward in great numbers.
As the people thus year by year went further and further westward, a demand arose for good roads to connect them with the East. The merchants on the seaboard wanted to send them hardware, clothing, household goods, farming implements, and bring back to the seaports the potash, lumber, flour, skins, and grain with which the settlers paid for these things. If they were too costly, frontiersmen could not buy them. If the roads were bad, the difficulty of getting merchandise to the frontier would make them too costly. People living in the towns and cities along the seaboard were no longer content with the old-fashioned slow way of travel. They wanted to get their letters more often, make their journeys and have their freight carried more quickly.[1]
[Footnote 1: McMaster's History of the People of the United States,
Vol. III., pp. 462-465.]