young men who controlled it fixed their hands upon the commercial future of the United States. The newest of industries, the trade in petroleum and its oils, reached fifteen millions in Pittsburg alone in 1864.

The trunk-line railways with their spurs and branches adjusted themselves early in the war to the new direction of business currents. They then began to carry the new inhabitants into the cities, the new manufactures to their markets, and to press upon iron, coal, and timber for their own supplies. Men of business laid the foundations of huge fortunes in supplying the new and growing demands. The stock company, with negotiable shares and bonds, made it possible for the small investor to share in the larger commercial profits and losses.

The growth and elaboration of companies and commerce were projected upon a legal system that was most accustomed to small enterprises and local trade. Not only had the corporations to establish customs and precedents among themselves, but courts, legislatures, and city councils had to face the need for an amplification of American law. The speed with which the new life swept upon the country, the inexperience of both business men and jurists, the public ignorance of the extent to which the revolution was to go, and the cross-purposes inevitable when States tried to regulate the affairs of corporations larger than themselves, make it unnecessary to search further for the key to the confusing half-century that followed the Civil War.

The rapid changes in manufacturing, transportation, urban life, and business law that came with the prosperity of the early sixties gave to these years an appearance of materialism that has misled many observers. None of the developments received full contemporary notice, for war filled the front pages of the newspapers. The men who directed them were not under scrutiny, and could hardly fail to bring into business and speculation that main canon of war time that the end is everything and that it justifies the means. But though war was not the sole American occupation between 1861 and 1865, and though a new industrial revolution was begun, material things often gave way in the American mind to altruistic concepts and the service of the ideal.

Congress endowed the agricultural colleges in the early years of the war, and the state universities, though thinned by the enlistment of their boys, established themselves. The creation of new universities, the endowment of older foundations, and the beginning of an education that should fit not only for law, medicine, and theology, but for business, agriculture, engineering, and teaching, all bear testimony to the real interests of American democracy. The ideal was as yet far removed from the fact, and the intellectual leaders of the United States were yet to pass through a period of black pessimism, but the people were still firm in their faith that education is the mainstay of popular government, and gave their full devotion to both.

The four years of the Civil War carried the United States over a period of social and economic transition and left it well started on the new course. They enlarged and expanded the activities of government, hastening that day when there should exist a public conviction that government is a matter of technical expertness and must be run in a scientific manner for the common good. They raised the problems of taxation and currency to a new importance, and impressed their significance upon the men who directed the industries of the country. In their prosperity they made it possible to save the Union; and at their close a Union party, uncertain of its strength and its personnel, faced the problems of a united country which included an industrial North, a desolated South, and a vanishing frontier.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

CHAPTER II

THE WEST AND THE GREENBACKS

The activity of the North and the East between 1861 and 1865 was imitated and magnified among the youthful communities that made up the western border and ranged in age from a few weeks to thirty years. These had been mostly agricultural in 1857. Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Kansas had been the frontier before the Civil War. In place of these, now grown to be populous and more or less sedate, a new group appeared farther west, within what had been believed to be the "American Desert." By 1868 Congress completed the subdivision of the last lands between the Missouri River and the Pacific, since which date only one new political division has appeared in the United States.

The last frontier, that developed after 1857, was novel as well as new. It was made up of mining camps. Everywhere in the Rocky Mountains prospectors staked out claims and introduced their free-and-easy life. Before 1857 the group of Mormons around the Great Salt Lake was the only considerable settlement between eastern Kansas and California. Now came in quick succession the rush to Pike's Peak and Colorado Territory (1861), the rush from California to the Carson Valley and Nevada Territory (1861), and the creation of the agricultural territory of Dakota (1861) for the up-river Missouri country, where in a few more years were revealed the riches of the Black Hills. In 1863 the mines of the lower Colorado River gave excuse for Arizona Territory. Those of the northern Continental Divide were grouped in Idaho in the same year, and divided in 1864 when Montana was created. Wyoming, the last of the subdivisions, was the product of mines and railroads in 1868. Oklahoma was not named for twenty years more, but had existed in its final shape since the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Bill in 1854.

The legitimate influence of these mining-camps upon the United States was great. It was no new thing for Congress to solve its national problems on the initiative of the West. Since the passage of the Ordinance of 1787 this had been a frequent occurrence, and the history of the public lands had always been directed by Western demands. In 1862 the agricultural West, whose capacity to cultivate land had been magnified by the new reaper of McCormick, had obtained its Homestead Act, by which land titles were conveyed to the farmer who cleared the land and used it. Thomas H. Benton had fought for this through a