The list of labor-saving machinery in agriculture is by no means exhausted.There are clover hullers, bean and pea threshers, ensilage cutters, manure spreaders, and dozens of others.On the dairy farm the cream separator both increases the quantity and improves the quality of the butter and saves time.Power also drives the churns.On many farms cows are milked and sheep are sheared by machines and eggs are hatched without hens.
There are, of course, thousands of farms in the country where machinery cannot be used to advantage and where the work is still done entirely or in part in the old ways.
Historians once were fond of marking off the story of the earth and of men upon the earth into distinct periods fixed by definite dates.One who attempts to look beneath the surface cannot accept this easy method of treatment.Beneath the surface new tendencies develop long before they demand recognition; an institution may be decaying long before its weakness is apparent.The American Revolution began not with the Stamp Act but at least a century earlier, as soon as the settlers realized that there were three thousand miles of sea between England and the rude country in which they found themselves; the Civil War began, if not in early Virginia, with the "Dutch Man of Warre that sold us twenty Negars," at least with Eli Whitney and his cotton gin.
Nevertheless, certain dates or short periods seem to be flowering times.Apparently all at once a flood of invention, a change of methods, a difference in organization, or a new psychology manifests itself.And the decade of the Civil War does serve as a landmark to mark the passing of one period in American life and the beginning of another; especially in agriculture; and as agriculture is the basic industry of the country it follows that with its mutations the whole superstructure is also changed.
The United States which fought the Civil War was vastly different from the United States which fronted the world at the close of the Revolution.The scant four million people of 1790 had grown to thirty-one and a half million.This growth had come chiefly by natural increase, but also by immigration, conquest, and annexation.Settlement had reached the Pacific Ocean, though there were great stretches of almost uninhabited territory between the settlements on the Pacific and those just beyond the Mississippi.
The cotton gin had turned the whole South toward the cultivation of cotton, though some States were better fitted for mixed farming, and their devotion to cotton meant loss in the end as subsequent events have proved.The South was not manufacturing any considerable proportion of the cotton it grew, but the textile industry was flourishing in New England.A whole series of machines similar to those used in Great Britain, but not identical, had been invented in America.American mills paid higher wages than British and in quantity production were far ahead of.the British mills, in proportion to hands employed, which meant being ahead of the rest of the world.
Wages in America, measured by the world standard, were high, though as expressed in money, they seem low now.They were conditioned by the supply of free land, or land that was practically free.The wages paid were necessarily high enough to attract laborers from the soil which they might easily own if they chose.There was no fixed laboring class.The boy or girl in a textile mill often worked only a few years to save money, buy a farm, or to enter some business or profession.
The steamboat now, wherever there was navigable water, and the railroad, for a large part of the way, offered transportation to the boundless West.Steamboats traversed all the larger rivers and the lakes.The railroad was growing rapidly.Its lines had extended to more than thirty thousand miles.Construction went on during the war, and the transcontinental railway was in sight.
The locomotive had approached standardization, and the American railway car was in form similar to that of the present day, though not so large, so comfortable, or so strong.The Pullman car, from which has developed the chair car, the dining car, and the whole list of special cars, was in process of development, and the automatic air brake of George Westinghouse was soon to follow.
Thus far had the nation progressed in invention and industry along the lines of peaceful development.But with the Civil War came a sudden and tremendous advance.No result of the Civil War, political or social, has more profoundly affected American life than the application to the farm, as a war necessity, of machinery on a great scale.So long as labor was plentiful and cheap, only a comparatively few farmers could be interested in expensive machinery, but when the war called the young men away the worried farmers gladly turned to the new machines and found that they were able not only to feed the Union, but also to export immense quantities of wheat to Europe, even during the war.Suddenly the West leaped into great prosperity.And long centuries of economic and social development were spanned within a few decades.
