EARLY ENTERPRISE OF THE UNITED STATES MERCHANT MARINE
WHEN the War of the Revolution came to an end, the territory of the United States extended along the Atlantic coast from Maine to Georgia, and westward over the Appalachian Mountains as far as the Mississippi River. The population, including slaves, numbered no more than 3,500,000. The settlements have usually been considered in groups--those of New England, of the Middle states, of the Southern states, and, last of all, that most interesting group west of the mountains. Virginia, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania were the most populous states. Philadelphia, the largest city, boasted a population of 42,520 in the first census year (1790). New York was second, Boston third, Charleston fourth, and Baltimore fifth. Newport and Portsmouth, though small, were yet ports of importance, and so, too, was Salem.
The interests of the different groups of population of the country were then supposed to be in some ways antagonistic. The Southern states produced tobacco, rice, and indigo for export, and had relatively few ships; wanting low freight rates, they expressed, at times later, the fear of combinations between owners of ships living elsewhere, by which rates would be raised. The seeming antagonisms were magnified by the lack of means of intercourse between them. While roads wide enough for vehicles had been cut from town to town near the coast as far south as Virginia, and a few had been opened into the interior along the routes of armies during the war, the most comfortable way of travelling was by water, and ships were the only means for transporting freight, save only as some goods were carried on mules and wagons into the interior--on one route as far as Pittsburg.
From a print in the possession of the Lenox Library]
On the whole, a bird's-eye view of the United States showed a wilderness, 820,680 square miles in extent, that had a line of settlements along the coast. The political condition of the country was not unlike its physical--chaotic. The thirteen colonies, having thrown off allegiance to the mother-country, had essayed the formation of a ship of state, but had created only a raft of thirteen logs, if such a simile may be permitted, which chafed each other with growing friction. Congress was nominally the executive, the legislative, and the judicial head of a nation, but the money it issued ceased to circulate, and the bonds, representing borrowed coin and war material, were little better. As a body, the Congress consisted of a score or so of respectable gentlemen who met in a hall hired for the purpose, where they expressed their opinions on matters of international as well as local concern, and then begged the sovereign states to take action. They had no power _to do_ anything--not even to raise the money with which to pay the rent of the hall in which they met.