Globalization of the United States, 1789-1861

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Reynolds, Jeremiah N. Address, on the Subject of a Surveying and Exploring Expedition to the Pacific Ocean and South Seas.... New York: Harper and Brothers. 1836.

Jeremiah N. Reynolds. Address, on the Subject of a Surveying and Exploring Expedition to the Pacific Ocean and South Seas.... New York: Harper and Brothers, 1836. Title page.

Just as colonial Americans had “tamed the howling wilderness,” so it was now to be the mission of national Americans to explore “unknown oceans,” argued Reynolds.

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But no sooner had peace been proclaimed, than our commerce again flourished, and chartered every gale. The South Atlantic and Pacific oceans, where our enterprise had been checked, became our highways, and every estuary and river was again the resort of our hardy navigators. It is only with this new Saturnian reign that my dawn of recollection commences, and then only after some years of this prosperous epoch had elapsed. Not only had new channels of trade been opened by the persevering industry of our merchants, until the extreme east had been laid under contribution, but our fisheries had again extended from our coasts to the shores of Brazil, thence running the longitude to Africa, and around each cape throughout the great Pacific and Indian oceans, to the Maldives and the Isles of Japan. New staple productions of agriculture had likewise sprung up in the interval; and cotton, which had been introduced into this country several years subsequent to the Revolutionary War, as a mere botanical experiment, now became the most important article of commerce, throwing into a secondary rank bread-stuffs, tobacco, rice, and other articles formerly first in the commercial scale. The milder climes of the south had used cotton stuffs almost exclusively as wearing apparel; but not so the northern, till the improvements in machinery had so facilitated their fabrication that millions are now clothed in manufactures of this article. The sugar of the south, with the hemp and flax of the west, had by this time come into general use, and the upper region supplied bagging for the lower country. The manufacturers, after no small opposition from rival interests, began to influence national economy; and having succeeded in establishing themselves, were of no doubtful success. The march of internal improvements had now commenced, with cautious and prudential pleadings on the one hand, and enthusiastic, uncalculating ardour on the other, and in its progress soon opened new markets for our agricultural and manufactured wealth. By these means, where the necessaries of life only were to be obtained, and those of the simplest kind, articles were required which but a short time before were deemed luxuries.

As the interior was travelling down, the seaboard was travelling up[.]

Everything was quickened by the spirit of progressive advancement, and the whole country felt the beneficial effects to the remotest village of our wide spread confederacy. We cannot, even at the risk of appearing fanciful, refrain from quoting an appropriate stanza from the productions of a native poet, which, though poetry, is not fiction, and though warmly coloured by a vivid imagination, is a faithful detail of facts. Speaking of the union of the lakes with the ocean at the opening of the Erie canal:

“The sire of ocean takes
A sylvan maiden to his arms,
The goddess of the crystal lakes,
In all her native charms.
She comes attended by a sparkling train,
The naiads of the west her nuptials grace,
She meets the sceptred Father of the main,
And in his heaving bosom hides her virgin face.”

The capabilities of every spot were considered and measured by their productive results. No mind or body was idle; every one laboured to increase his individual means, and thus directly added to the resources of the nation. The bosom of the earth poured forth its abundance in proportion to the extent of commerce, and the demands of the manufacturing interest. The fables of the ancients became truths to us. They represented the earth to be filled with hidden treasures, which it was the high prerogative of genius and untiring perseverance only to obtain. We realize this fiction in the value which labour, guided by intelligence, imparts at the present day to the vilest substances, and most unpromising materials. The iron consumed every year, exceeds tenfold in value the precious metals produced by all the mines in the world. The ancients considered that a favoured land, where Ceres lived in harmony with Pluto; meaning, doubtless, that there exists an intimate connection between all the pursuits of life, when efficiently followed out; and where each member of a community labours in behalf of himself, in the benefit conferred on his neighbour.

It has been a part of the creed of some political economists, both here and in Europe, that it would be best for us as a nation, to remain, for an indefinite time to come, agriculturists, and suffer other nations to come and take the productions of our soil in exchange for their own manufactures. But this dogma, though enunciated so emphatically from the high places of science in Europe, and echoed by some otherwise sound politicians and true patriots among us, has been gradually losing ground, and has for supporters at the present day, few besides those who are so evidently under the influence of interested motives, that their arguments must appear vitiated to every impartial mind: and furthermore, if ever so plausibly maintained, they would fall to the ground from the fact that the genius of the people has never, from the commencement of the controversy, been in accordance with them. The nation, almost without any regular process of reasoning, but guided by an instinctive impulse, came to the conclusion that its labour, divided among the three great interests, was infinitely more productive than if confined to one alone; and nothing could prevent it from furnishing its own merchants, not only for the supply of domestic, but also of every foreign commodity. Feeling an innate consciousness that no labour was too great, nor enterprise too arduous, they set forth upon untried voyages, and cut with daring keels unknown oceans, with the same hardihood that impelled them to pierce unexplored forests, and tame the howling wilderness.