While these resources lasted, while the
blockade was ineffective, while the Confederacy could produce men to
replace all who fell, while a paper currency and scrip could be floated,
and while the nation hesitated to put forth its strength, the South was
able to maintain a strong front, although driven successively from
Maryland, Missouri, Kentucky, Western Virginia, and Tennessee, and thus
deprived of nearly half the population and resources on which it
originally relied.
The enlarged canal of New York, and the great railways which furnish
direct routes from the West to the Atlantic, have of late years diverted
from the Father of Waters a very large proportion of the exports of the
West, but the steamers and flat-boats which floated down the Mississippi
literally fed the Cotton States. Laden with corn, flour, and lard, with
ploughs, glass, and nails, with horses and mules, and live stock of
every description, they distributed their cargoes from Memphis to New
Orleans, and came back freighted with sugar and cotton.
At length this great commerce has been interrupted, and the South, cut
off from this almost indispensable supply of the necessaries of life, is
now struggling for existence, and diverts its negroes from the
remunerative culture of sugar and cotton to the cultivation of grain and
corn.
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