Keeping in mind the sectional conditions of 1830 as set forth in the third chapter of this volume, we shall come to a better understanding of the Civil War if the prosperity of the different parts of the Union be closely analyzed. The people of the United States were poor indeed in 1830 as compared with 1850-60. Between 1815 and 1846 the receipts of the Federal Treasury fluctuated violently; but from that date to 1860, except for two years of panic, the Federal Treasury was always full and there was generally an annual surplus of from $5,000,000 to $10,000,000. During the Jacksonian era the prices of staple commodities fluctuated as much as fifty per cent in single years. Cotton was twenty cents a pound during all of the twenties; it was as low as seven cents when nullification was the critical issue; but from 1850 to 1860 cotton sold at ten or twelve cents. Corn was in most places twenty-five cents a bushel during Jackson's and Van Buren's Administrations; between 1850 and 1860 it rose in price steadily and was almost everywhere readily marketable at fifty cents a bushel. In the era just preceding the war prices were steadily rising, and the demand for American produce, cotton, corn, tobacco, wheat, and sugar, was always greater than the supply. This prosperity was unequally distributed, as always. The East had developed her manufactures beyond all expectation, and the great mill belt stretched from southeastern Maine to New York City, its center of gravity, thence to Philadelphia and Baltimore, and from these cities westward to Pittsburg. Another belt ancillary to this began in western Massachusetts and extended along the Erie Canal to Buffalo, thence to Cleveland, Detroit, and Chicago. In these areas, or in the industrial belt as it may be termed, there lived about 4,000,000 mill operatives, whose annual output of wool, iron, and cotton manufactures alone was worth in 1860 $330,393,000 as compared to the $58,000,000 of 1830. Perhaps the meaning of these figures may become clearer if we note that the total investments in these industries was considerably less than the yearly product. Nor was the East less prosperous in other lines. Her tonnage had increased from a little more than 500,000 in 1830 to nearly 5,000,000 in 1860. The freight and passenger ships, built of iron, and encouraged by liberal subsidies from the Federal Government, employed 12,000 sailors and paid their owners $70,000,000 a year. They carried the manufactures of the East to the Southern plantations, to South America, and to the Far East. This great fleet of commercial vessels was owned almost exclusively in Massachusetts, New York, and Pennsylvania, and its owners were at the end of the decade about to wrest from Great Britain her monopoly of the carrying trade of the world. [Illustration: The Industrial Belt of 1860]