But the time was past when the power of a single State could withdraw it from the Union. The President issued a proclamation, warning the people of South Carolina against any attempt to carry out the ordinance of nullification ; he ordered a naval force to take possession of Charleston Harbour to collect the duties under the act; he called upon Congress for additional executive powers, and Congress passed what nullifiers called the "bloody bill," putting the land and naval forces at the disposal of the president; and he is said to have announced, privately and profanely, his intention of making Calhoun the first victim of any open conflict. Affairs looked so threatening that an unofficial meeting of "leading nulli fiers" agreed to suspend the operation of the ordinance until Con gress should adjourn; whence it derived the right to suspend has never been stated.
The President had already asked Congress to reduce the duties; and many Democratic members of Congress, who had yielded to the popular clamour for protection, were very glad to use "the crisis" as an excuse for now voting against it. A compromise tariff act, scaling down all duties over 20% by one tenth of the excess every two years until 1842, when the remaining excess over 20% should be dropped, was introduced by Clay and became law. Calhoun and his followers claimed this as all that the nullification ordinance had aimed at; and the ordinance was for mally repealed. But nullification had received its death-blow, even those southern leaders who maintained the right of secession refused to recognize the right of a State to remain in the Union while nullifying its laws.
All the internal conditions of the United States were completely altered by the introduction of railways. For 20 years past the Americans had been pushing in every direction which offered a hope of the means of reconciling vast territory with enormous population. Stephenson's invention of the loco motive came just in time, and Jackson's two terms of office marked the outburst of modern American life. The miles of rail way were 23 in 1830, 1,098 in 1835, some 2,800 in 1840, and there after they about doubled every five years until 186o.
A railway map of 1840 shows a fragmentary system, designed mainly to fill the gaps left by the means of communication in use in 1830. One or two short lines run back into the country from Savannah and Charleston; another runs north along the coast from Wilmington to Baltimore; several lines connect New York with Washington and other points; and short lines elsewhere mark the openings which needed to be filled at once—a number in New England and the Middle States, three in Ohio and Michigan, and three in Louisiana. Year after year new inventions came in to in crease and aid this development. The anthracite coal of the Mid dle States was now successfully applied to railways (1836), and to the manufacture of iron (1837). Steam navigation across the At
lantic was established in 1838. The telegraph came next, S. F. B. Morse's line being erected in 1844. No similar period in American history of the 19th century is so extraordinary for material devel opment as the
1830-40. At its beginning the country was an overgrown type of colonial life ; at its end American life had been shifted to entirely new lines, which it has since followed.
The steamboat had aided western de velopment, but the railway aided it far more. The steamboat in fluenced the railway, and the railway gave the steamboat new powers. Vacant places in the States east of the Mississippi were filling up; the long lines of emigrant wagons gave way to the new and better methods of transport. Chicago was but a frontier fort in 1832; within a half-dozen years it was a flourishing town, with eight steamers connecting it with Buffalo, with dawning ideas of its future development of railway connections. Two new States, Arkansas and Michigan, were admitted (1836 and 1837). The population of Ohio grew from 900,00o to 1,500,000, that of Michi gan from 32,000 to 212,000, and that of the country from 13,000, 000 to 17,000,000, between 1830 and 1840.
With the change of material surroundings and possibilities came a steady amelioration of social conditions and a development of social ideals. Such features of the past as imprisonment for debt and the cruel indifference of old methods of dealing with crime began to disappear; the time was past when a State could use an abandoned copper mine as its State prison, as Connecticut had formerly done. The domestic use of gas and an thracite coal, the introduction of expensive aqueducts for pure water, and the changing life of the people forced changes in the interior and exterior of American dwellings. Wood was still the common building material; imitations of Greek architecture still retained their vogue; but the interiors were models of comfort in comparison with the houses even of 181o. In the "new" regions this was not yet the case, and here social restraints were still so few that society seemed to be reduced almost to its primitive ele ments. Western steamers reeked with gambling, swindling, duel ling and every variety of vice. Public law was almost suspended in some regions; and organized associations of counterfeiters and horse-thieves terrorized whole sections of the country. But this state of affairs was altogether temporary, as well as limited in its area ; the older and more densely settled States had been well pre pared for the change and had never lost command of the social forces, and the process of settling down went on, even in the newer States, with far more rapidity than could have been expected.