A steamboat, coming from
New Orleans, brings to the remotest villages of our streams, and
the very doors of the cabins, a little Paris, a section of
Broadway, or a slice of Philadelphia, to ferment in the minds of
our young people, the innate propensity for fashions and
finery....
Cincinnati will soon be the centre of the "celestial empire," as
the Chinese say; and instead of encountering the storms, the
seasickness, and dangers of a passage from the Gulf of Mexico
to the Atlantic, whenever the Erie Canal shall be completed, the
opulent southern planters will take their families, their dogs
and parrots, through a world of forests, from New Orleans to
New York, giving us a call by the way. When they are more
acquainted with us, their voyage will often terminate here."*
* Vol. I., p. 25 (May, 1827).
The new West was frankly materialistic. Yet its interests were by
no means restricted to steamboats, turnpikes, crops, exports, and
moneymaking. It concerned itself much with religion. One of the
most familiar figures on trail and highway was the circuit-rider,
with his Bible and saddlebags; and no community was so remote, or
so hardened, as not to be raised occasionally to a frenzy of
religious zeal by the crude but terrifying eloquence of the
revivalist.
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