James Flint, a Scot, usually is identified as an economist; nothing is known of his personal life. He came to the United States in the autumn of 1819 and, unlike most such travelers, wasted little space in his book on the Atlantic voyage, nor for that matter on his passage through New York and Philadelphia to Pittsburgh. At Pittsburgh he began his detailed descriptions and analyses of American economic conditions and prospects.

As Flint traveled down the Ohio River, he continued collecting information, especially that pertaining to the states of Ohio and Kentucky. Then, for eighteen months, he lived across the river from Louisville, in Jeffersonville, Indiana, and from that base made the most comprehensive economic survey up to his time of the western portion of the Ohio Valley.

In prefatory remarks to Flint's Letters from America, reprinted as vol. 9 in his collection of Early Western Travels, Reuben Gold Thwaites declared that Flint "was of a good family, had been carefully educated . . . and had come to the United States for research material"-all of which may be true, though Thwaites did not tell whether he derived these conclusions from internal implications of the book or from external biographical sources known only to him. No matter; Flint was indeed well educated and, even if the conclusions of his research found publication in no other place than his , they did anticipate some of those of Tocqueville and Bryce, as Thwaites observed.

Flint was aware of the new economic, social, and political issues raised by the acquisition of the Louisiana Territory and of the continuing ones resulting from the existence of slavery and the attempt by some to extend it into the new western states. His analyses were equally perceptive about the financial health of the West. He explained that because of the balance of payments problem, American cotton, which could be marketed for only a few cents a pound, when it returned from the mills in Manchester in the form of a garment now cost the farmer $35 for a coat. And he showed how the West was even worse off for having chartered banks to issue paper money backed up by nothing of tangible value, with the result that their bank notes were discounted up to 50% even in neighboring states.

The most surprising thing about James Flint is that after the publication of this one book he was never heard from again.

&mdashCharles Boewe

Source: Early Western Travels, 1748-1846, 32 vols. Edited by Reuben Gold Thwaites. Cleveland, Ohio: Arthur H. Clark Co., 1904-07.