South of the United States

“ It is not so diversified, but the vast areas of cotton on the one hand and of sugar and corn and rice on the other, and the forests, present well-marked features and give the South a handsome natural aspect. It is true that the Southern point of view as regards the Negro does not change very much, and that all vote one way, but it does not follow that the Southern point of view as regards the whole future of the [98] United States has not been modified and will not change. The South has been very poor and is becoming rich, will perhaps become very rich and prosperous. ”

“ Small as is the number of Northerners in the South, the number of aliens is not much larger. In the whole United States there were in 1900, 10,500,000 foreign-born, of whom only 727,000 were in the whole South; while the lower South from North Carolina to Texas contained 303,000, and the five states from South Carolina to Mississippi only 45,000. Of the 16,000,000 additional persons of foreign parentage in the Union the South had again 1,500,000. ”

“ The West is now turning a little back toward the East, and I have found some people, who probably had some ancestral connection with New England, but whose birth, early residence, and business life were in the West, who have come back to the old home. All this is pleasant, all this is surety of the future of our country. It is pleasant to know that the South is being obliterated, that all that made it distinctive in the sense of separation or alienation is being gradually wiped out. ”

“ Irritation in the South.—This plan of government was naturally very offensive to the South, for it made the negroes practically rulers over their former owners. In June, 1868, the representatives of Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana, North Carolina, and South Carolina were elected under the new conditions and readmitted to Congress. Those of Georgia, Mississippi, Texas, and Virginia were not admitted before 1870. During the first period of reconstruction the freedmen in the South were generally in control ”

“ The inhabitants of the colder portions of a country have often shown their superiority to the men who dwell in the warmer districts. The causes of the contrast between the Northerners and the Southerners, which has dominated in the development of the United States, may for the most part be clearly traced: the South was weakened by the plantation method of cultivation, and slavery; its white population increased slowly, and shared to a lesser degree than did the Northerners in the strengthening, educating influences of agriculture and manufacturing industries. ”

“ The South itself feels the strength of its position so well that its ambition is to separate the valley of the Mississippi from the Eastern States, and to unite itself to the West, consigning the Yankees of New England to a solitude which would ruin them. ”

“ The South was then essentially a plantation region, producing one or two great staples that found a ready market in the world, but dependent for its implements of industry and domestic utensils upon the States of the North Mississippi Valley. ”

“ Effect on the South.%—In the South, in the first place, it changed the system of labor from slave to free. While the South was a slave-owning country free labor would not come in. Without free labor there could be no mills, no factories, no mechanical industries. The South raised cotton, tobacco, sugar, and left her great resources undeveloped. ”

“ We take nothing from the Southern States that has not already been taken from the Northern. The South shall have just those rights that every eastern, every middle, every western State has—no more, no less. We are not seeking our own aggrandizement by impoverishing the South. ”

“ If we were to take the rich Eastern and Northwestern states, with their immense population, enormous manufactures (New York City contains over twenty thousand factories) , and vast transportation lines, the fact that the South is far behind the North in things both material and intellectual would stand out even more clearly. ”

“ In the North all was life, enterprise, industry, mechanical skill. In the South there was dependence on black labour, and an idle extravagance which was mistaken for elegant luxury—tumble-down old hackney-coaches, such as had not been seen north of the Potomac for half a century, harness never cleaned, ungroomed horses, worked at the mill one day and sent to town the next, badly furnished houses, bad cookery, imperfect education. No parallel could be drawn between them and the Northern States at all. ”

“ It has been my privilege to study the condition of our people in nearly every part of America; and I say without hesitation that, with some exceptional cases, the Negro is at his best in the Southern states. While he enjoys certain privileges in the North that he does not have in the South, when it comes to the matter of securing property, enjoying business advantages and employment, the South presents a far better opportunity than the North. ”

“ These settlers of the Valley of Virginia and the North Carolina piedmont region—English, Scotch-Irish, Germans, Scotch, Irish, Welsh, and a few French—were the first pioneers of the Old Southwest. From the joint efforts of two strata of population, geographically, 6 socially, and economically distinct—tidewater and piedmont, Old South and New South—originated and flowered the third and greatest movement of westward expansion, opening with the surmounting of the mountain barrier and ending in the occupation and assumption of the vast medial valley of the continent. ”

“ The Southern States have great advantages over the Northern in soil, climate, and situation; they have a monopoly of the tropical productions so greatly sought by all northern nations; they have superior facilities for the acquisition of wealth, and through that for the rapid increase of population. In some countries the advance of both is retarded by oppressive legislation. Of this the South cannot complain, as it will by and by appear. ”

“ The South is a prosperous and advancing region on the highway to wealth, but advancing rather more slowly than other agricultural sections of the country, and in material wealth far behind the West and farther behind the Middle states and New England. ”

“ Still, on any basis of comparison with the least wealthy states and sections of the North—whether it be made between the total population of equivalent groups or between the white populations only, leaving out of account the productivity of the Negroes, the South is below the national standard of wealth and progress; it grows constantly in accumulations and in productivity, but its yearly additions are less than those of the Northwestern states, and much less than those of the Northeastern states. ”

“ The Americans of the United States stand in precisely the same position with regard to the peoples of South America as their fathers, the English, occupy with regard to the Italians, the Spaniards, the Portuguese, and all those nations of Europe which receive their articles of daily consumption from England, because they are less advanced in civilization and trade. ”

“ Today a New South may be said to be everywhere apparent. The Old South still exists in nooks and corners of many States, it is true: there are communities, counties, groups of counties, which cling to the old ideas. In the hearts of thousands of men and women the Old South is enshrined, and there is no room for the new; but the South as a whole is a New South, marked by a spirit of hopefulness, a belief in the future, and a desire to take a fuller part in the life of the nation. To trace the development of the new spirit and to discuss its manifestations is the purpose of this book. ”

“ Later in the year the Southern Commercial Congress, representing ten States, assembled in Washington, and I was asked to preside at the opening session in the large ballroom of the New Willard Hotel. There were three or four hundred people present. I devoted my address to a comparison between the old agricultural South and the new industrial South, pointing out that as the economic interests of the South were no longer sectional but national, it must follow that politically there is no longer a reason for "the solid South." ”

“ Intelligent people in the East are studying, not ridiculing the West.
The recuperative energy displayed by the Southern people has been even more wonderful and admirable than that exhibited by France after the German conquest. France was not denuded, as the South was denuded of all that represents wealth save a fertile soil and the resolution to rise from the ashes of the past. And the South has risen. I passed through North Carolina and Virginia just before the close of the war. Recently I visited the same States, and South Carolina and Georgia for the first time since the war. ”

“ The negro population grew by leaps and bounds, until on the eve of the Revolution it amounted to more than half a million. In five states—Maryland, Virginia, the two Carolinas, and Georgia—the slaves nearly equalled or actually exceeded the whites in number. In South Carolina they formed almost two-thirds of the population. Even in the Middle colonies of Delaware and Pennsylvania about one-fifth of the inhabitants were from Africa. ”

“ The mountains and their inhabitants are a numerous and significant part of the population in all the upper tier of the Southern States, including Oklahoma; and though they are much less numerous in the lower South, they furnish a large body of voters, and their slow progress is in itself a difficult problem. The Appalachian range, from Canada to Alabama, is made up of belts of parallel ridges ”

“ The soil would have soon fallen into the hands of United States capitalists. The products are so valuable in commerce that emigration there would have been encouraged; the emancipated race of the South would have found there a congenial home, where their civil rights would not be disputed and where their labor would be so much sought after that the poorest among them could have found the means to go. Thus in cases of great oppression and cruelty, such as has been practiced upon them in many places within the last eleven years, whole communities would have sought refuge in Santo Domingo. ”

“ With a climate much milder and more equable than that of the Northern states, with a potential fertility of soil, equally great under proper management, the South is making greater strides than any other part of the country.
The foregoing shows that in every section opportunities of getting the people to the land exist. Where a man should go is determined by a variety of things. ”

“ Physically, they protect the cotton belt from the North, and thus affect the climate; and they are fountains of water power as yet little developed. South of the mountains and thence westward through northern Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas, is a hill region which is from every point of view one of the parts of the South most interesting and at the same time least known by Northerners. This is the traditional home of the Poor Whites; whose backwardness is in itself a problem; whose industry contributes much more than the world has been prone to allow to the wealth of the South ”

“ The northwest was changing to a land of farmers and town-builders, anxious for a market for their grain and cattle; while the southwest was becoming increasingly a cotton-raising section, swayed by the same impulses in respect to staple exports as those which governed the southern seaboard. Economically, the northern portion of the valley tended to connect itself with the middle states, while the southern portion came into increasingly intimate connection with the south. ”

“ The Old South rested everything on slavery and agriculture, unconscious that these could neither give nor maintain healthy growth. The New South presents a perfect democracy, the oligarchs leading in the popular movement—a social system compact and closely knitted, less splendid on the surface but stronger at the core—a hundred farms for every plantation,192 fifty homes for every palace, and diversified industry that meets the complex needs of this complex age. ”

“ Between the extreme slavery advocates of the Far South and the so-called pro-slavery Democrats of the Douglas type, there was a chasm which no appeals to party loyalty could bridge. As the spokesman of the West, Douglas knew that, while the North was not abolitionist, it was passionately set against an extension of slavery into the territories by act of Congress; that squatter sovereignty was the mildest kind of compromise acceptable to the farmers whose votes would determine the fate of the election. ”

“ So for more than fifty formative years of our history the Old South was the dominating power in the nation, as it had been in the foundation of the colonies out of which came the republic, and later in fighting its battles of independence and in framing its policies of government. ”

“ Independently of this commercial utility, the South and the West of the Union derive great political advantages from their connection with the North. The South contains an enormous slave population; a population which is already alarming, and still more formidable for the future. The States of the West lie in the remotest parts of a single valley; and all the rivers which intersect their territory rise in the Rocky Mountains or in the Alleghanies, and fall into the Mississippi, which bears them onwards to the Gulf of Mexico. ”

“ The harshness of the Northern winter climate has turned a stream of travel and occupation to the Gulf States, and particularly to Florida, which is indeed now scarcely a Southern State except in climate. The Atlanta and New Orleans Exhibitions did much to bring people of all sections together socially. With returning financial prosperity all the Northern summer resorts have seen increasing numbers of Southern people seeking health and pleasure. I believe that during the past summer more Southerners have been travelling and visiting in the North than ever before. ”