Southeastern United States

“ 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 relation of the Provinces of the Lake and Prairie Plains to the rest of the United States is an important element in the significance of the Middle West. On the north lies the similar region of Canada: the Great Lakes are in the center of the whole eastern and more thickly settled half of North America, and they bind the Canadian and Middle Western people together. On the south, the provinces meet the apex of that of the Gulf Plains, and the Mississippi unites them. To the west, they merge gradually into the Great Plains ”

“ 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. ”

“ The already huge colored quarters in some Northern cities were widely expanded, as whole counties in the South were stripped of their colored laborers. The race question, in its political and economic aspects, became less and less sectional, more and more national. The South was drawn into the main stream of national life. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Though the Great Southwest is now the most sparsely inhabited region of its size in the United States, it was once the most populous and wealthy, probably more populous than it is to-day, with all its present American enterprise. Hundreds of years before the Spaniards first appeared in the New World, the valleys of Arizona and New Mexico contained a numerous population, supporting considerable cities, and irrigating extensive tracts of land with wonderful engineering skill. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Having reached their destination on the further shore, they would naturally tend toward the South and Southeast, attracted by a climate continually improving in mildness, and a country more fertile and abounding in wild fruit and game, the farther south they proceeded. They seem to have followed one another in different centuries; and those who first found their way to the valleys of the Ohio and lower Mississippi, and to Mexico, came in contact with other races from southeastern Asia, who had preceded them long enough to establish a civilization. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Last came the Civil war, fought among ourselves, certainly not undertaken for any purpose of foreign conquest, yet attended by the uniform result of all our wars. It closed in 1865, and was followed in 1867 by the acquisition of Alaska.
In this policy of territorial expansion, the South was the leading factor. It is one of the contributions which the South as a section of the Union, and as a factor in its upbuilding, has given to the United States. Historians have not chosen to emphasize this fact. ”

“ 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 ante-bellum times few Southerners traveled widely, except the comparatively small number of the richer young men who found their way to Northern colleges, or abroad. Until ten years ago it was difficult to hold Southern conventions and gatherings of intellectual men of kindred aims because people could not afford to travel. Now there is more circulation, more knowledge of the world, more willingness to see in what respects the South lags behind, a greater spirit of coöperation between Southern states, and with some people of other sections. ”

“ The North is not the whole nation; New England is not the only type of the people. There are other States differing widely from this. In the southern States you find a soil more fertile under skies more genial. Through what beautiful rivers the Alleghanies pour their tribute to the sea! What streams beautify the land in Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi! There genial skies rain beauty on the soil. Nature is wanton of her gifts. ”

“ 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. ”

“ What the Mediterranean Sea was to the Greeks, breaking the bond of custom, offering new experiences, calling out new institutions and activities, that, and more, the ever retreating frontier has been to the United States directly, and to the nations of Europe more remotely. And now, four centuries from the discovery of America, at the end of a hundred years of life under the Constitution, the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history. ”

“ The orderly way in which to study the Southwest would be to take up first the land, its flora, fauna, climate, soils, rivers, etc., then the aborigines, next the exploring and settling Spaniards, and finally, after a hasty glance at the French, the English-speaking people who brought the Southwest to what it is today. ”

“ In my section they deem their interests more closely identified with those of the South, than with the manufacturing East, and will never permit the mouth of the Mississippi, their great natural highway, to pass into the control of a foreign people, hence it is not improbable that in certain eventualities they would join hands with the South ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 Appalachians made a true Chinese Wall, shutting all England-in-America, in those early days, out from the vast inland plateau of the continent, keeping upon the seaboard all England-in-America, from the north to the south. To Virginia these were the mysterious mountains just beyond which, at first, were held to be the South Sea and Cathay. Now, men's knowledge being larger by a hundred years, it was known that the South Sea could not be so near. ”

“ It may be well at this point to ask, toward what ideal we are working, and fairly to consider the forces that are co-operating with, or working against, us in this effort. The most potent factor in the creation of a new South must be, of course, the South itself, as of necessity she will be chiefly the architect of her own fortunes, good or bad. ”

“ From the cross-fertilization of the ideas of two social groups—this back-country gentry, of innate qualities of leadership, democratic instincts, economic independence, and expansive tendencies, and the primitive pioneer society of the frontier, frugal in taste, responsive to leadership, bold, ready, and thorough in execution—there evolved the militant American expansion in the Old Southwest. ”

“ 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." ”

“ During half a century the people of the South had been in control of the Government, but Nature and advancing civilization had been steadily against them. They had won a brilliant victory in the Southwest, but found it barren. The only remaining territory in which they could hope to plant slavery was that stretching westward from Missouri, Iowa and Minnesota to the borders of Utah and Oregon. ”

“ From several of the Indian tribes inhabiting the country bordering on Lake Erie purchases have been made of lands on conditions very favorable to the United States, and, as it is presumed, not less so to the tribes themselves. ”

“ During the latter part of the nineteenth and the first part of the twentieth centuries, people in the Southwest continued to seek new ways to satisfy their water needs, which by that time were increasing rapidly as new settlers moved into this fast-developing region. ”

“ 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. ”

“ To the Eastern and Northern mind the Southwest raises a dim picture of hot desert, bare mountain, and monotonous plain sparsely grown up to cactus, sage, greasewood, or bunch-grass, and sown with the white bones of animals which have perished from hunger and thirst; a land of wild Indians, of lazy Mexicans, of rough cow-boys, of roving, half-wild cattle, of desperate mining ventures, of frequent train-robberies. ”

“ Nobody gets into Congress from the South but by their direction; nobody speaks at Washington for any Southern interest except theirs. Yet there is, at the South, quite another interest than theirs; embracing from two to three times as many white people ”

“ Initiative, self-reliance, boldness in conception, fertility in resource, readiness in execution, acquisitiveness, inventive genius, appreciation of material advantages—these, shot through with a certain fine idealism, genial human sympathy, and a high romantic strain—are the traits of the American national type as it emerged from the Old Southwest. ”

“ 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. ”