Volume V Part 15 (1/2)

[1895]

The reader of this history is already aware how forces and events after the Civil War gradually evolved a New South, unlike the contemporary North, and differing still more, if possible, from ante-bellum Dixie. By 1900 this interesting situation had become quite p.r.o.nounced. The picture here given is but an enlargement of that presented earlier--few features new, but many of them more salient, and the whole effect more impressive.

Harmony and good feeling between the capital sections of our country continued to manifest itself in striking ways, as by the dedication of a Confederate monument at Chicago, the gathering of the Grand Army of the Republic at Louisville, Ky., and the cordial fraternizing of Gray and Blue at the consecration of the Chickamauga-Chat-tanooga Military Park, on the spot where had occurred, perhaps, the fiercest fighting which ever shook United States ground.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Several stone monuments.]

The Chickamauga National Military Park.

Group of monuments on knoll southwest of Snodgra.s.s Hill.

The Atlanta Exposition, opening on September 18, 1895, epitomized the Newest South. The touch of an electric b.u.t.ton by President Cleveland's little daughter, Marian, at his home on Buzzard's Bay, Ma.s.s., opened the gates and set the machinery awhirl. Atlanta was a city of but 100,000, hardly more than 60,000 of them whites, yet her Fair not only excelled the Atlanta Exposition of 1881, that at Louisville in 1883, and the New Orleans World's Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition of 1884-5, all which were highly successful, but in many features outdid even the Centennial at Philadelphia. The Tennessee Centennial and International Exposition at Nashville, in 1897, was another revelation. Its total expenditures, fully covered by receipts, were $1,087,227.85; its total admissions 1,886,714. On J. W. Thomas Day the attendance was within a few of 100,000. The exhibits were ample, and many of them strikingly unique. Few, even at the South, believed that the Southern States could set forth such displays. The fact that this was possible so soon after a devastating war, which had left the section in abject poverty, was a speaking compliment to the land and to the energy of those developing it.

The progress of most Southern communities was extraordinary.

Agriculture, still too backward in methods and variety, gradually improved, gaining marked impetus and direction from the agricultural colleges planted in the several States by the aid of United States funds conveyed under the ”Morrill” acts. The abominable system of store credit kept the majority of farmers, black and white, in servitude, but was giving way, partly to regular bank credit--a great improvement--and partly to cash transactions.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Men tending trees.]

A grove of oranges and palmettoes near Ormond, Florida.

Florida came to the front as a lavish producer of tropical fruits.

Winter was rarely known there. If it paid a visit now and then the State's sugar industry made up for the losses which frost inflicted upon her orange crop. The rich South Carolina rice plantations bade fair to be left behind by the new rice belt in Louisiana and Texas, a strip averaging thirty miles in width and extending from the Mississippi to beyond the Brazos, 400 miles. Improved methods of rice farming had transformed this region, earlier almost a waste, into one of the most productive areas in the country, attracting to it settlers from various parts of the North and West, and even from Scandinavia. Dairying, fruit and cattle-raising and market-gardening for northern markets, other new lines of enterprise, created wealth for mult.i.tudes. King Cotton was not dethroned to make way for these rivals, but increased his domain each decade.

In 1880 the value of farm products at the South exceeded by more than $200,000,000 that of the manufactured products there. In 1900 the case was nearly reversed: manufactures outvaluing farm products by over $190,000,000. During this decade the persons engaged in agriculture at the South increased in number 36 per cent., but the wage-earners in manufacturing multiplied more than four times as much, viz., 157 per cent. Each of these rates at the South was larger than the corresponding rate for the country. The same decade the capital which the South had invested in manufacturing increased 348 per cent., that of the whole United States only 252 per cent. The increase in manufactured products value was for the South 220 per cent., for the whole country only 142 per cent. The increase in farm property value was for the South 92 per cent., for the country only 67 per cent. The increase in farm products value was for the South 92 per cent.; for the whole United States it was greater, viz., 133 per cent.

Land at the South was boundlessly rich in unexploited resources. More than half the country's standing timber grew there, much of it hard wood and yellow pine. Quant.i.ties of phosphate rock, limestone, and gypsum were to be dug, also salt, aluminum, mica, topaz, and gold. Especially in Texas, petroleum sought release from vast underground reservoirs. The farmer did not lack for rain, the manufacturer for water-power, or the merchant for water transportation to keep down railroad rates.

The white Southerner, of purest Saxon-Norman blood, had the vigorous and comely physique of that race. Nowhere else in the land were the generality of white men and women so fine-looking. Easy circ.u.mstances had enabled them to become gracious as well, with the dignified and pleasing manners characterizing Southern society before the Civil War.

High intelligence was another racial trait. The administration of the various Industrial Expositions named in this chapter required and evinced business ability of the highest order. During the quarter century succeeding reconstruction popular education developed even more astonis.h.i.+ngly at the South than in the North or the West. Nothing could surpa.s.s the avidity with which young Southern men and women sought and utilized intellectual opportunities.

With few exceptions Southerners had become intensely loyal to the national ideal, faithfully abiding the arbitrament of the war, which alone, to their mind--but at any rate, finally and forever--overthrew the old doctrine that the Union was a compact among States, with liberty to each to secede at will.

Straightforwardness and intensity of purpose marked the Southern temper.

If a county or a city voted ”dry,” practically all the whites aided to see the mandate enforced. The liquor traffic was thus regulated more stringently and prohibited more widely and effectively at the South than in any other part of the country. Even the lynchings occurring from time to time in some quarters, while atrocious and frowned upon by the best people, seemed due in most cases less to disregard for the spirit of the law than to distrust of legal methods and machinery. Indications multiplied, moreover, that this d.a.m.ning blot on Southern civilization would ere long disappear.

The most aggravating and insoluble perplexity which tormented the Southern people lay in dealing with the colored race. Sections of the so-called black belts still weltered in unthrift and decay, as in the darkest reconstruction days. These belts were three in number. The first, about a hundred miles wide, reached from Virginia and the Carolinas through the Gulf States to the watershed of the State of Mississippi. The second bordered the Mississippi from Tennessee to just above New Orleans, and extended up the Red River into Arkansas and Texas. A third region of negro preponderance covered fifteen counties of southern Texas.

In these tracts and elsewhere white political supremacy was maintained, as it had been regained, by the forms of law when possible; if not, then in some other way. The wisest negro leaders dismissed, as for the present a dream, all thought of political as of social equality between whites and blacks. Swarms of the colored, resigned to political impotence, were prolific of defective, pauper, and criminal population.

Education, book-education at least, did not seem to improve them; many believed that it positively injured them, producing cunning and vanity rather than seriousness. This was perhaps the rule, though there were many n.o.ble exceptions. In 1892, while the proportion of vicious negroes seemed to be increasing in cities and large towns, it was almost to a certainty decreasing in rural districts--improvement due in good part to enforced temperance.

A conference on the negro and the South opened at Montgomery May 8, 1900. Many able and fair-minded men partic.i.p.ated, representing various att.i.tudes, parties, and sections of the country. Limitation of the colored franchise, the proper sort of education for negroes, the evils of ”social equality” agitation, and the causes and frequency of lynching were the main subjects discussed. The consensus of opinion seemed to be that for ”the negro, on account of his inherent mental and emotional instability,” acquirement of the franchise should be less easy than for whites. It was maintained that the industrially trained colored men became leaders among their people, commanding the respect of both races and acquiring much property, yet that ex-slaves, rather than the younger, educated set, formed the bulk of colored property-holders.

Figures revealed among the colored population a frightful increase of illegitimacy and of flagrant crimes. It seemed that crimes against women, almost unknown before the war but now increasing at an alarming rate, proceeded not from ex-slaves, but from the smart new generation.

Lynching for these offences was by some excused in that negroes would not a.s.sist in bringing colored perpetrators to justice, and in that a spectacular mode of punishment affected negroes more deeply than the slow process of law, even when this issued in conviction. The severer utterances at this conference may have been more or less biased; still, if, allowing for this, one considered the data available for forming a judgment, one was forced to feel that calm Southerners had apprehended the case better than Northern enthusiasts. Colored people as a cla.s.s lacked devotion to principle, also initiative and endurance, whether mental or physical. Colored deputies, of whom there were many in various parts of the South, so long as they acted under white chiefs, were, like most colored soldiers, marvels of bravery, defying revolvers, bowie knives, and wounds, and fighting to the last gasp with no sign of flinching; but the black men who could be trusted as sheriffs-in-chief were extremely rare.

Whether the faults named were strictly hereditary or resulted rather from the long-continued ill education and environment of the race, none could certainly tell. As a matter of fact, however, few even among friendly critics longer regarded these faults as entirely eliminable. A well qualified and wholly unbiased judge of negro character gave it as emphatically his opinion that any autonomous community of colored people, no matter how highly educated or civilized, would relapse into barbarism in the course of two generations. This view was not rendered absurd by the existence of fairly well administered munic.i.p.alities here and there with negro mayors. Many negroes were extremely bright and apt in imitation, also in all memoriter and linguistic work. The New Orleans Cotton Centennial and the Nashville Exposition each had its negro department. But it was distinctive of the Atlanta Fair that one of its buildings was entirely devoted to exhibits of negro handicraft. At once in range and in the quality of the objects which it embraced, the display was creditable to the race. Here and there, moreover, the race had produced a grand character. The most notable of the opening addresses at the Atlanta Fair was made by the colored educator, Booker T. Was.h.i.+ngton, President of the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Inst.i.tute for negro youth.