The Old and New South, a Centennial article for the International Review, afterwards corrected and published separately. New York: A. S. Barnes & Co. 1876.
The Old and New South, a Centennial article for the International Review, afterwards corrected and published separately. New York: A. S. Barnes & Co. 1876.
The approach of the Centennial Celebration is not hailed in the south with the demonstrative joy of the north. It would be out of taste to expect that the former should appear to triumph greatly over the life of the nation preserved at the cost of her recent overthrow. Her late antagonist can rejoice in a vast and happy population, great material prosperity, and the fresh fame of a world-renowned success. It is meet, while remembering she has so lately saved the union by her stupendous armipotence, that the north should exult as a people never did before. The south has been made to feel the pangs of a sudden impoverishment and the incalculable discomfort of complete economical unsettlement; and she has not learned the new lessons which she must learn to become self-sustaining and progressive. But her earnest spirits, doing painfully the slow task of repairing lost fortunes; seeking after the system proper to succeed planting; striving to make their homes pleasant again and to give their children a fair hope in the land,—these intent workers, who are most of them scarred confederate veterans, even if they will not say it loudly, have come around to hold in steadfast faith that it is far better the Blue Cross fell, and the American union stands forever unchallengeable hereafter. And they have brought with them the great mass of their people. They cannot joy so happily as the north, but they have a warm welcome for the Great Commemoration. For they see that the evils which followed as the scourge of defeat are soon to pass away, while the fall ofslavery and the failure of secession are to prove greater and greater blessings as years roll on.
And so the time has come for a southerner calmly to discuss the past, present, and future of the south. He has no use for the methods of popular and unscientific politics, wherein everything is blamed or applauded as being the result of party measures. The intentions and motives of the actors, on both sides of the late strife, will give but proximate explanations. How the two sections became, to use the fine phrase of Von Holst, economically contrasted; how the southern people and their representative politicians were bred, under their circumstances, into opposition to the union; and how the northern people and their representative politicians were bred, under widely different circumstances, into love of the union; how the long clashing in politics culminated in civil war; how the south was utterly crushed and her whole industrial system destroyed; how she slowly re-erects herself into a new condition better than the old,—the ultimate solution of these questions can only be found by discussing them in the light of those laws of development which give every community a policy suited to what it discerns to be its best interest. These laws are of far more importance than the politician, who is but their creature. Leaving to others to fight over the old struggles of the political arena and bandy hard words with one another, we will try to discuss our subject in the manner we have indicated to be appropriate.
To understand the present and future, we must first understand the past. To understand the New south, we must first understand the Old south, the distinguishing feature of which was negro slavery. Mr. Stephens, then Vice-President of the southern confederacy, in an address to a large assembly in Savannah, in March, 1861, said of the new government: “Its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery—subordination to the superior race—is his natural and normal condition.” There is no doubt slavery was the corner-stone of southern society; and when it was removed, four years later,a thorough disintegration of the whole fabric was the logical result.
When our country was first settled, the southern regions were far more attractive in soil and climate; and their other natural resources—minerals, good harbors, navigable streams, water-power idling everywhere, to mention no more—were equal to those of the other section. The subsequent advancement of the north has been so rapid as to excite the wonder of the world; while it is said by us of the south, jesting upon our worn-out and exhausted land, that we have done worse for the country than the Indians before us, who stayed here many centuries and yet left the soil as good as they found it.
The plantation system was the great barrier to southern progress. From its first historical appearance, among the Carthaginians, from whom the Romans seem to have derived it, this rude and wholesale method of farming has rested on slaveholding. Its workings have been similar everywhere. In Italy, under the Roman republic, absorbing the petty holdings, it drove out the small farmer; it destroyed the former respect for trades and handicrafts, and brought them into disfavor; it prevented the development of the industrial arts; it created a non-reciprocal commerce. Centuries later, it did the same things in our southern States.
A sketch of the leading features and results of the plantation system, as it existed in America, is our proper beginning.
The driver, as the negro foreman was called, was not very common in the south, and was generally under the superintendence of the overseer. Could the planters have made a good overseer of the driver, of course they would have consulted their interest, and reproduced the ancient slave-steward of Rome. Slaveholders keep their slaves under careful surveillance, but they do not usually overlook them in person. It is not often that a master engages in an employment which brings him into daily and intimate contact with the lowest orders, and which he instinctively feels to be degrading. The planter could have neither his first choice, which would have been a slave overseer, nor his second choice, a superintendent fromhis own rank in society; and so, as the next best thing, he took as overseer a white hireling from the non-slaveholding class. The tillage of the fields was thus intrusted to the overseers, who were, for the most part, men of little education and business skill, and who had no interest in their employment except to draw its wages. Thus the foremost, if not the only, southern industry was managed by incompetent and careless agents.
The Roman master, in the later days of the republic, having always vast markets open to him, shunned the expense of providing for women and children, and bought new slaves instead of breeding them; but the closing of the African slave-trade, and the softer hearts and manners of modern times, led our planters, at last, to rely on propagation as their only source of supply. The negroes were, therefore, well cared for, and, in a genial clime, increased rapidly. This increase, however, did not keep pace with the increasing demand for southern products, and so the market value of the slave rose rapidly. To the Roman slaveholder, land was almost everything, and his rustic slaves nothing; to the southerner, the slaves were almost everything, and the land nothing. There was no careful cultivation of the soil, no judicious rotation of crops, and no adequate system of fertilization. Southern husbandry was, for the most part, a reckless pillage of the bounty of nature. The planter became possessed with a roving spirit, and was continually seeking “fresh land,” as virgin soil was termed. In the older sections, where there was most stability, the best farming consisted in judiciously eking out the natural fertility of the fields, and when that was exhausted, in leaving them to recuperate by years of rest. Thus a given working force required, year by year, a greater and greater allowance of land, and the plantations became steadily larger, the small farmer retiring, and the white population becoming continually less. Many of these older sections turned, from being agricultural communities, into nurseries, rearing slaves for the younger States where virgin soil was abundant. The fertile lands of the new settlements, by yielding bountiful crops, gave fresh impulse to the plantationsystem, and here the small holdings were absorbed more rapidly than they had been in the older States. The southern slaves, regarded as property, were the most desirable investment open to the generality of people that has ever been known. They were patient, tractable, and submissive, and never revolted in combined insurrections, as did the slaves of antiquity. Their labor was richly remunerative; their market value was constantly rising; they were everywhere more easily convertible into money than the best securities; and their natural increase was so rapid that a part of it could be squandered by a shiftless owner every year to make both ends meet, and he still be left enough of accumulation to enrich him steadily. And so the plantation, or rather the slave, system swallowed up everything else.
There were no distinct industrial classes. There were negro blacksmiths, negro carpenters, negro shoemakers, etc., all over the land, but they were mere appendages to the plantations, and far inferior in capacity and skill to the artisan slaves of antiquity.
The commerce of the south was non-reciprocal. She traded raw produce for manufactures which she should have made herself, or which she should have got in exchange for manufactures of her own. The over-mastering energy of slave property, dissolving, as it were, all things into itself, kept her from that development of trades, manufactories, and industrial arts which is the solid and unprecedented progress, and far more durable wealth, of the north.
There were a few exceptions in the way of restorative agriculture, and of diversified investments of capital in railways, manufactories, inland navigation, and mercantile enterprises. All along the northern border there were efforts to let go slavery, and non-slave industry was slowly emerging in a few places; but these things were as dust in the balances. The slave system was rooted in the best portions of the land, and nearly all of the productive wealth of the south was in, or dependent upon, planting. Implacable enemies of slavery were rapidly increasing in numbers and power, but she continued blindly sacrificingeverything to rear negroes. When actual emancipation came—that nipping May frost—the south showed, on a gigantic scale, in her poverty and one solitary and portentously dried-up source of wealth, a parallel to Ireland, smitten with famine by the sudden failure of her only supply of food. When the charity of the world and the returning bounty of nature had again fed the Green Isle, everything fell back into the old track, and she could go on smoothly as before. But not so with the south: her wealth has fled; her occupation, the plantation system, is gone; and she must, for a generation, grope painfully in the dark, trying novel ways of subsisting, enduring want and many failures, before finding again the light of plenty and comfort.
The duties of the planter have changed. The management of a farm is not like that of a plantation, and one skilled in the management of slaves is not necessarily efficient in the directing of freedmen. Many other countries have been impoverished by wars; but is not this instantaneous and almost complete taking away of a great people’s mode of living unique in history? The most resolute secessionist would have lost heart and put up his sword, could he have seen, before the war commenced, how easily the solitary prop of southern wealth and comfort could be overturned, to be set up no more. But in none of the ablest of the anti-secession arguments of 1860 were the consequences of defeat predicted.
Some portions of our country have been built up into a high degree of prosperity by a steady influx of foreign settlers. How much has been added to the power and wealth of the northern States by the immigration from the old lands of those who, when first they come, can do no more than subsist themselves by their own industry, almost defies computation. How the force of the preponderant population of the north pressed upon the south during the war, and at last crushed her down! Slavery repelled the free immigrant from the south, and he went elsewhere with his power to enrich and defend.
The uniform and rapid advancement of civilization is mainly due to the struggle of the poor to better their condition. Theseefforts result in complex division of labor, accumulation of wealth, and better than these, in the production of a great population engaged in diversified industries. In such a population, improving year by year in business habits, consists the strength of a nation. The slave had no hope of rising, and the system of which he was a part repelled free workingmen, and thus the south lost the benign emulation and energy of a lower class. The ancient slaves were not alone rural laborers and domestic servants, as were those of the south. The former, being of kindred blood with their masters and near their level in natural capacity, were initiated in the various industries, some of which flourished greatly under their management. Though the slaves of old were very degraded, they were not as low and grovelling as those of our day. Enfranchisement was common; and, in a few generations afterwards, the descendants of the freedman were indistinguishable amid the body of free citizens. The ancient states were not, therefore, prevented by slavery from having advanced and diversified industries, nor were they denied the impulse of a possible rising from the lower to the higher classes. But the American slave was of the remotest race, far below his master in development, and the horror of receiving him into the body of free citizens grew continually stronger. The law discouraged manumission, and frowned upon the increase of freedmen. Thus, the African slavery of the south was the most hopeless form of servitude the civilized world has ever seen; and, by preventing the formation of a great class of freemen, engaged in respectable industry, it killed the very roots of social progress. These influences of slavery, so repugnant to American ideas, will be more vividly seen and understood in the answer to the question, What would have been the present condition of the south had it not been for slavery? Undoubtedly her land would have smiled with a fertility richer than the endowment of nature; her industrial arts would, ere this time, have branched out into multifarious activity; her own ships would have been carrying her produce and manufactures abroad; and, as the crown of all, she would have had a teeming population of workers, whose education in the methods ofself-support would have been the assurance of unlimited future advancement. In brief, in all the elements of the greatness of a community, the south might now have equalled, if not excelled, the north.
But there are some other effects of slavery to be noted before the outline of the Old south can be clearly and fully drawn.
Among the planters, costly and liberal instruction was given to a few of those who were to adorn places of leisured ease, or to fill the necessary professions and public positions; but, in the midst of the sparse and shifting rural population, there could not be that devotion to the education of all, which is one of the most conspicuous glories of the northern States.
In consequence of the sparseness of the planters and their roving habits, there was not that subdivision of different portions of the counties into small self-governing wards, which Jefferson so fondly desired. He said of the New England townships, that they had “proved themselves the wisest invention ever devised by the wit of man for the perfect exercise of self-government, and for its preservation.” He also said that he considered the continuance of republican government as absolutely hanging on two hooks, to wit, “the public education, and the subdivision into wards.” This government of every vicinage in its home affairs by itself, as originated in New England, and is now spread far and wide throughout the northern States, is the most beneficent achievement of American democracy. By this coercion of the citizen to participate in the constant administration of public matters directly concerning his interests, self-government becomes, as it should be, the business of everybody, and everybody is compulsorily educated in the best of all learning for the race.
The finale of slavery remains to be told. As opposition to it increased from without, the south became more and more closely united. She honestly believed that wanton intermeddlers were attacking her dearest rights. The steady and continually strengthening warfare against slavery, and her continuous and earnest defence of it, began—it is impossible to determine precisely when—to knit her into a nationality of herown. He who understands what Mr. Bagehot calls “nation-making” will discover, in the past history of the south, if he looks attentively, many signs of this tendency, which steadily progressed unperceived on her part, and still more so on the part of the north, until the south began to coalesce into a nation as compact as her scattered and random elements would permit. The long advocacy and support of slavery in the political arena had fevered her whole people, and finally, under these promptings to a national life, politics absorbed nearly all of her intellectual powers.
There is a striking parallel between this sustained effort of the south and the struggle of Ireland, when the latter, for the fifty years ending with the advent of the present century, was arrayed against the British, in their encroachments upon her independent government. During this half-century, Ireland maintained that she was an independent integral part of the British Empire, just as Virginia contended that she was a sovereign in the federation of States. Ireland, like a southern State, challenged every seeming interference, by the general government, in her local affairs; and the claims put forth, in each instance, were inexorably contested by an adverse government, claiming supremacy and supported by superiority of power. Both were on the eve of revolutionary secession without knowing it. The results in Ireland and the south were similar: there was but one intellectual activity, namely, politics. The memory of all Irishmen of that time not forgotten—and many of their names are familiar words—is nothing but resistance to English aggression. Even Curran, Ireland’s great forensic advocate, made his world-wide fame in defending Irishmen against the prosecutions of the British ministry. It was much the same at the south in the period antecedent to the civil war. She had neither literature nor science; but she had statesmen and advocates, who will be remembered as long as her soldiers and generals.
The national germ had long been growing below the surface, in darkness, and at last it burst into view, and shot up into a body of amazing proportions. There was not the birth of a new nation at Montgomery in 1861; only the majority of this vigorousyoung member of the family of nations was there proclaimed. But, for all of the eloquence of its orators and the virtue and bravery of its people, it was, as compared with its adversary, in raw and untutored nonage, and the great disaster that befell four years afterwards was then preordained. It was her unshunnable fate that she should be denationalized on the battle-field.
The late war was a conflict between implacable enemies. Each belligerent, standing up for national life, was resistlessly coerced to fight to the last. Neither can be blamed. The past may be taxed with lack of wisdom. It may be that as Scotland and, more lately, Ireland have been peacefully denationalized, a preventive, anticipating the dreadful event of war, might years before have been devised by statesmanly forecast. The actual combatants—the southerner fighting for the confederacy, and the northern soldier bearing up the flag of the union—were equals in manhood and virtue. The survivors, federal and confederate, at last see this, and therefore they go in company to decorate alike the graves of the dead of both armies.
The cause of all these evils—the backwardness and stationariness of the south; a wasteful husbandry, without other industries; the instability of her wealth; her want of a great class of freemen engaged in the different arts; her barbarically simple social structure; her neglect of common schools; the absorption of all her intellectual energies in feverish and revolutionary politics; and, finally, secession and the reddened ground of a thousand battle-fields—was slavery. It is gone. The malignant cancer, involving, as it seemed, every vital and menacing hideous and loathsome death, was plucked out by the roots; and after a ten years’ struggle of nature, we see the body politic slowly but surely reviving to a health and soundness never known before.
Here we find the dividing line between the Old and the New south. The former ended, and the latter began, with the giving of freedom to the negroes—an event which will prove in the future to have been an emancipation even more beneficial to master than to slave. Immunity from all the evils of slaverywhich we have catalogued will distinguish the New south from the Old.[198]
The sudden impoverishment of the southern people, and the unlooked-for change in their ways of living and thinking, had they occurred in the most peaceful times, and been followed with the best of government, would have produced a profound shock and a long paralysis. But the bitterness of subjugation, and the mistake of needlessly offensive and goading government, with harsh reconstructive measures, have prolonged the lethargy. And yet the American union shows benignly in the present condition and promised future of the section. The ten years sinceemancipation are instructive. Slowly has the New south been disentangling herself from the débris of the Old, and she has emerged far enough to enable us to perceive that a better era has commenced. Much has been lost, but more has been saved. All the germs of true wealth and power and the solid well-being of a community have survived; and solace for the past and earnest of a great future may be found in the fact that she has reached at last, and for the first time, a position in which she can develop these elements, free from the suffocating hindrances of former days. We may now properly inquire, What of the past does the south retain, and in what will consist her future progress?
She retains her genial climate, her kindly soil, and her many natural resources. If the peace of the American union is assured, as everything now graciously promises, these natural advantages will, in a few generations, far more than compensate for all her losses, and ultimately place her in the very van of progress.
The best inheritance of the New from the Old south is the southern people. We have seen how slavery checked industrial development, and how many of its other effects were hurtful. After allowing fully for all these, there will be found a great residuum of progressive energy, of intellectual strength, and of moral worth in the people of the southern States. They need not fear a comparison, in these respects, with the most enlightened communities. Great men, like Washington, Jefferson, Calhoun, Jackson, and Lee; political and military heroes, judges, lawyers, and orators, such as the south has given birth to, in unbroken succession,—are the unmistakable signs of a great people.
The rank and file of the confederate armies have given proof that the men of the south must be classed, in all the elements of complete character, with the best that the world has ever seen. Crime was so infrequent that a single morning of the term of a rural court, before the war, nearly always sufficed to dispose of every indictment; there was little want or pauperism; virtue was everywhere the rule in private life, and therewas seldom even the suspicion of corruption in government or the administration of justice. The history of this people since the war shows that they are possessed of the best Anglo-Saxon mettle. They are slowly beginning to thrive wherever they have been left to govern themselves, in spite of the complete industrial revolution, the loss of property, and change of occupation, of which we have written. And in many places, where reconstruction has been harshest, and negro misrule yet prevails, the whites have developed an unlooked-for self-maintaining capacity, and have demonstrated that even there must be the eventual predominance of intelligence and virtue, should “natural selection” alone work to secure it.
The southern people have learned much wisdom in the last ten years. Their heavy vote in 1872 for Horace Greeley—a man to whom a foreigner would have supposed them unappeasably hostile—if there was nothing else, would alone suffice to show that they are rapidly laying aside all hindrances to progress. And now that slavery is gone and she has so quickly conquered the animosities of the war, the south may be likened to a capable and energetic young man, who, having failed, as the result of inevitable misfortune, in a wrongly-chosen business, has been relieved of all embarrassments and has entered upon his proper calling. More may reasonably be expected of such a man than of one more prosperous who has not had the like discipline.
As her nationalizing tendency has been destroyed by the removal of slavery, and as her future must necessarily be shaped by union influences, she will heartily embrace the political creed of the union. The doctrine of the sovereignty of the States, which was advocated with very great ability by many of the southern statesmen—notably by Calhoun, in his speeches in congress, and in his “Discourse on the Constitution of the United States,” and with still more taking effect by Mr. Stephens in his “Constitutional View of the War between the States,”—has now no disciples at the south. General Logan gave expression to the prevailing creed of the present, when he said, at a recent reunion of former confederate companions:
“In considering, then, the future of the south, there is one fact suggested at the outset which has been demonstrated to us by the logic of events. It is, that under the operation of causes, which, although unseen at the time, appear now to have been inevitable in their results, a vastsocial organismhas been developed, and is now so far advanced in its growth as anational body politic, and no longer a mere aggregation of States, thatunityis a necessity of its further development. In reviewing the past, we can now clearly see that this national organism has beengradually developed; and, while many seek by various theories to account for the failure of the confederacy, the result may be regarded as the necessary consequence of those laws of development under which this social organism—the United States—was being evolved.”
And the south is pleased to observe that there are no genuine signs of too much centralization. On the contrary, the town system is destined to spread fast and far; and the increase of local option laws; the splitting of larger into smaller counties; the strengthening tendency to submit constitutions and many legislative acts to voters; the greater disposition often to amend the State constitutions in the interests of progress; the vigorous growth in each State of its own body of laws; the rapid multiplication of towns and cities, with governments peculiar to each, are some of the many convincing proofs that local self-government is increasing and flourishing. Of the last particular Judge Dillon says:
“We have popularized and made use of municipal institutions to such an extent as to constitute one of the most striking features of our government. It owes to them, indeed, in a great degree, its decentralized character. When the English Municipal Corporations Reform Act of 1835, was passed, there were, in England and Wales, excluding London, only two hundred and forty-six places exercising municipal functions; and their aggregate population did not exceed two millions of people. In this country, our municipal corporations are numbered by thousands, and the inhabitants subjected to their rule, by millions.”
Reflecting southerners see, in the present condition of the southern States, the very strongest possible guaranty that thetrue balance between national cohesion and local freedom is to be preserved. They see that the happy equilibrium is of a character so permanent and stable as to have survived the convulsion of civil war. The southern States are not held as conquered provinces. On the contrary, aside from the abolition of slavery and the fundamental legislation securing to the old slaves the full fruition of their freedom, there has been no perceptible change in the relations of these States to the United States.
Surely, to the student of history, whereinvae victis!is written on every page, this fact has wonderful significance. It recommends the American form of government to the rest of the world as the incoming of the new stage of civilization, wherein oppression and war shall become unknown. However long contending armies may devour populations and paralyze industry elsewhere, we are assured that war-sick America will fight with herself no more. This assurance repays the south a thousand fold for all that she has lost and endured.
The great economical interest of the south is her agriculture; and in this industry, as well as among those who conduct it, a constant transition has been taking place during the ten years since emancipation. There is a melancholy change in the homes of landholders from the case and comfort ofante bellumdays. The neat inclosures have fallen; the pleasant grounds and the flower-gardens, once so trim and flourishing, are a waste; all the old smiles and adornments are gone. Change at home is accompanied by still greater change without. The negroes—and they constitute the great bulk of the laboring population—tend to become a tenantry, cultivating the land, in some instances, for a part of the produce, but oftener for a fixed sum of money. Many of these realize from their labors little more than enough to pay a moderate rent. Others work for wages, either in money or in some portion of the crop made by their labor. As the negroes are scarce, and their labor so important, they have often, directly or indirectly, a voice in the area of land cultivated, the mode of cultivation, and the kind of crop raised. The result, in many places, is retrogression. Theface of the country is much altered. Only a small part of the land, as compared with that tilled before the war, is under cultivation, the remainder becomes wild. Could the fallen confederates return they would not in many places recognize their old homes. Nearly every man of average business ability could control his slaves, before the war, with little trouble; but it now requires far more than ordinary capacity to find and keep good tenants, to employ laborers amid the present scarcity, and to retain and make them remunerative when employed. The freedman is a different character from his former slave self, and is to be governed by different methods; and the true art of managing him is cabalism to many who were prosperous planters before the war. Multitudes of these show great despondency, for there have been thousands of failures among them.
But when we examine into this depression, we find that it is but the result of the transition from the formerrégime, and not a deep-seated and fatal decay of the vitals. These are some of the symptoms of assured recovery, noted within the last three or four years: a steady contraction of credit, and widening prevalency of the cash system; growing conviction that the whites must depend upon their own labor more, and less on that of the negroes; augmenting number of land-owners who decline to secure the merchants advancing supplies to their tenants and laborers; a greater acreage devoted to food crops; general advocacy of diversified planting; spreading dissatisfaction with the laws giving large exemptions to debtors. Southern economical affairs, in their sinking, “touched bottom” (to use the forcible expression now in vogue) about the end of 1874.[199]There has been a probable increase since of the mass of distress, as the heat of a summer day increases, by accumulation, for a while after noon, though the sun is imparting less and less. Steady amelioration will soon be general. A new system is slowly developing, and can be plainly discerned among the rubbish of the old. The change from former days most noticeablenow is the multiplication, increased energy, and continually, growing trade of the smaller towns. This is due to the decay of planting, which was a wholesale system, and the coming-in of farming, which is a small trading system using much less concentrated capital. The large moneyed man, for evident economical reasons, buys in commercial centres—in cities—but the small purchaser must needs buy in the nearest market. Allowing for the great increase of farmers, and the control by the negroes of their earnings, there are many thousands more of small buyers in the south than there were before the war, and towns build up to sell to them.
There is another fact, not so noticeable as the rapidly growing local trade, but still more important. A class of new planters, consisting mainly of men too young to have become fixed in the methods and habits of former days, is springing up. They are new yet; but there is, in many parts of the south, at least one who is teaching many watching idlers by deeds and silence. They have remodelled their domestic economy, accommodating it to their smaller incomes and to the uncertainty of household help. They have discarded the outside kitchen, have substituted the cooking stove for the old voracious fireplace, and have brought the well with a pump in it, instead of the old windlass and bucket, under the roof of the dwelling, so that the household duties may be more easily despatched by their wives and children. And they have also remodelled their planting. They diversify their crops and products, raising more grain, and introducing clover and new forage plants. Some abandon entirely the cultivation of the old slave crops, and supply the nearest towns with feed and provisions. These planters of the New south till less land, and strive to improve it; they study the superiority and economy of machinery; they provide themselves with better cotton-gins, often using steam to work them; they have presses which require fewer hands than the old packing-screw; better plows are used; and harrows, reapers, and mowers, which, in many parts of the south, were seldom known before the war, are now common. This little band keeps pace with agricultural progress, as recorded in the journals; theyseek for and find many new sources of profit; they prepare the people for laws fostering the interest of the planter in many particulars; they mold the opinion of their neighborhood; and their ability, skill, and wealth slowly increase. They struggle with a new order of things, having to think for themselves at every turn, and often misstep and fall in the dark, but they pick themselves up, and find the way again. The light of the new experience which they are kindling grows brighter each year, and is beginning to draw some of their neighbors to travel in it.
It is not our object to give a false impression of the influence of the class of farmers last referred to. They are but few, and their efforts are but the beginnings of the happy coming change. Their courage, power, and numbers are manifestly on the increase; and, as there is no other progressive activity in agriculture, and they meet no opposition save the passive resistance of despondency and inaction, it is almost certain that they will lay deep and sure the foundations of the needed renovation of the south. It is their belief that, to make agriculture generally prosperous, and to school the people to habits of thrift and saving, are the first steps, and that manufactories and trades and heterogeneous industries will naturally follow.
They desire northern settlers, to add useful features to agricultural economy, and diversify planting. A few have come, and they are prospering. It seems rational to expect a steady influx of these for many years, bringing capital and methods better suited to the needs of the changed times, raising the value of landed property out of its impeding prostration, and strengthening the industrial force. The climate; the abundance of cheap, cleared land; the long settlement having demonstrated the country to be healthy; the fact that plowing and other important outdoor work can be done on the farms all the winter round; the many railways, the multiplying towns and growing cities; the variety of products, and easy access to market—now that slavery and the animosity of war are gone, and the misrule of the carpetbagger has ended nearly everywhere—these, and many other advantages daily disclosing themselves, excel most of the new States and the Territories in offeringinducements to immigrants; and, in due course of time, a vast number of settlers, both American and foreign, will be added to the population. There are many indications that the immigration of stock-raisers, wool-growers, market-gardeners, orchardists, beekeepers, in fine, small farmers of every kind, adapted to the soil and climate, will soon begin in earnest. When it does, the rebuilding of the south will be rapid.
The coming-in of northern capitalists, to invest in railways, mines, manufactories, and other large moneyed enterprises—most especially to develop the great resources of water-power—may be expected to begin at once, and considerably, upon the close of the centennial year. It seems now that this is the most powerful agency that may be expected to begin immediate work, in introducing the much-needed higher type of industrial organization.
The feelings of the two races toward each other were, for a few years after the war, bitterly hostile. The whites had, all their lives, seen the negroes in slavery, and from their infancy they had heard their preachers defend slavery, not in the abstract, as their phrase was, but in the concrete. The “concrete” meant African slavery, which was justified on the ground that the African was divinely intended in his nature for slavery, which was to him christianization and civilization, so long as he remained a slave; while, the moment he was set free, he would revert to his primitive barbarism. When these God-given slaves were suddenly cut loose from mastership, and the wealth of the capitalist, the portion of the orphan, and the mite of the widow were swept away at once by emancipation, either directly or as a necessary consequence, there was a great shock given to the whites. But when, three years afterwards, a new constituency was created, in which the slaves, just emancipated, outnumbered the whites, in many counties, the storm of passion that burst forth can hardly be described. The whites feared that the old relation was about to be inverted, and that they would be made slaves to the negroes. There was many a deed of violence, and many a poor negro paid his life for a few offensive words.
But a wonderful change has taken place. When the southern States were “reconstructed,” as it is termed, in 1868, a negro school-keeper or preacher, if known to be a republican in politics—as he generally was—was hardly safe anywhere beyond the limits of a city. The negro schools were often broken up by mobs, and sometimes black congregations were attacked at night in their churches and dispersed by armed whites in disguise. Now, the colored children troop securely to school, and the colored churches and their congregations are sternly protected by law everywhere. Seven years ago a colored person could hardly get justice, in even the plainest case, from a jury of the other race. Now, in all of the courts, he has the influence of white men to aid him, and rarely is an unjust verdict rendered against him. He makes better friends of the whites. There is no need for him to legislate or hold office over them; he cannot yet do these things right for himself. He rises, however, and his importance is felt more and more. His labor is a necessity. Learning to use it aright, he will surely win all that he deserves. The healthful sentiment prevails everywhere, at the north as at the south, and with the late slave also, that to force his growth is as unfortunate to him as is misjudged parental assistance, which often keeps adult children from ever becoming self-reliant. The colored race in the south must be educated by the struggle for existence into self-maintenance. This training, like the material recuperation of the south, will require time, with patience and hopefulness.
The negro tends resistlessly to a fixed position in his own class. He does not wish to ride in the same railway-car with fine ladies and gentlemen, nor could you persuade him to send his children to a mixed school to be teased by white scholars. He will not be legislated out of his natural circle, where he feels comfortable, into one where he will be ill at case. He seeks for himself a separate home, school, church, and occupation, in all of which he can, at a distance, imitate the white, to whom he is ever looking up. The statute books may be covered with laws having a different purpose, but they will be as powerless to check the current of separation as prescribed rates of interest areimpotent to keep down usury when money is dear. In a domestic world, a company and circle of his own, the negro will make a start for himself.
But the negro is grossly misunderstood. It is too generally forgotten that he is many centuries below the white in evolution. Slavery has elevated him far above the savagery of Africa, and introduced him to perhaps his only chance of civilization.
His future in the south is a mystery. Many of his best friends do not believe that he can hold all the great advantages that he has gained in the last ten years. The whites have been muzzled by hostile government. They were stunned, while the negro was stimulated, by emancipation. Their natural effort to hold on to theante bellumsystem has also helped the old slave. But, when small and diversified farming is fully developed, and accumulating capital brings in the higher industries, there may be a general need for more efficient and skilled labor than the average negro can supply. While he is forever safe politically against the white, he may not be economically safe.
In noticing the leading features of the New south, we have merely hinted at her rich natural endowments. We have deemed of more importance the character of her people, the new views and principles beginning to assert themselves, the great economical changes following and to follow the abolition of slavery, and the potent effects soon to be wrought by copious immigration. For upon these the future mainly depends.
The south is in a thorough and long transition. Her fields are to be made fertile and to smile beautifully with an infinite variety of products; her provisional labor is to be gradually supplanted by a permanent system; industries, trades, and manufactories are to be founded and everywhere multiplied; she is to have local organizations which will foster more of self-government; her common schools are to be reconstituted and rendered truly serviceable to all; and she has also her part to do in literature, science, and art, as well as in domestic and national politics. We must not be oversanguine in hope of her immediate progress; but we can certainly take courage, when we find that every one who perceptibly influences society by preceptor by example—whether he be prominent like Gordon or Lamar, or only a humble planter leading the fore-row in his fields—is seeking for and finding the right path. These leaders must, in the nature of things, have a larger following every year. In due time, their children and their children’s children will make the south of a piece with the more prosperous portions of our country.
[I intended to incorporate in the foregoing these two passages, but by some inadvertence they were not printed in their several places:
I said of Von Holst:
“Though he does not equal Mommsen’s vivid delineation of the effects of Roman slavery, his work is in grateful contrast with most of the anti- and pro-slavery literature of America, by reason of his freedom from ethical declamation, and his presentation of the real evils of slavery, in the light of social, and especially economical, laws.”
I also said of the negro:
“His flexibility; his receptivity to civilization, so different from the inveterate repugnance of the Indian; his satisfaction and almost complete freedom from discontent, insuring him against any violent change; the probably long necessity for his labor; are all great things in his favor.”]
[To decide what is the right handle to a passage not pointed to by a chapter title, and place it in an index where an average reader will expect it, is often very hard. An alphabetical list of proper names and rememberable words that are in or near passages which one may wish to look for is much more easy to make than a minute subject-index, and it supplies much surer clews. What anIndex Nominumdoes for the Latin or Greek scholar suggests the serviceableness of this Index.]