The Southern South

CHAPTER XV

In its mildest form this system of irresponsible jurisprudence takes the form of notices to leave the country, followed by whipping or other violence less than murderous, if the warning be disregarded. Such a method owes all its force to the belief that it proceeds from an organized and therefore a powerful race of people. Next in seriousness come the race riots of which there were many examples during the Reconstruction era; and occasionally they burst into serious race conflicts, of which half a dozen have occurred in the last decade. The responsibility rests in greater measure on that race which has the habit of calculated and concerted action: reckless Negroes can always make trouble by shooting at the Whites; but the laws, the officers of justice, the militia, the courts, are in the hands of the white people. Since they are always able to protect themselves by their better organization, their command of the police, and the conviction in the minds of both races that the white man will always come out victorious, most troubles that start with the Negroes could easily be dealt with, but for a panic terror of negro risings which harks back to slavery times. It is very easy to stampede Southern communities by such rumors. When, in 1908, six armed Negroes were arrested in Muskogee, Okla., telegrams went all over the country to the effect that a race war was on, and two companies of militia were ordered out; but apparently there was not a glimmer of real trouble. Negroes have repeatedly been driven out of small places. For instance, in August, 1907, in Onancock, on the eastern shore of Virginia, there was a dispute over a bill for a dollar and a quarter which ended with the banishment of a number of Negroes. In the year 1898 there was a similar riot in Wilmington, N. C., and several thousand Negroes were either ejected or left afterwards in terror. The trouble here began in excitement over the elections.

By far the most serious of these occurrences was the so-called race riot at Atlanta, September 22, 1906, caused primarily by that intense hostility to the Negroes which is to be found among town youths; and secondarily by some aggravated crimes on the part of Negroes, and the equally aggravated crime of a newspaper, the Atlanta Evening News, which, by exaggerating the truth and adding lies, inflamed the public mind; on the night before the riot it called upon the people of Atlanta to join a league of men who “will endeavor to prevent the crimes, if possible, but failing, will aid in punishing the criminals.”

The whole affair has been examined by several competent observers, but the essential facts may be taken from the report of a committee of business men of Atlanta, who went into the matter at the time, and who declared that of the persons killed, “There was not a single vagrant. They were earning wages in useful work; ... they were supporting themselves and their families.... Of the wounded, ten are white and sixty colored. Of the dead, two are white and ten are colored.” This was not a riot, but a massacre, for which the Superior Race is responsible; and from every point of view it was damaging to the whole South. It kept back foreign emigrants, it deeply discouraged the best of the Negroes in Atlanta and elsewhere; it gave rein to the passions of the mob. Considering that nobody was killed from among the mob, it seems like a ferocious practical joke that scores of Negroes were arrested and charged with murder, while not a single one of the hundreds of real murderers has ever received the slightest punishment. Who can wonder at the grief and anguish of DuBois’s “Litany of Atlanta!” Every large place is liable to disturbance; Northern cities have had race riots, and are likely to have more. The recent assaults on and murders of Negroes in Springfield, Ohio, and Springfield, Ill., are not different in spirit from those in the South; and though there were plenty of indictments, the leader of the latter mob was acquitted on his trial—a result which was reflected in the famous Cairo mob of 1909.

What progress can be made in breaking up the savage and criminal instincts of the Negro when he sees the same instincts in the Superior Race, which is in a position to do him harm? If the Negroes for any cause should in any Southern city, where they are in the majority, take possession of the streets and hunt white people to death as was done in Atlanta, it would bring on a race war which would devastate the whole South; and the lower race would be severely punished for aspiring to the same fashions in gunshots as its superiors. As a commercial traveler said on the general subject of race relations: “You do not understand how the young fellows in the South feel; when any trouble comes, they want to kill the nigger, whether he has done anything or not.”

The third and most frequent form of race violence is lynching, a practice obscured by a mass of conventional and improbable statements. The subject has been set in its proper light in an impartial and scientific study by Professor Cutler entitled “Lynch Law,” based on a compilation of statistics which come down to 1903. He sweeps away three fourths of the usual statements on the subject, first of all disproving the allegation that lynching is a comparatively recent practice brought about by negro crimes since the Civil War. The term Lynch Law has been traced back to Colonel Charles Lynch, of Virginia, who, in Revolutionary times, presided at rude assemblies which whipped Tories until they were willing to shout “Hurrah for Liberty!” Till about 1830 lynching never meant killing; it was applied only to whippings or to tarring and feathering. In the frontier conditions of the South and West, the habit grew up of killing desperadoes by mob law, as, for instance, the celebrated clearing out of five gamblers at Vicksburg, Miss., in 1835. This process was also applied to some murderers, both Whites and Negroes.

Professor Cutler also disposes of the assertion that the most serious offense for which lynching is applied was unknown previous to emancipation. In 1823, a Negro in Maryland was badly beaten, though not killed, for a supposed attack upon a white woman. In 1827 one was burned at the stake in Alabama for killing a white man. From that time on, lynching of blacks continued in every Southern state—commonly for murder, in a few cases for insurrection, in at least nine ascertained cases previous to the Civil War for violence to white women. It is evident, therefore, that the extremest crime had been sometimes committed, and the extremest punishment exacted by mob violence before the slaves were set free.

The lynching of Negroes was kept up after the war, and carried into a system by the Ku Klux Klan and later White Caps, though usually applied by them for political reasons. About 1880 lynching of Negroes began to increase, nominally because of more frequent rapes of white women; and to this day one often hears it said: “Lynchings never occur except for the one crime.” In the twenty-two years from 1882 to 1903, Cutler has recorded 3,337 cases of lynchings, an average of 150 a year, rising to the number of 235 in 1892. In 1903 there were 125 persons lynched and 125 executed legally. Of these lynchings, 1,997 took place in the Southern states, 363 in the Western states, 105 in the Eastern states, and not a single one in New England. Of the 3,337 lynchings, 1,169 were of Whites (109 for rape) and 2,168 were Negroes, thus completely disposing of the notion that this practice either began because of negro crime, or was continued as a safeguard against it. Of the blacks lynched, 783 were charged with murder; 707 with violence to women; 104 with arson; 101 with theft; and from that on down to such serious crimes as writing a letter, slapping a child, making an insolent reply, giving evidence or refusing to give evidence. A Negro was lynched in 1908 for killing a constable’s horse.

The common notion that rape of white women, the most serious crime committed by Negroes, is on the increase, is also exploded by these statistics, which show that the proportion, which has been as high as one half of all lynchings, has come down to about one fourth. It may be said, therefore, without fear of contradiction that lynching did not originate in offenses by Negroes, is not justified by any increase of crime, and is applied to a multitude of offenses, some of them simply trivial.

Successful attempts have been made to lynch Negroes in Northern states, and in 1903 one was burned at the stake, in Wilmington, Del., which, however, is a former slave state, and the last to adhere to the whipping-post. Lynching has also much diminished in the West, so that it is becoming more and more a Southern crime. In 1903, 75 of the 84 lynchings were in the South, in 1907 the total lynchings had come down to 63, of which 42 were in the four states of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia, and only 2 in the North. The proportion of causes of lynchings remained about the same: murder, 18; violence to women, 12; attempted violence, 11; miscellaneous causes, 22.

The methods of the lynchers are very simple. In 1906 a white man, accused of murdering his brother, on whose case the jury had disagreed, was dragged out of jail and shot. In a great many cases the supposed criminal is hunted down by what is called a “posse”—really a self-appointed body of furious neighbors; and very seldom is there the semblance of investigation. If the offender is lodged in jail, that sanctuary of the law is often invaded. In August, 1906, a mob of three thousand men, incited by a person who afterwards proved to be a released convict, broke open the jail at Salisbury, N. C., in despite of addresses by the mayor and United States senator, took out and killed three supposed negro criminals. Occasionally, when a criminal has been tried, convicted, and is awaiting execution, he is taken out and lynched, for the excitement of seeing the man die, and perhaps from fear that he will be pardoned.

Naturally, in this quick method, mistakes sometimes occur. At Brookhaven, Miss., on January 2, 1908, a Negro was lynched for killing a white man; a few days later they caught the actual murderer, but consoled themselves with the belief that inasmuch as the first Negro was wounded when captured, the presumption was that he must have killed some other white man. A few days later, at Dothan, Ala., a Negro was taken out, hanged, and two hundred shots fired at him, but was found the next morning alive and unwounded, and was allowed to escape. In a recent case at Atlanta a Negro positively identified by the victim of a most serious crime was allowed to go to trial, and was acquitted, because the court believed him innocent, and the woman subsequently identified another man.

How does it come about that these mobs, composed invariably of white men and none others, cannot be put down by the white authorities? The first reason is that there are no rural police in the South to make prompt arrests and protect prisoners; the sheriffs upon whom the custody of such persons depends are chosen by popular election, and usually have no backbone; one of them who had actually lodged his prisoners in jail said that he hated to do it, and didn’t know how he could meet his neighbors. Jailors commonly give up their keys after a little protest; there are few cases where a determined sheriff, armed and ready to do his duty, could not quell a mob; but what can be expected of a sheriff who turns over a prisoner to the mob in order that they may “investigate” his crime? Occasionally a sheriff shows some pluck, and in December, 1906, President Roosevelt singled out for federal appointment a sheriff who had lost his reëlection because he had opposed a mob. Governors are sometimes very weak-kneed; a few years ago the governor of North Carolina delivered up to a mob a colored boy who had had such confidence in the Superior Race as to come to the executive mansion and ask for protection. At Annapolis, in 1908, neither the sheriff, jailor, nor municipal authorities made any effort to prevent the taking out of a prisoner; in Chattanooga, Sheriff Shipp, who permitted a Negro to be taken out of his hands and lynched, though the sheriff had been served by telegram with an order from a justice of the Supreme Court directing him to protect the criminal, was reëlected by a large majority; and apparently did not lose popularity when a year later he was sentenced to ninety days’ confinement for contempt of court.

In all the Southern states the last state resort for keeping the peace is the militia, and there have recently been two scandalous instances where these volunteer soldiers have permitted themselves to be overrun by a mob, giving up their guns without an effort to fire a shot. In one of these cases it was recorded that “No effort was made to hurt any of the soldiers however, as it was plain to the crowd that they had gained their point.” At Brookhaven, Miss., in 1908, the officer commanding the militia excused himself because the sheriff had not asked him to order his men to fire. These brave soldiers, these high-toned Southern gentlemen, these military heroes, called out for the special purpose of protecting a prisoner, would not draw a trigger!

The militia of course are not cowards, they are simply sympathizers with the mob; and throughout the South, in the press, and from the lips of many otherwise high-minded people, lynching is freely justified. Witness a coroner’s jury in Charlotte, N. C.: “We, the ... jury to inquire into the cause of the death of Tom Jones, find that he came to his death by gunshot wounds, inflicted by parties unknown to the jury, obviously by an outraged public acting in defense of their homes, wives, daughters, and children. In view of the enormity of the crime committed by said Tom Jones, ... we think they would have been recreant to their duty as good citizens had they acted otherwise.” The rector of St. Luke’s Church, Jacksonville, says: “I write as an upholder of law and order; as one who deprecates and denounces mob law; but I write as one who holds that law is but the will of the majority in a democracy, and that will is that every time a negro criminally assaults, or attempts to assault, a white woman, he shall be dealt with by mob law, which is law after all. Only I would say, let that mob be certain, ‘beyond a reasonable doubt,’ that they have the right man.” Listen to the Atlanta Georgian: “Some good citizens will say they are shocked, and deplore these evil conditions, and the demoralization they are going to produce, and all that, but they really ain’t shocked, although they think they are, and under proper provocation they would be lynchers themselves.” Even the late D. H. Chamberlain, once Reconstruction governor of South Carolina, says: “Practically I come very near to saying that I do not blame the South for resorting to lynching for this crime,” and Benjamin R. Tillman, Senator of the United States, has publicly declared: “I will lead a mob to lynch a man at any time who has attacked a woman, whether he be white or black,” and that it would probably be necessary “to send some more niggers to hell.”

The standard published reason for this acquiescence in lynching is that the usual course of law is inadequate; people point to the legal delays and the technicalities of the courts, courts organized by white men, held by white judges, influenced by white counsel, before a white jury. They claim that lynching is a rude sort of primitive justice, “an ultimate sanction” which is simply a speedier form of law, though mobs are notoriously easily confused as to persons and circumstances. They consider lynching necessary in order to prevent the taking of testimony in open court in cases of rape, a necessity which any legislature could obviate. They plead that lynching is the only penalty which will keep the Negro in bounds, although there are such strings of lynchings as show conclusively that the publicity given to sickening details makes lynching simply a breeder of crime. In the little town of Brookhaven, Miss., there were two lynchings in the first eight weeks of 1908. The Southern defenders of lynching set forth the solemnity of this form of execution, closing their eyes to the fearful barbarities which have accompanied many cases and are likely to occur any day.

The most cogent reason for the practice of lynching is that it gives an opportunity for the exercise of a deep-seated race hostility. Most of the murders and other crimes which lead to lynchings happen where Whites and Negroes are living close together. A lynching is an opportunity for the most furious and brutal passions of which humanity is capable, under cover of a moral duty, and without the slightest danger of a later accountability. Spectators go to a lynching, as perhaps they went to the witch trial in Salem, or a treason case under Lord Jeffreys, to get a shuddering sensation. Kindred of the injured ones are invited to come to the front with hot irons and gimlets; special trains have repeatedly been furnished, on request to the railroads, in order to carry parties of lynchers; in several instances the burning at the stake of Negroes has been advertised by telegraph, and special trains have been put on to bring spectators. After the auto da fé is over, white people scramble in the ashes for bits of bone. Within a few months a black woman was burned at the stake by a mob, though everybody knew she had committed absolutely no offense except to accompany her husband when he ran away after committing a murder. These are not incidents of every lynching, they are not condoned by those Southerners who disapprove of lynching; but when you have turned a tiger loose and given him a taste of blood, you are not entitled to say that you have no responsibility for innocent people whom he may devour.

The whole fabric of defense of lynching, which in some cases and for some crimes is justified by the large majority of educated white men and women in the South, may be exploded into fragments by a single test. If lynching under any circumstances is for the good of the community, why not legalize it? Why does not some state come out of the ranks of modern civilized communities in which public courts replace private vengeance and torture has ceased to be a part of judicial process, and enact that in every town the adult men shall constitute a tribunal which—on the suggestion that somebody has committed a crime—shall apprehend the suspect, and, with the hastiest examination of the facts, shall forthwith condemn him to be hanged, shot, or burned, and shall constitute themselves executioners, after due notice to the railroads to bring school children in special trains to witness the proceedings, and with the right to distribute the bones and ashes to their friends as souvenirs? Then the whole proceeding may be inscribed on the public records, so that later generations may see the care that has been taken to prevent lawlessness.

It would be unjust to leave this subject as though Southern people spent their lives in breathing out threatenings and slaughter. With all the conversation about homicide, all the columns of lurid dispatches about lynchings, in which again white people pen the dispatches and white editors vivify them, the everyday atmosphere seems peaceful enough; the traveler, the ordinary business and professional man, feels no sense of insecurity. Still one wonders just what was in the mind of the Alabamian who, after driving a Yankee a hundred miles through a wild part of his state, prepared to return by another way, but remarked: “I wouldn’t be afraid to drive right back over the same road that we came.” The chance that a respectable man in the South, who attends to his own business, will be shot, is very much greater than in any other civilized country; but powerful influences are at work to bring about better things. There are some indications that the Negroes will be compelled to give up carrying weapons, and then, perhaps, some of the Whites can also be disarmed. Sensible people deplore the insecurity of life. As for race violence, nobody who knows the South can doubt that the feeling of hatred and hostility to the Negro as a Negro, perhaps to the white man as a white man, is sharper than ever before; but that is the feeling of those members of both races who have no responsibility, of the idle town loafer, of the assistant plantation manager who could make more money if his hands would work better. On the other side stand the upbuilders of the commonwealth, the educators, the professional classes, the plantation owners, the capitalists, most of whom wish the Negro well, oppose violence and injustice, and are willing to coöperate with the best element of the Negroes in freeing the South from its two worst enemies—the black brute, and the white amateur executioner.

CHAPTER XVI

In every discussion of Southern affairs an important thing to reckon with is a fixed belief that the South is the most prosperous part of the country, which fits in with the conviction that it has long surpassed all other parts of the world in civilization, in military ardor, and in the power to rise out of the sufferings of a conquered people. This belief is hard to reconcile with the grim fact that the South under slavery was the poorest section of the country. Visitors just before the outbreak of the Civil War, such as Olmsted, and Russell, the correspondent of the London Times, were struck by the poverty of the South, which had few cities, short and poor railroads, scanty manufacturing establishments, and in general small accumulations of the buildings and especially of the stocks of goods which are the readiest evidences of wealth. Some rich families there were with capital not only to buy slaves, but to build railroads and cities; and when the Civil War broke out there was in service a quantity of independent banking capital. A delusion of great wealth was created by the listing as taxable property of slaves to the amount of at least two thousand millions. Although the legal right to appropriate the proceeds of the labor of the Negroes was transferable, it could go only to some of the 300,000 slaveholding families; and no bill of sale or tax list could make wealth out of this control of capacity to produce in the future; or if it was wealth, then the North with its larger laboring population of far larger productivity was entitled to add five or six thousand millions to its estimate of wealth. The South was made richer and not poorer by unloosing the bonds of the negro laborer.

All the world knows that from 1865 to 1880 the South was comparatively a poor community, not because of the loss of slaves, but from the exhaustion of capital by the Civil War, and the disturbance of productive labor. The opportunity for a fair comparative test did not come till the region settled down again; and then the output in proportion to the working population remained decidedly small when compared with European countries, and still smaller when compared with the Northern states.

During the last quarter century, however, the South has experienced the greatest prosperity that it has ever known. Its progress since 1883 has been such that an editorial in a Southern newspaper says: “Leaving her mines and her mills out of the question, the great South is rich in the products of her fields alone—richer than all the empires of history. She is self-contained, and what is more, she is self-possessed, and she has set her face resolutely against the things which will hurt her.” Since that statement was printed the material conditions of the South have improved, population has steadily increased; and the resources of the section have more than kept pace with it, manufactures have wonderfully developed, industry has been diversified, railroads and trolley lines are extended by Southern capital; the production of coal has been enormously increased; the utilization of the abundant water powers for electrical purposes is beginning; most of the older cities have been enlarged; and new centers of population have sprung up. The traveler by the main highways from Washington through Atlanta to New Orleans, or from Cincinnati through Chattanooga and Memphis to Galveston, sees a section abounding in prosperity.

What are the sources of this wealth? First of all comes the soil; beginning with the black lands in western Georgia and running through the lower Mississippi valley to the black lands of Texas, lies one of the richest bodies of land in the world, comparable with the plains of Eastern China. It is a soil incredibly rich and, once cleared of trees, easy of cultivation; blessed with a large rainfall and abundance of streams. This belt, in which the greater part of the Southern cotton is raised, is the foundation of the prosperity of the South, which for that reason is likely to continue permanently a farming community.

These rich soils are not to be had for the asking, and fully improved lands, especially the few plantations that are undrained, bring prices up to $100 an acre or more, but uncleared land is still very cheap, and away from the Black Belt may be had at low prices, especially in the piney woods regions, which when fertilized are productive and profitable.

Among the most valuable Southern lands are those under culture for fruits and “truck.” This is one of the few methods of intensive agriculture practiced in the South. Success in such farming depends on climate, accessibility to market, and skill. A belt of land in Eastern Texas which has good railroad communication with the North, has suddenly become one of the most prosperous parts of the South because its season is several weeks earlier than that of most of its competitors. Truck farming bids fair to change the conditions of the Sea Islands, of the Carolinas and of Georgia, since they are in easy and swift communication with the great Northern markets.

Scattered everywhere throughout the South are enormous areas of swamp land, partly in the deltas of the rivers, and partly caught between the hills. Under various acts of Congress 8,000,000 acres of so-called “swamp lands” were given to the states including much rich bottom land. The South is now making a demand upon the Federal Government to assume toward those lands a responsibility akin to that for the irrigated tracts in the Far West, and it seems likely that either a Federal or State system will undertake the reclamation of large tracts. The legislature of Florida, for instance, has authorized the levy of a drainage tax for the drainage of the everglades, where millions of acres could be made available. At present all the Federal projects under way, though they involve 2,000,000 acres and $70,000,000 of expenditure, are in the Far West and on the Pacific Slope.

The fundamental fact that the South is mainly agricultural is brought out by the statistics of occupations in 1900. The greater part of the population of both white and black races is on the soil. By the census of 1900, in sixteen states counted Southern, thirty-eight per cent of the population were bread-winners. Out of the total population of 23,000,000 there were 8,100,000 persons engaged in gainful occupations, of whom 814,000 were in large cities and the remaining 7,300,000 in small cities and the country. The rapid growth of towns and small cities is due to the prosperity of the open country; and hence the large city is less important and less likely to absorb the rural population than is the case in the North.

Except the Pacific Northwest no part of the Union is so rich in timber as the South. Until about ten years ago, enormous areas of timber land were so far from railroads that nobody could think of lumbering them; now that the hills of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and the Carolinas are penetrated with main lines, now that branches are pushed out and that logging trams stretch still farther, few spots lie more than fifteen miles from rails. Before sawmills arrive, men can earn fair day wages at cutting railway ties and hauling them as much as fifteen miles, so that the poor land-owners have one unfailing cash resource. Up to the financial depression of 1907, lumbering of every kind was very prosperous; new mills were under construction and a large amount of labor found employment. In 1908 many concerns were shut down, and planters were rejoiced because Negroes were coming back to them for employment. The check to lumbering is only temporary. The South still furnishes more than one third of the total product of the country; and Louisiana comes next to the state of Washington in the amount of annual cut. But, as a native puts it, “Timber is a’gittin’ gone”; and in ten years most of the Southern states will approach the condition of Michigan and Wisconsin in the decline of that industry. Nevertheless, one may still ride or drive for days through splendid pine forests that have hardly seen an ax. In most places when the timber is cut, farming comes in, and that is the cause of the extraordinary prosperity of the “piney woods” belt, through southern Georgia and Alabama; where the farmer of a few years ago was making a scanty living, he is now able to sell his timber, to clear the land, and to begin cotton raising on a profitable scale.

The South is conscious of the wastage of its timber resources, for the cut is now advancing far up on the highest slopes of the mountain ranges; hence the Southern members of Congress have joined with New Englanders in supporting a bill for an Appalachian Forest Reserve, which would set apart considerable areas at intervals from Mount Washington in New Hampshire to Mount Mitchell in North Carolina, to be administered by the federal government in about the same fashion as the similar reserves in the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Nevada and Cascade Ranges. This movement is greatly strengthened by the manufacturers, who believe that the water powers require a conservation of the upper forests.

Growing trees are available not only for lumber and railroad ties, but for turpentine, and any two of these processes, or even all three, may be going on at the same time. On a tract of pine land, no matter where, usually the first process is to box the trees for turpentine, and the men in the business sometimes buy the land outright, but oftener simply pay a royalty. For this privilege the old-fashioned price was a cent a tree, which would be about $40 or $50 for a 160-acre tract; but lately farmers have received as much as a thousand dollars for the turpentine on their farms. The box or cut in the trunk can be enlarged upward every year for five years; then if the tree is left untouched for six or seven years it may be back-boxed on the other side and will yield again for five or six years; so that it takes about twenty years to exhaust the turpentine from a given area. The flow from the incision, collected in a hollow cut out of the wood, or by a better modern method of spigots and cups, not unlike that used for maple trees, is periodically collected and carried to the still, where the turpentine is distilled over, and the heavier residue makes the commercial resin. At the prices of the last few years this “naval stores” industry has been profitable and millions of trees are still being tapped.

In mining, the South has no such position as in timber. The coal product is respectable and growing—in 1906 nearly 40 million tons, which was a ninth of the national product. Iron ore is also plentiful; and lead and zinc are abundant in Missouri. Of the output of more than a hundred millions of precious metals, not half a million can be traced to the South—and there are no valuable copper mines.

“Varsification, that’s what we want,” was the dictum of the sage of a country store in the South; and diversification the South has certainly attained. The annual money value of manufactured products has now become considerably greater than of the agricultural products, though of course the crops are the raw materials to many manufactures. In 1880 the manufactured products of the South were under 500 million dollars, or one eleventh of the total of the United States; in 1900 they had risen to 1,500 millions, or about one ninth of the total; and in 1905 they were 2,200 millions—a seventh of the total.

The most striking advance in manufactures has been in iron, the production of pig rising from 1,600,000 tons in 1888 to 3,100,000 in 1906, a seventh of the national total; a prosperity due in part to the close proximity of excellent ore and coal. But the production in other parts of the Union has increased even more rapidly, so that the proportion of iron made in the South is smaller than at any time in twenty years. One difficulty of the manufacture is that it requires besides the crude labor of the Negroes a large amount of skilled labor, which cannot be furnished by the Poor Whites or the Mountain Whites.

Another large manufacture is that of tobacco, which is grown in quantities in many of the Southern states, particularly in North Carolina and Kentucky, the great centers of the tobacco industry being Richmond, Durham (North Carolina), and Louisville. The tobacco factories are one of the few forms of manufacture in which Negroes are employed for anything except crude raw labor.

In distilled spirits the South produces nearly a third of the whole annual output—the greater part in Kentucky; the Lower South does not provide for the slaking of its own thirst; and of the milder alcoholic drinks consumed in the whole country, the South furnishes only about a tenth.

This success in manufactures is due in part to cheap power, for both fuel and water power are abundant and easily available; and since the South requires little fuel for domestic purposes, it has the larger store for its factories and railroads. The South has also become a large producer of petroleum, phosphates, and sulphur, and in its bays and adjacent coasts has the material for a valuable fishing industry.

For carrying on these various lines of business, the South is indebted in part to Northern and foreign capital; but very large enterprises are supported entirely by the accumulations of Southern capitalists; and the savings of the region are turned backward through a good banking system into renewed investments. The South before the Civil War was probably better supplied with small banks lending to farmers than in any other part of the Union, and in the last ten years a similar system has been again worked out. There are nearly 1,500 national banks in the South, of which two thirds have been founded since 1900; and in addition, there are numerous joint stock and private banks. That the business is sound is shown by the fact that practically all the Southern banks weathered the crisis of 1907, which was more severe there than in the North. In a very remote rural parish of Louisiana, in a small and seedy county seat, is a little bank opened in November, 1907, which, within two months, had accumulated $65,000 of deposits, and was still enlarging. Through these widely distributed banks capital is supplied to small industries and to opportunities of profit which would otherwise be neglected.

One needs actually to pass over the face of the South in order to realize how much progress has been made in transportation facilities. That section has always been alive to the necessity of getting its crops to market, and Charleston has for a century been at work on communications with the interior; and the Pedee Canal, the first commercial canal in the United States, was constructed in 1795 to bring the crops to that port. The navigable reaches of the Southern rivers up to the “fall line” were early utilized for light-draught steamers, of which some still survive. Turnpike roads were also built into the interior of the state; and the railroad from Charleston to Hamburg—140 miles—completed in the thirties, was the longest continuous line of railroad then in existence. Down to the Civil War Charleston had an ambitious scheme for a direct line across the mountains to Cincinnati. The effort to keep transportation up to the times for various reasons was not successful; settlements were sparse, exports other than cotton scanty, distances great, free capital limited.

In the last ten years the South has seen a wonderful advance in railroad transportation. States like Louisiana and Georgia are fairly gridironed with railroads, and new ones building all the time: indeed, in the “Delta” of Mississippi a railroad can live on local business if it has a belt of its own twelve miles wide.

Nevertheless, the present railroad system in the South, comprising about 80,000 miles, has been mostly built since 1880. This system includes several lines from the Middle West to the seaboard, so that Baltimore, the James River ports, New Orleans, and Galveston are enriched by commerce passing through their ports to regions outside the Southern states. Nevertheless, as will be seen in the next chapter, this means that the great distributing centers in the Union are outside the limits of the South.

The progress of the country is measured also by the great improvement in accommodation for travelers. The testimony is general that down to about 1885 there were, outside half a dozen cities, no really good hotels to be found in the South; now you may travel from end to end of the region and find clean, comfortable, and modern accommodations in almost every stopping place. The demands of the drummers are in part responsible for this gratifying state of things.

The country roads do not share in the advance. Nominally the South has over 600,000 miles of public highway, but little of it has even been improved. Some of the old pikes have gone to ruin, others are still kept up by tolls; but in many regions which have been well settled and thriving for a century and a half there is a dearth of bridges, and in bad weather the roads are almost impassable. So far, the difficulty is not much relieved by trolley lines. The cities are well supplied and some of them have a superior system; but few parts of the South have such a string of populous places as will justify interurban lines, exceptions being the Richmond-Norfolk and Dallas-Fort Worth systems. The trolley lines have been much developed by a Northern syndicate which, under the name of Stone & Webster, has made a business of buying or building and operating electric plants, many of them with elaborate water power; and the current is distributed for power, light, and transportation. Stone & Webster’s lines can be found all over the Union, as in Minneapolis and in the state of Washington, as well as in the South. The capital of the trolley roads in 1906 was 3,765 millions, or a fifth of the total trolley investment in the United States.

At the best points of contact between rail and water transportation great port enterprises are springing up. Galveston is the only port along the whole coast of Texas with easily obtainable deep water, and the Government has spent great sums in improving it, while the city has made the most gallant effort to rebuild and fortify itself against the invasion of the sea which a few years ago almost destroyed it. New Orleans feels itself the natural port of the lower Mississippi valley, and the Eads system of jetties keeps the mouth of the river open, though there is not water enough to float the great steamers that come into the large Atlantic ports, and the wharf charges are heavy; the actual commerce of New Orleans—exports and imports together—was in 1907 $28,000,000 less than that of Galveston. Inasmuch as New Orleans is a hundred miles from the open sea, an effort has been made to provide capital to build a gulf port about fifty miles to the eastward, but so far little progress has been made. The city of New Orleans has shown unusual enterprise in building a public belt line railroad ten miles long, intended to connect with all the roads entering the city; and the city thus steps alongside Cincinnati as the owner of a veritable municipal steam railroad. Between these ports there is unceasing rivalry, and the depth of water on the bar outside Galveston, or at the mouth of the Mississippi, is as interesting to the Southern business man as the bulletin of a football game is to a Northerner. Texas will prove to you by science, logic, and prophecy that no deep-draught vessel can get into New Orleans, or pay the awful port charges after it arrives; the Louisianian is confident that the next typhoon will silt up those Texan lagoon harbors which have no great river behind to scour them out.

Mobile, which is a place with increasing foreign commerce, can never hope to lead deep water to its present wharves, but about twenty-two miles below the city is an opportunity to bring large ships nearly inshore, and that is likely to be the future port of Mobile. Pensacola is the special favorite of the Louisville & Nashville Railroad, but seems to have no advantages which will bring it ahead of its neighbor Mobile. Of the lower Atlantic ports, Fernandina, Brunswick, Savannah, Charleston, and Wilmington are all limited in the depth of water, and several of them require difficult river navigation. The deep-water ports of Baltimore on the Chesapeake, and Norfolk, Portsmouth, and Newport News on the lower James, are on the extreme borders of the South and depend for their prosperity chiefly on Western commerce.

The transportation business of the South, as in other parts of the Union, has drifted into the hands of a comparatively few large corporations. The Southern Railroad, the Atlantic Coast Line, the Seaboard Air Line, and the Louisville & Nashville include nearly all the railroads between Virginia and Mississippi. The Baltimore & Ohio, Chesapeake & Ohio, Norfolk & Western, and the new Virginia Railroad connect the tide water of Virginia and North Carolina with the West. The Louisville & Nashville, Illinois Central, the Missouri Pacific and Queen and Crescent roads stretch southward from the Middle Western states to the Gulf. In Texas three or four railway systems compete for the business between the upper trans-Mississippi country and the Gulf, and there is a bewildering complex of branch lines. The net result is that the South outside the mountains is gridironed with railways. The areas more than ten miles from a railroad line in the South are now comparatively small. For this reason may be expected a more rapid development of the resources and wealth of that section in the next ten years than in the last decade.

CHAPTER XVII

Wealth the South possesses—large wealth, growing wealth, greater wealth than that section has ever before approached. So agreeable is this state of things that Southern writers are inclined not only to set forth their prosperity but to claim that theirs is the most prosperous part of the whole country and is soon to become the richest. As Edmonds puts it in his “Facts about the South”: “Against the poverty, the inexperience, the discredit and doubt at home and abroad of ourselves and our section of 1880, the South, thrilled with energy and hope, stands to-day recognized by the world as that section which of all others in this country or elsewhere has the greatest potentialities for the creation of wealth and the profitable employment of its people.” The Southern statements of the poverty of the South from 1865 to 1880 are more easily verified. The tracks of armies outside Virginia and parts of Tennessee were narrow; but at the end of the war the South had exhausted all its movable capital; the banks were broken; the state and Confederate bonds worthless; the railroads ruined; the cities disconsolate. And the labor system was, for a time, much disturbed, though never disrupted. As Henry Watterson, of Kentucky, puts it: “The South! The South! It is no problem at all. The whole story of the South may be summed up in a sentence: She was rich, she lost her riches; she was poor and in bondage; she was set free, and she had to go to work; she went to work, and she is richer than ever before. You see it was a ground-hog case. The soil was here, the climate was here, but along with them was a curse, the curse of slavery.”

The immense increase of wealth and productivity since 1880 is equally unquestionable. When it comes to the claim that it is the most prosperous part of the world, it cannot be accepted offhand. The fact that the South is well off does not prove that it is better off than its neighbors; the wealth and prosperity of the South are always limited by the character of its labor. Calculation of profits, adding of bank balances, cutting of coupons, have to some degree drawn men’s minds away from the race question; but on the other hand the demand for labor and the losses of dividends or of opportunities to make money because the labor is inefficient are ever renewed causes of exasperation. At all times the South is subject to reverses like those of other regions. The crisis of 1907 hit that section hard by cutting down the demand for timber, minerals, iron, and other staples, and was one of the factors in a decline in cotton which touched the pocket nerve of the South; and the railroads felt the loss of business. Still, most Southern enterprises weathered the storm, and in 1909 the tide of prosperity is mounting again.

If it be true that the South is the most prosperous part of the world, a disagreeable responsibility falls upon somebody for having less than the best schools, libraries, buildings, roads, and other appliances of civilization; if it be not true, there must be some defect in the social or industrial system which out of such splendid materials produces less than a fair proportion of the world’s wealth. To be sure a section or a state might lag behind in production and yet forge ahead in education, in the harmony of social classes, in respect for law, in good order. Switzerland is not a rich country, but it is an advanced country. The claims of superior productiveness can with difficulty be tested. The relative status of the two sections in intellectual and governmental ways has been examined in earlier chapters and the South cannot claim supremacy there. A similar comparison shall now be made as to the relative production and accumulation of the two sections.

A criterion of wealth much relied upon by Southern writers is the movement of commerce. We are told that two fifths of the inward and outward movement of foreign trade passes through Southern ports. The truth is that in 1907 that figure was $883,000,000 as against $2,432,000,000 in all Northern Atlantic, Lake and Pacific ports. The bulk of this Southern business, however, is in exports—$742,000,000—a third of the total. Not a tenth of all the imports came into Southern ports, and three fourths of that through the three ports of Baltimore, Galveston, and New Orleans, from all which a part goes into non-Southern states. The explanation is that through the Southern ports pour the staples, but that the return cargoes, especially of manufactures, go to Northern ports, even though part of it is later distributed to the South. A second correction is due to the fact that about $536,000,000 of the exports goes through the five ports of Baltimore, Newport News, Norfolk and Portsmouth, New Orleans, and Galveston, all of which are entrepots for immense trade originating beyond the limits of the South. For instance, New Orleans and Galveston together shipped 24 million bushels of the 147 millions of wheat exports—practically not a Southern crop. Even in such an unreckoned increment of income as the federal pension lists, the South is less forward than the North, which drew 113 millions a year against 25 millions in the whole South and 11 millions in the seceded states—most of that to colored soldiers.

The relative wealth of the two sections is best measured not by foreign trade but by internal production and by public income and expenditure, calculated on a per-capita basis. Of course conditions vary greatly from state to state; in Alabama there is steady farm work most of the year, while in North Dakota the winter is a time of comparative leisure; California uses agricultural machinery, South Carolina depends chiefly on hand tools; Wyoming is so young that it has had little time to accumulate capital, Tennessee has large accumulations. It would be unfair to compare Arkansas with Connecticut, or Illinois with Florida, on a strictly per-capita basis. The only way to equalize conditions for a fair comparison is to take groups of states and set them against other groups of equivalent population and of similar interests, so that local errors may neutralize each other.

As a basis for such a comparison of resources, three sets of tables have been made up. The first sets apart the group of eleven seceding states with 17,000,000 people (West Virginia not included) as being typically Southern; and places against them a group of agricultural states extending from Indiana to Oklahoma, also containing 17,000,000 people. The second tables include the whole South—viz., the fifteen former slaveholding states (excluding West Virginia), together with the District of Columbia, including a population of about 28,000,000 people; to which is opposed the Middle West and Pacific states from Indiana to the Coast, together with Vermont and New Hampshire, which are added to make up a full 28,000,000. To such comparisons the objection has been made that it averages the confessedly inferior rural negro population with the picked immigrants from the East and abroad in the Northwest. The objection is a concession of the lower average productive capacity of the South; but in order to compare the white elements of the two sections by themselves, a third set of tables compares the whole South containing 17,900,000 whites and 8,000,000 blacks against a group of Northern agricultural states with a population of 18,000,000 whites and 234,000 blacks.

The materials for such comparisons are various. Every traveler has his impressions of the relative prosperity of South and North based on what he sees of stations, public and private buildings, cities and stocks of goods, and on the appearance of farms and work-people throughout the country. For precise indications, the population of the states is estimated year by year in the Bulletins of the Census Bureau; estimates of accumulated wealth are made every few years by the Department of Commerce; returns of annual crops by the Department of Agriculture; banking statistics by the Treasury Department. The annual Statistical Abstract prints summaries of manufactures and other industry, and on these topics the Census Bureau issues valuable bulletins. For tax valuations there is no general official publication, but the World Almanac collects every year from state auditors a statement of assessments. Most of these sources must be accepted as simply a series of liberal estimates, but the factors of error are likely to be much the same in the Northern and the Southern communities, and at least they furnish the basis for a comparison in round numbers. The tax assessments are significant, because they are revised from year to year, and the methods of assessment are not very different in the various parts of the country and are likely to err by giving too low a value or omitting property, so that comparisons from tax returns are relatively more favorable to the poorer than to the richer communities.

I. The Eleven Seceding States.

Tabulation based upon the principles stated above will be found in the Appendix to this volume; and a study of those tables reveals some interesting comparisons between the eleven communities which formed the Southern Confederacy and nineteen Western communities, the two groups each having in 1900 about nineteen million inhabitants. The assessed taxable valuation of the Southern group in 1904 was 4,200 millions; in the Northern group it was 9,700 millions, or more than double. Four years later the valuations were 5,200 millions as against 13,800 millions. Since tax assessments are subject to many variations, perhaps a fairer measure of sectional wealth is banking transactions. The bank deposits of the National groups of the Southern group were, in 1906, 700 millions, in the Northern group, 2,400 millions. Bank clearings in the same year were respectively 4 billions and 8½ billions.

All the eleven seceding states together in 1906 valued their real estate at 2,900 millions, their personal at 1,800 millions, total 4,700 millions. A corresponding Northern group (in which the richest state is Indiana), counts its real estate worth 7,700 millions, its personalty, 2,700 millions, a total of 10,400 millions. That is, the Northern land and buildings are counted nearly thrice as valuable, and personalty about a half more valuable, though everybody knows that there is a vast deal of untaxed personalty in the North.

The miles of railroad in the Southern group were 55,000; in the Western, 94,000; the total value of agricultural products in the South was estimated at 1,060 millions, in the North at 1,945 millions. Even the cotton crop of the eleven states, worth 550 millions, was overbalanced by the Northern corn crop which brought 595 millions. The manufactures in the South for 1905 were 1,267 millions; in the Northwest 2,932 millions. The Southern group expended for schools 26 millions, the corresponding Northern states expended 91 millions. The value of Southern school property was 43 millions, of the Northern group it was 216 millions; the average annual expenditure per pupil in daily attendance in the South was $9.75; in the North about $28.45. For public benevolent institutions the South expended in 1903 net $3,000,000, the North $7,000,000; the Southern group had 1,070,000 illiterate Whites, of whom 76,000 were foreign born; the Northern group had 207,000 besides 389,000 illiterate foreigners. In the indices of accumulated property the comparison is about the same; the Southern deposits in all banks were, in 1906, 701 million dollars, the Northern 2,439 millions. In manufactures the Northern group, with a capital of 2,240 million dollars and 903,000 hands, produced 2,932 millions; against Southern capital of 1,140 millions, employing 659,000 persons and producing 1,267 millions.

The comparison of valuations brings out one unexpected result, namely, that several of the Southern states have actually less taxable property now than they had fifty years ago. This does not mean that they are poorer because they have lost their slaves. Leaving slaves out of account, in 1860 South Carolina had a valuation of $326,000,000; in 1906 of $250,000,000; in Mississippi the valuation of real estate in 1860 was $158,000,000; in 1906, with a population more than twice as great, it was $131,000,000; in the rich state of Georgia the valuation in 1860, deducting slaves, was $432,000,000 against $578,000,000 in 1906. The Southern people feel justly proud of the fact that the valuations of the eleven former members of the Confederacy between 1902 and 1906 increased by 962 millions, from a total of 3,799 millions to 4,761 millions, that their annual manufactures increased by 450 millions; from 819 millions in 1900 to 1,267 millions in 1905.

This increase in industry is so striking that the Southern states suppose they are unique in that respect; but the corresponding Northern group of equal population in the same periods gained 4,000 millions in valuations and 705 millions in annual manufactures. These figures may be checked off in various ways. Take, for instance, the annual value of crops; the South is very certain that with its cotton, its corn and other crops together it is far in advance of the North. In the Southern states which were in secession (excepting Texas) the value of farms and stock in 1900 was 2,100 millions, the value in an equivalent Northwestern group was 7,800 millions. The total farm product in the Lower South was 1,360 millions, in the Northern group of equal population 2,390 millions. If Texas be compared with a group of Pacific states, of equivalent population, the Texan farms are worth 960 millions, the Far Western 1,400 millions.

The Lower South has been saving money of late years and is proud of its growing bank deposits, from 168 millions in 1896 to 701 millions in 1906, an increase of 450 per cent; but the equivalent Northern population has increased from 716 millions to 2,439 millions. The Lower South in 1905 had 917 national banks with deposits of 308 millions and assets of 568 millions; the similar Northern states had deposits of 834 millions and assets of 1,418 millions. Let us see whether the South makes up this disparity by its state banks. In 1906 the Lower South, including Texas, had deposits of 700 millions in all banks; and total bank clearings of about 3,920 millions; the equivalent Northern group had deposits of over 2,400 millions, with total clearings of about 8,500 millions. Measured, therefore, by accumulated savings, by bank capital, by clearings, the South is poorer than the least wealthy section of the North. 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.

II. The Whole South

It might fairly be said that it is unreasonable to compare the former seceding states which have gone through the disruption of their labor by Civil War with new Western communities in which there has been no destruction of capital. Accordingly the second set of tables compares the whole South—fifteen states and the District of Columbia—with a Northwestern and Pacific Coast group of equivalent population. Since a part of the contention of Southern writers is that the South was richer than the North before the Civil War and is only returning to her rightful place of supremacy, it is worth while to examine the supposed wealth of the South in 1860. The assessed valuation of the Lower South was then 4,330 millions, which a Southern statistician attempts to show was 750 millions more than the combined wealth of New England and the Middle states; out of this sum, 3,100 millions was for personal property, including about 1,200 millions for slaves; but either the slaves should be left out or a capitalized value of Northern laborers should be added on a slavemarket basis.

Passing by the figures of 1870, which are discredited by all statisticians, in 1880 the total property valued for taxes in the Lower South was 1,880 millions, in the whole South was 3,420 millions; while in similar blocks of Northwestern population they were respectively 2,712 millions and 4,640 millions. This is a splendid record for a people who had given their all in a civil war and who had to build up nearly every dollar of their personal property from the bottom. The land, of course, was always there, but was worth much less per acre in 1880 than similar good land in 1860.

How far has this rate of progress been continued since 1880 as shown by the inexorable method of comparing groups of Southern states with groups of Northwestern states of equal population? The tax valuation shows about the same proportion, so far as can be ascertained, to real values in one section as in the other. The local differences of mode of assessment when averaged would probably not disturb the result by more then ten per cent. The whole South (16 communities) as compared with a Northern group of the same number of people in 1907 showed 8.5 billions of assessed property against 13.7 billions in the North. It may therefore be set down as proven that the taxable wealth of the lower agricultural South is less than half that of similar agricultural communities in the North; so that while mining and manufacturing states like Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri have about the same wealth as similar Northern communities, the South as a whole has not one half the wealth. Take the former slaveholding states all together, including such a rich commonwealth as Missouri, and the farm value in the whole region in 1900, with 28 millions of people, was under 5,000 millions; while 28 million people in the West and Northwest owned farms to the amount of about 11,000 millions, or more than double. The total Southern crops in 1899, the last year in which the totals are obtainable, were worth 1,360 millions, the Northern crops counted up to 2,390 millions. The value of the Southern corn crop in 1905 was 416 million dollars; the equivalent population in the Northwest raised 601 million dollars’ worth of corn. The whole South raises about 32 million dollars’ worth of oats; the North raises 201 millions. The Southern potato crop is worth 19 millions; the Northern, 76 millions. Southern hay counts up to 66 millions and Northern to 258 millions. Even in tobacco, the North furnishes 7 million dollars’ worth against 35 million dollars in the South. Cotton is the one crop that is exclusively Southern, and the crop of 1905, the year that we are considering, including the seed, was worth 632 million dollars. The Southern group had 127,000 teachers, school property of 84 millions, and total school revenue of 45 millions, against competing Northern figures of 199,000, of 293 millions, and of 120 millions. It is difficult in these figures to find justification for the notion that the South as an agricultural region is richer than the North, or is likely ever to rival it.

The actual figures for the present conditions of the South are sufficiently attractive. During the four years 1904-1907 the big crops and high price of cotton gave to the South such prosperity as it had never known before, the total output being nearly fifty million bales, which sold, in cash, for about 2,700 million dollars. This happy result was reflected in every city and every county of the rural South, for old debts were paid, new houses built, land doubled or even trebled in value, and a spirit of hopefulness pervaded the whole population. A buoyancy is reflected in the press, and particularly in the Manufacturers’ Record of Baltimore, the leading Southern trade paper. “The South,” says the Record, “is now throughout the world recognized as the predestined center of the earth, based on greater natural advantages that can be found anywhere else on the globe.” Or as another Southern paper put it some years ago: “In 1860 the Richest Part of the Country—In 1870 the Poorest—In 1880 Signs of Improvement—In 1889 regaining the position of 1860.”

Nobody can be more pleased with Southern prosperity than New Englanders, who have long since found out that the richer other sections of the country become, the more business Northerners have with those sections; if there are directions in which the South is making more rapid progress than the North, it should be candidly acknowledged. Nobody can visit thriving cities like Richmond, Atlanta, Birmingham, Memphis, New Orleans, and the galaxy of future centers of population in Texas, without hearty pleasure in the increasing evidences of civilization, but it is very unevenly distributed. Off the main lines of transportation the towns are still ill-built and unprogressive, and the greater part of the area of the South is no farther along than states like Illinois and Minnesota were in the late sixties.

It is, however, a ticklish thing to make these comparisons, because many Southerners, and particularly Southern newspapers, consider it an attack upon the South to intimate that it is still much improvable. As the Macon Telegraph said a few months ago: “After all what does it matter that a Harvard professor should consider us lazy and not even excuse us on the ground that we are victims of the hookworm? We still have the right to go on expanding the figures relating to our remarkable industrial upbuilding, until we have driven New England out of the business of cotton manufacturing.”

The best measure of comparative wealth would be a statistical statement of accumulations. On this subject there are many wild guesses. The Manufacturers’ Record in January, 1907, makes claims for the South which deserve especial examination: “England’s wealth, according to the London Express, is increasing at the rate of $7,000,000 a week. That is less than one seventh of the rate of the increase of wealth in the South. The increase in the true value of Southern wealth in the past twelve months was $2,690,000,000, or about $7,300,000 for every day in the year, including Sundays and holidays. Not only is the speed of increase in the South so much greater than that in England, but the South possesses resources, agricultural and mineral, that make certain in the future even a much greater rate of increase than England.”

Except poor old poverty-stricken New England, all the world will welcome this prodigious accretion of wealth. Think how many opera tickets you might buy for two and a half billions of dollars! The only attempt at exact figures of our national wealth is the estimate of the Statistical Abstract, published about every four years, and not based on any exact figures. Such as it is, it is relied upon by the Southern writers; and it sets forth that in the four years from 1900 to 1904 the total national wealth increased by less than 20 billions, an average of 5 billions a year; it is hardly likely that a third of the population, which in other respects is below the Northwest, was contributing more than half this annual gain. The only ground for the assertion seems to be an alleged increase in the Southern tax valuation from 7 billions in 1906 to 8 billions in 1907; assuming that the average proportion of valuation to actual value is forty per cent, you have your two billions and a half.

The first comment on this statement, which is selected as typical of the broad claims which float through the Southern press, is that the figures furnished the World Almanac for 1908 by the state authorities show that the Southern valuations in 1906 were 7,813 millions, and in 1907, 8,474 millions; so that the increase of assessments is 650 millions instead of 1,000 millions. In the second place, the estimated true value by the Statistical Abstract in 1904 was about 20 billions for the whole South; and on a basis of comparison of the valuations of 1904 and 1907, the increase in the whole three years would be at best only two and a half billions. In the next place, two and a half billions a year means that every man, woman, and child, black and white, is on the average laying up a hundred dollars, which is an amazing rate of saving.

Having thus proven that the material progress of the South is exaggerated, the next logical step is to show that perhaps it has foundation, inasmuch as the equivalent 28,000,000 people in the Northwest in 1905 are gaining wealth still more rapidly, having increased their estimated “true value” from 44 billions in 1904 to at least 50 billions in 1907. The South, which supposes itself to be getting rich faster than any other part of the globe, has in the last few years actually added less to its wealth than a similar Northwest agricultural region. In the year 1906-7, while the South added 650 millions to its tax duplicate, the North added 850 millions. If, as may be the case, the 650 millions of valuation meant 1,700 millions of new wealth, the Northwest was adding at least 2,300 millions.

In all this array of figures there is no criticism of the South, no denial that it is more prosperous than it has ever been before; no desire to minimize its splendid achievements which are helping on the solution of the race problem; but it is essential that the Southern people should measure themselves squarely with their neighbors. The single state of New York, with less than a fifth the population of the South, has as much property as the whole South (leaving out Missouri), and adds every year to its wealth as much as is added by the whole South (leaving out Texas). The South is really at about the same place where the Northwest was thirty years ago; it is developing its latent resources; building its cities; perfecting its communications; starting new industries; and in much less than thirty years it will come to the point that the Northwest has now reached; but that section is still driving ahead more rapidly, and thirty years hence may be proportionately richer than it is to-day. If the South is saving four millions a day, the Northwest is saving five millions; and the Middle and New England states, the other third of the country, are saving eight or ten millions a day. If the South is to range up alongside the Northwest, to say nothing of the Northeast, it must increase its production still faster, and the only way to accomplish that purpose is by improving the average industry, thrift, and output of its people.

III. Comparative Efficiency of White Populations North and South

Some Southern statisticians, while admitting these indubitable figures, contend that the South is improving at a much more rapid rate, and hence must in no long time overtake the North; but it must be remembered that in most of these fields of comparison the North not only shows from two to two and a half times the output, but that its annual or decennial increase is absolutely larger than in the South; that is, that the annual amount which the South must add to its present output, in order to catch up with the North, is larger than it was a year ago, or at any previous time. A conventional explanation of this state of things is that the Negroes constitute a large part of the Southern working force, and are much below the average of Americans in their productive output; but when comparisons are made between similar aggregations of white population, results are not very different. If the whole South (including the District of Columbia) be compared, not with a block of about 28,000,000 Northern people, but with a block of about 18,000,000 white people corresponding to the 17,900,000 Whites in the South (both figures for 1900), the results are still startling; although the South has all the advantage of the labor and production of 8,000,000 Negroes besides the Whites. The debts of the Southern communities in 1902 were 374 million dollars; of the Northern, 301 millions. The total taxes raised in 1902 were: South, 116 millions; North, 202 millions. The estimated Southern wealth in 1900 was 16.7 billions; in 1904, 19.8 billions, an increase of 3.1 billions; in the North the corresponding figures are 25.8 billions and 31.4 billions, an increase of 5.6 billions. The Southern assessed valuation of 1907 was 8.5 billions, of the Northern group 10.7 billions.

What makes these differences? It certainly is not because the South is deficient in natural resources, in fertility, in climate, in access to the world’s markets, in the enterprise of its business men. What is the reason for this discrepancy between the resources and the output of the South? Some of the Southern observers insist that the North is made rich through its manufactures. In order to eliminate that condition the comparisons in this chapter are all with Western and Northwestern states (Vermont being included simply to equalize the numbers); some of these states, as the Dakotas and Oregon, are very similar in their conditions to the purely agricultural and timber states of the South; in other states, such as Indiana and Wisconsin, there are large manufactures, which, however, are no more significant in proportion than those of Maryland and Missouri. The Northwestern states have more manufactures than the Southern, but they have more of everything, which indicates industry and prosperity. The obvious reason is that laborers in the South, both white and colored, are inferior in average productive power to Northern laborers; and the obvious remedy is to use every effort to bring up the intelligence, and the value to the community of every element of the population.