The Southern states since the war, 1870-71 / by Robert Somers

THE
SOUTHERN STATES SINCE THE WAR.

THE
SOUTHERN STATES
EGBERT SOMEES.
WITH MAP.
rob |Ufo MACMILLAN AND CO.
1871.

LONDON : E. CLAY, SONS, AND TAYLOIi, PRINTERS,
BREAD STREET HILL.

PREFACE.
THERE is little to say by way of preface to this book. To explain how it came to be written would lead only to personal details of no interest to the reader. Its defects cannot be extenuated nor its merits enhanced by any statement in this form; and a Preface might as well be wholly dispensed with but for a tribute of thanks which it is alike incumbent and pleasing to pay.
To John Pender, of Manchester, who warmly encouraged my design from first to last, and gave me letters of introduction that proved most valuable to Eobert Dalglish, M.P. for Glasgow, who readily obtained from the Foreign Office a letter commending Her Majestys Consuls to render me such assistance as they could properly afford and to all in the United States* too numerous to name, from whom through these and other : relationships much information was received I owe the most cordial acknowledgments. JSTor can J omit to express my ^admiration of the general civility of the American people, from whom, during a sojournrof months among them with all the curiosity of an >inquirer, not a word escaped in my hearing unwelcome to a*stranger or a British subject to hear.

vi

PREPACK

This Inquiry has been accomplished without connection with any Association, mercantile or political The Author alone is responsible for the manner in which it has been performed, and the conclusions to which it comes.
Among the many writers who visit the United States with somewhat similar purposes of observation, one so seldom directs his steps to the South that I am fain to hope there may be found in this circumstance alone an ample warrant of publication.

CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I. Introduction : General Subjects of Inquiry ........ Page I
CHAPTER II. Mount Vernon.--W dngton's life as a Planter.--The Woods of Virginia.--
Aspect of the ' .ntry from Aoquia Creek to Richmond.--Agricultural Divisions of V .nia--Their general Characteristics .... Page 7
CHAPTER III. City of Eichmond--Some features of its Trade and Industry.--Tone of
Politics.--The General Assembly.--Testimony "borne of the Freedmen by Employers.--Bate of Wages.--Dearness of Articles of Consumption, and its Causes.--Population of the State and City.--Schools for the Negro Children. .................. Page 14
CHAPTER IV. -The Land Question in Virginia,--Estates and Farms for Sale without Pur"" cliasersT^-Effects of War and Revolution.--The Annual State Fair.--
Abundant natural Fertilisers. -- New Industries. -- Regularity of the Markets for Tobacco and other Agricultural Produce.--Railways.--Desir ableness of Virginia to Middle-class Settlers ...... Page 21
CHAPTER V. The Pine Forests of North Carolina.--Extended Cultivation of Cotton.--Pay
ment of Negroes by Shares in the Crop.--Small comparative Cost of Rail ways.--The Port of Wilrnington. -- Exports of North Carolina since the War.--Partial compensation of lower Prices by higher Exchange Value of the Dollar.--Wilrnington, Charlotte, and Rutherford Railway.--Governor Holden versus the White People.--Great increase of Negroes in Wilrning ton.--Rate of Wages .............. Page 28
CHAPTER VI. j-.Charleston--its Ruin in the War--Marks of gradual Restoration.--
ry,--Great Fire of 1862.--Charleston account of the Losses of the Southern States.-- Loud Complaints of Misgovernment and Financial Jobbery.--Majority of Negroes in the Legislature.--Atmosphere of Poli tical Suspicion.--Efforts of the Whites to regain a share of Representa tion.--The Reform Union ............. Page 37

viii

CONTENTS.

CHAPTER VII.
Exports of Cotton from Charleston before and since the War.--Opening made for New York Speculators.--Decrease of Banking Capital in South Carolina.--A Fortunate Development--The Phosphate Deposits.--Their Extent and Characteristics--Manufacture into Manures.--Great activity of the New Trade.--Eice Cultivation likely to diminish.-- The Environs of Charleston .................. Page 44

CHAPTER VIII.
The Negro's "best Friends."--Sinister complexion of Politics.--Kindly Social Influences at work.-- State of Education.--System of Medical Relief in Charleston.--The Health Statistics.--Proportionate Mortality of Whites and Blacks.--Salubrity of the Climate.--Freedmen's Savings Banks ................... Page, 50

CHAPTER IX.
The Capital of South Carolina.--The State Pair a failure,--Usury.--Governor Scott on the Position of Affairs.--The Blue Ridge Railway project.--Mr. Treasurer Parker on Taxation and Negro Free Labour.--Political Opinions of the Farmers.--Arguments for and against Payment of Negro Farmlabourers by Wages or Share of the Crops.--Railway Freight.--Cottonbagging and the Price of Cotton .......... Page. 56

CHAPTER X.
Entry into Georgia.--The Town of Augusta--its Buildings--its Cotton Market.--Revolution in Agriculture.--Importance of selected Cotton Seed.--Large amount of Cotton grown by Small Farmers.--Opinion on the Negroes.--Augusta Cotton Factory.--Education Act.--Observance of the Sabbath. ................ Page, 62
CHAPTER XI.
The Country from Augusta to Savannah.--Alleged Poorness of the Soil.-- Population of the State.--Competition betwixt the Cotton Lands of Georgia and the Mississippi ''Bottom.'''--Probable effects of Good Farming.-- Want of Stock and Grass.--The Central Railroad Company . . Page &.

CHAPTER XII.
The " Forest City."--Abundant demand for Labour.--Great increase o: Cotton Exports.--Small proportion of Imports. -- Disadvantages t< Savannah of indirect Trade.--Rate of Wages. -- Relative purchasrn; power of Money in England and the United States.--Conclusions of thi British Consul.--State of Public Health.--Mortality of the Negroes.Banking in Savannah.--Sylvan features of the City .... Page 7

CHAPTER XIII.
The Railway System of Georgia.--Convenience of the Cars.--The " Captain; or Conductors.--Safety of Single-rail Lines.--Greater fertility of tl Soil in the Interior.--Want of facilities of Branch Traffic.--Dilato Cotton-picking.--General Characteristics of the various Divisions Georgia ...................

CONTENTS.
CHAPTER XIV.
Central position of Macon.--Command, of the Bailway System.--Great development of Eailway Enterprise.--Success of the Old Lines.--State Endorsement of Eailway Bonds.---The system of Railway Financing.-- Does State Endorsement add to the Security of a First-Mortgage Bond ? --Macon Cotton Manufactures ........ j. .. Page, 80
CHAPTER XV.
of Atlanta from the ashes of the War.--The H. I. urnball House.--Interview with a " Drummer" of the latest Patents.-- The "Asses' Bridge."--The Hotel System.--Population of Atlanta.-- Eemoval of the State Capital.--Origin of the Kimball House Specula tion.--New Executive Mansion.--An Education Meeting.--Costume.-- Peaches. -- The Granite Mountain.--Bound Cartersville.--Need of a Geological Survey of Northern Georgia ........ Page 93
^
CHAPTER XVI. ^
Progress of ChattaT ^a.--Ascent of Lookout Mountain.--Geographical and Geological Fe7 es.--Traces of the War.--The Boiling Mills.--Banks' Puddling Apj. .atus.--Cost of producing Coal and Ireii Ore.--Visit to Mineral Properties.--Agricultural qualities of the Land.--Stream of Emigrants at Chattanooga.--Navigation of the Tennessee . . Page 103
CHAPTER XVII.
The " Valley of the Tennessee "--its first Settlement by White Plantersits Physical Features.-- Present Agricultural Condition.--Competition betwixt the Old and New Cotton Lands of "the West."--Marks of Desolation.--Want of Labour.--Movements of the Negroes.--Division of Estates.--Symptoms of Eevival.--Progress of the Small Hill Farmers. Page 111
CHAPTER XVIII,
Eoutine on a Cotton Plantation.--The Surroundings.--Planting and Mar riage.--A Bide "round" 2,500 acres.--Disposal of the Soil.--Organization of Labour in the Cotton-fields.--Cotton-picking.--Ginning and Pressing. --Need of White Labour.--Live Stock on a Plantation.--The Hogs.-- "Killing Day."--Pauperism and Free Labour.--Shallow Ploughing.-- The "Mussel Shoals" of the Tennessee . ....... Page 118
CHAPTER XIX.
The Town that Jones built.--Eiot in a Liquor Saloon.--What the Planters complain of.--Pay and Privileges of the Negroes.--The Plantation Bell.-- The doctrine of Equality run to Seed.--Planting discussions in Jonesboro'. --Bad Whisky and other commodities.--Need of Tariff Beforni. Page 12G
CHAPTER XX.
Town of Florence.--Traits of the War.--New Bridge over the Tennessee.-- Factory.--Abundance of Water-power.--Tariff Duties on
Machinery.--Possibility of manufacturing Yarn in the South for Export.

CONTENTS.
--Cypress Greek.--Natural Beauties and Characteristics of its Ravines.-- The Dripping Springs.--The Plantations.--Opening for Dairies.--Severe spell of Frost ................ Page 134
CHAPTER XX r.
Corinth in Mississippi.--The Soil and Surroundings.--A Cotton Manufac turing Scheme.--The Country southward on the Mobile and Ohio Rail road.--The " Prairie Land.":--Okolona.--A large Plantation on the " Prairie."--Preference of the Negroes for their old Masters.--The Share and Wages Systems.--The late Robert Gordon ..... Page, 142
CHAPTER XXII.
Stoppage on the Railway.--" Doctoring " the Engine.--A Word of Advice to Railway Companies.--The Town of Meridian.--Supposed Traces of Coal. --The "Ku-Klux-Klan"--its Rise, Progress, and Decline.--Difficulty of finding Teachers of Negro Schools ......... Page 149
CHAPTER, XXIII.
From Meridian to Eutaw.--Mr. Stanton's failure to pay the Interest due on the A. and C. Bonds.--The Alabama " Prairie " Land.--Bridge over the Tombigbee.--Tuscaloosa.--Decline of Learning in the University.-- River System of Alabama.--The Warrior and Cahawba Coal and Iron Fields.--The Chinese on the Railway Works ...... Page 157
CHAPTER XXIV.
The Vieksburg and Montgomery Railway.--Demopolis.--Despair of the Planters for Labour. -- Negro Women. -- Selma -- its Cotton Mart.-- Reform of the Municipality.--Claims of the Town to be a Railway Centre. --Free School System in Alabama.--The Negroes and the School or Poll Tax.--Distribution of the School Money.--National Banking.--Patent " Cotton Transplanter "............. Page, 165
CHAPTER XXV.
Progress of Trade and Population in Montgomery.--Opening of the Mineral Districts by Railways.--Existing Ironworks.--Coal and Iron Seams in the Cahawba Basin.--The Red Mountain--its Deposits of Hematite.-- Proximity of the Warrior and Cahawba Coal-fields.--Recent Survey of Mr. Tait, F.G.S.--Analyses of Alabama Coal and Iron Ores.--Agricultural Qualities of the Mineral Region.--Probable Geological History.--Relative Price of Montevallo Coal and Pennsylvania Hay ..... Page 172
CHAPTER XXVI.
Night Journey to Mobile. -- The Timber Region.--Tensaw River.--^Emigrants.-- Obstacles to Shipping in the Bay.--Extension of Railway Connections.-- Exports of Cotton and Lumber.--Increase of the Trade in Coffee.--Want of Capital.--Banks.--Paper Manufacture.--Cotton Oil Mills--Lesson to Planters.--The late Elections.--Health and Amusements . . Page 180

CONTENTS.

CHAPTER XXVII.

The New Road from Mobile to New Orleans.--Singular character of the Country.--The "Iron Horse" crossing Bays, Lakes, and' Lagoons.-- The "Rigolets."--First Impressions of New Orleans.--Goods on the Levee.--The Custom House.--The Streets and Avenues.--The Shell Road. --Weather in January.--Vegetation.--Sunday in a City of "All Nations."
Page, 188

CHAPTER XXVIII.

PopulatioriojL-5rw--OTlearis..T--Natural Resources.

__

'.--Cotton.--Sugar.--Tobacco.--Rice and Grain"--

Disability.--^Disproportion of Imports to Exports.--Great Decline of

Imports of Coffee and Internal Trade ........ Page 196

CHAPTER XXIX.
Grievances.--Review of the Tariff--its baneful Effects on the Producing Classes.--Deficiency of Mercantile and Banking Capital.--The " National Banks."--Severity of Taxation.--Importance of a Revision of the Fiscal System of the United States ............ Page. 204'

CHAPTER XXX. Trip in the Bradish Johnson down River.--The Sugar Plantations. --River
Traffic.--Passengers.--The Scenery ......... Page 214

CHAPTER XXXI.
Woodlands, Point Celeste, and Magnolia Plantations.--The Sugar-Mills.-- Sugar-refining Apparatus. --Culture of the Sugar-Canes.--Fowler's Steam Ploughs.--Thomson's Road and Field Steamer.--Large Fixed Capital of Sugar Estates in Louisiana.--Chinese Labour ...... Page 220

CHAPTER XXXII.
Matters of general interest in New Orleans.--The " Negro Legislature."-- The Negroes and the Poll or School Tax.--More about Sugar-growing and Sugar-making -- Cost of Louisianian Sugar- making Machinery. -- Comparison with Prices of Glasgow Machinery for Sugar Plantations.-- The " Sugar Concretor."--Probable Causes of "backward state of Sugar Culture in Louisiana ..'.........,.. Page 226

CHAPTER XXXIII.
Mineral Traces in Louisiana. --Discovery of Rock Salt.--Rich Deposit of Crystalline Sulphur.--Ramie.--Ladies' Costume in New Orleans.--Tea.-- Health Statistics of New Orleans.--Carrolton.--Stroll on the Bank of the Mississippi.--Fine Art " Remains."--Floral Development in February. Page 233
CHAPTER XXXIV.
Incidents at Summit.--Want of Towns in the Interior of Mississippi.--Mr. Solomon's Account of his Commercial Relations with the Planters and Negroes.--The Law of Lien.--Usury.--The Free-trade Question.--Some Characteristics of the Dram and Drug Shops ...... Page 239

CONTENTS.
CHAPTER XXXV.
The Capital of Mississippi.--Interview with Governor Alcorn.--Average Product of Cotton per Acre in the "Mississippi Bottom."--Vital and
. Economic Statistics.--Comparison of White and Negro Births and Mar riages.--Value of Farms in 1860 and 1870.--Proposed Payment of the Old State Debt ................ Page 247
CHAPTER XXXVI. The "Mississippi Bottom."--Plantation at Austin.--Obstacles to Culti
vation ................... Page 255
CHAPTER XXXVII. Progress of Memphis.--Eeceipts of Cotton.--Buying on Spinners' Orders.--
Through Bills of Lading.--Import of Foreign Goods at Memphis.--Politics and Kailways of Arkansas.--Extensive Biver Communications.--Definition of the " Cotton Belt."--Banking and Insurance Capital.--Jefferson Davis. --The Southern Presbyterians and the Free Church of Scotland.
Page 258
CHAPTER XXXVIII. West and Middle Tennessee.--Backwardness of Eural Labour.--Proportion of
Corn and Cotton Crops.--Spring like " Glorious Summer."--Necessity of an approved Rotation of Crops in the Cotton States.--Similarity of Cotton and Turnip Husbandry.--City of Nashville.--Disorder of the State Finances.--Farming in Tennessee.--Fallacy in the question of Free v. Slave Labour.--Conclusions as to the Prospects of Cotton Culture.
Page 266
CHAPTER XXXIX.
Concluding Eemarks ............... Page 275
INDEX .................... Page 285

THE
SOUTHERN STATES SINCE THE WAR,
CHAPTER I.
Introduction : General Subjects of Inquiry.
[WASHINGTON--October 23.]
I PURPOSE, in a not too hurried tour of the Southern States, to give some account of their condition under the new social and political system introduced by the civil war. I shalLendeayour to collect such notes of the progress of their cotton plantations, of thlfstate of their labouring population and of their industrial enterprises, as may help the reader to a safe opinion of their means and prospects of development. It will no doubt also fall to me to give such information of their natural resources, railways, and other public works, as may tend to show to what extent they are fitted to become a profitable field of enlarged immigration, settlement, and foreign trade. It is a prevailing idea on both sides of the Atlantic that the Southern States are likely to make vast progress in the next ten or twenty years, and it must be matter of common interest to see, by a near though brief view, how far this idea is supported by their actual circumstances.
The production of cotton is the chief material interest in the Southern States. It is the supply of cotton wool they have yielded, and may be made to yield, which gives them so powerful a hold on the attention of the manufacturing interests of the world. But while I shall make close observation of the state and prospects of cotton culture in the South, I must guard this inquiry against all supposed intention of trying to affect the current price of cotton, or of making guesses at the crop of the coming year or the next. Such questions are discussed in a thousand quarters, and from every possible point of view, with a keenness and intelligence that no single individual could hope
l. My inquiry will be one of a more general, though at same time, perhaps, of a somewhat deeper and more perient character. The desirable end is that theSouthern

INTRODUCTION.

[CH. i.

States, in due course, should produce two, five, or tenfold the quantity of cotton they have yielded any year since the war. It is probable that only through a reduction of price can any such expansion take place. A few cents per Ib. may decide whether the looms of Lancashire are to be half idle, to work full time, or to be increased in power and number with a rapidity that would speedily overtake the largest crops which America and other cotton regions of the world might produce. But whatever the possible demand for cotton-cloth may be were it only cheap enough, and whatever the manufacturing resources of Great Britain, it is clear that the growers of cotton will not pro duce increased crops save on terms which, in the whole circum stances of their agriculture, will yield them a satisfactory profit, and that the two interests thus involved can only move forward in harmony and in step with each other. The question of a larger supply and lower price of cotton resolves itself practically into a question of greater skill of culture, greater efficiency and economy of labour, better handling in all respects of the whole agricultural resources of farms and plantations, whereby the necessary profit may accrue from the larger quantity of cotton produced at the same cost. This is a problem which has been solved satisfactorily in nearly every department of industry. It is a problem which the Southern planters have to solve, not only in competition with one another, but in competition with other cotton-growing countries which now occupy a much higher posi tion in cotton supply than before the American civil war, and which, though not so^capable in some respects as the Southern States, have peculiar advantages of their own--such as cheap labour and notions of profit quite un-American--that have kept them steadily for years, and may keep them permanently, as effective competitors in this branch of production.
It may be well, while on this point, to give the relative proportions of cotton supply in Great Britain during the three years following the close of the American War:--

COTTON IMPORTED INTO THE UNITED KINGDOM IN BALES. 1

1866.
1,162,740
407,650 Egypt .......... 167,450 Turkey, &c. ........ 32,770
111,830
1,206,660 Madras .......... 294,370
346,730 China and Japan ....... 18,840

1867.
1,225,690
437,210 181,170
16,990 129,020 1,095,440
' 163,400
249,910 1,940

1868.
1,262,060
636,807 188,689
12,758 100,651 1,038,925
243,949
169,198 --

3,749,040 3,500,770 3,660,127 Exports from U.S. to all countries 1,548,000 1,553,000 1,656,000

John Peader and Co.'s " Statistics of Trade."

CH. i.]

GENERAL SUBJECTS OF INQUIRY.

3

So that the total exports of cotton to all countries from the United States have for these years been less than half the cotton of all countries imported into the United Kingdom; while of the British imports of cotton the United States have contributed less than India alone, after making allowance for their somewhat heavier bales.
It is important to note in connection with these facts that Great Britain retains for her own factories but a moiety of the cotton she imports from her possessions in India: while she now re-exports a smaller proportion of her shipments from the United States than in former times. Thus, of the total Indian exports in 1868 the Continent took 720,000 bales, or 46'73 per cent., and Great Britain retained 821,000 bales, or 53'27 per cent. In the same year Great Britain exported only 197,000 bales of American cotton. Whether the cotton of India be worked up in France and Germany and other Continental countries, or in Great Britain, it enters equally into competition with the cotton of the Southern States. But the fact that Great Britain parts so largely with the cotton of India in favour of American proves the identity of interest which subsists betwixt her manufacturers and the growers of the United States. If cotton is to be the chief staple of the South, and if by its extended production she is not only to restore her prosperity but to develop her vast resources to an extent hitherto unknown, it is only through the instrumentality of the cotton manufactures of England and Scotland that the process can be carried out. The cotton trade of the United Kingdom leans to American cotton. It is the United Kingdom which has its hand on the fabrics, the markets, and all the mechanical, artistic, and commercial resources by which the produce of the Southern plantations can find a profitable outlet. The British merchants and manufacturers say they can take an indefinitely increasing quantity of American cotton, but it must be produced at softening rather than hardening prices, since every substantial advance in value at once checks in all the markets of the world the profitable consumption of cotton goods. If the South cannot meet these conditions, the progress of British manufacturing industry will be so far retarded. If the British manufacturers cannot extend their operations at the price necessary to produce the raw material, the progress of the South, so far as it depends on the growth of cotton, will be retarded also. Such is the equal disability which the question of cotton supply imposes on both sides, and there does not appear to be the slightest room for any ' misunderstanding.
There are questions at issue in the Southern States worthy of investigation, which, however closely bound up in the com-
B2

4

INTRODUCTION.

[CH. i.

mercial problem, have also a moral significance of the highest human interest The emancipation of four millions of negro slaves is in itself a revolution of which the world has seldom seen the like, either in magnitude, in suddenness and com pleteness, in the desolation of war amidst which it was accomplished, or in the influence of its ulterior results on the future of mankind. In contemplating such an event one raised above commercial interests to the borders of the divine and the religious in human destiny. To observe the effect of such a total change of personal standing and social rela tions on the character, the industry, the sense of responsibility, and general habits of the negroes--how well or ill they adapt themselves to their new conditions of life, and whether they are likely, as free people, to rise in dignity and prosperity, or to stumble downward into deeper physical and social degradation --must be acknowledged to be matter of more than merely com mercial interest. Yet, in such a line of inquiry there is obviously the key to the immediate future industrial condition of the Southern States. In its economic bearings, it is the question of the relative value and efficiency of slave and free labour in the South, with negroes as the labourers, so often contested in theory, but now put to the test of practical experiment. The five years that have elapsed since the war cannot be expected to have solved this question, worth so many years of valiant trial and endea vour. But it may be discovered whether, so far, there be signs of that success of free negro labour so much to be desired, or of that failure so often feared. Nor can it be much less interesting to see how the white population of the South, more especially the owners of slave property, are bearing themselves under the new system. They were doubly crushed--crushed by a war in which they engaged with reckless bravery, and crushed under the fall of a system of servile labour with which their wealth arid fortune, the cultivation and existence of their estates, were so closely intertwined that to destroy it seemed to be utter ruin. The mettle of the Southern people is thus put to a severe trial. If the well-doing and well-being of the emancipated negroes would be gratifying to every benevolent feeling of the human heart, a course of fresh energy and enterprise on the part of the white population of the South would be honourable to the courage and resource of the superior race. Are they throwing off all lethargy and despondency, and exerting themselves with hearty resolve and enlightened effort to build up the prosperity of the country on a new and more stable basis ? What improve ments have been made in the system of cultivation, and in the means of economising labour and fertilising the soil, to compen sate the lost profits of slavery? And to what extent does Federal legislation aid and encourage, or hinder and discourage,

CH. i.]

GENERAL SUBJECTS OF INqUIRY.

5

the freed labourers and the owners and occupiers of land in the South to accomplish the great work which they are called upon to do ? If taxation be necessarily heavy, is it levied with equity and justice 1 Does the tariff give fair play to the agricultural industry of the South and West, or, in being made more consis tent with the just interests of these great sections of the Union, may it become more consistent with the interests of the whole American people ? ' I am indicating the questions which must occupy any investigation of the condition of the Southern States, and do not know that I have nearly exhausted them. It would be vain to think that a definite and conclusive reply could be given to so many queries ; but as they have all been more or less keenly canvassed by an extremely intelligent and energetic population, and are amenable to facts, it may be possible to throw some light on a subject so deeply interesting. It is mani fest that great caution will have to be observed against too hasty conclusions. I shall have, in the first instance, to describe simply, and to collect facts and corroborations, and allow evi dence to accumulate, before attempting to arrive at results.
It must be said that, so far as the production of cotton goes, the South is giving proof of gradual recovery from the exhaus tion and disorganization of the war. It may be wrong to rest on cotton as the sole test of Southern prosperity. Yet, as cotton is the chief product of the South, it is a good index, and it may be well, as evidence of the progress made under free labour and of what had "been done under the slave system, to put on record here the crops in the following years :--

185S-9 1859-60 1860-1

UNDER SLATE LABOUR.l
.......... .......... ..........

Bales.
4,019,000 4,861,000 3,850,000

UNDER FREE LABOUR. 2
1866 ........... 1,900,000 1867 ........... 2,340,000 1868 ........... 2,380,000

The crop of 1869 shows a further increase, and has been stated unofficially to have been fully 3,000,000 bales; while the crop of this season promises a much larger annual increase than any year since the war. On the other hand, there are some unfavour able symptoms in the Southern States. There is not only much political agitation, which may be sound and unavoidable enough, but there are signs of disaffection to Federal rule, and occasional outbreaks of violence, engendered apparently by fierce party

1 Report of B. F. Nourse, United States Commissioner to Paris Exposi-r

tion of 1867.

a Department of Agriculture, Report, 1868.

6

INTRODUCTION.

.[CH. I.

hatred, that may be of small moment in presence of returning prosperity, but, if spreading or long-continued, cannot fail to react unfavourably on the material interests of the country, and require to be taken into account.
It may be added in these introductory remarks that I did not leave home without recommendations and facilities of access to the best information in the principal Southern States ; and that I have also cordially to acknowledge the courtesy of the heads of various departments of the Administration at Washington. With respect to the census returns, I must own a certain degree of disappointment. A census of the whole United States is taken, by Act of Congress, at the close of every decennial period. Many of the States also take a decennial census within their respective bounds, and so order it in point of time as to make it fall in the middle term of the decennial period of the Union census. Had this outline been filled up, there would have been a return of the population of the United States in 1860, when the war was just beginning; again in 1865, when the war had just closed; and now in 1870, when five years of peace have followed five years of sanguinary intestine strife. But a census is not taken, probably cannot be taken, in the United States, even in time of peace, with the swiftness and accuracy of the smaller though more densely peopled areas of European countries. There are consequently both blanks and delays in the census returns of the United States, and I may not derive so much advantage from this source as I anticipated.
Still, incidental advantages and disadvantages apart, the period at least is not ill-chosen for the purpose I have set be fore me; and, considering the magnitude of the subject and its numerous ramifications, the utmost any writer can well hope or promise to do, is, while keeping a steady eye on the more im portant practical questions at issue, to convey such knowledge of the country and such means of judgment as may be gathered only by personal travel and observation.

CHAPTER II.
Mount Vernon.--Washington's life as a Planter.--The Woods of Virginia.-- ' Aspect of the Country from Aoquia Creek to Richmond.--Agricultural Divisions of Virginia.--Their general Characteristics.
[RICHMOND. VA.-- Oct. 26 to Nov. 3.]
BEFORE proceeding from the American capital southward into Virginia, I, could not deny myself the pleasure of a visit to the ancient homestead of "Washington, whose historic figure and noble character are ever present to the mind at the quiet city in which the Eepublic has not unwisely established its seat of government. The pilgrimage to Mount Vernon is easily accomplished. A sail down the Potomac is almost as delightful as a sail on one of the Highland lochs of the Clyde. The scenery, indeed, is neither bold nor picturesque, but is well de nned, and in many of its features beautiful. The shore on either side is traced by a line of yellowish sandy bluff's, not very high, but wavy in their outline, and clothed to the water edge with young forest wood, arrayed at this season in all the colours of the rainbow; with a background of rolling upland, on which there is the same crown of forest timber, sombre in the distance, and stretches of corn and pasture visible in the middle space, over which a brown and moorish aspect rests. I had noticed a similar air as of wilderness on more level tracts, all the way from New York to Philadelphia. The stalks of Indian corn in autumn are either gathered up in large sheaves, or left standing gaunt-like where they grew, shorn only of their richly-laden ears, with no white stubble, but only the red-brown till beneath. On pasture land the wild grasses have sprung far up in autumn, and over shadowed the more tender blade, which, after the scorching heat, has begun to grow green again under the rains and temperate sun of a second summer. With Maryland on one shore of the Potomac and Virginia on the other, both of which' States have passed in a few years from slave culture to war a>nd devastation, and not infrequent desertion of lands, the darkening effect of such natural causes can only be increased. But as the great white-coated steamboat, drawing only two or three feet of water, glides rapidly on, there is no want of objects made memor-

8

MOUNT VERNON.

[CH. 11.

able by the war, if nothing else, to arrest attention. Without even looking back on the city of Washington, with the dome of its Capitol always prominent, but always less enchanting as distance brings it into more critical view, there is the long bridge, slanting many miles over the shallows of the estuary from Washington towards Alexandria, across which- the. Federal troops defiled to meet the hosts of the Confederacy ; overlooking it is Arlington House, the residence in ante-war times of General Lee, now the property of the Federal Government on an arrearof-taxes title, and converted into a military cemetery; on the other side is Navy Yard, and away down on the Virginia shore is Alexandria, with the steeple visible of Christchurch, to which, though ten miles from Mount Vernon, General Washington was accustomed to go with his household for Divine worship, and where a pew Bible of his is still preserved as a sacred relic. The remains of earthworks are seen on some of the higher groiuid on both banks, and Fort Foote, an extempore construction, armed with heavy guns, is still a power on the Maryland shore. On the same side is Fort Washington, an old defence of solid masonwork, which was destroyed in the war of 1812, and afterwards rebuilt. Such is the approach from the city of Washington to the country-seat of the Commander-in-Chief of the War of Independence.
Mount Vernon is situated on a somewhat higher bluff, and its woods are richer than most others on the Potomac. Its little cupola and grey roof, when first seen, are not striking. It is only on ascending to the colonnade of the mansion, formed of eight stately pillars, and looking round, that one perceives the beauty of the site, the good taste, the simple dignity, the fine order and arrangement of the whole place. The Potomac, as seen from the piazza, and in reality the rear of the building, is more like an inland lake than an estuary or a river. It is land locked towards the capital by the ridge on which Fort Washing ton is erected, and by the sinuous shores towards the sea; there is a grassy plot down to the edge of the shelving bank of forest; and as one looks through the openings among the trees upon the smooth and glistening waters of the Potomac, and a coasting schooner or oyster wherry with her white sails passes by, the effect in the pure bright atmosphere of this part of the world is extremely lovely. The landward front of Mount Vernon is not less interesting in its way. On one side is the kitchen and on the other the domestic servants' apartments. A covered way of light open arches connects these houses with the main building. The lawn, though not extensive, is neatly laid out. First, a circular plot, then a long rectangle of grass, flanked on both sides by old trees and avenues. At the end of the lawn is a gateway which appears to have been the main entrance;

CH. ii.]

STATE OF VIRGINIA.

9

beyond is a grass park, with orchards sloping downward on either hand; behind all, woods and woods. One could hardly imagine a more exact reproduction of an old English country seat. Parallel to the lawn there is a vegetable garden on the same si^. as the kitchen, and on the other side a flower garden, with the remains of a row of negro houses, the windows of which seem to have, had the full benefit of the fragrant flowers and plants of which Washington was evidently an ardent admirer and cultivator. There are still shown in this garden two " sweet-scented shrubs" (Calycanthus Floridus), presented to him by his compatriot and successor in the Presidential chair --Jefferson. The leaves of this plant shed a delightful odour, and when in full flower its sweetness fills the whole air. The offices are situated in a hollow part of the ground, to which a paved way descends from the front of the mansion. Considering that Mount Vernon is a frame building, it seems in a quite wonderfi|il state of preservation. The frames are raised above the ground-level over cellars extending under the whole building, and entered by a flight of steps and wide door at each end of the colonnade. These doors, when left open, allow a current of fresh air to pass through all this under-story, in which Washing ton kept his wine and other household stores. It is hardly necessary to speak of the interior, which has been so often described. There are the quaint rooms and quaint stair cases one expects to find in old country houses, and various relics which have hardly a place in these notes. There is a noble dining-room, that appears, with the apartments above it, to have been an addition to the original building, and from which a door opens on the colonnade, and on the cool and refreshing breeze and charming scene of the Potomac. One can fancy Lafayette retiring here from the table to smoke his pipe or cigar of pure Virginian, and, in presence of his sincere and noble-minded host, indulging in delightful dreams of the coming age of " liberty, equality, and fraternity." All the details of Mount Vernon, apart from political associations, convey a vivid impression of a planter's life and surroundings in America a hundred years ago. Washington is said to have possessed ten miles of river shore and six miles inland. There was accommo dation at Mount Vernon for all the service required in the household, the gardens and orchards, the stables and dairy, and such work of cultivation and forestry as belonged to the esta blishment of a country gentleman. But Washington had his extensive territory to reclaim by degrees, and he would have his cleared ground and labour settlements among the woods, and the work of the axe and the plough would go on from year to year under Ms wise guidance, with occasional military operations against the Indians, in which his heroic spirit would find vent

10

MOUNT 7ERNON.

[CH. n.

through all the kindly tendencies of his nature. Still, with all this activity, the passion of money-making, so rampant in the present day, could scarcely have heen felt by Washington. Mount Vernon is not in the tobacco region of Virginia. It was the Westmoreland, even by name, of this second England. It had soil, and sun, and variety of product, in comparison with which, indeed, the northern moorland of England was but a desert. There would be abundance of Indian corn, some wheat, every variety of fruit and fowl, traffickings in timber, and all the rude plenty of a wild but teeming land. But no money-bags, no accumulation of speculative stocks, or of solid capital in the Funds. The only plan of life which can be conceived as followed by Washington, is that of working out, by great personal sacri fice and heroism, in Virginian wilds, the highest form of life then known in England. A great change seems to have passed over the world since those days. To be master of thousands, tens of thousands, and millions of dollars in " cash down " is now the ruling passion. There are multitudes of rich men and their sons in ]STew York, and other great American towns, who, if animated by only a little of the spirit of Washington, could plant many a Mount Vernon, and cause many a wilderness in the United States to blossom like the rose. But the spirit which founded America and American Independence is not remarkably pre valent in the world to-day. The fortunes made by trade and commerce in the old country are often turned with happy and beautifying effect on the waste places of England and Scotland ; yet this seldom occurs in the United States, where the heroic work of subduing the untamed land is left for the most part to the poor tempest-tossed emigrants of Europe.
The Virginian shore of the Potornac down to Acquia Creek is of the same type as at Mount Vernon. The sand bluff .is more or less naked to the eye, the foliage more or less varied and brilliant in its hues. A few miles past Mount Vernon there is a long range of building, not in very good repair, but which yet might be supposed to be the residence of a landholder struggling under difficulties of labour and want of capital. It is occupied as a fishing-station, at a rent of 1,000 dollars per annum, There are shad and herring fishings on the Potomac. The herring shoals begin to come in the spring, and there is probably a busy scene at that period of the year. But there is little mark of extensive fishery operations on the Potomac, and the herring probably have a good time of it in these and other American waters. I should scarcely have noticed this fishing station but for the bright and exquisitely blended colour of the trees amid which it is set. The composition of the Virginian woods affords scope for a much deeper study than I can give to it. The very brushwood develops elements of commercial

CH. ii.]

STATE OF VIRGINIA.

11

value. But besides the hickory, the cedars, and maples, one is struck by the various oaks, the ashes, the chestnuts, and beeches, so familiar in the "Old Country," and some of the species may not be indigenous. Six or seven generations of British planters have passed over this memorable land of Virginia.
The leav^j were falling fast towards the end of October, but the bare branches, seen from a little distance, only added a new variety of colour to the beauty of the woods. The Eichmond and Potomac Eailroad soon passes literally from the bosom of the water to a table-land of considerable elevation, which drops down again into the valley of the Eappahannock, where Fredericksburgythe scene of a heavy Federal defeat in the war, comes in view. The _old_. town does not seem_ to_ha_ye suffered iSSfib_frora the furious cannonade which the hostile forces"pOUTed over the tops of its highest steeples from the opposite banks of the river, and there was a stir of people about the station, including not a few thriving-like country folk, that was cheer ing to see. The heights behind Fredericksburg, on which the Confederates were posted, are neither so steep nor so lofty as the accounts of the battle might have led one to imagine. The character of the country, indeed, all the way from the Potomac to near Eichmond, is the same. There are no mountains or hills, and no rock, but a rolling alluvial country, broken only by ravines where the streams in the course of ages have washed a deep bed out of the unresisting soil. The deepest cuttings of the railroad track reveal only the same bottomless deposit of clayey sand, with but a light top-dressing of vegetable mould, as is seen on the exposed bank of the Potomac. TJhe_land4s well cleared, the woods in,_m,any.,places.ia,Ying been cut down to raefe~"Belti7"ffie boundaries betwixt one property and another, and not more than are necessary for shelter. The soil has also at one time been nearly all cultivated. The marks of the plough are everywhere, seen. But thousands of acres are rapidly re turning to a state of nature, and little forests of young pines are springing where Indian corn and even wheat may have recently grown. There is a curious fact mentioned in connection with the Yirginian woods. When the oaks are cut down, they are followed by a crop of pines, and when the pines fall under the axe the oaks come again. When the soil has been exhausted by bad cultivation, and is left to take its own way, it is prolific of pines. Of this peculiarity I had ocular proof in many fields, over which the furrows were still traceable, covered with little pine-shoots, thick as if planted in a nursery. The soil in this district of Virginia is certainly not so rich as to dispense with the aid of skilful and liberal culture; but the tracts on which crops had been grown this year showed, in the standing stalks of corn, fair powers of vegetation; and the alluvial character of

12

RICHMOND.

[OH. n.

the soil must render it duly responsive to subsoil ploughing and

manure. Along the Orange and Alexandria Eailroad, which

passes from Washington to Eichmond farther to the west, there

are richer and more peopled districts, and yet much land ready

for new owners, the highest price expected for which is twenty

dollars, or 41. to 51. per acre; but from five to ten dollars per



acre would probably purchase farms of any size along the railway

route from Acquia Creek.

The district to which I'have been referring is the last which

the people of Virginia wish a stranger to see. It is held to be

the poorest part of the State, and is " the Wilderness " of the war

times, where most of the great battles were providently fought.

Yet from Fredericksburg to Ashland, some fifteen miles from

Richmond--a pretty little place, with several fine houses, and a

Methodist College, attended by a large number of hearty young

men--there must be tens of thousands of acres, in the immediate

'

vicinity of a great line of railway communication, capable of

successful settlement, and of developing all the conditions of

fruitful, prosperous, and happy country life. In thus attempting

to estimate the worst part of Virginia there is at least the

advantage of arriving a fortiori at a conception of what the

better parts must be.



At Richmond the scene changes,jjid_itjs_anly__in the capital

of the State .that one finds a key to all the various districts and

agricultural resources of Virginia. The tide flows up the deep

channel of the James Eiver to Eichmond, bearing large sea

going vessels to the bridges ; but it flows no farther, a series of

falls immediately above Eichmond stopping thus abruptly the

tidal flow. This has led to a division, not infrequent on the

American continent, into " Tide-water Virginia," applied to the

territory along both banks of the James Eiver betwixt Eichmond

and the Atlantic, and "Granite or Piedmont Virginia," the

region round the upper course of the James, terminated by

the famous Blue Eidge Mountain chain, where the sulphur

springs are found, and whither the Americans, from New York

to New Orleans, repair every summer season for health, pleasure,

and invigoration. There are many large and productive farms

along the tidal course of the James, and in the peninsular

countries formed by the James and York Elvers. Two sons of

'

General Lee, whose death has called forth profound marks of

respect in Eichmond as well as all parts of the South, cultivate

large estates in tide-water Virginia; and new families, both from

the Northern States and from England, have purchased land and

settled in this part of the State. But the heat in summer is

severe to all but the acclimatised. The land is low, and in some

v,

places swampy; and near Norfolk, the great shipping port of

Virginia, with probably the best and most capacious harbourage

OH. ii.]

STATE OF VIRGINIA.

13

on the American shores, there is the " Dismal Swamp," which is neither agreeable in aspect nor salubrious in effects. The Vir-
finians themselves are of opinion that the " Piedmont" of the tate, from its European temperature and upland character, the variety and homeliness of its agricultural productions, its water power, aiJ ^s facilities for manufacturing industry, is the best adapted for British settlers. Betwixt the Blue Eidge and the Allegheny range is the great valley of Virginia, that, with the exception probably of the Shenandoah Valley, its northern part, has been less disturbed and impaired by the war than any other section of the State. Then there are the midland counties, where tobacco is the principal crop, and where " planting," as it may be distinguished from simple farming, is carried on with no inconsiderable prosperity. The southern counties along the border of North Carolina have many cotton-fields. All the way from Petersburg to Weldon the white woolly bolls are seen at this season gleaming deep down among the green leaves of the cotton shrub. In all these various divisions of Virginia, though in some more than in others, properties which in any other part of the world would be deemed valuable are offered for sale greatly in excess of the demand.

CHAPTEE III.
City of Richmond.--Some features of its Trade and Industry.--Tone of Politics.--The General Assembly.--Testimony borne of the Freedmen by Employers.--Eate of Wages.--Dearness of Articles of Consumption, and its Causes.--Population of the State and City.--Schools for the Negro Children.
[RICHMOND, VA.--Oct. 26 to Nov. 3.]
THE capital of Virginia, and erewhile of the Southern Confedera tion, is a busy and spirited town, and has a very engaging population. But all its importance does not strike one at the first glance, and many a traveller on the through route to the South may pass away from it with an inadequate opinion of a place rendered historical by recent events. The city is situated on a series of hills and vales, and only a small part of it is seen on entering or passing through the streets, until some elevation is reached where the eye takes an extended view. It is pleasing and animating to look down a busy and stately street from the top of one of the heights, and see it, after traversing the valley below, rising in a straight line up the side of the hill beyond; and of such coups-d'oeil there are many in Eichmond. Like most of the American towns, its streets are laid off in straight lines, and crossed by others equally straight. It may be called, as well as Washington, a " city of magnificent distances," for the outlines traced for the future expansion of the capital of Virginia much exceed its actual development. It has its Broad Street, like Philadelphia, intended to be the main artery of a great city, and yet occupying but a subordinate, and certainly not a central, place in the existing organization of the town. The lower ground along the bank of the James Biver is busy and dusty, the seat of tobacco and other produce warehouses, ironworks and foundries, factories and workshops, and rattles all day long with the noise of lorries drawn by four mules, with a negro mounted postilion-wise, who loves dearly to crack his whip, and cries to his animals more than enough. Sambo is a natural-born Cockney. Whether one meets him in the hotels, or driving his lorry in the streets, or roaring at the railway stations for the honour of carry ing one's luggage, he gives assurance of a man who imbibes aptly

OH. in.]

STATE OF VIRGINIA.

15

the genius loci, and contributes his full share to all the smartness and animation, polite or noisy, of the scene.
It is not within my purpose to describe the trade, the mechanical industries, or the various phases of civic life in Eichmond. But some leading features may be mentioned in a few sentences. The Tredegar Ironworks, reconstituted since the war, if * L the largest of the kind in the United States, execute an almost unequalled variety of work, not only making iron, but every kind of iron castings--from railway spikes to field artillery--with, equal resource and success, and are carried on with vigour and activity, employing a thousand hands. The Company use annually a certain portion of Scotch pig, notwith standing the high, tariff duty of seven dollars per ton, as a sort of luxury on account of its greater fluidity and adaptation for foundry purposes. Various smaller foundries and machine shops in Richmond display much, spirit and ingenuity in the manufacture of engines and other implements for agricultural purposes. I have also remarked the great number of warehouses for the sale of phosphates and artificial manures, as well as guano, ground bones, and other natural fertilisers, showing how much the attention of the agricultural community is directed to the means of enriching the soil. Yirginia has within herself an active propaganda, both chemical and manufacturing, of this new philosophy; but manufacturers of soluble phosphates from Baltimore and other northern seaports visit Eichmond regularly, and pass down south through all the leading centres and sea ports as far as Montgomery and Selma in Alabama, doing a satisfactory trade. The discovery of marl deposits in the tidal region of Virginia, as well as of the Carolinas, has given an impulse to this question of fertilisation that is daily extending. Though the use of artificial manures may not be so widely spread among the farming population, yet there is no part probably of England or Scotland where more genuine interest is taken in the question, and as the movement is not confined to this State, where it is not least important, it is well worthy of being noted as a sign of reviving agricultural improvement and enterprise in the Southern States.
The ,war,_ heavily as it pressed by fire and sword, .and .siege upon .Eichmond, has left but few traces in the external aspect of the city. A few blocks of building still stand in aH the ruin in which they were left by the fires lighted on the night of the evacuation. The tobacco warehouses burned down on that wild occasion have been replaced by temporary erections. But the " Libby Prison" and " Castle Thunder," and other great houses, of business, which were devoted to the reception of Federal prisoners and Confederate wounded, are now restored to trade. A sober sadness may be described as the prevailing mood of the

16

RICHMOND.

[OH. in.

people, which the death of General Lee has probably at the present moment deepened. There is no dejection, no loss of honourable pride, and little repining at the bitter consequences of the war, but a resolve, more deeply felt than strongly ex pressed, not only to accept the situation, but to turn it to account of improvement, and to build up anew the prosperity of the old Commonwealth, which the Virginians love with an ardour and a faith in the future hardly credible in a community so greatly shattered, and so bereft for the time of the prestige it long maintained in the Union.
JIheJoneof politicsan.Yirginia, after some experience of New York, seems to me very temperate. The old party in the State, called in electioneering parlance Democrats, as distinguished from the Republicans and Eadicals, or the new party introduced by the issue of the war and upheld by the authority of the Federal Government, has regained in the recent elections a moderate ascendency. An incident, which has just occurred in the Courts, appears also to be regarded with no little quiet grati fication by the native Virginians. One Chahoon, a lawyer, who was made Mayor of Eichmond by the Federal Executive at the close of the war, and who failed to be elected in regular course under the Act of Eeconstruction, has been tried and sentenced to four years in the Penitentiary for attempting to defraud the State of 7,000 dollars by forgery. It was the case of an estate left without heirs, of which Chahoon attempted to secure posses sion by forging documents in the name of fictitious claimants. "The Federal Government could hardly avoid making what are called " military appointments" to civil offices in the state of affairs which arose on the dissolution of the Confederate Govern ment ; and where these appointments were in favour of officers of repute and discretion in the Federal army, there was a guarantee not only of honour and integrity, but of the temporary character of such infraction of the regular course of election. But Chahoon appears to have been an adventurer--a specimen, pure and simple, of the " carpet-bagger "--and his conviction and punishment have given undisguised joy to the native party of the State, who see in them a sign that things are coming right again, and that law and justice will have free course in Virginia.
The General Assembly of Virginia has been holding for a week or two an adjourned session, and transacting without excitement a good deal of important State business. As I had strolled up to look at the Capitol, which--as well as a very plea sant AVest End, equal in beauty and retirement to the best parts of Brooklyn or New York, with much more'notable in Eichmond --is only discovered as one mounts one eminence after another, I stepped in to see the Virginian Parliament. The Speaker of the House of Delegates was a reflective and intellectual-

CH. in.]

STATE OF VIRGINIA.

17

looking gentleman, himself a Delegate, and perfectly versed in '" the duties of his place. The Clerk, owing to some pain or
weakness in his eyes, had a white bandage round his temples, but was equally master of his position. I_counted among the 4elegates, three or; four coloured men, one of~wKbm was a pure negro, very well attired, and displaying not more jewellery than a gentle^1 "*1 ' aright; wear; while another, who seemed to have some white 'blood" in his veins, was a quite masculine-looking person, both physically and mentally. The Senate was presided over by the Lieutenant-Governor of the State, who was altogether like a young member of the British House of Lords, as the Senate itself had a country-gentleman sort of air not perceptible in the Lower House, which more resembled a Town Council or Paro chial Board than the House of Commons. _There..were _two coloured Senators among the number,, .quite "black,, but sena torial enough, and like men who in Africa would probably have been chiefs. Injh_e Lower House the coloured delegates mingled freely with the other members, but in the Senate these two sat .,m-a~Gomer.byjthemseives. Yet" they" seemed to take a cordial interest in the proceedings, and manifested all sympathy with the Senators who addressed the House. As I have never been able to understand the official monotone of our own courts, I cannot profess to have been able to follow every word with all the' differences of intonation here; but the procedure was quite intelligible, and I was pleased and amused to see how truly the form and pressure of the " Mother of Parliaments," after a century of separation, were reproduced in her Virginian child. The presence of coloured men in the British Parliament is im possible, simply because the negro element is not among us; but, the Virginian feature I have ventured to notice is only a -practical reflection of the great deliverance of Lord Mansfield --that slavery is incompatible with the law, air, and soil of England. As long as the political equality of the negro is not pushed to any greater extreme than it is like to be in Virginia, or made the factious instrument of bad and trading politicians, it can hardly be the cause of much trouble or discord in any part of the United States. c.The testimony generally borne of the negroes is that they work readily when regularly paid. Wherever I have consulted an effective employer, whether in the manufacturing works of Eichmond or on the farms and plantations, such is the opinion, with little variation, that has been given. In the country, negroes get from eight to ten dollars a month, with house and provisions. In Eichmond, for common and ordinary labour, they are paid fifteen dollars a month with provisions, or thirty dollars and find themselves in the necessaries of life. In various
branches of more or less skilled labour of which c

18

RICHMOND.

[OH. m.

capable tlie wages are much higher, and approach the standard of remuneration to white men in the same occupations. A dollar a day for common labour will appear high to the best labourers in England or Scotland, but there is a necessary qualification to be made in any comparison of the relative rates of wages in the two countries. The dollar does not go so far as its exchangeworth in British money would imply. The price of nearly everything bought in the shops is very high; the labourer cannot command the same comfort as the labourer of other countries, save at a much higher monetary rate of wages, which necessarily augments the cost of American products, and im pairs the commercial and competitive power of American industry. This state of things, arising from artificial causes operating over the whole United States, and inflating the monetary rate, not of wages alone, but of every form of profit, without making the working or any other class richer (what is gained nominally in wages and profits passing away in expendi ture), has already all but destroyed various branches of American trade, and enhances materially the productive cost even of such staples as wheat, tobacco, and cotton, in which the United States have a natural pre-eminence. This will probably be more ap parent now every year, until it forces itself on the public mind, and brings about a wholesome rectification.
Eichmoncl has several fine streets of shops and warehouses, that are not so well or fully stocked as similar places of busi ness in towns of inferior importance in England, and yet where every article needful in any rank of life may usually be pur chased. But one is astonished at the prices demanded and paid, and when the. shopkeeper is asked he says it is the result of the high tariff on foreign goods, which is no doubt largely true. The difference, however, betwixt his price and the real value of the goods is three or four times the amount of the Customs duty, suggesting other evils, starting probably from the tariff, but in active independent operation. The duties, being high, are more conveniently paid in New York than they could be in the South, where capital is scarce. This leads to indirect trade as well as transit, and the piling of one large profit on the top of another before the goods reach the consumer. Prices, moreover, received an inflation from the enormous expenditure and paper currency of the war, which the approximation now of the paper dollar to gold value and the pressure of taxation do not appear in many cases to have materially reduced. People speak, in giving an estimate of values, of " ante-bellum " and " post-bellum " prices. Things are thus floating along on an artificial level produced by all these derangements, rendering the cost of living and the cost of production in every depart ment expressed in money very high as compared with other

OH. in.]

STATE OF VIRGINIA.

19

countries. It is evident what a heavy incubus such a state of

tilings must be on a State like Virginia, impoverished and

crippled by years of devastating war, and needing supremely

every natural facility in the cultivation of her soil and the

increase of her wealth and produce.

The census returns of the City or State have not yet been

pubh"1" _.!, but I have been politely informed by Colonel Parker,

the United 'States Marshal here, that the population of Virginia

may be taken as 1,245,000, showing a decrease of the population

of the State since 1860 of from 20,000 to 30,000. The popu

lation of the city of Eichmond is 51,093. In 1860 Bichmond

had not more than 35,000 inhabitants, but the apparent increase

is mainly the result of an extension of the municipal bound

aries. The Marshal, however, claims for Bichmond, as it was

before the enlargement of the bounds, an increase of 5,000.

This result is questioned by citizens of much information, who

are disposed to think the population both of State and of city

lower than in the return. It is quite usual to find the census

questioned in the United States, and the mode of taking it--

not all in one day as in Great Britain, but by piecemeal and

irregularly--is certainly not compatible with strict accuracy.

The President has ordered a new census in New York, and will

probably do so also in Philadelphia and other places where the

returns have excited dissatisfaction. The decrease in Virginia

is believed to be chiefly in negroes, who were accustomed under

the slave system to be sent South in considerable numbers, and

who have migrated in the same direction voluntarily since their

O

i/

emancipation. Contractors, themselves coloured men, also come

down from the hotels in Boston and other Northern towns, and

engage negroes to go to them as servants. But the tendency of

the black man is to go South, and the probability is that Vir

ginia will continue to supply the Southern plantations with less

or more labour.

The Badical party in the State take credit for having opened

schools In Eichmond immediately after the war for the educa

tion of negro children. They say that from 5,000 to 6,000

were thus brought under instruction, and that the consequence

now is that black children can read and write, while many of

the white children are untaught. There has been no school

assessment hitherto in Virginia, but the Constitution under

..the Act of Beconstruction, requires free schools to .'be. .'estab

lished by assessment over the whole State, and .this ..provision

is being carried out with the assent of all parties. The city of

Bichmond has already appropriated 100,000 dollars for educa

tion. The practice is to have separate schools for the negroes.

I have been shown a large building in what was not long ago

the fashionable quarter of' the town, and then used as a grand

c2

20

RICHMOND.

[CH. in.

hotel, which has been purchased for conversion into a free school lor the negroes, and in magnitude will vie with the splendid free schools of New York or Philadelphia. Seeing that "buildings have to be provided, and that there are no reserved lands, as in the Western States, for the aid of common school education, the school-rate in Virginia will be pretty high for some time; but it will be a source of much profit in the end, and will make her labour more valuable, and her wide domains more attractive and more pleasant to settlers of every class.

CHAPTER IV.
The Land Question in Virginia. --Estates and Farms for Sale without Pur chasers.--Effects of War and Revolution.--The Annual State Fair.-- Abundant natural Fertilisers. -- New Industries. -- Regularity of the Markets for Tobacco and other Agricultural Produce.--Bail ways.--Desir ableness of Virginia to Middle-class Settlers.
[RICHMOND, VA.--Oct. 26 to Nov. 23.]
THE land question is the absorbing question in Virginia. How to get tne estates formerly productive again brought into culti vation--how to attract settlers of a superior class from England and Scotland, who would take their place in Virginian society as landowners and give a fresh impulse to the work of improvement going on--how to fertilise the soil and increase and improve the farm stock--how to turn, the woods, the mines, the beds of marl, the streams and waterfalls, the fruits and game, and all the abundance of nature to productive account, and so fill with new blood the wasted frame of the old Commonwealth, occupies the minds of all classes with an intensity of interest to which no other public concern can be compared. The first question asked of a stranger is whether he has come to look at land. I was not three minutes in Eichmond till a pushing Irishman offered to sell me a very fine milch cow and calf on the spot, or tell me where I could get a nice bit of land on very economical terms. But the stranger who is landward-bound is not left to such chance means of information. There are dozens of respectable estate agents, every one of wham has lists of farms and estates for sale which he advertises in the newspapers, and offers in feesimple at a rate per acre that in England or Scotland, or even Ireland, would be deemed but a moderate annual rent, and pay ment of which he is willing to take in cash just enough to' pay the expenses of suit, with the balance in instalments spread over three or four years. Every one of them states in private that he has even more lands on his list for sale than he advertises. Nor is this all. The-State.of,Virginia has.-app-oint.ed.,.a_Board_ of Emigration, composed of gentlemen.pf,.the highest standing and reputation, with General Eichardson, the Adjutant-General of the State, as secretary, whose sole object is to guide and assist, by every kindly office, persons from abroad wishing to invest a

22

THE LAND QUESTION.

[en. iv.

little capital and settle on the soil of Virginia. I might fill pages with a description of farms and plantations., and lots, large and small, of land that are thus in the market. But I shall only mention a few particulars from a list presented to me by General Eichardson. To show the great variety of choice, as regards situation for example, some of these farms and estates are in the immediate neighbourhood of Richmond, some are in Eoxbridge county, some in Orange county, others in Culpeper county, Chesterfield county, King William county, Louisa county, James City county, Xew Kent county, and so on. One is a tobacco plantation in Fluvanna, one of the most famous tobacco counties in Virginia. In the county of Orange there is an estate of 6,000 acres of improved land, with several dwelling-houses on it, the purchaser of which could make a Targe home-farm for himself, and have besides half a dozen or even a dozen farm tenants. The lands are " very fertile, and suited to grass." The purchase-money of this estate would be taken in instalments, spread over ten years if necessary. There are also many small farms, and lots of 20 to 50 acres. The highest price asked for any of these lands, which are improved, is 43,. per acre. One estate of 800 acres, " land good, with abundance of greensand marl only four feet below the surface," could be bought for fifteen dollars an acre. Among the number there are " 2,000 acres of undeveloped coal lands." Land rights are carefully registered and guarded in Virginia, and there is seldom any difficulty in tracing a clear title back through a long period of years.
To understand the avalanche of land bargains at present in Vir ginia, one has to remember that before the war the soil was owned chiefly by slaveholders, who had large estates which they never fully;' cultivated, but'on which they shifted, .their crops about from one place to another, and who, finding themselves with plenty of money and little trouble under this system, allowed their overseers and the slave-dealers to settle all the hard matters between them. At the close of the war, when the slaves became free, it is easy to perceive that with no means left to cultivate such large tracts of land under the new conditions, it became a necessity, as well as the best thing the owners could do, to sell large portions of their estates, and to retain just as much as they had capital and labour to cultivate; and this they have done and are doing to some extent. In many other cases, proprietors, not rich save in land before the war, have since become embarrassed, and, falling into debt and arrears of taxes, have had decrees passed against them in the courts, under which sales are ordered to proceed. There have been instances also of gentlemen " slain in battle," or driven from the country, or flying from it in despair, and of every form of vicissitude and ruin that follows in the train of war and social revolution. The consequence is that a

on. iv.]

STATE OF VIRGINIA.

23

large proportion of the landed property of a great and long settled State is literally going a-begging for people to come and take it. The like has seldom been seen before. The deluge of encumbered estates in Ireland was nothing compared' to it, for the land in Ireland, when brought to sale under a Parliamentary title, readilv <^mmairded purchasers at good prices. Yet there are no agrarian murders in Virginia. Nor is it a new and unde veloped country, where every element of civilization has to be introduced, but an old land of renown, where law and order pre vail and every social comfort may be enjoyed. There is hardly any part of Virginia where a settler on the soil would not only find towns and markets, and roads and railways, but have as his neighbours gentlemen who are no mean agriculturists, who are versed in all the science of husbandry, many of them breeders of the rarest and finest stock, and deeply imbued with the spirit of agricultural progress and improvement.
The annual State Fair at Bichmond has been held this week. This is an institution which is spreading rapidly in the Southern States. I had early note of agricultural fairs at Augusta and Atlanta, in Georgia, but found it impossible to be present. The Georgia fairs from all accounts have been most spirited gather ings. Charleston has also its first fair since the war this week, which I may be just in time to get a glimpse of. There have already been fairs in Lynchburg and Petersburg, in this State, and these now culminate in Bichmond. The fairs are competi tive exhibitions of stock, produce, implements, and manufactures, where planters, farmers, and engineers meet to compare notes, and where the young country people of far distant counties come to enjoy town-life for a few days, to assist at races and other field amusements in the afternoons, to fill the great hotels with balls and routs at night, and let all the gay spirit out, as most young country people everywhere love to do. The fair at Bich mond was held on a large open space that was the Champ de Mars of the South in the war times. I was struck by the com pleteness and permanence of the erections for this annual gathering. The Boyal Societies of England and Scotland them selves cannot vie, in the temporary fabrics of their great peri patetic shows, with the pavilions, committee-rooms, grand stands, restaurants, ware-rooms, and stalls for stock, made to last, on the fair-ground at Bichmond. A circular racecourse, formed within the square outer enclosure, is exactly one mile round. The exhibition of stock was not very extensive, but it contained some superb specimens of Hereford and Durham shorthorns, Ayrshire and Devon cows, and immense fat bullocks, all nativebred. There were many notable fine-wool sheep--South-downs, Cotswold lambs, one Cotswold ram (a very fine animal, im ported from Gloucestershire), and Spanish nieiinoes, which are

24

THE LAND QUESHON.

[CH. iv.

a favourite stock in Virginia. The merinoes were from Culpeper county. The British races of sheep and cattle seem to thrive, and to be capable of the same high development as at home. The large' breeds of swine probably exceed in size anything seen in the old country--Chesters, Bedibrds, and Woburns being pro minent. There was as fine a show of light thoroughbred horses as could be seen anywhere, but very few draught animals. I saw a grey Norman stallion, that had been imported, as large as a Clydesdale, but with a longer and smaller body than the barrellike trunk that gives the characteristic aspect of concentrated strength and power to that famous breed. There were some fine mules, and a few donkeys which seemed as large as horses, and brayed with corresponding volume. The implements and machines formed, perhaps, the most extensive display in the agricultural department of the Fair, and several steam-engines were at work on the ground, including a road-engine, with broad wheels, but of the ordinary type, and wanting in the pro perties of the india-rubber tire and other adaptations for draught and ploughing invented by Mr. Thomson of Leith. A show-room contained specimens of the varied manufactures of Virginia, and a large open shed was devoted to the raw materials and produce of the State. In this latter department I saw marls from various counties in the tidal region, and from Hanover county, north from Richmond; puddling clay and fine moulding sands ; and manganese from the Cabell mine in Nelson county. On the day of opening, Mr. Jefferson Davis, who was on his return home from Europe to Mississippi, appeared on the platform with the President and office bearers, accompanied by General Early and other associates in the war, and delivered a short speech, in which he congratulated the Virginians on the reviving prosperity of the State, and made passing allusion to former days and circum stances. Mr. Davis is an accomplished speaker, and expresses himself with a nervous force that thrills and rouses his audience. No politics were spoken, but it was obvious that the people retain a deep respect for their former leaders in the Senate and the field. The trotting races were a source of great attraction, and the Virginian horses certainly display amazing powers in this line. The light buggies in which they were har nessed flew round the course like chariots of the s_un. There is an amusement on these occasions which must be regarded, I suppose, as an outcome of the " chivalry " of the South. It is a tournament, wherein young men mounted on fine bloods, and dressed in fancy costumes of the olden time, endeavour at full gallop to run their lances through iron rings about two inches and a half in diameter, suspended from cross-trees placed in a line at some distance from each other on the field. The gallant knight who excels in this achievement has the honour of naming

CH. iv.]

STATE OF VIRGINIA.

25

among the fair ladies " the Queen of the Tournament/' whom he crowns with roses amidst the cheers of the spectators.
Whatever inroads may be made on tender hearts at these Southern fairs, there can be no doubt that they have many useful results, and are a manifestation of public spirit of the most commendable kind. The agricultural characteristics and resources ot the various districts are arrayed before the eye till they become familiar to all; and every new invention, dis covery, or means of improvement receives a degree of publicity and discussion which could not be so effectually attained in any other way. The Fair at Eichmond this year is deemed scarcely up to the mark of former seasons; but it was anticipated that .a great flood which, three weeks ago, swept the banks of the James and North Rivers, destroying life and property, and washing away soil to an extent of which there has been no pre cedent for a hundred years, would interfere most materially with the exhibition. " The hand of God," a pious old statesman said to me, " has lain heavily on Virginia for some years, and this flood is our most recent visitation." It must be regarded as a signal proof of the buoyant spirit and substantial resources of Virginia that " twenty thousand people," as the local papers reckon, should have flocked into Eichmond on this occasion, and that so varied and excellent an exhibition of agricultural stock, and of the materials and products of industry, should Lave,been made.
Since the discovery of the great marl deposits in South Caro lina keen interest has been excited and eager search made for similar treasures in the neighbouring Atlantic States. Virginia has shared this excitement, and every year seems to add to her discoveries of these native means of fertilisation. There can be no doubt that from Acquia Creek in the north-west of the State to south of Eichmond, and from Eichmond towards the sea, beds of marl are to be found not far from the surface, more or less rich in phosphates and ammonia. The marl is of various kinds. There are blue marls, white marls, greensand marls, and other sorts, the composition of which differs; but they are all beds of shells and fossil remains, and by proper treatment and manufacture yield phosphates of the highest utility in fertilising the soil. Along the eastern shore numerous banks of half-decomposed oyster shells have been found, which, without any manufacture, have
since the war enabled the agriculturists to dispense with lime. The Piedmont or Granite region, from the less exhausting nature of its husbandry, stands in less need of chemical manures than the tobacco, cotton, and wheat lands; but in the Great Valley limestone everywhere abounds, and there can be no question of the ample and convenient means which Virginia possesses for the renovation and enrichment of her soil. Necessity is the

26

THE LAND QUESTION.

[OH. iv.

mother of invention, and not only is this manure-question giving rise to promising developments, but new uses are "being found for materials with which the woods and wildest parts of Virginia abound. The bark of the oak-trees is made in Richmond to yield tannin capable of profitable exportation to the most distant markets. Shumac, worth 70 to 90 dollars per ton, is now produced in increasing quantities from a till lately neglected shrub ; and the bark of the black oak of Virginia is ground into quercitron, used in Glasgow and elsewhere for dyeing purposes, and fetching 35 dollars per ton. The reeds of the Dismal and other swamps, by a machine which I can only liken to a big gun, are torn into rags, .and the rind completely separated from the inner pulp, which makes excellent paper,--a manufacture of unlimited de mand in the United States. For the great products of Virginia there are the best of markets. Every ponncl of tobacco-leaf is bought in the Tobacco Exchanges of Richmond and the other towns for cash by firms of the most ample resources, and by agents of the French, Austrian, and other Continental Govern ments, as soon as sent in. The Corn Exchanges of the various towns are conducted with similar regularity, and there is an advantage to the wheat of Virginia in being so near the seaboard that it gains in cheapness of transit what it loses in yield as compared with new and more productive soils. The farmer in the virgin lands of the Ear West has to produce two bushels of wheat to carry one to the consumer. The minor farm products of Virginia find ready sale in all the principal towns, at prices which the inhabitants of even a European city would consider high. Thus, in Petersburg, I find eggs 18 to 20 cents a dozen; butter, 35 to 40 cents per Ib. ; chickens, 25 to 35 cents each, wholesale prices. Fruit of every kind in Virginia is produced in larger quantities than can be consumed on the spot, but is preserved in various forms and sent abroad, arid, raw, is daily bought and sold in the domestic markets. It seems only a nightmare, or some hideous misunderstanding, or unaccountable caprice of evil fortune, that can retard the progress of Virginia to prosperity and wealth greater and more substantial than she has known at any former period.
The following figures show the crops of tobacco in the four years before and four years after the war:--

1856-7 .... 1857-8 .... 1858-9 .... 1859-60 ....

Hhds.
52,909 72,720 68,593 76,950

1866-7 .... 1867-8 ....
1868-9 .... 1869,70 ....

HMs.
43,717 47,211
47,400 33,721

The average value of this produce would be about 150 dollars currency per hhd. Last year's crop was exceptionally small, but will bo made up this year, which has been very favourable to the

en. iv.]

STATE OF 71RGINU.

27

plant, as regards both quantity and quality. It is estimated on the Tobacco Exchanges that from 50,000 to 60,000 hhds. of superior Virginian will be sent into market before next year's crop. Virginia devotes about 120,000 acres to tobacco. Her crop of cotton before the war was only from 10,000 to 12,000 bales of 4Q.Q u"s., though a large quantity passes through her port of Norfolk froin other States. It is in her wheat crop that the effect of so many uncultivated farms, and the diminution of her agricultural production, is most plainly seen. In 1860 she pro duced 13,130,977 bushels of wheat. In 1868 her crop of wheat only amounted to 6,914,000 bushels. In Indian corn and other cereals the lost ground is equally conspicuous.
The State is well intersected by the great through lines of railway, both south and west, and the formation of 'cheap branches in the interior will now doubtless be a main object. But attention is chiefly directed in the meantime to the completiori of the connections betwixt the spacious harbour of Norfolk, on the Atlantic seaboard, and the Western and Pacific routes, so as to place Virginia direct on the highway of future com merce.
People who desire to change the Old World for the New, and to acquire either small or large farms without great change of circumstance, may do so more easily in Virginia than probably in any other part of the .United States. For emigrants of a superior class, with a moderate capital to invest in land, Virginia has peculiar attractions. Englishmen and Scotchmen will find here Episcopalian, Presbyterian, and Independent Churches, and a well-organized and agreeable society. They will find a popu lation scarcely distinguishable from their own countrymen in xanything--a population proud, indeed, of their State and of themselves, but still prouder of their mother-land, and equally proud to welcome and hold out the hand to all worthy of the mother-land who may come to settle among them.

CHAPTER V.
The Pine Forests of North Carolina.--Extended Cultivation of Cotton.--Pay ment of Negroes by Shares in the Crop.--Small comparative Cost of Bailways.--The Port of Wilmington. -- Exports of North Carolina since the War.--Partial compensation of lower prices by higher Exchange Value of the Dollar.--Wilmington, Charlotte, and Rutherford Railway.--Governor Holden versus the White People.--Great increase of Negroes in Wilming ton.--Rate of Wags.
[GOLDSBORO'--Nov. 5-6. WILMINGTON--Nov. 7-9.]
THE sun was just rising as the railway train, on my way south ward from Petersburg, plunged into the depths of the great pine forests of North Carolina. The scene by this time was not quite new to me. The Atlantic slope southward from New Jersey through Pennsylvania and Virginia to this point, so far, has all much the same natural features, but Pennsylvania is more cleared of wood, though (what I saw of it) not much better cultivated than Virginia, and the woods of Virginia have more variety than the forests of almost pure pine which flourish in North Carolina. The rising sun, as seen through these dense thickets, suffuses a vast golden radiance from a burnished centre, on which the eye can look steadily, and trace from background to. foreground, and on this side and that, the lines of light with which it pierces the glades, brightens the leaves, and plays round the dark trunks of the forest. It is as if all the distant outer edge of the wood were on fire, without smoke, or noise, or flame--aglow, simply, with irresistible, advancing, and spreading fire. But as the cars sweep on, the tall pines begin to whirl round in an endless dance, and the golden radiance seems to move through the wood with the speed of lightning, till the eye grows weary, and the brain, overtasked, and itself ablaze with the fire of imagination, becomes dizzy. One is glad to fall back on the seats for relief, but again and again leans forward to gaze anew on the glorious scene. The pines, which, as far as I can estimate, grow to a height of 70 to 80 feet, are bare and straight as the masts of a ship, with only a small cupola of branches and leaves at the top. It seems as if the very thick ness with which they spring up precludes any other develop ment. They crowd and jostle one another into nakedness. In

CH. v.]

STATE OF NORTH CAROLINA.

29

the fierce contest to go ahead, the lower branches, " cabined and confined," and choked to death, fall off till nothing but the bare stem with its hood of foliage remains. The very brushwood cannot live amidst the affluence and mastery of the pine in the Carolinian forests. Long as the woods of North Carolina have yielded enormous quantities of turpentine/nd naval stores to the wor1J7^ proves the inexhaustibility of the sources of these valuable products, that I must have travelled fifty or sixty miles through forest scenery without seeing a single tree that had been tapped for oil. It is only in the interior, and as one approaches nearer the port of Wilmington, that the manufacture of " naval stores " becomes visible in incised trees and turpentine distilleries
Yet the hand of man has long been busy over all these north eastern tracts of North Carolina. There are numerous clearings in the woods under cultivation, and farms and plantations, which yield Indian corn in abundance, and always cotton more or less successfully. Many of the cotton-fields, indeed, show but an inferior growth, but others in their immediate vicinity are nourish ing, even luxuriant. In some instances the heads only of the negro pickers were seen above the tops of the plant, while in others, no doubt the majority, the plant was not more than a foot and a half or two feet high, with considerable portions of the fields here and there showing either a total failure or a partial extinc tion of the culture by overgrowth of grass and weeds. The best crops are usually found in the neighbourhood of the dwellinghouses of the larger plantations and of the villages, and are the result obviously of manuring and more careful handling. The negroes and other small cultivators have settled on many of the clearings in the forest, and have not yet the art or the means either of growing or picking their cotton well. Yet one could not but observe the abundance of bolls on fields where the plants were smallest. An English pasture, covered with white daisies, is the closest simile which can be given of the aspect of many of these cotton patches. The picking was not more up to the mark than the preliminary culture, and, generally speaking, was most advanced where the cotton plant was largest and most carefully cultivated. I must remark, at the same time, that several negro lots have come under my observation which are little models of industry and improvement, from the cottage outward. The dwellings in this part of North Carolina are for the most part very poor--mere wooden shanties, without paint, or any other mark of comfort or substance. But this is by no means the universal character of the country. The railways pass through the poorest districts lying between important points of traffic, and it is only by getting away from the tracks of the cars and behind the woods that one discovers all the rural

30

'

GOLDSVORff.

[en. v.

development. There are many large planters in this region, who grow spacious breadths of cotton, and send as well-pressed iron-tied bales to market as are to be seen anywhere. The extent of cotton culture in North Carolina, and the fervour and energy with which it is prosecuted, are much greater, indeed, than one expects to find so near the northern limit of the Cotton Belt. The area within which cotton is grown in North Carolina may be denned by lines drawn from Northampton, county on the northern frontier, eastward through Halifax and Martin counties to Pamlico Sound, south-westward through Halifax, Nash, and Johnston counties, and thence direct westward as far as Meck lenburg county, which is said to be one of the best cotton dis tricts in the State.
An extension of the area of cotton culture is not at the moment a question of supreme importance as regards either the Southern States or an ample supply of the staple to the factories of Europe. The area may be extended without materially in creasing the aggregate produce, and the question of the time ,,- appears to be how, by skilful culture and the application of / manures, the same area may be made to yield a larger crop. It is to this object that the attention of growers in the South ap pears to be mainly addressed. Yet it is the opinion of persons of experience here that in North Carolina there is probably 20 per cent, greater breadth of cotton this year than last, though doubts are expressed whether the increase of produce will be in proportion. The weather, however, is favourable beyond expectation for the utmost yield of the cotton plant. The difficulty so far north is the shortness of the season, but up to this date there has not been a nip'of frost; the days are as warm as in July in England, the nights clear and pleasant, and there has been neither rain nor storm to retard the labour or destroy the hopes of the planter. With such weather, there is no reason,why cotton should not turn out as well for the grower, even in North Carolina, as any crop that could be cultivated. Since long before the war this State has suffered from emigration s Jbo the richer cotton lands of the South, and this is one of the social difficulties arising from the very superabundance of natural resources in America which it is hard to overcome. Some say that for every native in the State there are two strangers, and ask how any proper consolidation of society or stable industrial progress is possible in such circumstances ? But an extended cultivation of cotton is at least not a bad symptom in the meantime. The testimony borne of the negroes by candid and substantial people is that, while they dp_ not afford the supply of steady labour necessary, and there is room for more of them, or of more efficient labourers, they are doing much better than was expected before emancipation. They are

en. v.]

STATE OF NORTH CAROLINA.

31

[ on the cotton farms in some instances by wages, and in others by a share of the produce, the relative merits of which modes of remuneration are likely to become an important practical question in the Southern States. The acknowledged disadvantage of the latter mode is the uncertainty and inequality of the return for labour. The negroes on the share system, for example, had a larger remuneration last year, when the price oi cotton was high, than they will, have this year, when it has suffered a heavy cle- , cline. Can the negro be expected to understand or be satisfied .' with this fluctuating scale of^enumeration for lng.ib.il? Is it desirable that lie should be dragged, at his present stage of pro gress, into all the ups and downs of cotton speculation ? Is he likely to comprehend that, while doing his best probably in both years, he should have less this year than last, because France and Prussia have gone to war ? And if he cannot comprehend this, is there not a danger that he may be discontented, and think himself the victim of some fraud or injustice nearer
hofne 1 Eailways generally are--or, if not, ought to be--made at
very little cost in this part of the world. On my way to Wilmington, I have remarked about forty miles over which the rails pass in as straight a line as could be drawn mathematically, on - ground almost as level as a bowling-green, and with only the hue, light, marlly soil of the Atlantic slope to cut through. Not a rock, scarce a creek or stream, or marsh, in all this long dis tance. The American engineers have usually carried their lines along the ridge of the country to be traversed, and hence the few bridges, and the forest land with which the traveller in America becomes so familiar. On looking down on the track--for which, by the way, the construction of the cars, allowing free passage at all times from one end of the train to the other, affords peculiar facility--one sees for the most part a simple narrow clearing through the forest, a certain amount of spade and barrow work, with embankments here and there only a few feet deep; ribs of timber, or " railway sleepers," laid across; and then, longitu dinally, the iron rails, bound together by bolts, without the "chairs" and jointings which the heavy traffic on British rail ways renders necessary. Two light trains a day, with probably one freight train in the same period, form the general average of traffic, and can be conducted safely without the elaborate expen diture on " way " and " maintenance of way " in other circum stances indispensable. The railways hereabouts have numerous stations, which are simply landing-places, without buildings of any kind, for letting down passengers to farms and little centres of population in the neighbourhood; and they have also " depots " where there may be a little town or not, but where there are great amounts of produce to be " shipped," and

32

WILMINGTON.

[CH. v.

where the companies erect sheds and provide every structural convenience necessary to the traffic. The main outlay of American railways, however, away from the great cities, is the iron rail. The timber is got on either hand in abundance at every step of the road, and the proprietors of the lands are so eager to have railway communication that they not only open their woods, but give tens of thousands of acres along the track for ever to the companies. The earthworks, and all into which labour on the spot enters, have to bear, indeed, the great inflation of prices which dates from the war, and which renders the monetary cost nearly double what it was before. But the iron rails are the most formidable difficulty.
Wilmington is the only shipping port of any magnitude in North Carolina. The railway system of the State, converging at Goldsboro', has been extended to Beaufort, about 100 miles north of Wilmington, where there is said to be deeper water, and other advantages, and which is expected to compete with Wilmington for the export and import trade. But the results hitherto have not been equal to the most sober expectations. It is always a difficult and tardy process to divert trade from an established channel. Wilmington, like all the old Atlantic ports, has great depth of water up to its warehouses. It was the chief port for blockade-runners during the war, and the success with which that trade was conducted in the face of the Federal cruisers is adduced as a proof of the safety and convenience of the harbourage and its outlets. The stormy dangers of Gape Hatteras, which increase the rate of insurance at New York, may be a drawback in the coasting trade betwixt Wilmington and seaports to the north, but not betwixt Wilmington and any port south of ]STorth Carolina, while they can hardly affect, in any degree, the direct trade of Wilmington with Europe. The cotton steam-press here was destroyed in the war, and has "not yet been replaced. \ There is a great number of intelligent, energetic, and honourable men of business in Wilmington, in cluding a few prominent Northern men, who have made money in North Carolina, are imbued with an earnest desire to develop the prosperity of the State, and will not readily allow the trade of the port to dwindlgf
/ The exports of North Carolina, of which the great bulk passes through Wilmington, have been steadily on the increase since the close of the war/ With the exception of 186.6, the first year of peace, when a considerable quantity of produce stored up during the blockade found outlet, and when the export of cotton amounted to 64,000 bales, the cotton exported annually has been 38,000 bales till the past season, in which it has increased to 57,855 bales. The production of cotton in a State can seldom be inferred from the exports of its own harbours, owing to the

CH. v.]

STATE OF NORTH CAROLINA.

33

divers lines of transit by which cotton finds its way/$> market, and Worth Carolina itself is not an exception to the general rule in this respect, since some of its cotton, with much more from farther Sonth, goes to Norfolk in Virginia, and some to Charleston in South Carolina. But North Carolina exports hardly any cotton which is not the TYi-oduce~bTltsl)wn soil, and the rapid increase of export during the (past year shows a largely extended internal production. The average price of cotton realized in North and South Carolina in the four years after the war was 28-f cents per lb., while in 1869-70 it was but 22J cents per lb., and has since been still further reduced. But it is worthy of observation, that while the average Value of the dollar, in the four years succeed ing the war, was 649 to the pound sterling, during 1869-70 it has been as high as 5'70 to the pound sterling. This difference may not be immediately felt by the grower under the roundabout style of business and the elaborate frustration of economic prin ciples prevailing in the United States, but it shows that a fall of the currency price of cotton is not exactly equivalent to a fall of value, and that, under any moderate approach to free trade, and a fair rating of goods and materials of every kind, the possi bilities of American production of cotton and other staples, with -a handsome profit to the producer, would be immensely increased. The exports of spirit of turpentine from North Carolina in 1866 were 57,000 casks, in 1867 they rose to 89,000 casks, in 1868 to 96,000, and last year to 120,000 casks. In 1870 the same ratio of increase will not be shown. The pro duction has not been so great as in 1869. The benzoin spirit distilled from petroleum is interfering with the demand for spirit of turpentine, and the increased labour and energy thrown into the production of cotton naturally marks a diminished attention to the industry of the forests. The price of the spirit of tur pentine has fallen since the war from 25 dollars to 15 dollars per cask, and crude has declined in equal proportion. Yet, what with the increased quantity produced, and the higher value of American currency, North Carolina has been receiving annually an almost uniform sum in pounds sterling for her turpentine and other naval stores. The export of rosin has increased from 343,451 barrels in 1866 to 544,498 barrels in 1869. The price has dropped in the same period from 5 to 2J dollars per barrel, but the dollar is worth in British money from 15 to 18 per cent, more than in 1866. The export of lumber of all kinds has been well maintained year after year since the close of the war, and though at slightly reduced rates, has of late been increased; so that, with the extended cultivation of cotton and other marks of reviving agriculture, the gradual recuperation of North Carolina seems beyond question.
Wilmington is striving in various ways to develop the resources
D

34

WILMINGTON.

[en. v.

of the State and to improve its own position as the port of ship ment. Chief among the objects anxiously promoted by its leading men is the completion of the Wilmington, Charlotte, and Eutherford Eailroad. There are 170 miles of this line in opera tion, but a considerable extension is still necessary to render the projected communication complete. Along the southern border of North Carolina there are several well-settled and productive counties which have no railway communication with the coast, and the object of the promoters of the railway is to open up these counties and to form a connection with the Tennessee line and the great thoroughfares to the South and West. The leadingports on the Atlantic seaboard have all a lively ambition to get into direct railway communication with the Western States and the route to the Pacific. This appears to them to be the great highway of future commerce, while at the same time the exten sion of their lines westward meanwhile serves most important local objects. There is little reason to doubt that, by means of direct railway communication with Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, and Illinois, Wilmington as well as other Southern seaports would command a share of the AVestern traffic with Europe, at present carried by a longer route to New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. .New York more especially, by its great concen tration of capitaland means of communication, and the keen ness, not to say unscrupulousness, with which the latter are worked in its favour, overshadows and overlays as with an in cubus the natural and regular development of the Southern sea ports, and introduces some very uneconomic elements into the trade of the South and West with Europe. Whether this want of balance can be corrected remains to be seen, but, at all events, there is every propriety in North Carolina seeking to have the means of carrying her own produce quickly and cheaply to the seaboard. The counties yet to be penetrated by the Wilmington and Eutherford line are rich in agricultural and mineral resources. Mecklenburg, one of the number, has long been among the fore most cotton-growing counties in the State. The whole district is largely peopled by thrifty and industrious Scotch settlers of long standing. On being shown the book of a cotton factor here, I found, with some surprise, that fully one-half of his con signers were " Macs." Many of the planters of North Carolina send down their cotton to Wilmington, bale by bale as they gather it, under heavy charges of transit, which, in a state of declining prices, may one day turn the scale against production. As it is, there is much grumbling this season. The growers say that 15 cents per Ib. at the gin is the lowest price at which they can produce cotton, as 15 cents go at present in the United States. The cheapest access to market is thus of the most vital importance. Yet the promoters of the Wilmington and Euther-

OH. v.]

STATS OF NORTH CAROLINA.

35

ford Railroad, notwithstanding all the outlay and substantial progress they have made, are met by great difficulty. Three years ago they were authorized by their charter to borrow 2,500,000 dollars on first mortgage bonds, than which there is no better security; but there would seem to be little hope of getting the money on this Continent unless the company sell its bonds at 50 for 10o at 8 per cent, interest, or, in other words, borrow at 16 per cent, and'pay at last in principal 100 for every 50 bor rowed ! New York, which is the chief centre of these financial, operations, has probably no great disposition to promote railwaysL--- which threaten in some degree its own imperial monopoly, or it may not have funds enough for all the projects of this kind urged on its attention; but such things might surely somehow be better and more easily accomplished.
The want of confidence betwixt_ the..white people of North Carolina and the State Government that followed upon the war | continues to prevail, though in a limited and subsiding degree. Notwithstanding the test oath, by which persons who took part in the war are excluded from office, the negro mass vote, and the high-handed measures of the party in power, the wMte_.pjop_ulation- of ..the State_aj-e gradually acquiring influence, ,. and have made considerable gains inTEe "elections' this autumn. I'-" The Governor, HokLen, has weakened rather than strengthened his influence by a cry which he raised, in a case of supposed murder, against Ku-Klux conspiracy and outrage in the State, and the military and other measures he adopted on the occasion. The fact that a murder had been committed might be clear enough, but that a secret confederacy existed among the white people for purposes of violence was denounced as an invention of the Governor to agitate the negroes, and to keep them banded on his side in the elections. The case at all events broke com pletely down on inquiry, and the parties arraigned right and left on a charge of complicity were discharged by the Eadical judges. Governor Holden is not a " carpet-bagger." He is what is called here a " scallowag," or what in the amenities of electioneering parlance in England would be termed " turn-./coat." He is said to have been more fiercely Confederate than' the Confederates themselves during the war, but upon the surren der to have turned round, and, placing himself at the head of the negroes, secured his pre-eminence.1 The fierce passions excited betwixt North and South by the war are kept alive by the'system "of rule which has. almost .inevitably followed, _.but there are symptoms that bitter feelings and inane .resentments will gradually give way. A Northern man of business readily
1 Governor HoldeB, since the above was written, has been impeached, found guilty of high crimes and misdemeanours against the State and the liberties of the citizens, and expelled from office.
D2

36

WILMINGTON.

[OH. v.

attains the position due to him among his fellow-citizens in the South. Mr. Silas Martin, the present Mayor of "Wilmiiigton, though a Northerner, was freely elected to his office; and is held in deserved respect by all classes of the population for his business qualities and standing, and the zeal and probity with which he promotes the interests of the port and of the State.
The white and coloured population of North Carolina are nearly equal in number. Here in Wilmington the negroes are in a large majority, the census of this year having brought out the following results :--

White males ......... White females .........
Total whites .... Coloured males ........
Coloured females ........
Total coloured . . . Foreign males ......... Foreign females ........
Total foreign . . .

2,697 2,832
---- 5,529 3,446
4,455
---- 7,901 348 200
---- 548

Total population of Wilmington . . 13,978

This is an increase of fully 4,000 since the previous . census, which is remarkable, considering the vicissitudes through which the town has passed in these ten years, and is indicative, not only from the large majority of negroes, but the large excess of coloured females over coloured males, of the tendency of the ) H'egro, since emancipation, to desert the country for the town, V and to do so in a loose and vagrant fashion. Society cannot be in the most healthy condition where the coloured females are four to three coloured males. But there is abundance of employ ment most part of the year in "Wilmington for all the able-bodied negroes willing to work. The rate of wages paid them for com mon labour is from 1 to 1'25 dollars a day, and for whitewashing, bricklaying, and labour more or less skilled to which negroes have been trained, as high as from 2-50 to 3 dollars a day.

CHAPTEK VI.

City of Charleston--Its Euin in the War--Marks of gradual Eestoration.-- The Battery.--Great Pire of 1862.--Charleston account of the Losses of the Southern States.-- Loud Complaints of Misgovernment and Financial Jobbery.--Majority of Negroes in the Legislature.--Atmosphere of Poli
tical Suspicion.--Efforts of the Whites to regain a share of Eepresentation.--The Eeform Union.

'

[CHARLESTON, S.C.--Nov. 10 to Nov. 14.]

CHARLESTON--" old Charleston," fondly so called by its citizens --that has braved " the battle and the breeze," if not a thousand, a good hundred years--the centre of Carolinian trade
and commerce, the centre always of strong political emotion, and the" centre also where the negro element was densest and negro slavery was intrenched as in a stronghold alike by fear and interest--is getting, slowly but surely, on its legs again from the downfall inflicted by the war. Never had a completer ruin fallen upon any city than fell upon Charleston in the years from 1860 to 1865. Her planters, who, with noble country seats on the banks of pleasant streams, amid groves of live oaks affording deep shade from the summer sun, could afford to have their winter residences here in town, were reduced, as by the grinding of a nether millstone, from affluence to poverty--her merchants were scattered to the four winds of heaven--her shopkeepers closed their doors, or contrived to support a pre
carious existence on contraband of war--her young men went to die on the battlefield or in the military prisons of the North --her -women and children, who could, fled to the country. The
Federal Government, mindful of Fort Sumter and the first indignity to the Union flag, kept Charleston under close block
ade, and added to its miseries by occasional bombardments. When this process in five years had reached the last stage of exhaustion, and the military surrender gave practical effect to
emancipation, the negroes in the country parts, following up the
child-like instinct of former days that Charleston was the El Dorado of the world, flocked into the ruined town, and made its
aspect of misery and desolation more complete. The streets were empty of all but themselves; the houses had not only

38

.

CHARLESTON.

[CH. vi.

lost all their bright paint without, but were mostly tenantless within; many fine mansions, long deserted, were fast mouldering into decay and ruin; and the demand for labour and the supply of provisions were at the lowest point. Seldom, with a deeper ruin of the old, has there been a more hopeless chaos out of which to construct a new order of things than Charleston pre sented in those days. Yet the process of amelioration has year by year been going steadily forward. Many of the old merchants of the city, and many active agents of exchange, both new and old, have come to put the wheels of trade once more in motion. Some of the old planters have also survived, and are seen, though in diminished numbers and with saddened countenances, yet with the steady fire of Anglo-Saxon courage in their eyes, attending to affairs like men determined to con quer fortune even in the depths of ruin and on the brink of the grave; while others, not so much to be respected, unwilling to . work and ashamed to beg, seek to maintain some remnant of the ancient dignity no one knows how. The quays and wharves are busy; new ones, to meet new branches of trade, have been built with files of counting-rooms to suit; the cotton presses are again at work; lorries laden with the staple products of the interior pour the livelong day along the streets towards the river; revival is extending from the business parts of the town to the quiet quarters of private residence; and the hotels, always of the first consideration in America, are already, with their stately colonnades of white pillars, their freshly painted fronts, and their troops of polished waiters of various hues of ebony, magnificent in Charleston. I went down one evening to the Battery, an esplanade at the seaward end of the peninsula, formed by the Cooper and Ashley Eivers, on which Charleston is built--not of great compass, seeing that the embouchure of the two rivers here draws the land to a narrow point, but beautiful and refreshing, looking out on the spacious bay direct to Fort Sumter and the far Atlantic, and calling up associations of the Spanish Main and the West Indies, the distant British Islands, and of naval and historic glory, at the crowding thoughts of which the heart of every English-speaking man leaps to his mouth. Though Charleston, like other cities, has its West-End --as I have seen from the tower of the Orphan Asylum, a noble institution which the war has left in full vigour--where goodly houses along stretching avenues of trees, and ample garden grounds, afford a happy and elegant retreat to prosperous men of business, yet there is reason enough why the Battery should be a point of peculiar eminence and fashion in Charleston. The residences round the esplanade--palaces in their way--after long neglect, are undergoing rapid renovation. I am told that, apart from the "nabobs" who live in these charming marine villas, the

CH. vi.]

STATE OF SOUTH CAROLINA.

39

Battery in ante-war times was the resort every evening of a long array of carriages, in which fair ladies reclined, and happy gentlemen, cooled themselves after the heat and toil of the day. The only equipage I saw was the handsome buggy of a dry-goods man from the North, who is rather liked for the spirit he dis plays. But the ladies of Charleston meantime take a constitu tional \, CU.K on the Battery with their babies and nurses, and the gentlemen say the carriages will come again in due time.
Such is the hopeful uprising of commercial progress in Charleston just now. But the old town has much to recover. In the winter of 1862 a calamity more destructive and terrible than all the Federal bombardments befell the devoted city. A fire broke out in some negro shanty on the Cooper River, and, favoured by the wind, spread and swept down all before it in a curious zigzag but generally straight line through the centre of the town, till stopped by the Ashley Eiver on the other side. This appalling conflagration, the desolation and misery cuased and the hospitality evoked by which, amidst all the troubles of the war, cannot be described, still leaves its mark, like the course of a caterpillar that has eaten its way over a cotton leaf, upon the city of Charleston. Fires, once sprung, must propagate here with fearful rapidity. A large proportion of the side, streets of Charleston are built of wood. The houses are simply frame erections. They are all dry as tinder, and airy as they can be made. An accidental spark or flame which in our British towns would be instantly smothered by the damp atmo sphere, the stone walls, the dense fogs, and the absence of sun and ventilation, is here fraught sometimes with alarming conse quences. Not the slightest suspicion of incendiarism rested upon the great Charleston fire of 1862. The negro is not given to the folly of setting his house on fire to roast an egg for somebody else to eat; and such is the power of discipline and habit over him, that he continues, save on election nights or other periods of great excitement, to turn into bed at the early hour in the evening prescribed to him by a sort of curfew law in the days of slavery. The question asked when one surveys the vast ruin caused by this fire is, What became of the insurance companies ? The insurance companies of the South ? The war soon rendered their position untenable. The number of persons caring to insure rapidly diminished, and as the destruction of fire and sword spread wider and wider, the companies went down by the board, till the whole insurance capital of the Southern States, and all the interests centred round it, shrivelled up like a scroll and disappeared. One must go to Charleston in order to hear all the ruin of the war summed up in good round emphatic English. Any old merchant citizen will reckon on his fingers what the war lost of property, capital, and substance of every kind to the South.

40

CHARLESTON.

[CH. vi.

First, the property in negroes, which, whether property in right reason and natural equity or not, was introduced under the sway of England, was recognised by the Constitution of the Kepublic, was protected by the laws of the United States, and was to all material intents and purposes as essentially property in the South as anything elsewhere which makes profit and can be bought and sold;--this property was abolished, and was four hundred millions sterling. The whole banking capital of the South, which can not be estimated at less than two hundred millions more, was swamped in the extinction of all profitable banking business, and, finally, in a residuary flood of worthless Confederate money. The whole insurance capital of the South--probably a hundred millions more--also perished. The well-organized cotton, sugar, and tobacco plantations, mills, factories, coal and iron mines, and commercial and industrial establishments, built up by private capital, the value of which in millions of pounds sterling cannot be computed--all sank and were engulfed in the same wave. Every form of mortgage claim, with the exception of two or three proud State stocks, shared for the time being the fate of the principal, and only now crops up amidst the subsiding deluge like the stumps of a submerged forest. And so on the account goes as long as the fingers hold out, till the demonstra tion made is that the South by the war was peeled to the bone, and left not only without a cent in its pocket, but without any thing by which a cent could be made, save the rude but produc tive land and the bright sun, powerful indeed as natural germs of wealth and prosperity, but needing, to give them vitality, more capital and labour, more invention and ingenuity, more of everything which it seemed most difficult to supply.1 Terrible though the picture of ruin and impoverishment be, as thus

1 The census returns of the total value of the taxable property of many of the States hare been published since my visit. The basis may not be a very accurate one, but is doubtless an approximation to accuracy. 'Referring to the figures, the total valuation of Florida has declined from 888,929,685 in
1860 to $31,167,464 in 1870; Georgia, from 618,232,387 in 1860 to $202,563,557 in 1870; Louisiana, from 1435,787,265 in 1860 to $250,588,510 in 1870; while in Mississippi the decrease has been from $509,427,912 in
1860 to 1154,635,527 last year. South Carolina has not suffered as great a depreciation as some other States, the returns placing her present valuation at 1174,409,491 against 489,319,128 in 1860. The valuation of Virginia
and West Virginia in 1870 was 480,800,267 against 657,021,336 ten years ago. Kentucky appears to be recuperating, her valuation in 1870 being
423,776,099 against 528,212,693. The impoverishment of the South has told materially on the total taxable property of the Union. This value
increased betwixt 1850 and 1860 from 1,200,000,000 to 2,100,000,000, or 75 per cent. The increase in the last ten years has been only 25 per cent., or about ,500,000,000. The country, on the other hand, now owes a National
Debt, without reckoning State and City debts, of an amount nearly equal to
what appears to be the whole increase of taxable property in ten years.

CH. vi.]

STATE OF SOUTH CAROLINA.

41

drawn here in Charleston, I suspect it is in the main true of the whole South, and the marvel must be that affairs should already be so lively, so hopeful and elastic, as they everywhere appear. It was to be expected that the young men would enter upon business with fresh life and energy; but more remarkable than they are the men of advanced life who, still on the top of the wave, are guiding and controlling by their experience the new order of things.
Charleston, like Boston--for a good comparison there is nothing like the antipodes--has an English look about it. The old city has not fallen so mathematically into the parallelo gram formation as the cities of the United States in general. The inhabitants still cast many a fond look towards the old country, and contrast the present misrule with the time when the laws of England were the laws of South Carolina. Such is the deep sense of change and revolution produced by the down fall of State Eights and the inroad of Federal power and innova tion, that they profess not to know what the laws of South Carolina now are, or whether she has any laws at all. Ask what the system of rule is, and the reply will uniformly be that it is " nigger rule," which is in one sense true. The negroes are more numerous than the whites in South Carolina. Being all citizens of the United States, they have all the right of voting, while many of the whites are not naturalized; and the War Radicals who came in to take the lead in political affairs, and to hold offices for which the prominent men of the State were dis qualified by the test oath, have succeeded in controlling the negro vote, and casting it almost en masse in thoir favour at the polls. There not being "carpet-baggers" or "scallowags" enough in the State to fill all the seats in the Legislature, the negroes have largely returned men of their own race to watch over " laws and learning," and " ships, colonies, and commerce," at the Capitol. The House of Eepresentatives consists of 80 coloured men and 44 whites, and the Senate of 11 coloured men and 20 whites--there being one seat vacant just now. The white people of South Carolina are thus practically disfranchised, and a pro letariat Parliament has been constituted, the like of which could not be produced under the widest suffrage in any part of the world save in some of these Southern States. The outcry of misgovernment, extravagant expenditure, jobbery, and corrup tion is both loud and general. The negroes are declared to be the dupes of designing men, comparative strangers to the State, whose object is simply to fill their pockets out of the public spoil. Political charges are not minced in South Carolina. There is room, indeed, to hope for a good deal of exaggeration. The exclusion of the superior part of the population from all influence in public affairs must of itself tend to magnify the

42

CHARLESTON.

[cu. vi.

enormity of everything enormous, and to distort everything not quite square that is done. The members and dependants of the
State Administration are said, after having depreciated the South Carolina bonds to 40 and 35 cents, and bought in largely at such prices, to have then offered gold interest at New York, which at
once advanced the price to 95 cents, and enabled them to pocket millions. Possible and condemnatory enough, but it was a good thing in itself to restore the financial credit of the State; and in North Carolina, for example, the business men and the pro
prietors have since the war urged upon the Legislature to place the public credit of the State on the best footing, and will not desist till they succeed, under the conviction that honesty to the
public creditor is the best policy, and the corner-stone of all progress and improvement. State Commissions are said to be issued on roads, lands, and other departments, the members of
which do little but job and make profit to themselves and their friends. The State Government buys lands on which to settle and give homes to negroes. This is commissioned, and land is said to undergo sale and resale before it becomes the property
of the State. It is not believed that the negroes will in any considerable number make homes on these properties, and the
only advantage I have incidentally discovered from such settle ments is in one instance where the negroes, not having crops enough of their own to occupy their labour, formed a reserve force from which a neighbouring planter has drawn extra hands to gather in his cotton. Eailway contracts and railway bonds,
in which the State has its finger, are also suspected of offering opportunities not exactly consistent with the public good. The phosphate deposits in the bay and rivers have been leased at a royalty of a dollar per ton to a single company, not, I am to believe, without heavy sums distributed in the House of Eepresentatives; but the principle of this transaction is discussed freely by all parties, and it is thought by some that the law of the United States will not sanction a commercial monopoly of
what is public estate. A State census was taken last year,
which is thought to have been a superfluous labour, seeing that the decennial census ordered by Congress fell to be taken this year, and the Governor is supposed to have sought in this way to give employment to partisans, and to secure votes. Every
thing thus moves in an atmosphere of political suspicion. One
of the most favourable signs, indeed, is the keenness with which
the acts of the State Government and Legislature are scrutinized, and the activity with which the native white population endea
vour to recover influence and authority both in the State and in Congress. Prior to the recent elections, they organised a Reform
Union on the basis of the political and civil equality of the negroes, turned out in large numbers to the ballot-boxes, pro-

CH. vi.]

STATE OF SOUTH CAROLINA.

43

tected the negroes who were voting on their side, and in Charleston succeeded. But, throughout the State, the move ment so far has failed to divide the negro vote with the Eadical party, who remain in a large majority. The principles of the Eeform Union seem to be consistently maintained in practice. Many of the white electors in the city voted for Delarge, a negro tailor, as representative of their district in Congress, because they believed' him to be more trustworthy than his white opponents.
I allude at this length to political affairs in South Carolina, because it is very obvious that a system of government resting almost wholly on the votes of the negroes is not a desirable state of affairs as regards either the State itself or the general interests of the Union. It destroys confidence in the integrity and stability of the Administration, prevents the investment of money, and renders impossible that hearty co-operation of the public authorities with the substantial people of the State which is so essential to the interests of all classes of the community.

CHAPTER VII.
Exports of Cotton from Charleston before and since the War.--Opening made for New York Speculators.--Decrease of Banking Capital in South Carolina.--A Fortunate Development.--The Phosphate Deposits--Their Extent and Characteristics--Manufacture into Manures.--Great activity of the New Trade.--Bice Cultivation likely to diminish.-- The Environs of Charleston.
[CHARLESTON, S.C.--Nov. 10 to Nov. 14.]
IMMEDIATELY before the war the port of Charleston passed out to sea as many as half a million of bales of cotton in a year. This large supply was drawn from many wide districts beyond the borders of South Carolina, the total production of ginned cotton in which was 300,900 bales in 1850, and 354,412 bales in 1860, this latter being the largest crop which the State had ever produced. The extended commercial relations of Charleston, and its convenience as a place of shipment for the cotton of parts of North Carolina, Middle Georgia, the Sea Islands, and regions still more distant, were thus well established before the war. Charleston is resuming all her old connections, but has to contend with new conditions of railway communication in the interior, as well as with the fresh flow of capital and commercial energy into ports formerly occupying a subordinate position which has characterised the last few years of reviving industry and enterprise in the South. But all the old sections of the country from which cotton came to Charleston continue to send her more or less still; and with some further development of her railway system, and an increase of banking and commercial capital, Charleston is certain to maintain a leading position both as a market and a port of shipment for cotton. She exported in the year ended August 31 last, 238,000 bales of Upland cotton and 13,000 bales of Sea Island, which, though much short of ante-war times, show a large increase on preceding years since the war, and from the high prices realized present a volume of trade in money value which compares favourably with the most prosperous times in Charleston. The cotton exported here in the past year is estimated at 25,750,000 dollars, and, with a new crop still larger coming forward rapidly to market, has produced

CH. vii.]

'STATE OF SOUTH CAROLINA.

45

a very satisfactory feeling, both retrospectively and prospectively. There is probably, in the meantime, a larger proportion of the cotton exported from Charleston sent forward here simply for shipment, and giving little return to the town itself, than in former times. The cotton speculators at New York push over the heads of the local merchants and factors, and, by cutting before the point, do little go~J~~^i:obably to themselves, while impoverishing the trade of the Southern seaports and muddling and confusing the market. Instances have occurred in which they have bought cotton in the interior, cash on the spot, upon which advances had already been made by Southern merchants ; but this, of course, is a practice which cannot extend, and immediately checks itself. Yet the excessive activity of speculation in buy ing and moving cotton is very apparent, and is of doubtful benefit either to the planter or to the consumer. The poverty to which the cotton dealers of Charleston were reduced by the war, and the ruin which fell upon all her financial resources, made an opelaing for the capital of speculators of which they have availed themselves, and which only closes up as the profits of trade once more accumulate and the town becomes richer. Before the war Charleston had a banking capital of 13,000,000 dollars, whereas to-day she has a banking capital of only 1,892,000 dollars.* The State of South Carolina, outside of Charleston, had a bagMng~cap1Ian5efore the war of _3,_000,000 dollars, but now of rrnlyjjOO^lOO dollars. The crippled capacity of planters and merchants to raise and move such large crops of exportable produce as those of South Carolina may be inferred from these facts. The charges for the use of money are enormous. The banks turn over money at the rate of 1 8 to 24 per cent., on a class of business which presents little or no risk. In the country districts the rates are still more exorbitant, so that it is with money as with everything else that enters into the production and transport of cotton--it is loaded with a costliness in dollars of now all but par value with gold, which to an Englishman or Scotchman appears simply unbearable. Hence the cry for a high price; hence the difficulty and discontent into which every fall seems to plunge the producer; and hence the struggling condition of the Southern States despite their natural advantages and hold on the commercial world. Until capital be more largely established on the spot for the trading purposes of the country, and substantial reductions of the tariff permit a more direct trade between the South and Europe, and bills on England become saleable in the great depots of Southern produce, the cotton trade can hardly be in a sound condition, while it is impossible that such cities as Charleston can be enriched by the vast inland countries behind them, or be to them in return the strength,
and ornament they might well be.

46

CHARLESTON.

[CH. vn.

Meanwhile, the most fortunate thing that could have occurred in the present circumstances of Charleston has occurred, and is in full progress of commercial development. It has been found within the last two or three years that all round Charleston, and at a few feet from the surface, there are immense marl deposits, so full of phosphates that they cannot be anything else than incalculable heaps of animal remains thrown or washed together, such as science has hitherto not been able to explain, and as commerce, with its clear eye for means of wealth and profit, has not hitherto discovered in any part of the world. The deposits are in the form of little lime-like nodules, light in weight and easily crushed and pulverized. Mixed with these are all but completely petrified ribs, vertebrae, tusks, and other bones of both land and sea monsters of the early tertiary period. So perfect in form are these petrified bones, that, with a collection ample enough, an. Owen might have little difficulty in constructing skeletons of the original animals. From some specimens as much as 85 per cent, of pure bone phosphate has been obtained by chemical analysis. But the petrifaction in most cases is too complete for easy treatment, and the great matter commercially at present are the little chalky and irregularly rounded nodules, which yield from 45 to 65 per cent, of bone phosphate. They are found lying in layers under a thin top-dressing of sandy soil, embedded in a bluish clay and earth, and are dug out by pick and shovel much in the same fashion as potatoes. The scientific record is that these layers extend over an area of 70 miles by 60, but, as known to commerce here, there is given an area of 60 miles by 20, including the river beds. The deposit is found in the beds of all the shore rivers, and on the land lying between. The layers vary from six inches to several feet deep. The digging, being done by hand, is not pursued beyond four feet, but a new trench is opened, and the digging carried on in the easiest form. An acre has been known to yield 1,300 tons of nodules. The river and marine deposit differs from the land deposit in being of a blackish colour, harder, and with not so large a percentage of phosphate. The average richness in phosphate of these deposits is usually given at 45 for river and 57 for land. The nodules, when dug up, are washed in long troughs with paddles worked by a strong stream of water from a force-pump, and, thus freed from clay and sand, are sold on the wharves or conveyed into the factories constructed at Charleston for their conversion into soluble phosphate manures. These establishments first put them through kilns to dry them thoroughly, then crush them into pebbles, and afterwards grind them into fine powder by the ordinary circular millstones. In this state the material is taken to a loft, where it is washed with sulphuric acid, and subjected to such varied chemical treatment

\

CH. vii.]

STATE OF SOUTH CAROLINA.

47

and composition as may be desired in the final product. When wheeled off from the. chemical apparatus into a heap, it cakes, and has to be ground again, after which it is put into bags, and is ready to be transported and applied to the soil. An immense business has already been done both in the raw and manu factured article. The nodules were first extracted for manufac ture i'-L^. manure in the North, but the whole business has been taken up briskly in Charleston, and to import artificial manures into South Carolina is now like carrying coals to Newcastle. An export of the nodules to the most distant parts is growing into magnitude. Vessels are loading just now with this phos phate deposit for England and Scotland; and such is the energy with which the Charleston men have thrown themselves into the utilisation of this mine of wealth round their shores, that the export of the raw material is likely to increase with rapid stride, freight being probably the greatest difficulty in the case. As for the manufacture of superphosphate manures here for local purposes of fertilisation, the result is placed beyond all doubt. The Wando Company, which was the first to enter fully into the trade, divided 30 per cent, of profit, and created by its success a little furore, for phosphate digging and manufacture. There are now twelve companies operating or about to operate in this new-industry, and local works for the manufacture of sulphuric acid have also been set agoing. The planters are taking the manure freely. On the day I arrived in Charleston, bills for a million dollars of this home-made manure fell due and were satisfactorily discharged. One effect has been to benefit the railways in giving them more inland freight, of which they have hitherto felt the scarcity. Some of the planters I have met with say that the manure is as good as Peruvian guano, while others do not give quite so favourable a report. The price is 30 per cent, less than guano ; and with an expenditure of three to five dollars to the acre there is the most abundant practical testimony of its productive and profitable results. The scientific men have hitherto not thrown much light on this remarkable natural phenomenon. I believe Dr. Shephard, of the Medical College here, has had more to do in bringing this extraordinary deposit into notice than any other. Agassiz came and looked at it, and was deeply interested, but declined to enter into any elaborate scientific diagnosis or investigation. It seems that tlr -pie had been long carting the nodules off the soil as an oh' _^cdon to the plough, and were laying the streets with them, ignorant or heedless of their valuable properties. They are, no doubt, a superficial deposit, and cannot be dug out to much depth. There is usually a rapid end to such concen trated animal remains. The nodules overlie an immensely deep bed of white limestone marl, in which Dr. Shephard has found

48

CHARLESTON.

[CH. vii.

from 2 to 9 per cent, of phosphate of lime. There is an artesian well in Charleston, that has been bored down 1,200 feet for water, passing through eight or nine hundred feet of this white limestone marl, which has been recognized a,s under lying all the country round. Over this dense bed of marl the phosphate nodules are found, sprinkled as in a layer in some places of a few inches deep, and cropping out in stray pieces on the surface of the soil; but from the varying thickness of the layers, and the frequency with which the diggers have not exhausted them at the depth of three or four feet, the pro bability is that they will be found in pockets of occasionally great richness. The deposit has already, at all events, been found uniformly over an immense area, and science has begun to forecast its discovery at other points of the coast from Acquia Creek to the shores of Florida. The remarkable thing com mercially is that these phosphate deposits of South Carolina have been brought into daylight and practical use at the moment when they are most needed to fertilise the sandy and exhausted soils of the Atlantic States, and to bring them up to a better competitive level with the richer lands of the G-ulf and the Mississippi. To South Carolina they are indeed twice blessed, for while increasing the productiveness of the inland soil, they will gather immediately at Charleston a large amount of capital, which is here one of the things most wanted.
The phosphate " diggings " may be expected to make serious inroads on the rice lands round Charleston. But this is pro bably no great loss. INTothmg could be easier than to extend the cultivation of rice all about Charleston, which on various sides has broad, shallow, sedgy swamps, through which the tide flows from the rivers. I went out a few miles to a cotton plan tation, and a part of the road---made by a heavy deposit of shells--passed through a section of this swampy ground. The part of the swamp thus separated was rapidly forming into good agricultural soil. The tidal water must be banked off from rice land, and a free command of fresh obtained for irrigation. It would not be difficult, by a few embankments, to make much new rice ground about Charleston; but the wet culture of rice is admitted, even in these parts, to be more fatal to human life than almost anything else, and to extend it up to the very streets of a large town would be bad policy. Eice was a diminishing product of the United States for ten years before the war. YeJL_^2utlL-Carplina sold of her crop of the year just ended 40,000 tierces, which were not only_an increase on the previoiis year, bnt were two-fifths of the total production of rice in the American Union. Almost the whole went to home consumption. "South Carolina rice has all but ceased to be an article of export to foreign countries. The cotton plantation

CH. vii.]

STATE OF SOUTH CAROLINA.

49

which I went to see did not present a paradise to be put in contrast with a rice-field. It had been, the pet place of the owner and cultivator of several plantations. There was a splendid mansion closed up, and flower and vegetable gardens over which the pigs of the negroes had free "ish and entry/' and a noble verandah from which there was a delightful view of the n^er River and of fine avenues of trees by which the plantation was approached and bounded on all sides. There were also superior fields of cotton, sown with Dickson's seed and amply phosphated, and so full of young bolls that it was doubtful whether so late they could ever come to maturity. Yet it was confessed to me that all would not pay. This is probably not the way in which cotton can be profitably cultivated in these days, and my city friend, who pays a rent of 700 dollars for the place, seemed quite conscious of the fact, and not to care much about it one way or other. Yet I could not but admire the environs of Charleston--good roads which one expects to see on approaching any place of importance, whether it be the chief city of a State or the residence of a duke or a millionaire--- noble trees, too deeply draped perhaps with the mossy veils peculiar to miasmatic regions--summer gardens which adverse circumstances have closed, and many other places of public and private resort, now silent and neglected, but capable or being repaired and reanimated with a richer and brighter life than that of former days.

CHAPTEK VIII.
The Negro's " best Friends."--Sinister complexion of Politics.--Kindly Social Influences at work.-- State of Education.--System of Medical Eelief in Charleston.--The Health Statistics.--Proportionate Mortality of Whites and Blacks.--Salubrity of the Climate.--Freedmen's Savings Banks.
[CHARLESTON, S.C.--Nov. 10 to Nov. 14.]
APART from the passing excitement of the elections just over, and the disappointment of the white population at the voting of the negroes en masse for the Eepublican or Eadical party, the general tone of social life in Charleston is kindly and temperate, and all classes of society are working together with considerable harmony for mutual good. The negro is beset at present by two parties who claim to be his " best friends." The Eepublicans, who came in with the close of the war, appeal to him as his best if not only friends; and, looking at the political issues of the war, and the decree of emancipation, with its elaborate guarantees of reconstruction, the negroes could not but regard the Eepublican party politically as their friends. Nor can it be denied that the organs of the Federal Government have laboured to introduce institutions for the moral and social benefit of the negroes, and, as far as their limited means would allow, have be friended that large portion of the population. I have not found any one on the other side who is prepared to blame the negroes for voting almost universally as they did in the elections which raised General Grant to the Presidentship, or who appears to have expected that they would or should have been other than fast adherents of their emancipators. But the political agitators and hungry spoil-and-office hunters of the party are accused of appealing to the ignorance and passions of the negro population --of telling them that the white people of the State are eagerly seeking an opportunity of restoring slavery, which they have certainly no wish to do, and which they could not do even if they would; and now, after five years of this, it is considered hard that the negroes--when there are great public objects of .economy, protection from jobbery and corruption, and a sound .and healthy administration of the affairs of the State to promote,

CH. vni.]

STATE OF SOUTH CAROLINA.

51

in which the Hacks are as closely interested as others--should cast their votes in a body against the great majority of the white population, and terrorise such of their own colour as are disposed to act differently. This feeling breaks out violently just now in bar-rooms and at street corners, and is often expressed more quietly and reasonably, yet firmly, in private circles. Many seem re""\, M despair of the negro as a politician, while others talk of a " war of races " and other disorders sure to arise. The feeling is no doubt all the stronger since the evils of " carpetbagging " and negro demagoguery are apparent to respectable men of both parties, and, while violently denounced on one side, are not denied, but sometimes admitted and deplored, on the other. Though politics in South Carolina thus wear a some what sinister complexion, yet there is a healthy action and a sober practical opinion underneath the surface that promise beneficial results. The issues left by the war are being rapidly closed; the Eeform Union, which has figured prominently in thelate elections as the organ of the native white people of the State, recognizes fully the civil and political equality of the negroes not only as an election platform, but as the fundamental law of the United States; this position is likely to be main tained, and may be expected soon to bring about in this, as in other Southern States, a better balance of parties. Meanwhile social bonds are being knit together, and many .ameliorative influences are quietly at work. The ladies, who had a long apprenticeship of self-devotion during the war, are exerting themselves to give work, and to sell the work of poor needle women of both races. Nearly all the old charities of Charleston remain in operation, and schools and missions are doing much to improve the population.
By a law passed five years before the war a public school system was introduced into South Carolina, which became well developed in Charleston; and now the State has passed under the new free-school principle, embodied in the Constitutions of the Southern States under the Acts of Eeconstruction. It is only by degrees that this system can get into general operation, and, indeed, it is doubtful whethe^ fhe ground lost in education during the war has yet been reco, A. The official statistics for 1860 give 20,716 pupils in 757 public schools, whereas they show for 1869 only 381 public schools and 16,418 pupils. The new law is now, however, being put into operation; the State has appropriated 50,000 dollars to this object, and, aided by the Peabody Fund and other voluntary contributions, South Carolina may be expected soon to be tolerably well furnished with the means of education for the whole population. Charleston is probably more advanced in this respect than any other part of the State, and the education of negro children is already quite a
E2

52

CHARLESTON.

. [CH. vin.

prominent feature, one building devoted to the coloured people "being capable of receiving 1,000 scholars.
There is in Charleston a well-organized system of medical relief, and much attention is paid to sanitary conditions and arrangements. The city is divided into five health districts, over each of which there is appointed a physician in charge, with an office and dispensary, where attendance is given an hour every morning and an hour every afternoon. The physicians are also required, when called upon, to visit certain public institutions-- such as the Alms House, the Old Folks' Home, the Small-pox Hospital--situated in their districts. From the annual report for last year of Dr. Lebby, the City Eegistrar, which is very full, it appears that the total mortality of whites was 220 males and 233 females--453; and of blacks, 421 males and 497 females --918. The greatest mortality of whites occurred in the months of June, July, and August, and of blacks in July, August, September, and October. Of the 453 whites who died, 181 were children of five years and under; and of the 918 blacks who died, 461 were children of five years and under--the mortality of infants among the coloured people being propor tionately much greater than among the whites. Both races seem equally long-lived, though the coloured people would seem to have the advantage. Among the deaths are recorded 33 whites from 70 to 80 years, 9 from 80 to 90 years, and 6 from 90 to 100 years ; and 44 blacks from 70 to 80 years, 29 from 80 to 90 years, and 10 from 90 to 100 years. But the remarkable fact is the greatly larger mortality of the negroes, in proportion to their total number, as compared with the white people. The census taken last year by order of the Governor, and generally accepted as substantially correct for Charleston, gave the popula tion of the city as 20,354 whites, and 24,570 blacks and coloured. On this basis, the mortality of 1869 shows one death in 44'93 whites, and one death in 26'77 coloured people. In other words, very nearly twice as many coloured people died as white people in proportion to their respective numbers. Before the war this disparity in the mortality of the two races was not so marked. The returned population of Charleston in 1860 was 26,969 whites, and 21,440 coloured. The mortality of whites in that year was 719, or one in 37'5, and the mortality of coloured people 753, or one in 2847. The health of the whites has greatly improved since the war, while the health of the negroes has declined, till the mortality of the coloured population, greater than the mortality of the whites before the war, has now become so markedly greater, that nearly two coloured die for every one white person out of equal numbers of each. To those accus tomed to think of slavery only as prolific of every form of evil, this increased mortality of the negroes under emancipation

CH. viii.]

STATE OF SOUTH CAROLINA.

53

may appear surprising. But when one considers the strict, almost domestic control under which the slaves were kept in Charleston, how they were cared for when young and provided for when old, and how their number in the city was kept down to the actual demand for their services, one finds natural reasons enough for an increased liability to death in the severe ordeal they ha~:_ passed through since their emancipation. In 1860 there were 5,529 more white than coloured people in Charleston. There are now 4,217 more black and coloured than whites. The absolute increase of the negro population of Charleston since i860 is 3,130. They flocked in from the country at the close of the war, deserting the Sea Islands in large bodies, and produced all the evils of overcrowding at a time when the white popula tion, who could alone employ and maintain them, were not only thinned in numbers, but reduced to poverty, and the trade and wealth of the town were destroyed. Such a state of things could only have a disastrous effect on health and life, the traces of which still remain. The physicians in charge of the health districts also complain of the extreme carelessness of the negroes in following their advice, and administering the medicines pre scribed. A negro woman will come with her sick child to the dispensary at the morning hour, but does not return in the afternoon or next day as she ought, but makes her appearance a few days after to announce that she administered some charm of her own, and that the little patient is dead. New classes of disease are also notable in the returns of negro mortality--such as consumption, from which they used to be peculiarly exempt, and diseases which spring from immoral causes. Yet with all this access of negro mortality in Charleston, the whole deaths in 1869 were not more than 1 in 32'77, which it would be quite possible to match, and even exceed, in the mortality returns of various large cities of the United Kingdom. But if the negro population and mortality of Charleston be excluded, and the white population only considered, there is a degree of healthfulness which is almost unequalled in large towns of the old country. The mortality of whites in 1869 in Charleston was only 1 in 44-9 3. The morta.. . all England in the same year I find to have been 1 in 4417, and of all Scotland 1 in 42'52.
I imagine there is much nonsense thought and spoken about the unhealthiness of these Southern countries and Southern sea ports. Any passing impressions of mine, indeed, would be a very unsafe guide; for I have been travelling in an atmosphere so bright and clear, and yet so temperate and agreeable, and so pleasant by night and day, as to form a rather fascinating con trast to the climate of the United Kingdom at the same season of the year. This is the famous " Indian summer" of the South, and Charleston has its earlier and fiercer summer, when there is

54

.

CHARLESTON.

[OH. vm.

a considerable amount of sickness, and when febrile affections prevail. But this city has been singularly free from all epidemic disease for some years past. On the hottest day in 1869 the mean temperature at 2 P.M. was 86'77, and the thermometer is never known to rise above .97 degrees ; while in eight months of the year the temperature has an equable range from 50 to 65 degrees, with fair weather, and rainfall only heavy at very rare intervals, as the prevailing characteristics of the climate. No doubt the health of the town owes much to the well-organized staff of medical officers and the efficient arrangements made for the treatment of disease among the poorer classes. I was politely shown through the City Hospital by Dr. Lebby--an establishment of great extent, marked by scrupulous cleanliness and order, and devoted equally to white and coloured subjects." The white female ward is probably as lightsome, airy, and fine a sick-room as is to be seen in a public hospital anywhere. There is a lunatic ward, the inmates of which are chiefly blacks of a very low order. There were only two white women in the number--one of whom, a lady of Italian origin, had been driven to distraction in her matrimonial relations. Surgical cases, some of them very difficult, are also treated with marked success, the proportion of negroes operated upon being about 6 to 1 of whites. There is no general registry of births and marriages in Charleston, which detracts from the light thrown by its other wise ample vital statistics on the physical and social condition of the population.
That the negroes are improving, and many of them rising under freedom into a very comfortable and civilized condition, is not only admitted in all the upper circles of society, but would strike even a transient wayfarer like myself in the great number of decent coloured men of the labouring class and of happy coloured families that one meets. There is an institution in Charleston which early attracted my attention. In Broad Street one sees the office of the National Freedmen's Savings and Trust Company. I believe this form of National Savings Bank for the negroes was founded by the Freeclmen's Bureau in the first years after the war. It has spread over all the chief towns of the South, and has already in deposit upwards of two millions of dollars, almost entirely the savings of the negro population. The deposits in the Charleston branch were 165,000 dollars at the end of October, and are monthly on the increase. Go in any forenoon, and the office is found full of negroes depositing little sums of money, drawing little sums, or remitting to distant
parts of the country where they have relatives to support or .debts to discharge. The Freedmen's Savings Bank transacts a general exchange business betwixt the various points at which ;,t has branches. Perhaps " branches" is not the exactly proper

CH. viii.]

STATE OF SOUTH CAROLINA.

55

designation, for each, bank is an independent corporation in

itself, has a subscribed capital, is governed by its stock

holders, and is altogether probably too like an ordinary com

mercial bank for the humble functions it has to discharge. Yet

there is a certain degree of national concentration and control.

0

The banks are under the patronage and protection of the

Fede*"*1 Government, and from the centre at Washington a

monthly Circular is published, which reports the progress of all

the various offices, and contains an amount of general matter

very suitable to the negroes, and very desirable for them to read.

The funds are for the most .part invested in the Federal Debt,

I

the high interest of which enables from 5 to 6 per cent, to

j

be paid to the depositors. But the Federal Government does

not appear to be bound to make good to the depositors any loss

accruing from the failure of a bank through embezzlement or

any other cause. The responsibility in such a case would fall

on the subscribed capital of the stockholders so far as it was

stTfficient to make good the deficiency. There is an opening

in this state of affairs for partial and local disasters, which is

happily closed in the National Security Savings Banks of the

United Kingdom. But practically the Freedmen's Savings and

Trust Companies do for the negroes what our National Savings

Banks do for the working classes of England, Scotland, and

Ireland; and it is gratifying to find that the negroes have in five

years accumulated nearly half a million sterling of deposits.

This result is the more significant since it is confined almost

wholly to what were formerly the Slave States, and is but very

feebly developed in New York and other Northern towns where

it has been tried. The number of depositors in Charleston is

2,790, of whom nine-tenths are negroes. The average amount

at the credit of individual depositors is about 60 dollars. The

negro begins to deposit usually with some special object in view.

He wishes to buy a mule and cart, or a house, or a piece of land,

or a shop, or simply to provide a fund against death, sickness,

or accident, and pursues his object frequently until it has been

accomplished.

While some portion of tl aer slaves are probably sinking

into an even worse condition man the first, there are others who

are clearly rising,, both morally and socially. The system of

free labour, as was to be expected, will thus, in its own rough

but salutary way, sift the chaff from the wheat; and but for

the electoral antagonism of the moment, and the parading more

than enough of negroes as senators, as policemen, as militia, as

the armed force and the dominant power of the State, the

relations of the two races on both sides would here be more

kindly and cordial, and the prospects of the negroes themselves,

more hopeful than could well have been anticipated.

CHAPTEE IX.
The Capital of South Carolina.--The State Fair a failure.--Usury.--Governor Scott oa the Position of Affairs. The Blue Eidge Bailway project.--Mr. Treasurer Parker on Taxation and Negro Free Labour.--Political Opinions of the Farmers.--Arguments for and against Payment of Negro Farmlabourers by Wages or Share of the Crops.--Kailway Freight.--Cottonbagging and the Price of Cotton.
[COLUMBIA, B.C.--Nov. 15-16.]
IT was on the morning of the first frost this season, in the South that I was landed on the railway platform here from Charleston. Day had just broke, and nothing could be more inspiriting than the clear sky and sharp air, the paling moon and stars being just visible and no more, as the glorious effulgence along the eastern horizon shot its golden light up to the zenith. The country all round cultivated and interesting. The hills, or rather mounds, lower and rounder, the hollows less deep and abrupt, and the whole landscape presenting a more swelling outline than at Eichmond in Virginia, with woods no more than enough for ornament. The hotels in these parts are very obliging. They send carriages to the railway depots for guests, whether they can entertain them or not, while an express company's van picks up the baggage, for both of which services a handsome fee has to be paid. Columbia is a city of such " magnificent distances" that a stranger is never quite sure when he is in it or out of it. I am conscious of having arrived at the depot, and of being there in the country; of having by-and-by seen a stately building on an eminence which was clearly the Capitol, and two or three church spires about as widely apart as such objects may be seen in any English country landscape; of having been set down at a hotel full from floor to roof with country-people who had come in to the State Fair; and finally, of having sauntered forth to look for another inn and found myself in the country again. Columbia, it will be remembered, was completely burned down by Sherman in the war, the State House being almost the only .building that was spared or, fireproof, proved impervious to the flames. The town is being built up anew by degrees, and

OH. ix.]

STATE OF SOUTH CAROLINA.

57

many fine brick houses have been erected since the close of the war. But what magnificent outlines of streets sweeping spaciously for miles over the heights and hollows of that rich landscape, having rows of fine old trees on either side, and, inter sected by other wooded avenues equally broad and long, opening up in all directions the most delightful vistas! These vacant streets ^--^ solitary residences here and there, and since it must have cost a good deal to lay them out, and perhaps something considerable to keep them up, the suburban residents of the capital of South Carolina enjoy for nothing an amenity which money could, hardly command, in any part of Western Europe.
The State Fair, though attended by a multitude of happylooking people, was a failure as regards agricultural interest or display. There was little or no stock, which surprised me more in Columbia than in Charleston, where the same deficiency was very obs'ervable. The South Carolinians cannot vie in this respect with the Virginians. There is either no superior stock in this State, or the stockowners have not sufficient interest in its extension to be at the trouble to show it. The present disjointed state of political relations has also probably something to do with it. But the truth is that the Atlantic Cotton States have, till very recently, neglected stock-raising, for which they have some excuse, not only in the absorbing attention which the cotton-plant requires, but in the nature of the soil, which is un favourable to the development of good pasture land or winter forage. The difficulty may, no doubt, be overcome with care and perseverance, and it is only now that agriculturists in these parts are awakening to the importance of combining general elements of agricultural wealth with the growth of cotton.
The cotton-growers are not in the most satisfied mood this season. The heavy fall in the price of cotton--partly in conse quence of the Franco-Prussian war, and partly owing to the large crop of last year, now reckoned to have been 3,300,000 bales, and the still larger being gathered--has occurred when they had placed themselves under heavy accounts for manures, and disappoints their expectations of profit. The phosphates' are generally allowed, hov to have had a marked and favourable effect on the crop, and increased quantity will pro~ bably in many cases retrieve the fall in value. Complaints of the usurious rates charged for money are general among the farming community. Twenty-five and even thirty per cent, is taken by banks and people who have money to lend as a quite ordinary rate; and it is doubtful whether the planters are as
thriving as the commercial interests around them. Governor Scott, whose administration I had heard severely
blamed, courteously favoured me with an interview, and entered
freely into conversation on the condition and prospects of the

58

COLUMBIA.

[CH. ix.

State. He said that some official protection of the negroes was necessary, and, indeed, found to be unavoidable by persons in authority. Alluding to the dictum of Chief-Justice Tanney on the Dred Scott case, that " a negro had no rights which a white man was bound to respect," he remarked that there were still some who seemed to be actuated by that view of the question. He bad had to give safe-conducts to negroes leaving the State; and subordinate magistrates were not unfrequently called upon, and felt bound, in the discharge of their duty, to throw the pro
tection of the law over the coloured race. Governor Scott expressed a very hopeful view of the progress of South Caro lina, and explained to me on the map the merits of the Blue Ridge Eailway, the formation of which he is most anxious to promote. This project, which was prepared two years ago, and for which a company has been organized, and the necessary powers obtained to subscribe capital and borrow on'mortgage bonds endorsed by the State, is designed to connect the exist ing railway communications of South Carolina from Anderson county with Knoxville in Tennessee and with the lines to Ken tucky and the Western States. To get into direct and conti nuous communication by rail with the great West is a common object of ambition to all the Atlantic Cotton States and their seaports, and may be said to have become an absolute necessity of South Carolina if she is to keep pace with the progress made in this direction by her sister States. The Blue Ridge Eailroad would not only be of essential importance to Charleston and Port Royal, but would develop a large traffic betwixt the interior of South Carolina and the rich and productive States both to the west and the south. The produce of Kentucky is sent round eleven or twelve hundred miles, and brought back to points in South Carolina within a hundred miles or two of the place from which it started. The line is being extended at both ends, and some grading or earthwork is being done, but the borrowing powers of the company have not yet been exercised. Upon my observing that American railroad companies sometimes provided that their rails should be home-made, the Governor said that this was not the case in South Carolina, and that, on the con
trary, it was a condition of the Blue Ridge Company that the road should be laid with the best English rails. Mr. Parker, the State Treasurer, with whom I conversed for some time, stated that, before the war, the assessment for State purposes was levied, among other means and substance, on the slaves; that this source of revenue was now, of course, abolished; and that a larger rate had to be laid on land and other substance proper, all of which had been greatly reduced by the war, and was only being gradually, though rapidly, restored. Mr. Parker is of opinion that the labour of the negro as a free man is more effi-

CH. ix.]

STATE OF SOUTH CAROLINA

59

cient than when he was a slave ; and in proof of this conclusion adduces that many of the negroes perished during the war and
immediately after it, that the negro women are now almost wholly withdrawn from field labour, that the children who were made available under slavery for industrial purposes are being
more and more absorbed by the schools, and yet that, with all these ^ _J.uutions of the labour power, the production of South Carolina and other Cotton States is rapidly rising to a magnitude
equal to that of any former time. The "fairs" in the South afford a good opportunity for obtain
ing information on country, affairs. The hotels are filled with intelligent men, who all seem to know one another, and who are
ready enough to enter into conversation with strangers ; while the railway cars form a sort of free assembly, in which affairs
are discussed with all openness. In my travels from Columbia towards Georgia T gathered much opinion, as it were, in the mass. The dissatisfaction of these country folks of South
Carolina with the present state of government in the United States is palpable enough. They exclaim bitterly against the corruption which prevails in public life ; they are utterly
opposed to the high tariff on European goods, looking upon it simply as a means of plundering the cultivators of the soil in the South and West for the benefit of Northern manufacturers,
overgrown, they say, in wealth, and adepts in bribery and lobbyrolling ; they point to the enormous prices of goods sold in the Southern towns, and long for the growth of manufactures among themselves, and the direct importation of foreign goods into their own seaports; they express disappointment that more direct trade has not sprung up with the South since the close of the war, the high tariff notwithstanding; they declare American statesmen of the present day to be dwarfs and nobodies com pared with those of former times; and when the whole gamut
of political discontent has been sounded, one often hears the remark, so startling to any European admirer of American Inde
pendence, that Washington marl A a capital mistake, and that it would have been better for ' juntry to have remained under
the rule of England. To such an appeal to British patriotism
I could only reply that England could scarcely, in any circum stances, have continued to govern so great a country as the United States, and Avould certainly not be inclined to undertake
the responsibility now. On political subjects the people are very emphatic, if not a little excited, and the party newspapers
are more emphatic and excited still. But on agricultural and business matters they at once become cool, practical, and reason
able, and talk with acute apprehension of the point in hand,
whatever it may be. It is felt that the old system of cultivation,
or rather want of cultivation, is no longer suitable or possible,

60

COLUMBIA.

[CH. ix.

and that there must be deeper ploughing, more attention paid to stock and to the formation of good farm-yards, with plenty of manure, and vegetable compost from the forest and the ditches, so as to give heart, vigour, and greater variety of elements to the soil. There is little or no disparagement of the negro as a labourer among respectable countrymen, who need his services and employ him. On the contrary, there is much appreciation of his good qualities, a good deal of kindly patience towards his bad qualities, and much greater satisfaction with what he has done, and may yet be trained to do, as a free labourer, than one might be prepared to find. How to shape his relations as a farm labourer is thoroughly well canvassed. The alternative presented is that of paying him by a share of the crop or by wages, both of which plans have obtained a footing, and each of which is acknowledged by the practical mind of the planter to have its advantages. A summary of the arguments I have heard pro and con on this question would occupy a considerable space. But on the whole, so far, the preponderance of reason, as well as weight of testimony, inclines to the side of wages. One objection to the share system, which goes much deeper in my opinion than at first appears, is that it renders the negro indifferent to and reluctant to perform any kind of work on a plantation which does not bear immediately on the corn and cotton crops in which he has a share. A planter who cultivates on the share system must see his fences falling out of order, his manure heaps a diminishing quantity, and his hogs and cattle strayed, stolen, or starved; or, resorting to the wages system after all, must employ special hands to do these and other kinds of farm work. As the system of agriculture improves, the neces sary labour on plantations will become more and more varied, with the direct result of increasing the corn and cotton crops per acre ; and to pay wages to one class of men, probably whites, to do various kinds of work, in order that another class, certainly blacks, may share an increased abundance to which they have contributed nothing, will prove too unjust to be prac ticable. The rapid and regular picking of the cotton crop, which is the greatest difficulty of the planter, has kept the share system more in countenance than probably anything else, but in practical experience it seems .to fail at this point as at others. The share system implies rations to the negro from the beginning of the year to the end, and if the rations for a week are con sumed in half that time, an additional supply must be given, which places the negro so heavily in debt to his employer by the time the picking season has come, that he is apt, more espe cially under declining prices as this year, to be regardless of the financial results of the partnership with his employer into which he entered in January. The picking of cotton, as far as I know,

CH. ix.]

STATE OF SOUTH CAROLINA.

61

does not involve any greater natural difficulty than harvest season in all countries, when extra labour, stimulated by higher
pay, flows freely into the fields, and crowns the labours of the husbandman with a success in which all feel they have a per sonal interest. But in the thinly populated Cotton States of America, with labour on every plantation too inadequate for its ordir'-j ^outine of work, and vast spaces of mere wood, without town or village, betwixt one plantation and another, the social conditions are, of course, different. Yet some planters in South Carolina succeed in employing extra hands in the picking season, giving rations and 50 cents per 100 Ibs. of cotton picked. The production of cotton per acre is no doubt very varied, but one
hand and a mule in general cultivate 20 acres of cotton and 10 of corn, producing 10 bales of cotton and 100 bushels of
corn.1 One bale of cotton on good land per acre, with the help of phosphates and good picking, may be attained in some instances ; but half a bale of cotton per acre is deemed a very
'"favourable result in these parts. The railways in South Carolina conduct the cotton freight on
a rough-and-ready rate of a dollar per bale to Charleston, with out being particular as to the weight of the bales, or a handful
of miles of transport. One result is that the bales are becoming always heavier. Another curious instance of turning the penny to advantage is that the late high price of cotton has created a demand for heavy bagging, sold with the bale at the cotton price, which only the coarsest hempen looms of Kentucky can supply. As the price of cotton falls this temptation is reduced, and the point is just about reached when the protected hempen stuff of Kentucky is dearer than the unprotected cotton wool of
the Southern States.

1 A negro usually works two mules, but he cannot cultivate or gather the crop which his mules plough and " lay by, that is, finish for the season." He requires several hands, a little staff of labour, to make and gather the crop.

CHAPTER X.
Entry into Georgia.--The Town of Augusta--its Buildings--its Cotton Market.--Revolution in Agriculture.--Importance of selected Cotton Seed.--Large amount of Cotton grown by Small Farmers.--Opinion : on the Negroes.--Augusta Cotton Factory.--Education Act.--Observance of the Sabbath.
[AUGUSTA, GA.--Nov. 17-19.]
MY first acquaintance with, the State of Georgia has been made at the thriving and busy town of Augusta, situated on the border line of South Carolina, and connected with Columbia by an ex cellent railroad. The town at once establishes in the mind of a stranger a favourable prepossession of the State. It is lively, well built, well organized, and as amply furnished with mer chandise as any small inland town of the most flourishing pro vince could be expected to be. Augusta escaped direct devastation by the Federal armies during the war, and no doubt owes much of its compact condition and steady march to that happy immu nity. But it was finally cut off from all its communications, and its inhabitants shared the general impoverishment which blighted every portion of the Southern States. It is surprising, therefore, to see already so much spirit and abundance as prevail in Au gusta. The town has a " Broadway," before which the imperial street of New York must, all circumstances considered, hide its diminished head; for the Augusta Broadway is three times as broad as that of New York, and has a neatly-constructed market place at either end, with as much space for expansion as in future may be necessary. But the Broadway of Augusta is really no make-believe. Nearly the whole ground-space is occupied with well-stocked stores, in which everything, from a needle to an anchor, from the humble fabrics woven on the spot to the finest cloths of Europe, from the commonest earthenware to the choicest crystal, and all the products of the soil from cranberries to cotton, may be bought. And how substantial the houses are, and how many fine buildings meet the eye ! The Freemasons have a pillared edifice as chaste and pure as the White House at Washington, with their insignia brightly gilt on a ground as of alabaster. The dry and brilliant atmosphere encourages every where a cheerful style of ornamentation. It is remarkable how

CH. x.]

STATE OF GEORGIA.

63

widely the ancient Order of Freemasonry is spread throughout the Southern States. I find traces of it everywhere, and traces
which sometimes reflect no little, honour on the "brotherhood. For example, a tract of land laid out in lots, with cottages and
cultivation, where the widows and orphans of deceased Free masons find quiet and comfortable homes ; or a school-house in some "i;'.^i'y district where it is difficult to discover a popu lation, built <by the Freemasons, who, content with the second story for their lodge-room, have devoted the lower to the educa
tional purposes of the community. Augusta is an extensive cotton market. Since the lifting of
this year's crop began, the receipts have been about 1,500 bales a day. The railroads place Augusta in rapid communication with the adjoining counties of South Carolina, and with all parts
of Middle Georgia, and the cotton collected from, these wide dis
tricts is poured down by rail to Savannah for shipment. The telegraph works all day betwixt Augusta and Savannah, and betwixt Augusta and towns farther inland, telling what cotton can be bought or is selling for; while prices at New York and
Liverpool are eagerly scanned, and form the basis of the day's transactions. The local factors and merchants deal freely in cotton, though the former operate chiefly on order from Savannah,
Charleston, and New York. Seldom has cotton been brought more rapidly to market than this season, which is to be ascribed not only to the favourable weather, but to the activity of buyers and speculators, and the necessity, rather than the interest, of
the planters; for under the heavy fall of prices, generally attri buted here to the war in Europe, and scarce at all to the yearly expansion of the crop, the planter might be tempted, with the stock of American at Liverpool still low, and the return of peace probably not distant, to hold back in expectation of better prices. But the growers of cotton, though restoring rapidly their planta tions and their stock of implements, are, for the most part, still
poor in purse, and have to draw heavy advances on the growing crop. Paying from 2 to 2J per cent, for money per month, with storage and insurance charg boot, the planter finds that to
hold is a costly business, and that it is better to sell at once than
to extend his borrowings and charges in the expectation of an advance of two or three cents per Ib. The crop, save in so far as it may be interrupted by the action of middlemen and specu lators, is therefore rolled from the field, over hundreds of miles
of railway and thousands of miles of ocean, to the great markets
with marvellous despatch. Though insurance in the South was swept away during the war, yet it is growing up again with great
rapidity; and statesmen and generals, whose names were famous
in the war, preside over local companies or act as agents of New
York or British corporations.

64

' AUGUSTA.

[OH. x.

A great revolution in agriculture is going forward in this district, and indeed throughout the whole of Georgia. The most lively discussion is kept up on such points as the preparation, of land for crops, the selection of cotton seed, the use of fertilisers, the improvement and increase of live stock, and a more careful and varied cultivation than has hitherto been followed. There appears to be a strong feeling' of the necessity of bringing intelli gence and an active spirit of improvement to bear on the management of plantations, which, in ante-war times, were allowed to drag along with slave labour and overseers, as they had done for generations. Agricultural Societies have been formed in all parts of the State, and have been consolidated into a general institution, which holds two conventions every year for the discussion of agricultural questions, and for making arrange ments for the holding of annual fairs or exhibitions of industry. Numerous periodicals are published here, and throughout the State, which are chiefly devoted to the land interest, and discuss practical farming in all its branches with much vigour and intel ligence. Farmers and landholders constantly interchange their views and experience in these organs, and the actual results obtained from the use of phosphate and other manures, or from Dickson's and other classes of cotton seed, and the advantages of various kinds of implements, or the payment of labour by wages or shares in the crops, are chronicled with business-like detail. , The consequence is that the production of cotton per acre has been sensibly increased on the middle quality of land in Georgia, the soil of which in general has hitherto borne but an inferior reputation. Half a bale per acre is becoming more of an average than it once was; two bales to the three acres is deemed a super-excellent result on the best land with guano or phos phates, and a bale to the acre is said to be attainable when land, seed, manure, season, and mode of cultivation are all favourable, though I rather think there are very few instances of such a rate of production in Georgia.
Of the vital importance of good selected seed there can be no doubt, and much of the inferior crop seen throughout the Atlantic States is probably to be ascribed to carelessness in this particular. Mr. Dickson's seed and its offspring are now exten sively propagated throughout this and neighbouring States. But the best seed will rapidly deteriorate without careful and annual selection, and probably the greatest service rendered by Mr. Dickson and other agitators of this cardinal point is seen in the increased care which planters bestow on the quality of the seed annually set apart from their own crops. One could pur chase here two thousand bushels of a seed that appears to be peculiar in species, and is certainly remarkable in its fruitfulness. The branches of the plant grow up more straight from the

CH. x.]

STATE OF GEORGIA.

65 '

stem, and thus cover less room in the drill than most other cotton, while the number of bolls produced is much above the average. On one branch I have counted ninety bolls, the great majority not only mature but picked of cotton. The grower began by purchasing as much seed as planted ten acres, the pro duct of which gave him seed next year for the whole plantation. But, in or^ - _ M keep up the quality, he carefully selects his seed each year 'by setting two trusty negroes to pick only from the sterns bearing the greatest number of full, sound, and ripe bolls.
In Middle Georgia, as well as in South Carolina, much cotton is now grown by white labour. This occurs chiefly on small / farms, the proprietors of which were formerly unable to compete ' with the large combinations of slave labour, but are now raising a considerable amount of cotton. There are now also many small patches of cotton in the neighbourhood of towns and villages, where fruits and vegetables cannot be so well preserved from 'depredation by vagrant or destitute negroes as in former times. It is the outcome of cotton from these and other unusual quarters that has probably caused the estimates of crops since the war so habitually to fall short of actual results. Speculators, looking only at the diminution of negro labour, and at the state of the large plantations, the disorganization and diminished pro ductiveness of which are very apparent, have formed erroneous conclusions. The large planters, who cannot command labour or capital to cultivate more than a section of their former cotton area, endeavour to sell or to farm out portions of their planta tions; but this process can only be developed slowly in a country where there is so much land in this state and so few people. Yet some land is farmed out at a crop-rent of one-fourth the produce; while a good many strangers come into this part of the State, buy land, and settle down to its cultivation. Estates bring from five to fifty dollars per acre, according to the quality of the land and the degree of improvement. The average purchase-money of an improved farm is from fifteen to twenty dollars per acre. The fr jgroes command from eight to twelve and a half dollars a month, with rations, houses, and fire; women, from five to eight dollars. But the share system of paying labour prevails more than that of wages, at the rate of one-third of the crop with rations, or one-half without rations. "The negroes," says a very competent authority to me, "are/ working better and stealing less every year, and would be well enough if the political agitators would only let them alone.'* The agitators complained of are " the carpet-baggers," who come into the South with very light equipment, for the sole purpose of getting themselves elected Representatives by the negro vote, and of working themselves into some office in which they may

66

AUGUSTA.

[CH. x.

make rich, by not the most honest means, at the public expense. The tactics of these trading politicians are declared to be some times of the most wild and desperate description. It is said the negroes have been told from the stump that their former masters owe them wages from the date of Mr. Lincoln's proclamation, and that anything stolen from them now is but in fair liquida
tion of the account! There is a prosperous cotton factory in Augusta, of no mean
extent, which produces sheetings and shirtings, and other plain domestic fabrics. The hands are all white people, male and female, and differ little from factory operatives in the smaller towns of England or Scotland. The capital of the company is 600,000 dollars, on which a profit of 5 per cent, a quarter, or 20 per cent, per annum, has for some time been regularly realized and paid. The factory has both steam and water power, and has established a basis of skilled labour that is not likely in a town of such considerable population to fail in the future. But the large profit made by this manufacturing concern of late years probably requires that the facts should be stated, that in its early history it was unfortunate to the share holders, that it was sold to a new company at much less than it had cost, that it remained in undisturbed operation during the war, when the simplest domestic manufactures were in the highest request, and that the factory thus obtained a vantage ground which it has hitherto held with happy success. In such considerable towns as Augusta a large amount of labour, other wise idle and unprofitable, may be utilised without impairing in any degree the main interest of agriculture, and this cotton factory proves with what advantage various manufactures may be prosecuted in the Southern States.
The Legislature of Georgia has passed an Act to carry out the system of free public schools, which, has become, with certain local modifications, a fundamental law of the United States. Much attention is paid to the Act, and to the steps necessary to bring it into operation.
Augusta passes on the Sabbath Day into as profound a tran quillity as any town in England, or even in Scotland. The Georgian newspapers have adopted a plan of publication which can only have been suggested by a determination to observe with Hebrew precision a rest from labour during the day of twenty-four hours as defined throughout all the European and Western worlds. They are issued on Sunday mornings as on other days of the week, because the labour essential to their production, though not to their distribution, can be completed by twelve o'clock on Saturday night. It has not occurred to the Georgian newspaper people, that while the Western day begins and ends at twelve at midnight, the Hebrew and Eastern day

CH. x.]

STATE OF GEORGIA.

67

begins and ends at six p.m. The consequence is that they give to the people their mass of secular print on Sabbath morning when they would rather not have it, and withhold it from them on Monday morning when it would be acceptable to all. I walked out on Sunday afternoon towards the country. Not a beer saloon or even a candy shop was open, scarcely a person walkiT"^ about, and only a street car at long intervals passing along. At length I met a grave-looking man with a lively little girl in his hand, whom I congratulated on the delightful weather, to which he cheerfully responded. Was Augusta advancing rapidly ? He did not think it was. I then ventured to ask him whether the churches in Augusta had an evening service, to which he replied that he really did not know; that the only thing he knew was there was no Universalist Church, morning or evening, in Augusta. It was easy to perceive that my friend was himself a Universalist; and that in a community of Pres byterians, Episcopalians, Baptists, and Methodists, he did not -think it worth his while to know whether there were any even ing diets of worship in Augusta, because there was not a Universalist Church! Eeligious sects maybe more numerous in the United States than in any other part of the Christian woild, but there is nothing essentially distinctive in this little incident, the like of which might befall anywhere.

T2

CHAPTER XL
The country from Angtista to Savannah.--Alleged poorness of the Soil.-- Population of the State.--Competition betwixt the Cotton Lands of Georgia and the Mississippi " Bottom."--Probable effects of Good Farming.-- Want of Stock and Grass.--The Central Railroad Company.
[SAVANNAH, GA.--Nov. 20-23.]
THE distance from Augusta to Savannah., the great seaport of Georgia, is 132 miles by rail, and is travelled, with frequent stoppages for freight, in eight to nine hours. The aspect of the country gives an impression of a rather poor soil. There is the same white sandy surface as strikes one all the way down the Atlantic States. The crops of corn and cotton are not heavy, though often wonderfully fruity; and the woods, which abound, are of lighter timber than in many other parts of the South. Pine prevails almost without a rival, and an extensive lumber trade is done in all the counties east and west of this line of railway. Burke County, on one side, is a large and compara tively rich county, with its agriculture well developed; and Emmanuel County, on the other, produces large quantities of good timber, and has a social life more rude than is probably characteristic of the vast rural spaces of Georgia. The name attracted my attention to this county, which I thought must necessarily be the home of piety, virtue, and every Christian felicity. But these are fruits not the first to bloom in the American wild's. Yet Emmanuel County has an ideal in its name which in due time, with the spread of culture and popu lation, it may approach. The old pine of the primeval forest serves so many purposes that it must be pronounced a most useful tree. But it is also, when prepared and polished, a very beautiful wood. Some of the finest panellings I have seen in the houses and railway cars are of pine. Though the forests still occupy an inordinate space in Georgia, yet in the most woody parts many fine tracts have been opened out, and many garden spots appear, in the course of a day's travel, where the wilder ness really blossoms like the rose. The Georgian woods withal have often a very old-country aspect that startles one from the recurring reveries produced by a foreign land. Their light and

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varied character, the birds' nests of a departed summer hanging loosely among the rapidly disrobing branches, the wood-pigeons flying swiftly about, and the buzzards poising themselves far above the topmost boughs, under the mild autumnal sky, are very similar to what one may have seen among the copse-woods of England and Scotland; and the squire's mansion, with its park atil uiees, its dovecot and rookeries, the squire himself with his attendants and goodly villages with their ancient churches and hostelries, are expected every moment to appear, though they never do. I do not think the railway from Augusta to Savannah, while stopping often at depots and little stations in the woods, touches a single place of such considerable size as to form a small town or village. The landholders and farmers enjoy much sport when so inclined; but they are lost in the woods, and probably do not consider the railway tracks the best ground for game. As for poachers, though the name is hardly known here, the field . for them is boundless. One party stepped out from the train, rough and unkempt, with guns and dogs, and blankets rolled in sail-cloth for nightly bivouac, who appeared to me marvellously like persons of this class. I should have been glad to daguerreotype them on the spot, so like were they and yet so unlike what I have seen elsewhere. But amidst all this wildness and solitude, aad apparent poorness of soil, it is cheering to see, wherever there are houses and close cultivation, how luxuriant the cotton-fields become, and what varied abundance is revealed. There are fine peach-orchards with rows of cotton-plants betwixt the trees, and vast fields of 60 to 100 acres of cotton and Indian corn, dis playing much strength and fertility of soil and sun, and exciting but one regret, that so much cotton should be unpicked, and so little work going on, in these late and precious hours of one of the finest falls ever known even in this propitious clime.
The soil of Georgia, save on the bottoms of the Savannah and other great rivers, is relatively poor; but it has been made poorer by a superficial system of culture, that has left the subsoils untouched, and, after a few iTM,ars of incessant cropping, has con signed it to waste and ' ,nness in favour of newer clearings. The Georgian planters and farmers have hopped about from one part of their extensive territory to another, without settling down with a firm grasp upon any; ana, while making inroads on the wilderness on one hand, have allowed it to grow up afresh on the other. The ease with which once ploughed land in Georgia becomes a pine barren is commensurate with the difficulty with which it was originally torn from the forest. With this picture constantly before their eyes, and only just beginning to vanish before a larger intelligence and deeper agricultural ideas, people hereabouts wonder that men should wear out their days on such poor soil when there is so much better and richer to be got in

70

SAVANNAH.

' [OH. xi.

other parts of the American continent; and many in Georgia and along the Atlantic slope are nowise loth to act upon this view of life. I have observed trains of bullock waggons carrying farmers and their families from Georgia and South Carolina west ward to Texas and Arkansas; and this movement is said to be much more extensive than could be supposed from cursory obser vation. So that, while the cry of the Atlantic States is for more people, they are losing many of those they have got, and progress is thus made slow and uphill--every step forward being but too likely to be followed by one backward. The population of Georgia, which in 1860 was 1,055,000, is now returned at 1,200,000; but this increase, if real, must be almost wholly confined to the towns. The theory of poor soil, when followed out, raises the question whether the cultivation of cotton in such States as Georgia may not be doomed to disappear before the more pro ductive fields of the Mississippi bottom and the South-West, and it has, no doubt, a severe competition to undergo from that vast region. It is difficult for less than half a bale to the acre to stand against a bale to the acre, or even two bales to the three acres, raised with much less labour and expense. But one can hardly believe that the great Southern districts on the Atlantic seaboard can quickly succumb. They have advantages of health, of proxi mity to the great cotton markets both of America and Europe, and of greater convenience of settlement to people of capital, which must help to sustain them. ISTor can it be admitted that the soil of Georgia is poor in any but a relative sense. A fine sandy-clay soil, of great depth, extremely friable and easily wrought, cannot be called poor. It is soil liberally responsive to the plough and to manure. Any approach, not to " high," but to moderately good farming, would be extremely profitable ; and with deep ploughing, were the application of liquid manure possible, which it cannot well be for a long period, the results would be astonishing. When the Georgian agriculturists learn, as they are fast learning, to spread their labour less about, and to devote themselves on enlightened principles to the steady develop ment of manageable holdings, a meagre cultivation may not be extended over so large a superficies, but a better and more enduring impression will be made upon the land, of which enough has already been cleared for fifty or a hundred years to come.
There is one sad defect that forces itself on attention everywhere. Very little live stock is seen on the plantations or about the farmhouses, while there is also a too apparent difficulty of grass. Only few cattle are visible, save the sturdy animals in yoke pulling patiently their loads of timber and other produce; and the few that do appear are generally in poor condition, with rough coats covering an anatomy of

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bones. The hogs roaming through the woods are mostly lean, and, from the swiftness with which they run from one feeding-ground to another, seem to have to go through a heavy day's work for their necessary repast of acorns. The Southern States have not yet surmounted the indifference to live stock that prevailed under the system of culture by slave labovr Iu is also to be remembered that nearly all the live stock on the plantations was consumed by the war, that many of the planters were left without a cow or an ox, with scarce a hog or even a chicken, and that since the war they have had to buy, breed, and recover every useful animal on their lands. It is the forgetfulness of this fact that has led to an exaggerated estimate in Europe of the fortunes made in cotton-planting from the high prices realized since the close of the war. The planters had to resume operations with their farms in ruin, with fences to rebuild, with labour scarce, scattered, and disorganized, with everything to buy at prices three times higher than before the war, and no money to buy with; and it is certain that hut for the high price of cotton two-thirds of the planta tions could not have continued in cultivation after the first attempt in 1866.
A curious agricultural question might be raised as to whether the deficiency of live stock is the result of the proverbial difficulty of growing grass, or this itself is a natural con sequence of that. Of course, a planter who has little or no stock is not apt to trouble himself much about pasture or fodder. Nothing, at all events, is more striking in Georgia and other Atlantic States than the want of herbage. The heights and much of the level land are covered with woods, and at this season withered leaves are strewn over the all but bare earth. On the cultivated spaces the Indian corn-stalks stand in solitary state f^ of long lines of white sand; while the tracts over which plough has ceased to go are covered with pine shoots and weedy herbage, or browned like moor and heather by a brittle and " sticky" vegetation, which a forcing sun draws up from weak and frivolous roots into rank and grim luxuriance. Is all this inseparable from the soil and climate ?-- or is it a mere phase of Nature left to her own wild caprice ? Is the green grass, close and tender, always browsed by cattle with avidity, and ever beautiful to human eye, the final polish, the last touch of perennial richness, which cultivation im parts to the soil? In some parts of Georgia what is called " wire-grass" springs up in the woods. The farmers burn it down in winter, and it comes out in spring, sweet and nourish ing, and is much liked by cattle; but the heat of summer makes it wiry and unchewable, and fit only for the burn ing process of the winter. The " impossibility" of grass in

72

SAVANNAH.

[OH. xi.

Georgia is somewhat an enigma. One occasionally sees ver dant patches of clover, and in many parts the cotton rows, which the planter has much to do to protect from grass all summer, are covered in the fall with a long white fibre, that on being examined is found to be nothing less than the best kind of hay. The influence of soil and climate on any particular growth is not to be disputed; but when live stock on the Georgian farms has had time to increase and improve, and the farmers have begun to experience what an essential element it is of agricultural wealth and prosperity, grass in some form or other will probably be found to grow in Georgia.
The Central Eailroad, on which I have passed from Augusta to Savannah, was all but totally destroyed in the war by General Sherman during his famous plunge into the interior of Georgia, so far away from his base of operations as to astonish and alarm his friends. The feat was accomplished by organizing an immense force of cavalry, which, passing Augusta on the left, spread themselves over the centre of the State in such strong and numerous parties as to render effective resistance impossible. In the bewilderment of the Confederates that ensued, the cavalry fell upon the Central Kailroad, tore up the rails, and, gathering immense piles of sleepers and timber from the woods, burnt, melted, and twisted them in the flames so as to render them useless. During the war Georgia had been a great source of supply to the Confederate armies, but Sherman's command of the railway from Atlanta to Chattanooga, and this destruction of the Central Eoad, cut off the State like a dead branch from the Confederation, and contributed materially to the surrender that soon followed. The Central Company had been wise enough to reserve from their earnings a large fund, placed in London, and as soon as the war ended, they relaid their lines with English rails, and resumed a traffic that has been always large and profitable. This company is a banking as well as a railway company, and has just received from the Legislature a renewal of its banking privileges for a term of thirty years. Such conjunction of two very different functions may seem anomalous in countries where abundance of capital has enabled the division of labour to be minutely developed, but no one who has marked on the spot the scarcity of money and exchange, not only in the interior, but in the great seaports of the Southern States, can wonder at the readiness of banking functions to gather round any solid interest or corporation, or doubt that the banking department of the Central Eailroad Company of Georgia has done good service to the State. All the older lines of railway in Georgia have been remarkably successful, and have paid larger dividends than most of the

OH. xi.]

STATE OF GEORGIA.

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leading British and European railways. Since the war, the railway system in Georgia has been much extended, and new lines and connections are still being devised, and receive the State's endorsement of their bonds with an enterprise which is approaching, if it have not already passed, the limits of discretion.

CHAPTER XII.
The K Forest City."--Abundant demand for Labour.--Great increase of Cotton Exports.--Small proportion of Imports. -- Disadvantages to Savannah of indirect Trade.--Rate of Wages. -- Relative purchasing power of Money in England and the United States.--Conclusions of the British Consul.--State of Public Health.--Mortality of the Negroes.-- Banking in Savannah.--Sylvan features of the City.
[SAVANNAH, GA.--Nov. 25.]
THE " Forest City" lias made progress since the close of the war, not only in trade and population, but also in healthfulness and general improvement. Buried among trees--that give a novel and striking beauty to the city--and situated on a low delta of the Savannah River, marshy in many places and liable to inva sions of yellow fever, Savannah might be expected to be more than usually fatal to human life, and to present more than usual obstacles to the material and social prosperity which depends so essentially on the health, vigour, and increase of the population. But the force and elasticity of rapidly-expanding trade are carrying Savannah successfully over all impediments. The liberation of the negroes, while thinning the number of field hands on the plantations, has thrown an ampler supply of labour into thriving towns and cities in the South than could have been obtained, under the slave system. Savannah has had no difficulty, of late years, in absorbing all the labour that has come to it, while stopping up with energy, at the same time, the sources of crime and disease. The Corporation has bought land beyond the municipal boundaries, the cultivation of rice has been pushed back into the interior, and a system of dry culture has been introduced all round the city. Though Savannah was occupied by Union troops after the surrender of the Confederate armies, yet the large number of independent commercial men in the city were resolved not to allow their municipal government to pass into the hands of political adventurers, and the Federal Government was wise enough to let them manage matters in their own way. The consequence is that confidence and con tentment prevail in the community. A superior white police has been organized--quiet, intelligent, officer-like men, all of

CH. xii.]

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75

those I have noticed--who not only exercise a wholesome moral

influence on the people, but enforce with great care the removal of nuisances and the observance of cleanliness and order.
The business of the port has made a remarkable advance since the close of the war, and the increase of shipments this year has exceeded all former precedent. The receipts of cotton at Sava^-'L in the season of 1869 amounted to 361,285 bales,

of which 351',005 were Upland, and 10,280 Sea Island cotton. In the season of 1870 the receipts have been 490,085 bales, of which 473,722 have been Upland, and 16,363 Sea Island--the increase in one year being thus 128,800 bales. Taking the t^al American crop at 3,150,000 bales, one-seventh of it has passed

through the port of Savannah. Of the shipments of cotton the past season at this port--

Great Britain . . . took France ......
Other Foreign ports . ,, ^ The Northern States . ,,

Upland.
200,284 bales. 41,353 ,,
17,265 ,, 214,188 ,,

Sea Island.
4,286 bales. 2,243 ,,
--,, 9,606 ,,

The money value of exports from Savannah during the past year is estimated at 30,221,576 dollars, of which 17 millions were taken by foreign, chiefly British, vessels. The total
imports, are valued at not more than 1,115,821 dols. gold. This immense disparity of imports and exports shows how little pro gress has been made since the war in direct trade betwixt Europe and the Southern States. The tariff operates.materially
to shut out British goods, and to move such foreign trade as is permitted to New York, whence goods are carried to the South more and more by railway, and less and less by American coast ing vessels. This is one cause of that decline of the mercantile marine of the United States to which the citizens of the seaports are becoming so sensitively a^'ve. The restriction of foreign trade by the tariff, and the dor ion acquired by New York over the whole American trade in imports, are attended with depressing
effects on the Southern States. Their chief cities have but half a chance of prosperity. The great power of Savannah in drawing-
cotton to her wharves would be equally effective in drawing foreign products in exchange, and distributing them over the
same wide area as she drains of cotton; but her service in this direction is excluded, while the service she does render is placed
under disability. Only few vessels comparatively can come to her port save in ballast. Yet when the cotton season opens, the great
demand for tonnage then known to arise brings a forest of masts
to the river, and shipmasters crowd the brokers' offices seeking cargo at rates which will pay the expenses of their vessels both ways. The lines of railway traversing the interior from
east to west are affected in much the same manner. Trains-come

76

SA VANNAH,

[OH. xn.

to the seaport laden with cotton, but return over their long dis tances with little or nothing. Were free and direct importation open, the railways would have traffic on both trips, would be more profitable, and could be more successfully extended. At pre sent, of course, their rates are heavier than they would other wise be, so that much of the cotton crop is carried to market alike by sea and by land under a disability. How many planters in this season of low price for their staple may feel the pinch of this narrow and distorted shoe ! All goods, both foreign and domestic, moreover, are much enhanced in price as well as deteriorated in quality to the Southern consumers, who are in this way made to bear a burden to which the whole State and Federal taxation, heavy as it now may be, is light in comparison.
The large increase of receipts of cotton at Savannah during the past season is attributed partly to larger production per acre in Georgia through the use of fertilisers, but still more to the supplies received from other States, and in particular from Alabama, for which latter result the port is indebted to extended railway communications. A large amount of cotton that formerly went to Mobile, and some to New Orleans, now finds its way to Savannah. The prices realized at this port by planters compare favourably with those paid at Mobile and New Orleans. While the Savannah cotton commands about the same rates abroad, the distance of ocean transport is so much shorter that a saving is effected in freight, interest, and insurance.
Though the Sea Islands have reverted in many cases to their former owners, and are still held for cotton culture, yet it is gene rally thought that the cultivation of the long staple will gradually diminish, owing to the low prices it has commanded of late years relatively to " upland." Egyptian cotton has taken the place of Sea Island to a great extent in Europe. The present season has been unusually propitious for the island crop, and the quality of the staple is better than last year. There have been no caterpillars, and everything has worked well for the plant. But the quantity of land planted has been considerably less, and consequently the crop is estimated to be from 2,000 to 3,000 bales under that of last year. It has so far been sent but slowly to market.
It is generally admitted that the negroes have worked more steadily this year than in any previous year of free labour, and planters have declared to me that they could not do without the " darkies " in the field, so superior are they to any white labour that has yet been tried. Public opinion is well re conciled to free negro labour, and the main cause of dissatisfac tion with the coloured population is the too ready ear they lend to political agitators, and the blind persistency with which they

CH. xii.]

STATE OF GEORGIA.

77

are said to enable such persons to acquire predominance in the State Governments against the will of the white citizens. The rate of wages in Savannah for unskilled labour, including such classes as waggoners, is 1J dollars a day of ten hours; and for skilled labour, such as that of printers, tinsmiths, and carpenters, from two to five dollars a day, according to skill and merit. This rjriTM~'-J. high value of labour, however, is largely accounted for by dearnsss of goods ; or, in other words, the little way a dollar goes in purchasing the necessaries and comforts of life. An impression has been growing on me since my inquiries began that the American currency dollar is little more than equal in purchasing power to the shilling in England. Yet the American currency in all transactions of exchange with foreign countries is only 11 to 13 per cent, less value than gold. This state of things presses with extraordinary severity upon all classes in the United States who produce anything for export, and, if prolonged, must tend to shut American products out of the markets of the world. My impression of the relative purchasing power of money in England and money in the United States was probably based on too narrow a deduction ; but the British Consul here, by enter ing into a minute analysis as regards such goods and necessaries only as artisans and labourers require, has arrived at the conclusio.n that the relative purchasing power of money here and in England is in the proportion of 45 to 100. Our Consuls in America, by the way, have had this question brought home rather sharply to themselves. Paid salaries of so many hundred pounds sterling per annum, for each of which they got seven or eight dollars some years ago, they find that their pound sterling does not now bring them more than five dollars, while the dollar has not risen in practical value here in anything like the same proportion. But the hardship this entails on foreign residents falls equally, or rather doubly and trebly, on the producers of the great American ? ,s, who pay for labour, goods, and materials on the inflated scale of prices, and get back their returns on the strict standard of monetary exchange, thus lite rally buying in the dearest and selling in the cheapest market. It might be some consolation for this anomaly if it could be shown that any class of people is really the better of it. Take, on the Consul's figures, as an example of prices, articles which all would expect to be superlatively cheap in the United States. Thus, beef of the country, lean and leathery, is in Savannah Id. per Ib.; Northern beef, prepared for such large cities as New York and Baltimore, and tolerably good, is Is. 3d. per Ib.; mutton, 7<i per Ib.; bacon, Is. Id. to Is. Zd. per Ib.; coffee, lid.; tea,, 4s. Id.-, salt butter, ls..Wd.; potatoes, Is. 6d. per bushel; and the three-quarter pound loaf, 4d.
Among the drawbacks of life and labour in Savannah and

78

SAVANNAH.

[CH. xn.

other delta towns in similar latitudes must be placed the effects of climate, which great sanitary care can only mitigate, and which are, hardly consistent with continuous toil. The average heat in summer, from 12 to 3 p.m., is about 90 degrees in the shade, and though the health of the town itself shows great im provement of recent years, yet the suburbs and country are malarial, and in August, September, and October, malarial fevers abound, and are often fatal. The health statistics of the city are undoubtedly reassuring. The population is returned this year in round numbers at 29,000, of whom 19,000 are white and 10,000 coloured people. The number of deaths among the whites in 1869 was 423, or 1 in 47~28, which is a low rate of mortality. The mimber of deaths among the negroes in the same year was 429, 'or 1 in 23'3, being, as in Charleston, fully double the rate of mortality among the white people. The dis eases that cut off the negroes in greatest number were mias matic, tubercular, nervous, and respiratory. The chief causes of the white mortality were the three first of these classes of disorders. The rate of infantile mortality in Savannah, on an average estimated over a period of sixteen years, is one-fourth of the total deaths, while in England it is as high as one-third. All these results, with the exception of the high rate of mortality among the negroes, are very satisfactory, and are the more remark able inasmuch as the health of Savannah did not use to stand so well. In 1854, when the white population was only 12,468, the number of white deaths was 1,221, or 1 in 1O2, among which were 625 fatal cases of yellow fever. The blacks escaped that terrible scourge. Since 1858 there have been few cases of yellow fever in Savannah. In some subsequent years the mor tality was also great, though in most cases the excess was due to exceptional causes. In 1864 and the following year (the last of the war), 845 deaths occurred in the military hospitals. But 1866 and the subsequent years till now have shown a steady progress towards the excellent health-condition that has been described, and that is largely to be attributed to the prosperity and good government of the city, and to the care and vigilance of the authorities in proscribing and extirpating the more flagrant causes of disease. Interments are extra-mural, and one of the ceme teries is as beautiful as any institution of the kind can be. The supply of water is abundant and wholesome, one of the greatest blessings, since the supply of liquors is of questionable quality. The negroes in the Southern cities and towns, I fear, are falling into the habit of drinking inordinate quantities of bad whisky. The American people generally it must in fairness be ob served, are a sober race. But while temperance is ever praise worthy, and one of the greatest virtues of a free people, a little experience of American " drinks " somewhat detracts from

OH. xii.]

STATE OF GEORGIA.

79

the merit of sobriety in this country. The distillers and liquor merchants, by a short-sighted policy in drugging and poisoning what they produce and sell, have rendered total abstinence almost a necessity of life.
The banking capital of Savanna,h, which, had grown up to eleven or twelve millions, was mostly lost during the war. The Central Ea.il1"""! Bank alone withstood the melting power of that seven-times .heated furnace. The banking capital is now about three millions, quite inadequate to the expanded business of the city, but is being gradually increased. One or two new banks are just being established, one by Northern men who have come down for the purpose, and a very good speculation it seems to be as banking is conducted in the United States, espe cially in the South. A banking company invests its capital in Federal bonds, deposits these at Washington under receipt of the Treasury, receives 90 per cent, of their value in national currency, and, while paid regularly the full interest on its bonds, proceeds as a thorotighiy authorized National Bank to lend its currency on mortgage, bills of lading, and other- secure collaterals, at from 15 to 18 per cent. It would be well if all Northern speculations in the South turned out as profitably as National Banks on these terms are sure to do. Several Northern firms commenced busi ness in Savannah after the war as cotton merchants and brokers, but they have all" burst up," as the saying is when a firm either commits a bad bankruptcy and runs away, or honourably with draws from business when disappointed in its hopes of profit. Cotton-broking is competed so keenly in Savannah as to astonish the older merchants.
The growing commerce and well-being of the " Forest City " are, on the whole, pretty solidly assured. Savannah appears, indeed, destined to become one of the great marts and centres of life and activity in the South. Its co:mTion school system has already made satisfactory progress- negroes and the Eoman Catholics being equally furnished with schools of their own, though under the same general superintendence as the schools of the other parts of the population. If the sylvan character of the town be consistent with public health, I can vouch for its charming and picturesque effect. It is .very pleasant to sa.unter along Bull Street from end to end, passing from shops arid stores to squares, churches, theatres, and elegant private mansions, the forest shadows deepening as the architecture becomes more choice ; to look on either side down the long wooded streets, two, three, four rows deep in trees, according to their importance in the general intersection; to dwell for a little in admiration of a fine monument, glistening white as snow amidst the many colours of the autumn forest, erected in honour of Pulaski, who fell for the rights of Georgia in the War of Independence; to stand with

80

SAVANNAH.

[CH. xn.

curiosity before tropical plants that adorn the fronts of the houses, prominent among them the banana, covering the windows to the second floor with its great leaves, and suggesting ideas of some mammoth vegetable world; and again to pass on, with new sources of attraction at every step, till the avenue debouches on a small Bois de Boulogne, where an elaborate fountain plays, pointing the way to shady walks, in which the ladies prome nade with their babies and nurses, and lovers meet to exchange vows of eternal devotion. The spot is cool and sequestered. One can imagine the delight of it when a hot and scorching sun drives people in terror from the open sky. The street-ways betwixt the trees are several inches deep in a blackish sand that muffles every sound of hoof or wheel. Savannah looks as if 30,000 people had gone out from town into a bowery forest glade, and, without disturbing its silence or its beauty, made summer-houses amidst its flowers and plants, and under the shade of its spreading trees. .

CHAPTEE XIII.
The Railway System of Georgia.--Convenience of the Cars.--The " Captains " or Conductors. --Safety of Single-rail Lines.--Greater fertility of the Soil in the Interior.--Want of facilities of Branch Traffic.--Dilatory Cotton-picking.--General characteristics of the various Divisions of Georgia.
N, GA.--Nov. 26.]
THE Central Eailroad from Savannah to Macon connects at this point with the Augusta and Savannah road, which is also worked by the Central Company. Various branches and connections have greatly extended the communications of the Central. The Charleston and Savannah, which has again been opened, runs into its main line ; and it has a branch to Milledgeville, the former capital of the State, and Eatonton. At Macon it gets into connection with all the lines north, east, and west, and by extensions from Columbus, on the western border line of Georgia, is stretching out its communications to Mobile and Montgomery in Alabama. The business of this old-established company is managed with great ability and prudence ; and the same remark may equally be made of the Georgia Eailway, from Augusta to Atlanta, and its elongation to West Point, on the Alabama border. Both the Georgia and Cent^1' Railroads are now within sight of direct communication acre ,, .abama to Meridian in Mississippi, as well as to Mobile and New Orleans south. Another great system--the Atlantic and Gulf Eailway--is being gradually carried out under the energetic direction of Colonel John Screven, and opening up the southern section of the State, connecting Brunswick, an Atlantic seaport, with Macon north, with Albany and Bainbridge west, and with the Florida Eailroad and the Gulf of Mexico south. The Macon and Brunswick is a separate company, though part of the system. The South-Western and Muscogar Eailways run in a forked form from Macon to Colum bus, and from Macon to Eufala in Alabama. The " Macon and Western" to Atlanta is an essential link in the railway com munication of the State north and south ; and the Western and Atlantic, or " State Eoad," as it is called from being the property of the State, carries this trunk system north to Chattanooga in
G

82

MILLEN.

[CH. xiii.

Eastern Tennessee. These" remarks give a skeleton outline of the principal established lines of railroad in Georgia in active working condition, but new projects are brought forward in great number, and receive encouragement from the Legislature in the cession of State endorsement of their bonds to the extent of 8,000 to 15,000 dollars per mile.
The railways at this season carry on an extensive traffic. In my progress hither from Savannah I met four great cotton trains, twenty trucks at least in each, passing down to the sea port. The passenger trains seldom contain many people, except when some public gatherings are being held, or when immigrants and other through passengers happen to be numerous. The American cars are well adapted to the long distances over which passengers have usually to travel. The seats are ranged in small pews on either side, holding two persons each, with a free passage between, and at both ends there are doors giving communication with the other cars of the train. The opening and shutting and slamming of the doors, on a cold or wet day, while the train is in motion, form probably the only inconvenience of the arrange ment ; and though one unaccustomed may feel somewhat dis concerted on being set down in the same compartment with so many passengers, yet the Americans are by no means noisy when travelling, but for the most part sit as quiet as at church. There is seldom more than one newspaper editor "on board." Smoking is prohibited in all but the front car, to which the smokers go as it suits them. By this subtle arrangement the railway companies have arrived at a practically dividing line betwixt first and second class passengers--negroes and others desiring to travel cheap, and smokers who must smoke all the time, being required to take their passage in the smoking car, and not allowed to leave it during the journey. The "ladies' car " is the choice part of the train, and is strictly guarded from male intruders at the principal passenger depots. But the regulation of the " ladies' car" is somewhat anomalous in prac tice. The rule being to exclude only such male persons as happen to be travelling alone, it often occurs that very gentle manly people are turned away to an inferior place, while a much rougher set are freely admitted. Yet, when the train gets in motion, the free communication from one car to another soon redresses all inequalities. The railway conductor in America, or " captain," as he is called (just as the train itself and all about it are spoken of in nautical phrase), is a high official, of whom there is no counterpart in the old country. He collects the fares of the passengers ; in many cases apparently he keeps no account but the contents of his dollar bill pocket; and, having some period of usance in the company's money, he trades a little betwixt the country and the city, and no doubt

CH. xiii.]

STATE OF GEORGIA.

S3

makes a good thing of that. The consequence is that the " captain " is generally an imposing personage, without band or button as a mark of office, but elaborately fixed up in gold jewellery, and not much disposed to give information when asked for it. Many of the stations on the American railways have too small a population, some being merely ends of roads for 1^f-':ig down and taking up country people, to support a ticket office and a station-master; but the habit of paying fares to the conductors has so grown, that even in the larger towns nearly as many pass into the cars without tickets as with them. The passenger traffic is therefore conducted too free from any effective check over the receipts to be quite satisfactory to the boards of directors. The lines in the south are broad-gauge and single-rail lines, and what with the moderate rate of speed, and the necessity of the going train moving into a side track at appointed stations till the coming one has arrived and passed on, collisions seem to be less frequent, and the traffic to be con ducted with more security, than on double-rail and more heavily worked lines. One also finds the telegraph in active operation almost everywhere on the American railways. / The country, on the whole, considerably improves in fertility and settlement towards the interior of Georgia. On the road from Millen to Macon farming is carried on with more system; the crops are generally good, sometimes luxuriant; and there are marks of care and vigour in the work of cultivation round the farmhouses and in the fields. Cotton is brought down over twenty and. thirty miles of country to some of the railway stations on drays, with four mules to each, and almost as many negroes, a few bales at a time, on tolerable roads. Common roads in Georgia are easily made, and more easily mended than one might suppose--the receptive sandy soil drying and harden ing up after moderate *nin very soon. The labour required, even with fair road? ransporting cotton from the plantations to the railways, is enormous, and is often withdrawn from the fields when most needed. Were the railway companies to turn their attention to branch communication, and put on a "road engine" and train of waggons at every principal depot, great advantage would accrue to themselves as well as to the planters and the cotton trade. The backwardness of picking, while negroes and mules are toiling along the country roads with handfuls of cotton, is everywhere observable. Whole fields along this route, even at this date, are white as snow with cotton wool, which only the extraordinary fineness of the season, liable to break up at any moment, has saved from total loss. The frost, which appeared for the first time ten or twelve days ago, has come more or less at intervals since. Though a "killing frost," probably, in the cotton telegrams, it has con-
G2

84

MILLEN.

[CH. xin.

sisted hitherto of the slightest bite of cold imaginable, followed by days of warmth and brightness equal to English summer, and with neither wind nor rain of any account. The woods begin to show its effect in diversified change of hue; and the cotton plant not only shows it in a browner shade, but no doubt also feels it in a retardation of the latest crop of bells. But what signifies the lengthening of the crop, if even the first and second sheds of fruit have not been gathered ? Since the war picking has seldom been finished till February, and, besides causing much deterioration of cotton, has cut largely into the time and labour required to prepare the ensuing crop. Planters fret and worry under this state of things more, of course, than anybody else, but it is an evil that injures all. The negroes get up difficulties of wages, and fall into difficulties of debt and liens on their share of the crop. The fall of price is even a difficulty to the negro, for, with the most singular inversion of reason, he argues that when cotton is cheap it is not worth while picking it--as if the only way to get the better of the low price of any crop were not to make the quantity of it as large as possible. The negroes have some very peculiar traits of character, and are more like children than grown people. Served with the stipulated rations for a week, they will some times eat them up in three days, and fall into debt to their employers and their merchants for more than enough. Yet the prevailing remark is that they are improving. The courts in Georgia punish them for stealing, and as the resources of theft and idleness are closed against them, they begin to feel they must work to live. Such are some of the difficulties of the negroes on the land; but it must be added that the negroes on the land are not nearly so many as the land requires. There is an absolute scarcity of labour for the larger plantations under culture.
Middle Georgia and the whole Western border from north to south form the finest and richest agricultural region of the State. These districts are comparatively well settled, studded with pro ductive farms, and have towns of considerable population and manufactures. In the south-west there are Albany, Columbus, Thomaston, where cotton and woollen fabrics are manufactured with success; in the north-west there are Atlanta, Marietta, Rome, Dalton, and other towns which are growing in population and in traffic; while Macon and Augusta may be said to preside over Middle Georgia, and are at once a result and a source of the superior agricultural value and higher civilization of that section. While the cash value of farms in the various counties of Middle and AVestern Georgia is estimated by millions, in the other parts of the State it is more commonly estimated in thousands. The north-eastern counties of Upper Georgia are mountainous,

CH. xin.]

STATE OF GEORGIA.

85

and are impregnated along the river bottoms with gold deposits, which were the cause of a great excitement forty years ago that has broken out at intervals ever since. The deposits, after their first discovery, were deemed so rich that the land was surveyed, and distributed by lottery in forty-acre sections to all who had been three years citizens of the State. There were some prizes, bra many blanks. Yet gold-digging continues to be prosecuted among the mountains of Georgia. Copper ore has also been extracted in large quantity. The southern counties of Georgia are the poorest and most thinly peopled. The soil is more sandy, and all but wholly covered with pine forests, on which the lumbermen have hitherto made but small impression. Land in this section of the State is so extremely cheap as to be almost incredible. Purchases have been made at ten cents an acre. Any one ambitious of territorial possession might with little money become lord of a county or two, full of wood, and, in the event
the Baltic forests giving out, might be confessed in some generation or other to have made a splendid investment At the same time it is very difficult to pronounce in this climate what is poor and worthless land for agricultural purposes. The very different degrees of value of land seem to depend as much on the tract which settlement and population have taken as on the intrinsic qualities of the soil. I have heard it said that the sandy soil of these poor and sparsely-peopled counties, once cleared, would grow long-staple cotton as good as that of the Sea Islands, the season is so much longer than in more northern cotton States. The best crop of cotton I have met with in Georgia is that of a recent settler, who, on what was deemed poor land, has, by close attention and farmyard manuring, raised nine bales from thirteen acres.
The country from Macon to Atlanta, in the north-west of Georgia, is a fine r "" > upland, well cleared, with fringes of light forest timber, in wnich oaks, hickory, and other varieties of tree, as well as the ever-constant pine, are abundant, and where freestone is quarried. The soil assumes a redder colour than at Macon and southward. There is a rich growth of cotton, the picking of which is well up to the mark. Good farming seems well understood in most of this district. The homeliness of the scenery, its gentle hill and dale, its wide sweeps of cultivated land up to the margin of the forest belts, which twine themselves across the heights and skirt the valleys, are peculiarly striking. A more pretty and interesting country than much of it one could hardly desire to see.

CHAPTEE XIV.
Central position of Maoon.--Command of the Railway System.--Great development of Railway Enterprise.--Success of the Old Lines.--State Endorsement of Railway Bonds.--The system of Railway Financing.-- Does State Endorsement add to the Security of a First-Mortgage Bond ? --Macon Cotton Manufactures.
[MACON, GA.--Nov. 27-28.]
THE position of Macon, in the heart of Middle Georgia, where all the railways--north, south, east, and west--converge as to a common centre, renders it probably the most important and most promising inland town of this lively and enterprising State. It receives from 90,000 to 100,000 bales of cotton annually, and the drafts of planters in the surrounding country are honoured eagerly by merchants and warehousemen to the extent of their resources, with the view of fostering and increasing the importance of the town as a mart for cotton. The railway lines which meet and radiate from Macon would alone be sufficient to give a powerful and permanent impulse to its trade and industry. Extensive railway workshops have been esta blished, and have gathered round them a numerous body of mechanics. A number of the railway directors and capitalists, who are the life and brain of the great system of communication throughout the State, reside in Macon, and act together with much energy and judgment. The various depots, filled with goods and produce in transit, give an air of business and traffic to the town beyond what one would expect from its general development. Macon is not so compact or so well built as Augusta, but, with a shrewd head on its shoulders, it has also its fingers on a vast network of communication from all parts of the interior and extremities of the State, that will tend every year to increase its means of wealth and employment.
The railway interest, next to the agricultural interest, which is the foundation of all, is at present by much the largest and most prominent interest of Georgia. It is the one interest throughout all the South which, though greatly worn and wrecked by the war, stood erect and vital amidst the general ruin, and that seemed not only able to take care of itself, but to give a

CH. xiv.]

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87

helping-hand to the general recuperation of the various States. Hence the great development of railway enterprise in the South since the close of the war. Georgia has probably done more to restore and extend the connections of its old lines, and to build up new railways, than any of the other Southern States. The success which had attended its railways in the ante-war times, and the streL6U.u which they displayed amidst universal weakness when the war had ended, is no doubt one reason of the almost passionate activity of the State in this direction during the last four or five years. The Georgians had come to believe in railways at a crisis when faith in any other material interest had almost departed. The Georgia Eailroad from Augusta to Atlanta had before the war repaid in dividends its whole capital and 50 per cent, more, and remained a clear and going road to its subscribers when the war had passed away. This company has taken powers to increase its capital stock to five million dollars, to rebuild depots jmd shops, and replace rolling stock and rails. The Atlanta and West Point, which was an extension of the Georgia from Atlanta to the Alabama border, paid 7 per cent, interest from the day when the money was paid till the line was opened for traffic, after which it paid 8 per cent.; and in a few years the reserve had accumulated so much that a bonus of 100 per cent, was -declared to the stockholders in the form of new stock in that proportion--in other words, every 100 dollars of stock became 200; and yet on the capital, as thus doubled, a dividend of 8 per cent, has been paid from year to year, and no less from all appearance is ever likely to be paid notwithstanding the com petition to which the road has been or may be subjected. The Central Eailroad has regularly paid large dividends to its sub scribers--never less, I believe, than 8 to 10 per cent. The State Eoad from Atlanta to Chattanooga has also a large, steady, and prosperous traffic, whi^ AS wont to replenish the treasury of the* State, and has only Cv^_a to be profitable under the exoteric and transitionary rule of recent years. The management of the " State Boad " is a constant topic of attack and defence, and of banter not always of the pleasant sort, betwixt the local Conservatives and the party sustained in power by the " Eeconstruction " policy of the North. The Governor and the Legislature, acknowledging the justice of the complaints made against this department of the administration, have this year passed an Act to authorize a lease of the railway to any competent private company for a term of twenty years. The lessees are required to pay not less than 25,000 dollars a month into the State treasury, taking over the road and its appurtenances as they stand, and returning them in like condition at the end of the period of lease. There would appear from the terms of this Act to be no decrease of confidence in the substantial resources of the " State Eoad," and its pros-

88

MACON.

[CH. xiv.

pects of remuneration to the revenue of the State, at the expense of which it has teen built and maintained. This confidence I hear echoed on all sides. The railway antecedents of Georgia have thus been peculiarly favourable. Whether under the great movement of railway extension in progress its future experience will be equally favourable, depends 011 many conditions and considerations not easy at present to resolve. The old Georgian lines of railroad were urgently needed; they had a traffic ready for them; they tapped, as it were, the virgin soil of communica tion in the State; and they were made, step by step, when labour and commodities were cheap, with cash subscribed, and ready for every outlay on the neatest ready-money terms. The results were, economy in the cost of construction, an abounding traffic as soon as they were constructed, and ample dividends on the capital of the companies when brought into operation. The new railway era in this and other States of the South cannot be sup posed to present the same advantageous conditions.
Since it was impossible to raise within the State itself the money necessary to make new railways, the expedient adopted has been not only to give large borrowing powers by Act of the Legislature to any projector or company of projectors who have proposed to make a railroad, but also to give the State's endorsement of the bonds on which the money is bor rowed. The State generally endorses bonds to the amount of 15,000 dollars per mile. The cost of building a railroad in Georgia, I am informed on competent authority, is from 18,000 to 30,000 dollars a mile, so that on most lines there would appear to be a considerable margin beyond the amount of State endorsement, which must be covered by the capital of the stock holders. Still, the money borrowed on the State security bears an inordinate proportion to the capital invested by the com panies, and many do not hesitate to say that in some instances the roads are made almost wholly from the proceeds of the mortgage bonds. The Legislature of Georgia has passed an Act which prohibits the Governor or any other officer of State from endorsing the bonds of any railroad " until an amount equal to the amount of bonds for which the guarantee of the State is applied for has in good faith been first invested, and actually paid in and expended, by the owners or stockholders of the road." In the plain meaning of words, the Act imposes a con dition that the money borrowed under the State guarantee for railway purposes shall never exceed the paid-up capital of the companies; which, if strictly observed, would be alike good for the State, the bondholders, and the ultimate profit of the rail road projectors and companies themselves. If it should have the effect of delaying some of the less urgent projects, and spreading the construction over a longer period of time, nothing

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would be lost, and probably much advantage be ultimately gained. The number of railways projected in Georgia is so great as to remind one of periods of railway mania elsewhere of unfortunate memory. The Legislature this year has authorized the endorsement of the bonds of no fewer than thirty-two railroad companies. The endorsement is to be to the amount in some "-'.^ of 12,000 dollars and in others of 15,000 dollars a mile. Many' of the projects, of course, are only branches or elongations of existing lines from one Georgian town to another; but some are extensive schemes, such as the Atlanta and Blue Bidge, which aims at being a great competing through-line to the North. One wonders where all the money is to come from to carry out so many public works at once, and the expectation that the profits on the plantations will seek investment in rail ways does not seem to be well founded as an immediate resource, when one considers how much the planters have to do in stock ing, fencing, and improving their farms, and getting their affairs into such a train as to enable them to make any profit at all. But there can be no doubt of the immense utility of railways to the agricultural population in the absence of good common roads to market, or of the sacrifices the people are prepared to make in order to i attain a railway system reaching and penetrating almost every county in the State. The most ambitious " air line " through to the great railroads running North and West is always so contrived as to open up new districts within the State itself, and to give an impulse to internal improvement. The State only follows the general bent in helping forward the formation of railways by all legitimate means: and. the repre sentatives, as they pass bill after bill, pledging, under conditions, the security of the State, may probably think that to authorize endorsation is one thing and to endorse is another, and that by a natural process of seJ<v-t ' n a few only of the many projects will be'pushed forward ,,_ ./ne present.
Southern railway bonds bearing interest of 8 per cent, per annum have already been taken up to a large amount, and, under proper conditions, should be as solid a security as this or any country can offer. But they do not sell very favourably when issued, and they do not sustain well their original price. There is something faulty in the whole system of finance pur sued. The guarantee of the State has a large sound; but it is doubtful whether, in present circumstances, it contributes essen tially to the value of the bonds. The State debt of Georgia, as well as other Southern States, was inconsiderable at the close of the war, but it has been rapidly increased since, for other pur poses as well as railways, and, with its natural result of increased taxation, forms a constant theme of bitter political discussion betwixt the Kadical-Negro Governments and the white people

90

MACON.

[CH. xiv.

of the States. A curious incident has just occurred here, which serves to illustrate the feud that prevails in regard to the State finances. Governor Bullock proceeded to New York some days ago, with the view of negotiating the sale of some amount of State bonds, and was immediately followed by the son. of the Treasurer of the State, who reported to the New York banking houses that the bonds which the Governor wished to sell were informal and illegal, that they had not been registered in the terms of the Act, and that no transactions upon them would be binding on the State of Georgia. The Governor has written a note to Atlanta, to the effect that the Treasurer's son has been injuring the credit of the State, and the inference is that his financial mission to the North will be rendered of no avail. Such disclosures as these, commented upon with the utmost asperity by the local press, increase the suspicion of the Southern people as to the integrity with which their affairs are adminis tered, and one of the first steps of the Conservative-Democrat Government, for which the elections are gradually paving the way, will probably be to institute a strict inquiry into the financial proceedings of their predecessors in office. It is un desirable that such a substantial commercial interest as railroads should be embroiled in suspicions and investigations of this description, and the State guarantee, whatever its advantages to the issuers and the holders of the bonds, has obviously its dis advantages also. Its disadvantages, indeed, are more apparent than its advantages. The State engages, in the event of failure on the part of the stockholders, to pay the interest and principal of the bonds. When called upon to fulfil this engagement, the State will proceed to sell, lease, or work the road, and charge itself with the liability to the bondholders. But this is only what the bondholders would have immediate power to do them selves were there no State guarantee or intervention in the matter. The main security of railway bondholders is that the road be one well devised for traffic and for developing traffic, and that it be conducted under the control of the substantial business people of the country through which it operates, who, in virtue of their subscribed capital and commercial interests, have the strongest motive to provide for its economical construc tion and successful management. Where these conditions are found--and where may they not be found in these great and rising States ?--the first mortgage railway bond issued here is as good a security as it can well he made. There are supposable cases in which the superadded State guarantee might save the bondholders trouble; but there are equally supposable cases, on the other hand, in which it might give them a little of that com modity too.
English rails are in favour in Georgia, and, notwithstanding

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the high tariff duty, are sometimes bought to a large amount on a gold basis, delivered at Savannah. The old lines, I believe, will now re-lay their roads, as required, with the best steel rails.
Macon, like Augusta, has a cotton factory, that has long been a successful element in the industry of the town. The goods .manufactured are 36-inch shirtings, one Ib. to the three yards, and 30-inch shirtings, four ounces to the yard. The former bring 12^ and the latter 10J cents per yard. I found the factory working cotton at 12-| to 13 cents per Ib. The capital of the company is 128,000 dollars, on which the divi dend usually paid is 10 per cent., though sometimes as much as 21 per cent, has been divided; and a surplus fund of 50,000 dollars has been accumulated. This factory has only 5,240 spindles, and works at less advantage than the Augusta factory, which has more extensive and newer machinery. The number of hands employed in the Macon factory is 120. They are all whites. The wages paid to women are 24 to 25 dollars a month, and to boys 13 dollars a month. Another cotton factory is about to be opened in an extensive building that was erected during the war for a Confederate arsenal. It is to have 15,000 spindles, and a 350-horse-power engine. A very general desire is evinced in all parts of the country for the establishment of cotton factories, but the Southern people seem to fall into a series of mistakes on this point. Their ideas of manufacturing run in too narrow a groove. The small- factory in Macon has to beat up a good deal for a market for its goods, and the difference in price of cotton here and in New York--two to three cents per Ib.--may soon be more than lost in the difficulty and ex pense of selling the goods when manufactured. There are many branches of manufacture which, both in the towns and country parts ,of the South, mif-1-' /e prosecuted with probably greater advantage than simple u^ton fabrics. Variety of enterprise is eminently desirable. The cotton factories at Columbus are pro ducing cotton blankets, which are a novelty, are well spoken of by those who have' used them, and may be capable of introduc tion into distant markets; but the manufacture of sheetings and shirting's may soon be greatly overdone. It is the North which the South has always in view when it sighs for more and more cotton factories. The people say, Why should we pay Massa chusetts a protected and monopoly price for cotton goods, when we grow the raw material and may make them for ourselves ? The South, as Mr. Gladstone once allowed himself to say, is thus, after all, a distinct nation in the United States; but the North has to thank, not Mr. Jeff. Davis, but itself, for this dis tinction, in sacrificing the interests of the great mass of the population in other sections of the Union to a fatly protected

92

NACON.

[CH. xiv.

class of Northern manufacturers. Disaffection is fostered South and West by this blind and heartless policy.
The best paid class of working people in Macon are mechanics;, who receive from 4\ to 6 dollars a day; but it is one of the drawbacks on the supposed high wages of labour in America that a mechanic, with a wife and family, has to pay as much as 25 dollars a month for a house or cabin of four rooms.
Macon is finely situated on the side of a sandy hill, broken into wide and sloping hollows that stretch out in many fine avenues to be, and are overlooked by eminences that have already become the sites of spacious and elegant private resi dences. The country round is hilly and densely wooded.

CHAPTEE XV.
Extraordinary rise of Atlanta from the ashes of the War.--The H. I. Kimball House.--Interview with a " Drummer" of the latest Patents.-- The "Asses' Bridge."--The Hotel System.--Population of Atlanta.-- Removal of the State Capital.--Origin of the Kimball House Specula tion.--New Executive Mansion.--An Education Meeting.--Costume.-- Peaches. -- The Granite Mountain. -- Round Cartersville. -- Need of a Geological Survey of Northern Georgia.
/ [ATLANTA, GA.--Nov. 29-30 ; CARTERSVILLE--Dec. 1.]
I AMOVED in Atlanta under a shower of rain, the first I had seen in a sojourn of nearly two months in the Southern States. It was really a downfall worth speaking of, enough to make a Mark Tapley feel jolly. " It never rains but it pours" in Atlanta. Sherman poured such a shower of fire upon it as almost swept it from the face of the surrounding wilderness. It is now rising up a grander, fairer, and more ambitious town than before. But an architectural chaos reigns in the meanwhile over all its centre and circumference. The railway from Macon, after gliding through a suburb of cabins and passing a military barracks, begins to toll its bell and perform a sort of funereal procession, amidst the dtfrris of newly-built houses and the ruins of old ones, pieces of streets t' ich there is no visible entrance, and deepening files of cars and trucks from which there is no imaginable exit, finally drawing up more apparently from the impossibility of moving backward or forward than from the fact of having arrived anywhere. The various rail roads which meet at this crowded point do not go to the town; the town is gathering in thick and hot haste about the railways. A .general depot is being built, but, like every thing else in Atlanta, it is unfinished; and on the arrival of a train under rain the passengers are put down in the mud, to be there screamed at by steam-engines and high-pressure negroes, scared by the tolling of bells, and barricaded on every side by trains of cars, bales of cotton, boxes of merchandise, gable-ends of houses, and all sorts of building materials. " Is there any hotel in this city of Babel ?" I cried out, and was immediately told Atlanta had the biggest thing of the kind in creation.

94

ATLANTA.

[CH. xv.

"Where is it?" "There, sare; I take you"-- said a darkey, who had already marked me for his own--" there it is," pointing to a really magnificent edifice, which on the side next us seemed to have everything but windows--an edifice forming nearly two streets of Atlanta--so large, indeed, that it seemed impossible to judge where the entrance might be. " The H. I. Kimball House, sir. Have you nary heerd of the H. I. ?" said a short, thick man, all beard and no whiskers. I confessed that the Atlanta hiero glyphics were unknown to me, whereupon he put into my hand a printed paper, which, as I was now scaling a heavy intrenchment of brick and mortar, flanked by wet ditches of no mean account, I put into my pocket to cull some particulars from by and by. The inhabited front of the " H. I." was carried without loss of any kind, but not without difficulties that evoked sus picions and objurgations of a serio-comic kind, wherein how much I was deceived will appear from a fact or two. The hall or vestibule of the Kimball House is as big as a church, and prayer-meetings of a certain kind, I believe, are held in it sometimes. This hall is open almost to the roof of the build ing, with tier upon tier of galleries communicating with the various floors of the hotel, and affording the guests an oppor tunity of looking down on all that passes below. A gaselier drops from the higher stories over the hall, of such magni tude and brightness as might grace any opera-house in the largest cities of the world. The whole hotel is brilliantly lighted with gas. I was hoisted to my room in a steam-power elevator, surpassing in lubricity of motion the creaky and occasionally foot-crushing machine of the great " Continental" in Phila delphia, so dear to all the " commercials " of the Northern States. The bigger the hotels of America become, the greater nuisance they are generally found to be, but the Kimball House at Atlanta, to whomsoever it may prove a mistake, will be no mistake to any traveller in the upper regions of Georgia who may choose to make it his abode.
The rain having passed away, the first thought that occurred was to walk round what had now for the time become "my hotel;" but this I was never able to do. I found myself, in various attempts, always going away from it and always coming back to it. Parts of it seemed everywhere, and other objects began to distract my attention from its probable lines of circumvallation. Atlanta has several great business houses in the dry goods, hardware, grocery, and confectionery lines, with fine shops on the street for retail business, and upper floors for wholesale trade. One receives at every step a lively impression of the great power residing somewhere in the United States of filling the most distant and unpromising places with wares and traffickers of all kinds. Stores full of " Northern notions,"

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New York oyster saloons, and " drummers " of the latest patents out at Washington, are seen on both sides (when they have two sides) of the streets of Atlanta. One man showed me a more perfect kerosene oil or spirit lamp than I had seen or imagined. He lighted three or four of them, and flinging them heedlessly on the floor to burn at leisure in various corners of the store, instantly nulled out a patent washing-machine which is to drive everything else out of the market. He was about to show me a marvellous pot-hook with cradle appendages for weighing babies, when, notwithstanding my deeply awakened interest, I was obliged to come away. The streets of Atlanta are not yet lighted with gas, but the patentee came with me to the door, and sprung an immense spirit torch which threw a blaze of light into the gloom, revealing, in the distance, of course, a wing of the Great Hotel. It is difficult for a guest of the H. I. to lose himself in Atlanta, but it is easy for any one to be abruptly stopped by some impassable barrier, or danger ously inveigled in the network of railway tracks. The railways * pass along a narrow defile, and cut Atlanta for the present in two. I found myself standing on one occasion at this Asses' Bridge, beside a grave, elderly man, who was waiting, like myself, for an opening betwixt the long trains that blocked the way. As one moved on, another close behind was sure to give a snort and 3'olt along too; and when the down track was a little clear, the tolling bell of a train on the up track gave note of warning to adventurous citizens. I ventured to remark to my patient friend that it was strange the people of Atlanta could bear such an obstruction in the heart of the town. "What would you have them do ?" he asked me. " Petition, of course ; oppose the railway bills, overturn a Governor or two, if necessary; and insist on right of way." " Friend, you are a stranger--I guess the railways were here ber uhe people of Atlanta," was his reply ; and what he told me ^ ^cognized at once to be true. The rail ways were the beginning and the end of Atlanta in the old times, and the new city rising up around the place where it was erewhile convenient for the railway engine to be fed with wood and water has not yet had time to adjust all its relations. One of the difficulties of the present chaotic stage of Atlanta is that few people in it know anybody else. I had an introduction to a gentleman of some fame, whom I casually met in Macon just as he was going to the train for Atlanta. He had only time to say, " Be sure to hunt me up when you come to Atlanta." I did not take up the whole meaning of the phrase at the time, but I learned it afterwards. Yet when all ordinary means of hunt ing up people in Atlanta fail, there is one resource which, if you are a guest of the H. I., may be reverted to with some confidence. Begin and end your inquiries at the hotel, and ten to one you

96

ATLANTA.

[CH. xv.

find that you have been breakfasting, dining, and supping with the people you -want all the time. The secret of the " big hotels " in America is that they are designed in a very subordinate degree for travellers, and that they place their main chance on town boarders, to whose convenience they conform all their arrangements. The system of boarding in hotels prevails largely in the cities of the North, and I am sorry to note its rapid in troduction into the Southern States. The ladies, I think, when the first reluctance has been conquered, rather like the relief from domestic cares and the mock splendour of living in a grand hotel. Yet an American wife follows Paterfamilias into the public dining-room with a subdued sort of air; and more melan choly still, at least to me, are the children who close up the train with pale faces and precocious eyes, sit down at table among a crowd of sharp people, and are served by troops of obsequious waiters. The system may have its origin in Bepublican ideas carried to an anti-social and burlesque extreme ; but it is not the mould of life in which Republics are made or may best be preserved, and one cannot but reflect with some misgiving ' what a country America may be when a generation has arisen to whom the sweetest and most potent word in the English language, " home," has neither present meaning nor past association.
Atlanta is already quite a large place. Its population is given, in the usual round numbers of the census enumerators, at 28,000 to 29,000. The vague results of the present decennial census in the United States are somewhat perplexing, but they have more excuse in a town like Atlanta than in many other places; for if a census, instead of being taken in a night, be spread over the greater part of a year, how is it possible to state with precision the population of a city to which a hundred is added to-day, and probably half a thousand may be added to-morrow ? I am in formed, on the best authority, that of the 28,000 to 29,000 souls in Atlanta, the whites are in the proportion of 15 to 13 coloured. That the coloured people should be so numerous in a practically new town proves the large flux of negroes from country to town since the war. The marvel is how so large a population, white or black, has been gathered here in so short a time. " Northern capital " is the general explanation given ; and the Great Hotel is constantly referred to as a sample of the grand effects which " Northern capital" is destined to achieve in the Southern States. The number of Northern firms established in Atlanta, and the commercial prospecters flocking down from as far as Boston and New York, attest the mark which Atlanta and the " H. I." together have already made in Northern imagination. But the town is mainly indebted for all the progress yet made to political influ ences. The capital of Georgia has been removed from Milledgeville, situated, like other State capitals throughout the Union,

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as nearly as possible in the centre of the State, to this Northern town. The courts of justice, the annual sessions of the Legisla ture, and the constant residence of the Governor and other officers of State, give to 'Atlanta both traffic and 6clat, and may render it more and more a place of general concourse from all other parts of the State. Poor Milledgeville has been left in widow"1"--1 and desolation, and the State buildings, as well as much private property, been rendered of no account, while Atlanta is expected to grow into a great city. Two brothers Kimball came down from Boston at the close of the war in a humble and unassuming character, but probably with ulterior ideas in their heads. They are types of a class of aspiring Northern men who have rushed to the South since the war, some to run plantations, some to open mines of coal and iron, some to build railroads, others to establish great hotels, and all to give a grand impulse to Southern progress, and show the " old fogies "- in the South how to do it. Many of these enterprising men have already come to grief and left the country, while others are in full career to Fortune, or--her eldest daughter-- Miss Fortune. The brothers Kimball appear to have seen the tide in the affairs of Atlanta sooner than almost anybody else, and seized it with remarkable success. They saw that Atlanta had an opera-house which was never likely to be finished, and could yield no return to anybody even though it were. They bought this building, it is said, for 85,000 dollars, and they sold it immediately to the "reconstructed" .State at 350,000 dollars for a State House, to serve in room of the deserted building at Milledgeville. After this brilliant " spec," Mr. H. I. Kimball con ceived the design of a grand hotel " to beat all creation," and in eight or nine months has reared a splendid structure, at an estimated cost of 600,000 '] ollars, to accommodate "some 1,000 guests, and an unlimi4 amber of boarders." l The main front is 210 feet, and the sides 163 feet each. The dining-room is 75 by 40 feet, and the grand hall or ball-room is 103 by 46 feet, and 23 feet high. Besides the hotel proper, there are twenty-one stores and warehouses in the building. Two thousand labourers and mechanics have been thumping away in this mammoth caravansera since March last, and are still thumping. The esti mated cost may very likely fall much short of the actual cost, but the peculiarity of the hotel as a speculation seems to be that the going expenses must for a long period swell the capital outlay. There is a French cook at 250 dollars a month. The gas bill alone would open half a dozen coal mines. Any one who desires to live well and handsomely could pray for no better caterer than "mine host" of the H. I. Mr. Kimball has naturally become a man of great influence in Atlanta. He is a
1 Atlanta New Era. H

98

ATLANTA.

[OH. xv.

munificent patron of State fairs, horse-races, and every good work. His political influence is even thought, with probably a little dash of popular superstition, to be supreme in the State. A common saying in G-eorgia is that Blodgett, senator, controls the Governor, but that Mr. H. I. Kimball controls Blodgett. The old native citizens look with some distrust on the general brisk ness of trade and speculation in Atlanta. While willing to see " progress " in it all, they doubt whether robbery may not be going on. By an Act of Legislature passed this year, the Governor is authorized to receive from J. H. James a warranty title to " a city lot" for an executive mansion, and to pay the said James 100,000 dollars in 7 per cent. State bonds. The taxpayers are shaking their heads, sometimes gnashing their teeth. The narrow base on which the universal negro suffrage, " carpet-bag " quali fication, and white proscription under the .Reconstruction Act of Congress, have placed political power, tends everywhere to destroy confidence in the financial operations of the State autho rities. There is a decided rumbling in the sub-political world, and a great election to take place in Georgia towards the end of December may decide whether taxation and representation--the issue of State bonds and the property and substance pledged to pay them--are to be brought into more satisfactory and inter dependent relationship.
The present position of Georgia in the Union is a little anoma lous. The State started very fair for reconstruction and admis sion to the Union after the war, but the Legislature made a false step by ejecting two negro Deputies after allowing them to sit, vote, and take part in the proceedings of the session, and there has been some difficulty or delay since in getting the reconstruc tion properly " fixed up." But there is no doubt that the status of Georgia as a member of the United States will soon be com pletely arranged.
I was glad to find the Education Act of this year under practical consideration in Atlanta, where in the present turmoil some of the higher matters of the law are but too apt to be neglected; and I attended a public meeting of the citizens, the object of which was to urge the authorities to put the Act into operation. The meeting was not numerous, but intelligent and earnest as to the business on hand. There was strong advocacy of a system of free public schools for the people at large, the chief argument being one the force of which has been equally felt in the large towns of England and Scotland--viz., that private education is attainable only by the rich, and is too expensive for the working classes. One of the speakers, a mechanic, said that he and others would leave the town and seek a home in the "West unless their children could be better and more cheaply educated, and he called upon the owners of property to consider

CH. xv.]

STATE OF GEORGIA.

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what hope there would be of attracting artizans to Atlanta to build up the trade and wealth of the town if this privilege were denied them. A small party of opposition insisted on the financial difficulty, one of the number reminding the meeting that the city bonds had fallen to 72 cents per dollar, and assert ing that they would fall to 50 if more bonds were issued. The whole asao""7.ient, he said, would barely pay the interest of the city debt. But a quieter spoken and better informed gentleman denied this assertion, and stated with authority that the annual income of the town was 200,000 dollars, and the interest of the debt only 50,000. The resolutions in favour of the object of the meeting were at length passed unanimously. The Education Act of Georgia does not contain any compulsory provision, but it constitutes a State Board of Education, consisting of the Governor, the Attorney-General, the Secretary of State, the ComptrollerGeneral, and a State School Commissioner to be nominated by the Gpvernor and confirmed by the Senate, on which Board the central authority and responsibility rest; it provides for the organization of County Boards; the division of each county into sub-districts of not fewer than thirty pupils, and the intro duction of ambulatory schools into thinly peopled parts ; and it enacts that the funds shall be levied by a tax on the " taxable property " and on " the labour of the qualified voters " of each district. The State Board prescribes the text-books, but it is provided " that the Bible shall not be excluded from the public schools of the State." There are to be separate schools for white and coloured children.
The ladies of Georgia affect a Highland style of costume, wear tartan plaids, tartan ribbons, and brightly striped mantles, and, not to flatter them, are as gay and handsome as any other section of the fashionable sisterhood. The gentlemen also seem very fond of grey plaids, wh1' .ey place in smooth fold round their shoulders, losing one-half the comfort and all the picturesqueness of that Highland garment. One of these grey plaids costs from 13 to 15 dollars. A lady's shepherd tartan plaid--72 by 144-- sells in the shops at 8-| dollars. The American manufacturer's price, I believe, is 5'75 dollars, leaving the draper a profit of 50 per cent. One element of the high price of goods in the Southern States is no doubt the ample scale of retail profits. The shopkeeper expects a return of 50 per cent, on the staples of his stock, while on minor and miscellaneous articles his profit is almost anything he likes. Foreign goods in this region are not abundant. Yet English earthenware and cutlery, and fine cloths of England and France, are sold in Savannah, Macon, Atlanta, and other towns, and a much larger direct trade with Europe might probably be done, were anybody to take it up, notwith standing the heavy duties.
H2

100

CARTEESVILLE.

[en. xv.

The Atlantian who is fond of field sport, and chooses to keep a dog and gun, has abundant liberty of pastime. Partridges, turkeys, and sometimes deer, are shot freely in the wilds and woods round the town. One gentleman, oil whom I called, had just returned from a day's hunting, and was able to show me his spoils, among which was a bottle of home-made peach brandy that had been presented to him at a farmhouse, and proved a much sounder kind of whisky than three-fourths that issue from the public distilleries of the United States. Peaches are super abundant in Georgia and all through the South. The people scarcely know what to do with them. They dry them, pickle them, preserve them, and distil them; and after all, the hogs, I daresay, eat a great many.
There is seen from the upper windows of the Kimball House at Atlanta the most striking geological curiosity of Georgia. This is the Granite Mountain, rising sheer out of the plain to a height of near a thousand feet, and about seven miles in circum ference. The primary rocks, though known to occupy a con siderable area above the lowest falls of the rivers flowing to the Atlantic, are but rarely disclosed in the Southern' States. An uprising -of the Silurian formation appears in some places to have tilted the coal measures and the carboniferous strata to a considerable elevation, and to have given an anti-clinal deflection to what remains of the same deposits in the denuded valleys. But the primary rock seldom pierces the great mass of lime stones which forms the common floor of hill and hollow. The Stone Mountain of Georgia is, therefore, a very singular pheno menon, and must be deeply interesting to geologists. It is a solid pyramid of grey granite, its massive walls smoothed by the washing rains, the huge boulders resting on its sides no more disturbing its pyramidal outline than, if they were so many pebbles, and the tall forest trees growing at its base looking like shrubbery under its mighty shadow. The Stone Mountain, itself an abnormal development, may be said to mark the entrance from the south to a country of very different physical cha racteristics from the rest of Georgia, traversed by ranges of mountain, and impregnated with mineral treasures.
Cartersville is fifty miles north of Atlanta. By a convenient arrangement of the American railways a passenger on a through ticket can stay at intermediate places, and pass on at his con venience. I stopped at Cartersville. A branch railway is being made to Van Wert, twenty-two miles from Cartersville. and is about half opened. At Van Wert extensive slate quarries have been opened on the face of the hill--a fine dark-blue slate, which has hitherto been hauled in waggons to the railway at heavy cost, but will by and by, when the means of transport are completed, come into great favour for roofing. The branch

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line passes through a very lovely valley, well settled, and yield ing grain, cotton, and lumber in abundance. The soil all round Cartersville is a red clayey loam, deep and fertile, with abundance of limestone. The aspect of the country an English or Scotch farmer would at once recognize as that of a fine wheat-growing country, and heavy crops of wheat as well as cotton it does yield. .mere are numerous lime-kilns about, which produce the finest white lime, capable of being made an article of extensive commerce. Among the slate quarries, deposits have been dis covered, of a character somewhat between sandstone and soapstone, which are cut out quite soft from the bed, fashioned into bricks, and become very hard on exposure to the air. They take a fine, smooth surface, are cream-like in colour, and so far as yet known will prove most durable. The bricks, when dried, are very heavy. This seems superior material for dressingsround doors and windows, and cornicing. Marble quarries are wrought in Pickens County adjoining, and in a marble-yard at Cartersville I saw fine marble columns, almost pure white as well as variegated, and pedestals the scaly grain of which revealed a hard but ordinary limestone. The marbles of this section are carried chiefly to Marietta, a station on the State railway, and a considerable traffic is carried on in them to all the various towns'--some being even sent to the North. There is abundance^ of rock in this district for mill and grinding stones. But no coal, so far as I have learned, has yet been discovered, though iron ore has been wrought to a considerable extent, and pig is carried laboriously from the furnaces in waggons to " the State Eoad," twelve miles and more. No geological survey has, unfortunately, yet been made of Northern Georgia. The appointment of a qualified State geologist would be a measure of great public utility. The whole of J ^ , northern section of the State is evi dently rich in materials wi scientific observation and commercial interest.
The little town of Cartersville, rising up on either side of the railway--on both sides of which I lived long enough to find that there is a lively jealousy betwixt East and West, and the Big and Little-endians of the corporation--presented a quietly busy scene all day long. There was a crowd of waggons in the place, drawn some by oxen and some by mules, carrying their load of cotton or other produce to the depot, and. taking up at the stores their necessary supplies from the outside world, I stepped into the upper hall of a town house, which was being built in the front centre of the Big End, and found a bevy of young ladies and gentlemen whirling on " parlour skates " in a style which on ice would have made a great reputation. A young man " from the North " was presiding over a large assort ment of the " parlour skates " for sale ! The Americans are a

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[CH. xv.

most ingenious people in small things. Let a want, or semblance of a want, bo fe.lt through out the circumference of the Union, and "a young man from the North" will immediately appear and fix it all up to satisfaction. Still it is difficult sometimes to find the Post-office. I had wished to put a letter in at Carters ville, and the business men could tell me, with some slight variations, where the Post-office was the day before, while a larger number of witnesses had a distinct recollection where it was the previous week; but the whereabouts of the postmaster for the day being undiscoverable, I was drawn at length to the county building as the last intrenchment of official life, whither a spry, active little man, above middle age, in long light-blue coat and top-boots, driving a covered waggon with two mules, came at the same moment in search of "the Ordinary," a legal functionary, and one of much higher rank than the postmaster. We were alike unsuccessful in our object--indeed, there was nobody at all in the county building--and we dropped at once into the fellow-feeling " wondrous kind." He had sailed from Liverpool thirty years ago, and had now " hold of a water-power and factory" thirty-five miles from Cartersville or the railroad. " How many hands in the factory ? " " Seven." " How long does it take you to go home ?" "A day and three or four hours.'.' " Then you camp out at night ?" " Of course." This English man of thirty years' American citizenship, with, his " hold on a water-power" thirty-five miles from any centre of habitation, and no " Ordinary " to be found, seemed to me a deeply interest ing study, and I looked a long time after him as he briskly jogged on with his mules. His great expectation was that the rail way would soon be extended from Marietta to Pickens county, where his water-power and the marble quarries are. Yet the reins of authority are by no means loosely held in Cartersville. The Mayor had issued an edict in writing that barbers opening their shops on Sunday would be punished with the utmost rigour of law. The severity of this proclamation may hardly be estimated unless one remembers that few American citizens can really shave their own beards^' and that " the barber" is as great an insti tution in this country as he was in Spain four hundred years ago. The observance of the day of rest is marked all through Georgia. One sees many Puritan-looking countenances; and sturdy yeo men, with straight hair and earnest aspect, come and go on ambling palfreys and in splashed boots in such a place as Cartersville from sunrise to sundown. The state of society, the kind of traffic, the country roads, and all the surroundings here, probably diiibi1 very little from many a rural district of England in the days of the Eoundheads and Cavaliers.

CHAPTEE XVI.
Progress of Chattanooga.--Ascent of Lookout Mountain.--Geographical and Geological Features.--Traces of the War.--The Boiling Mills.--Banks' Puddling Apparatus.-- Cost of producing Coal and Iron Ore.--Visit to Mineral Properties. --Agricultural qualities of the Land.--Stream of Emigrants at Chattanooga.--Navigation of the Tennessee.
[CHATTANOOGA, TBNN.--Dec. 2--5.]
CHATTANOOGA is situated on the extreme verge of south-eastern Tennessee, but, in point of local attributes, is more closely allied to Georgia and Alabama than to the State of which it forms part. It acquired "world-wide notoriety during the war as the centre of important military movements, and has since been rendering itself famous in a more useful and enduring sense. The population, now 8,000, has largely increased during the last two years. The construction of the Alabama and Chattanooga Eailroad, the new life given to the Rolling Mills by an enter prising and successful company, and the increased importance attached to the mineral resources of the district, have all tended to enhance the value of property and give great briskness to trade and labour. From a little nest of shanties, Chattanooga is struggling forward ram'^7 into streets of brick, with hotels, stores, and public br _gs. The railways of North and South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Tennessee have here a common point of connection, and "md Chattanooga" figures all over the North-Eastern States as the index of a great route for passengers and emigrants to the South and to the vast tracts of Texas and Arkansas west of the Mississippi. Chattanooga is cradled amidst mountains, the great Cumberland chain spreading its spurs into Georgia and Alabama on all sides of it; and it may be said to sleep and wake to the sound of the waters of the Tennessee, which here pursues a most serpentine course, and in scooping out its bed amidst the sand and limestone rock appears at various points to have missed by a hairsbreadth a much shorter cut to the sea. Though built on one of the loops of the river, and environed by rock and hill, Chattanooga has ample space for expansion valleyward. In the immediate vicinity the Lookout range of hills terminates in the bold and striking peak

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[CH. xvi.

known as Lookout Mountain, which, as the country was inviting,
I resolved to ascend. Though near inid-winter, the.day was bright, sunny, and warm
as summer in England. A short canter across the plain brings one to the base of the mountain, striking it about the middle, where a winding road has been cut to the summit. On ascend ing, the hill appears as if built up of huge boulders bedded in red sandy clay, which, but for the boulders, one imagines would make a good crop-bearing soil. Great blocks of stone lie on the surface, worn by the weather into all shapes and forms. Solid masses, square or oblong, rise out of what seems a deep earth, as if they had a foundation far down, and were either still an integral part of the everlasting hill, or had been built in and carved by the hand of man. Pines, whose roots had struck the rock, and spread in strong ribs along its surface, and wound their tenderest fibres through its crevices, have shared the fate of storm or landslip, which has wrenched great masses of stone from their foundations, and placed them topsy-turvy on the mountain-side. The abundance of soil gives root all way up to a great variety of trees and shrubs. Wooden shanties peep out from the trees like nests along the mountain-side, and the con stant tinkle of the cow-bell gives notice that many poor families nourish themselves in this wilderness. The mountain is pretty steep from its base, but near the summit the sandstone rises up in a massive perpendicular wall, somewhat like the top ridge of the Salisbury Crags at Edinburgh, but three or four times as high, reckoning from the point where it rests visibly above the " millstone grit," limestone, and Silurian rocks which probably form the nether foundations of the mountain. This crest of free stone, with its fringe of pines and other trees atop, when looked at from a distance, while the sun is wearing down to the west, bristles up and spreads over the horizon like the comb of a cock. The road at length approaches the Summit House, frequented by New Orleans and other Southern people in summer, and by invalids from the Far West in winter. The glass in the house stood at 60 degrees between 11 and 12 o'clock. In summer the heat is seldom more than 85 degrees. Pushing forward, over the finest white sand, and through older and more umbrageous timber than appeared on the mountain-side, to the very edge of the cliffs in which the mountain abruptly terminates at a height of 1,800 feet, and at the base of which the Tennessee is forced by the massive resistance to make one of its sudden but graceful windings, scenes of surpassing loveliness burst on the view. The houses of Chattanooga seem sprinkled about like snuff-boxes on the plain. The majestic river, sweeping out from well-threaded mazes to the north, flows in a smooth and gentle current west ward, as if in mere kindness to Chattanooga, which otherwise it

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might overflow, and, passing behind a great ridge in that direc tion, emerges again in a broad and placid south-eastern curve round another side of the town, till, meeting this formidable wall of rock, it bends once more and flows in a western course past the base of the cliffs, and is finally lost to view amidst wooded mountains and gorges, almost as far north as the point at which it first cqmes into sight. The Tennessee, in describing this series of syphon-like movements, albeit rockbound, seems never to lose- its sovereignty of action, or to wander anywhere save according to its own sweet will. The process of denudation by the deluge of waters that must have rolled over these parts, splitting broad mountains in two, and washing down their dis integrated materials into a slowly and far-receding ocean, leaving only this perennial watercourse, amid deposits of " drift," and sand and clay, and minerals, and mountain sections thickly powdered with its alluvium, as its final representative in all this present equilibrium of land and water, is written on valley and mountain-top in characters so plain that "he who runs may read." Broad vales stretch away southward on either side of the mountain. Sandy pine-covered hills, which look formidable on the plain, appear like little mounds over which the plough might pass. Towards the east, tier after tier of woody heights lift the eye step by step to the towering Cumberlands on the verge of the horizon. Southward the view is bounded "by the hills of Georgia, and westward towards Alabama by a series of mountain ranges, thickly wooded, and bearing 'on their crown the same perpendicular wall of rock and comb of trees as the Lookout range. The outfliers, the tasselled rocky standards, of half a dozen great States, may be seen from Lookout Mountain. And here, on the topmost cliffs, the sandstone lies in great slabs, horizontal, vertica 1 i angular, forming pulpits and streets of rock; and topes 01 trees umbrella-like have grown up to give shade and shelter;--the scene erewhile of terrible commotions of Nature, followed by long ages of rest, and growth, and the silent spring and fall of vegetation.
The plateau of the mountain is of considerable breadth, though it is evident, from the depth of the adjoining valleys, that the denudation has been here extremely powerful, and has cut more deeply than on many of the other ranges. The only traces of the war visible are the sites of two or three batteries on the edge of the cliffs, and an earthwork in the centre of the plateau. Seven or eight thousand Confederates are said to have occupied ' this natural and impregnable fortress, but were surprised one morning by the Federals under Rosencranz, who stole in the night along the western base of the mountain, and, passing under the peak to the slopes on the eastern side, gained easy possession. Somewhile previous the Federals had struck the

106

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[CH. xvi,

railway at Bridport, and the defence at Lookout had lost its importance. The evacuation of Chattanooga by the Confede rates was followed by the great battles on Missionary Eidge, where the Federals encountered severe resistance, and Eosencranz lost his command.
The Boiling Mills at Chattanooga, which had done good service to the Confederates during the war, fell into the hands of the Federal Government, and have now entered on a new and pro mising career under an energetic and capable private company. General Wilder, whose campaigns had revealed to him the mineral resources of this section of country, is the active spirit of this enterprise. He has joined with him a partnership of capitalists, and is displaying a natural sagacity and aptitude in mining coal and iron, as well as in the mechanical operations of the Eolling Mills, that are likely to be attended with the most successful results. The company bought the old mill and 145 acres of land from the Government for 225,000 dollars, and are selling off the land in building lots at prices which will leave the actual cost of the mill and 30 acres of ground not more than 12,000 dollars. They have built a new mill in line with the old one, and are fitting up the necessary power and machinery, including twelve of I)anks' patent puddling apparatus--a new invention, of which confident hopes are entertained. This is the first mill in which it is. to be put to actual working test, and if it prove successful the saving will be about nine dollars per ton. The process of puddling is effected by steam-power turning a double circular chamber, in one section of which is the furnace, and in the other the bloom. One puddler will be able to attend two of these machines. A charge of from 600 Ibs. to 800 Ibs. of pig is put in, the chamber revolves, and the bloom, when perfect, is carried direct to the squeezer, thence to a furnace, and finally to the rollers.1 It is computed that, when all the new appliances are in operation, the mills will be able to make 150 tons of rails a day. The company mine their own coal and iron ore on a pro perty fifteen miles long farther up the Tennessee, on which they bring down the pig and coal in small steamboats, drawing.from two to three feet of water, to the Eolling Mills. There is a fur-

1 While these sheets have "been passing through the press, Mr. Banks has appeared at the autumn meeting of the Iron and Steel Institute at Dudley (Aug. 30), and submitted a paper explanatory of his " Kotary Puddling Furnace," which gave rise to an interesting discussion on mechanical puddling. Mr. Fothergill, M.P., is reported to have said that "the effects produced by Mr. Banks' furnace were so startling that he could not refrain from expressing the greatest interest in it. In that furnace the breaking-down of the fettling proved highly beneficial. It was claimed for it that it produced a higher quality of iron, and did away with the labour of the puddler." A suggestion that a commission should be appointed to go to America to examine Mr. Banks' works was well received by the Institute'.

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nace in operation at the mines, which produces 20 tons of pig iron, and is being extended to produce 40 tons, a day. The coal, as is characteristic of the coal measures in the South, is found in the face of the mountain, above the underlying masses of limestone, in seams of four to ten feet thick. The beds of iron ore are from six to fifteen feet. The company are working two veins of _coal and two of iron in such immediate juxtaposition that the furnace is close to both and midway between them. The cost of ore at the furnace is 2 dollars per ton ; the cost of coal 1 -40 dollars per ton ; the limestone 80 cents a ton; and the lire-clay so convenient as to cost'nothing. The company calcu late that they will be able to make iron rails and lay them down in Pittsburg cheaper than they can be produced in that great centre of the Pennsylvanian coal and iron fields; and if this should be demonstrated, the mineral resources of East Tennessee, Georgia, and Alabama will command immediate attention.
The Alabama and Chattanooga Eailroad, one of the great railway works of the last two years, passes from this point through the mineral districts of Alabama betwixt the Black Warrior and Coosa rivers, and has been already opened for traffic as far as Elyton; while at the other end, from Meridian in Mississippi, the connection has been simultaneously advanced. Some thirty-five miles on either side of Tuscaloosa at this date requires only to be laid with iron in order to complete this great line of communication. It is difficult to see how this road can pay in the meantime; but if it should facilitate the opening of the coal and iron deposits known to lie along nearly its whole route, it will be the means of doing great good to the State of Alabama, and may ultimately develop a large traffic.
With the view of visiting some mineral properties already operated upon, p-^ /f seeing the general indications of the country, I passeu ^own this line of railroad as far as Trenton. Near to that place there is an estate of 2,500 acres, extending across the valley from the top of Eaccoon Mountain to Lookout Creek, a small stream flowing near the base of the Lookout range. This property was bought some years ago for 75,000 dollars by Northern capitalists, who formed themselves into a company for mining and manufacturing iron. They erected a furnace of 30 feet base and 34 feet high; put up an engine of 70-horse-power, with the intention of erecting a. second furnace, for which the engine would have been sufficient; and proceeded to melt the iron ore abounding over the property. But, ap parently from want of practical skill and efficient arrangements, the company lost so much money--though it is difficult to see how--and fell into such discouragement, that its operations have for some time been practically abandoned. The property is in the meantime under the care of Mr. M'Lean, one of the share-

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[CH. xvi.

holders of the company, who is cropping the land. Mr. M'Lean accompanied me up the Eaccoon. Along sandy mounds near the base of the mountain he pointed out a series of pits where, a few feet from the surface, deposits of fossiliferous iron ore were dug out with great facility, and were found rich enough to keep the furnace, from which they are little more than half a mile distant, going while it was in "blast. These surface deposits are found in various parts of the property athwart the valley. The furnace was fired with wood, cut down on the mountain, and hauled by oxen to the plain. There is a winding bullocktrack up the steep which had been used for this purpose; arid our horses were able to carry us far up towards the summit. The character of the mountain differs little from that of Look out ; and on glancing across the valley one is struck with the verisimilitude of the faces of the hills. It almost seems as if the two ranges had been sliced, and had somehow glided or been floated away from each other. Nature has here, over wide districts, acted with such uniformity that it may be safely concluded that what is characteristic of one mountain or valley will be charac teristic of another. But though it has been known for fifty years to the blacksmiths of the district that there is coal in the Eaccoon Mountain, yet there has been no thorough survey of it, or no thorough effort made to mine either coal or iron from its bosom. Mr. M'Lean first conducted me to a spot where, from the debris around, coal had evidently been picked out; but, owing to the subsidence of the superincumbent rock, it could not be judged how far the excavation had been made, or of what thickness the seam, though visible enough, might be. Farther up, a bed of fine hematite ore was revealed along several yards, and was at least two feet thick. Wear this point the great wall of sandstone above had cracked, and fallen in masses down the mountain. This barrier seemed almost im passable, but we dismounted, and, climbing over the sea of broken rock, landed on a shoulder, where we discovered, half hidden by bushes, a real- coal-pit--a lateral boring into the mountain fifteen or twenty yards long, three or four yards wide, and about as many feet deep. The place was filled with water, and did not seem to have been entered for years ; but the black and glistening coal was seen in unbroken lines, nearly three feet thick, on both sides of the boring. The probability is that these beds of coal and hematite not only run along the whole range of hill till the latter falls away or is intersected by cross valleys, but lie through the whole mountain to the other side; so that the comparative thinness of the seams may be compensated by their vast superficial area, and the ease with which they may be brought to the face, and shot down to the furnace.
A few miles farther down the valley there is another mining

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property on which a large amount of capital was expended by the " Empire State Iron and Coal- Company" just before the outbreak of the war, but which has never recovered from the collapse that ensued. The ground was prospected, seams of i, ">al and iron found, and a furnace erected; but there operations see*-* to have ended. The property embraces the summits both of Lookout and Eaccoon Mountains, with the intervening valley, or rather valleys; for the Silurian has been uplifted between the mountains so as to produce an anti-clinal structure in which the strata are found to dip in opposite directions from the centre of the valley. One peculiarity of the " Empire State " property is that the coal measures have been exposed on both mountains, and that seams of coal and iron have been traced on the eleva tions of the valley with a dip towards the base of the hills on each side. I did not see the seam of hematite ore here which I saw on the other place, but I am told that hematite has been found, and all analogy would lead one to expect such a result. Prom the " fix " in which this estate has been left by the war, it might not only be taken up on advantageous terms, but under practical and skilful management might become very productive. A coal mine is wrought in the same neighbourhood at a place called "Eureka." This mine was not doing much, but Mr. Staraiton, the entrepreneur of the Chattanooga and Alabama road, called in the assistance of Mr. Miller, a retired Scotch coalmaster who has been spending a long holiday in this part, of the world, and under his direction the " black diamonds " were brought out in more satisfactory quantity.
The characteristic of all these properties is that they are very valuable in an agricultural sense alone. The railroad runs through the middle of them. The property under the care of Mr. M'Lean is as COUTH"-t and delightsome an agricultural estate as could be desired. i-e are at least 500 acres of superior arable land growing wheat, cotton, and Indian corn; a large dairy could be supported besides ; and the terraces of the mountain-side, basking under a bright sun, seem well-adapted for the culture of vines. Wide tracts of herbage on the mountain-top would rear many cattle. Pleasant little bits of forest glade enhance the charms of the scenery, and from the farmhouse in the centre of the valley, an old seat of the Cherokees, the eye falls over the whole bounds. A populous town is rising in the immediate vicinity, and in the event of mineral development the valley lands round Lookout may be farmed with great advantage.
Two classes of emigrants pass and repass through Chattanooga almost daily. Lithe young fellows rushing to or from some of the new terrorities in the South-West, who carry their blankets and few et ceteras in a knapsack, and make their own coffee on board the cars--resolved to spend little and earn much--so

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[CH. xvi.

hardy, eager, and impetuous that one would say that nothing less than a crop of gold could satisfy the turning ^ passion of their hearts; and small farmers, with their wives and children and favourite pointers, moving westward 'to Texas or Arkansas, who arrive in covered bullock waggons loaded with their household gods from distant points in the adjoining States--from homes which were made with difficulty towards others which may only be found with more. The restlessness of the American people, their eager quest of new lands, and their proneness to fall under the spell of new dreams of fortune, are very striking, and im press a certain character of change and adventure on every branch of business and pursuit of life. The proper cultivation of the soil, the progress of arts, and the development and con solidation of society are retarded, meanwhile, by the very super abundance of the elements out of which all the blessings of civilization spring. It will require probably a hundred years to settle the Americans down to works of minute but all-important improvement.
The Tennessee is navigable to small vessels hundreds of miles above Chattanooga. There is some talk of cutting the shoals farther down the river, and opening a continuous waterway to the Mississippi. Congress has shown some favour to" a scheme for spending four millions of dollars, and has already appro priated a hundred millions to carry out this purpose, which may have some beneficial consequences in the great valley. But Chattanooga is so well supplied with means of railway transit that it stands in but subordinate need of being made a shipping port. The railways in America are carrying all before them in inland traffic.

CHAPTEE XVII.
The "Valley of the Tennessee "--its first Settlement by White Plantersits Physical Features.--Present Agricultural Condition.--Competition betwixt the Old and New Cotton Lands of "the West."--Marks of Desolation.--Want of Labour.--Movements of the Negroes.--Division of Estates.--Symptoms of Eevival.--Progress of the Small Hill Farmers.
[VALLEY OF THE TENNESSEE, ALA.--Dec. 6 to Jan. 5.J
FROM Chattanooga and its mountain defiles to the great Valley of the Tennessee is only a night's journey on the Memphis and Charleston Eailroad, but it is like passing from one country into another--from Nature in her sternest and proudest to Nature in her softest and mildest moods. Fifty years ago this magnificent plain was in possession of the Indians, who called it by one of the sweetest names in their language--A labama, or " Here we rest." In 1818, when the American Government, in pursuance of its fundamental doctrine that " all men are born equal," had advanced far enough in its wars and negotiations with the Cherokees and other tribes to put up the partially evacuated lands for sale, the Valley of the Tennessee was noted far and wide, and pioneer merchants of the South-Western territories, who had made lit jrtunes in trade and commerce, and gentle families of agriculturists from Virginia and the Carolinas, hastened down to the sales and bought up the estates. The valley was then for the most part a great forest of oak and cedar, broken only by natural glades, crystal streams flowing through ravines of magnesian limestone, and broad spaces of rich bottom land along the course of the majestic river. When the settlers had built their log-houses on the picturesque sites abounding in the woods, and gathered round them their little communities of negro slaves--all the results of hard cash, according to the doctrine of equality then prevailing--herds of red deer would be seen of an early morning bounding across the lawns, flocks of wild turkeys roosting on the trees, and the Eed Man, lingering in his much-loved haunts, would let fly Ms arrow within the forbidden precincts, and assert his ancient right of chase. The new life in the Valley of the Tennessee

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[CH. xvn.

was full of romance, of a rough, but pictorial beauty, and of such, difficulty only as was made light and easy by the excite ment of new circumstances and the sense of growing affluence and security. It seemed philosophically to have only two draw backs, inasmuch as it was founded on the dispossession of one race and the subjugation of another. But philosophy did not rule the world more in those days than it does now. The North is becoming every year more savage and implacable against the Eed Man, and the South so much more indulgent towards the Black that he is already elevated into a sort of fool's paradise. After the Indians, there came white masters and black slaves in North Alabama; but there were only bridle roads from one plantation to another, no towns or pleasures of the ordinary civilized routine, and even bread and meat had to be imported. Yet cotton in those days was 25 cents per pound, and there was promise of money-making, with no one knows what El Dorados of territorial sentiment and splendour, snatched in imagination from the Old "World to adorn the New. So the planters put their wives on pads behind the saddle, met at each other's houses, lived a merry and hospitable life; and the Valley of the Tennessee was soon occupied from end to end by lords and ladies of the land--men capable in business, and dames bringing both grace and wisdom from afar--who spread civility and plenty round them by degrees, and gave a tone to society that was spoken of from New York to New Orleans, and the impress of which, after all the havoc of war and revolution, still remains.
The Tennessee River, escaping from the mountain tangle in which it winds through many a ravine and round many a rocky bend and forest dell over hundreds of miles of .its infant course, bounds at length into a spacious level country not far from Huntsville, a pretty little town of several thousand inhabitants, enclosed in an amphitheatre by the spurs of the Cumberland range, and possessing a magnificent natural water supply in a spring which sends forth a copious stream at the rate of 800 cubic feet a minute. The Tennessee, now at ease, flows in more majestic breadth without losing the air and dash, of moun tain freedom, or the will to wander in sweeping and graceful curves impressed by habit on its swelling waters: The valley first opens and extends towards the south over twenty or thirty miles, where the Tennessee bends round at Guntersville, and valley and river take a directly westward course to Bear's Creek, on the border line of Alabama and Mississippi. The Memphis and Charleston Railroad, which passes to the north bank of the river soon after leaving Chattanooga, approaches it again at Huntsville, and crosses to the south bank by an iron bridge at Pecatur, twenty-four miles farther west. The river here seems full half a mile broad, and has the same aspect of mingled

CH. xvii.]

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grandeur and beauty as impresses one at other points of its course. Cotton is brought in flat-bottomed boats and rafts from the plantations on the river bottom to Decatur, and is hauled up by mules to the railway depot. The Valley of the Tennessee, \>us stretching along nearly the whole northern frontier of Alabama, is fifteen to twenty miles or more broad. The line of hill country to the south, sometimes lost altogether, is at others visible only'in a narrow blue strip along the verge of the hori zon, which, as the sun sinks in the heavens, becomes more pro minent, and, mingling its deepening blue and purple with the burnished gold of the western sky, gives form and limit to a scene of extraordinary glory. The mountain range on the north is in some parts bolder and more lofty, but, being broken by valleys and wide declinations sweeping down from the table lands of Tennessee, presents an irregular outline. Many creeks flow down from the uplands on both sides to the river, and, fed by-numerous branches that are almost pure springs, have worn themselves deep beds through the underlying rocks, and amidst soily banks clothed with tree and shrub, and scented by every species of wild flower. There is not only abundance of water everywhere for man and beast, but a facility of water-power for which the development of the country affords little or no present use. - The soil of the valley is a deep reddish loam, almost dark in the bottoms, but of a lighter hue as the land ascends, till in the uplands, where the sandstones lie, the surface becomes almost, white. Limestones of various qualities underlie the whole region, and form the bed of the river. On many of the lands a reddish sandstone is strewn in small boulders, not water-worn or pebbly, but apparently little pieces of broken rock, which are thickly marked with shell and other marine remains. On one plantation, where th<" fragments are more than ordinarily plentiful, the plantc. ^ them gathered in heaps on his clover fields, and built up in fences--the only stone fences I have seen in the Southern States. One cannot lift one of these stones and break it without being struck by the number of fossiliferous indentations. The Valley of the Tennessee would, no doubt, be deeply attractive to the geologist who abandoned himself for months or years to its study, but to the agriculturist it presents itself simply as " a land of Goshen" where every product of the soil may be grown and cultivated with rare success, where cattle may be reared and made fat and tender, and the produce of the dairy may contribute no unimportant item to the resources of the farm. In the meanwhile its agriculture has reached only a rudimentary and transitional stage, of which cotton was the beginning and is still the end, with little garnishings of " hog and hominy" as a collateral, but, so far, all too narrow basis of security. Whether cotton can be successfully cultivated as the
I

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THE TENNESSEE FALLET.

[CH. xvn.

main crop in such sections of country as this, while at the same time full attention be given to other agricultural resources of the soil, is a question of deep concern, not only to the people here, but to the progress of cotton manufactures and the interests of the commercial world. If the production of cotton is bound to seek virgin soils and. speculative fields, it is impossible it can attain the solidity and permanence so desirable and essential to one of the greatest branches of human industry and trade ever known. The Valley of the Tennessee is a favourable sample of countless acres of the older cotton lands of America on which this question is now forcing itself on* the planter with all but desperate urgency and keenness.
It was hither that cotton culture made its first great stride to the West, and. forty years ago the Valley of the Tennessee occupied the same relative place as the Mississippi bottom and the rich virgin soils of Arkansas and Texas do now. We are here on the border line of lands the maximum product of which is half a bale of cotton per acre, and lands where a bale to the acre may be gathered with nearly as much cer tainty. The competition is severe and crucial. It seems to waver in the balance whether the old cotton lands will be impelled at once or be forced gradually to let the new have it, and set against their greater mortality and social dis
comfort the larger pecuniary returns arising from a more pro lific soil and a diminished area of production. An inspection of this valley does not at first view convey a very flattering impression of the regular and progressive extension of cotton cultivation. It consists for the most part of plantations in a state of semi-ruin, and plantations of which the ruin is for the present total and complete. They are mostly large plantations, 2,000 acres in extent or thereabouts, and retain very much the original division by the Government, according to exact lines of survey. The boundaries can usually be traced by the belts of wood which the old planters reserved round their possessions for fuel, fence rails, and other plantation purposes. A scarcity of timber is as great a disqualification to a cotton plantation as a
scarcity of water on a grazing farm, or a want of fall and outlet on an arable swamp. The trail of war is visible throughout the valley in burnt-up gin-houses, ruined bridges, mills, and factories, of which latter the gable walls only are left standing, and in
large tracts of once cultivated land stripped of every vestige of fencing. The roads, long neglected, are in disorder, and having
in many places become impassable, new tracks have been made through the woods and fields without much respect to boundaries. Borne down by losses, debts, and accumulating taxes, many who
were once the richest among their fellows have disappeared from the scene, and few have yet risen to take their places. But gene-

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rally the old homesteads and the old families continue to be the centres of reviving industry and cultivation, and many valiant efforts have been made since the war to stay the advancing tide of barrenness and ruin. Fences have been rebuilt round not a .K 'v of the plantations, and the negro and the mule been once moi\, set to work in growing corn and cotton. Yet in the best examples of this "kind the restoration is incomplete, and a plan tation, however firmly held and actively cultivated, has seldom more than one-third of its good arable soil in crop or grass, the balance being abandoned to broomsedge--a tall, grassy weed, which waves at this season in whitey rankness over immense sweeps of this fertile valley. Want of labour, and want of means of deep, rapid, and effective ploughing, are the chief immediate causes of this wide-spreading inutility of soil. When the Federal armies passed through the valley, many of the young and able-bodied negroes followed them to the wars, and few Ijyed through the toils and sickness of the camps to come back. When the war ended, and the bond of slavery was dissolved, other swarms went off to seek new masters in the field of free labour, and after a season of trial, often bitter, are only returning by degrees to their old homes. There is a marked deficiency of labour in the valley for the cultivation and improvements which the planters would otherwise be willing and prepared to under take. The patches of cultivation, under such a laborious crop as cotton, must follow slowly and patiently year after year the number of hands available. The general tendency of circum stances is to break up the large possessions of former times, since every proprietor feels that he has more land than he can profitably handle. Many of the planters would sell a portion of their estates were there any buyers; but I have been able to discover few new sef^ or investments of fresh capital in land. In one instance an ^^6iish doctor of medicine who came to this part of the world in quest of health, has bought a plantation in the neighbourhood of Courtland--a little village on the railway, that, in its general features and surroundings, may have reminded him of many a rural spot in his native land--and is so pleased with the result that he is bringing out his family and relatives. Upwards of ninety advertisements of real estate for sale are posted in the hotel at Courtland. The revolution that has passed over the soil has left many embarrassments, which time alone will clear away. One sometimes falls upon a great proprietor who came to the valley a working man, and made money, and added plantation to plantation, till he was richer than all the older planters or their descendants, and who now sits amidst his wilderness of lands without labourers, not knowing what to do with them, or at what figure to estimate his worth in the world. In such cases, as well as others in which
I2

116

TEE TENNESSEE VALLEY.

[OH. xvn.

farms have fallen into Chancery, the soil, for some nominal
tribute or share of the cotton crop, enough to pay the taxes, has been literally abandoned to the field hands, who still under emancipation retain much of the nature of ascripti glebas, and cling for better or for worse to the soil on which they were reared. I have seen more than one great plantation absolutely deserted, and as void of fence or labour as it was at the end of the war. This state of affairs has given rise to assiduous efforts to rent out land to cultivators; and a class of people called " croppers," mostly whites, enter into annual tenancies of land. But' as the beginning and end of these engagements is simply to raise a crop, they leave the country as it was, or a little worse, and are, so far, of little or no account as a means of permanent extrication or improvement. Yet behind all this difficulty there is an undergrowth of wholesome influences at work that promise ultimately a great revival and deliverance. The sceptre falling from the hands of fathers is being grasped by vigorous and stalwart sons, who are rallying labour round them, and, while plodding in the cotton field, are also riding and hunting, courting and marrying, and casting all the past behind them with hopeful outlook to the future. The war has been terribly severe on the old people. The long struggle over, they have dropped into their graves, unable to support the worry and anxiety any longer. "When a father dies in Alabama, as in other parts of the United States, his property is divided equally among his sons and daughters, and this law approves itself so entirely to the general sentiment that it is seldom countervailed by will or testament. The wealthy classes hereabouts, indeed, have almost a prejudice that it is a bad thing for any one to be born to riches or large possessions. In slavery times, when a planta tion, with its quota of human chattels, hung very much together and could not be well divided, one of the family would buy out the other members, and preserve the property. This is still being done in some cases, but frequently a division of plantations is being carried out; and by-and-by there will be three or four flourishing farms where there was only one before. Pushing law yers in the towns, and thrifty storekeepers, are also eking together good manageable farms, and cultivating them with fresh spirit and intelligence. Modes of agricultural improvement are discussed with animation in society and in the newspapers, and not a few of the older planters are " walking encyclopaedias " of all kinds of geological and rural lore. Some of Gray of Uddingston's ploughs are being imported all the way from. Scotland, and if Scotch ploughmen and land-stewards would only follow them, a favour able change would no doubt pass quickly over the soil. But while recuperation can here be but slow and gradual at the best, there are not wanting many signs of progress and vitality/ The

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population of the Valley of the Tennessee is too considerable and substantial to allow its great interests to subside. Though the reduced price of cotton this season has raised new fore bodings of difficulty, and caused planters in the heyday of life to talk of selling out and emigrating to Texas or Colorado, yet IL graver and more patient minds it has suggested ideas of a more diversified development of the resources of the soil, and more economic arrangements of labour and husbandry; and, in a greatly modified system of agriculture, the Valley of the Tennessee is likely, without eventually impairing its production of cotton, to find its way at no distant time to new prosperity and fruitfulness.
It is here, however, in one of the " gardens of the South," famous for the production of cotton, that one feels more and more the increasing wonder how all the large crops of late have been produced. The old plantations, indeed, have gone on extending their crop, little by little, year after year, since the "war--the first year after which, notwithstanding the high price then ruling, was probably the most unsuccessful ever known. But, acre for acre under cultivation, the Valley of the Tennessee yields now a smaller quantity of cotton than in slavery times, while there are obviously large tracts once cultivated now wild and in a state of rest and neglect. Yet, in going back from the river bottoms and the large plantations towards the uplands, one explanation at least, amidst various others, appears. The hilly districts have long been inhabited by a poor white population, who have always produced more or less cotton. But the high value to which cotton was raised by the war, and the " labour difficulty" of the large plantations, have inspired them with new hope, life, and industry; and this class of growers have swelled considerably c&- late years the deliveries of cotton at the railway depots. " all of price is probably as disappointing to them as to others, but the extent to which they raise their crop by the labour of their own families renders the per contra of cost less distinct to them than to the large planters. They gin and bale their produce at common gin-houses; they spin and weave their own cloth ; nourish their cows and hogs; and, when the seasons are favourable, succeed in raising a fair stand of cotton. There never have been better or larger crops of cotton in the hill districts than this season. These small hill farmers come down occasionally into the plain, looking for land to rent or buy; and it is not improbable that many of the better and more industrious class of families in "the mountains," as the gently swelling uplands are called, will eventually come down altogether, and help to renovate the waste places, and build up the agricultural prosperity of the Valley.

CHAPTEE XVIII.
Routine on a Cotton Plantation.--The Surroundings.--Planting and Mar riage.--A Ride " round " 2,500 acres.--Disposal of the Soil.--Organization of Labour in the Cotton-fields.--Cotton-picking.--Ginning and Pressing. --Need of White Labour.--Live Stock on a Plantation.--The Hogs.-- "Killing Day."--Pauperism and Free Labour.--Shallow Ploughing.-- The " Mussel Shoals " of the Tennessee.
[VALLEY OF THE TENNESSEE.--TOWN CREEK, Dec. 10.]
THE routine of life on a cotton plantation, though busy and en gaging enough, does not realize all the pleasures and advantages with, which imagination may surround it. There is nothing to which I can more aptly compare it than the life of a large sheep farmer in the pastoral districts of the old country. For while the occupation differs widely, there is often the same solitude, the same distance from town and market over difficult roads, the same want of society and of the smaller comforts and elegancies of civilized life, and the same general roughness of exterior cir cumstances. Save in the vicinity of towns, where the planters sometimes build houses and ride out to their plantations, or some famous old homesteads in the country where the wealth of a former generationhas erected mansions and offices more in the style of the rural gentry than of the farmers of England, the planters for the most part live in plain log-houses, with a wide open hall running through the middle of it from a verandah in the front to a dining apartment and kitchen in the rear. The temperature is so mild in winter that all open' arrangements for admitting air are tolerable, while in summer they are supremely desirable; and when the cold winds blow, or a brief spell of frost sets in, great log fires are kindled on the hearths, and blaze and glow as " in the brave days of old." The dwelling-houses, besides having more or less well-chosen sites, are usually surrounded by a spacious courtyard, snake-fenced on its four sides, with stable for saddle and buggy horses, smoke-house, cotton-shed, corn-cribs, and uncovered pens for feeding milch cows and other select portions of stock, ranged round the exterior of the yard, and giving rise to other little mazes of snake-fencing. Cabins for the negro domestic servants and other right-hand persons about

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the planter are also put up near the homestead, so that, with a kitchen garden and peach orchard at hand, the log-house becomes the centre of a considerable establishment. The planter has few white people about him. When he has talked, morning, noon, and night, with his overseer, or is visited by a neighbour, ht has exhausted the conversational resources of the place; for the negroes, though ^ost respectful and polite to their employers, and not without a 1: lorous side, do not add much to " the feast of reason and the u. w of soul." If- the planter be a married man, the usual fountain of domestic joys opens to him in the wilderness of life, and new. sources of economy and well-being spring up around him with marvellous richness and contentment. The planter may grow cotton, and some hog and corn, but it is his wife who makes the plantation flow with oil and wine, milk and honey. Matrimony and planting are linked together by indis soluble laws of nature, and herein probably arises one of the present difficulties of cotton-growing in the Southern States. Such is the progress of railways, towns and travel, and of a taste for luxury and gaiety, and all the effervescing pleasures and enjoyments of artificial society, that heroines willing to
" Scorn delights and live laborious days"
on a cotton plantation are not so plentiful as they were in former times. Both young men and young women here discover much fondness, if not ambition, for city life, and for some form of emergence into the great world without; and the one sex pull the other after them. The old couple, tottering on the verge of life, are often found struggling with the embarrassments of the time, and their sons far away from them in cities; while the younger bachelors, who have shown a good example in one respect, and are unable to do the same in another, spend on their plantations, as any one may imagine, a rough and hard time of it.
But with or without mistress, there is no idleness on one of these great cotton farms. As soon as a very early breakfast is over, the planter will have saddled horses in the courtyard, and ask you to take a ride " round" with Mm. A ride " round " a plantation of 2,500 acres is a good day's journey, but the weather at this season is here usually fine and invigorating, and an excursion on horseback, with everything new to look at, is very pleasant. On getting out from the labyrinth of gates and fences, it becomes a ride over open country and through bits of woodland, amidst wide-spreading patches of Indian corn and cotton, and undulating sweeps of long sedgy grass, broken here and there on the slopes by raw cuts and gaping blood-red wounds inflicted by the weather. These rolling tracts, when not under the plough, would be fine pasture lauds on a farm in England; but they are here simply a measure of the insufficiency

120

TOWN CREEK.

[CH. xvin.

of labour and inattention to stock. A few stray cows belonging to the negroes are the only cattle seen as one brushes through the far-extending sedge. Yet on this side and that, near the stead ing, one's eye does fall sometimes on bright green swards, where some choice animals are feeding with much zest. These are fields of rye or barley, sown in September, and now closely cropped by horses and mules, to shoot up again with new strength and tenderness in spring; or fields of clover in their first or second year, on which the stole and blade of this finest of grasses lie thick over the soil as a carpet. There need be no want of sweet and succulent herbage at all seasons on these Valley plantations. But corn and cotton, and cotton and corn, as one rides on, throw everything else into the shade. These crops are grown in alternate lots over large spaces of ground without intermediate fences, cotton one year and corn the next --this being the prevailing idea of rotation. But corn grows anywhere, and requires but little labour, and there are favoured spots for cotton down on " the bottom " where some creek flows along fine marginal stripes, and round loops and semi-islands of rich and dark-coloured land, where the favoured commodity has the preponderance. The negro " quarters " now begin to appear in rows of cabins, usually placed on the edge of the wood forming the boundary of the plantation, and under the system of free labour rapidly becoming little farm steadings, with corn-cribs and hog and mule pens of their own. It was usual in slavery times to concentrate the " quarters," and the cribs, and the mule stables, near the homestead. But under the free contract, by which the negro field-hand has become a sharer of the crop, and loves to have a mule of his own to ride on Sundays and in idle times of the year, it is found convenient to spread him and the necessary animal more about, near his work, where, if so in clined, he may protect both his own and his employer's property --which arrangement, expedient as it seems, and on the whole may be, has created a new difficulty to the planter; for the negro is not remarkably honest, and has such obtuse ideas generally on the precise relation of meum and tuum, that his master's share of the corn and cotton, when stored widely round, does not always appear to him anywise radically different from his own. But a man who has a large interest should be honoured with a large confidence and responsibility, and this general ethical principle has its sway here meantime too. The negroes toiled in gangs or squads when slaves, and they toil necessarily, though under much less control of the planter, in the same form still. A strong family group, who can attach other labour, and bring odd hands to work at proper seasons, makes a choice, if not always attainable, nucleus of " a squad." The picking time is the testing-point of labour in the cotton-fields, and that time

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is now, or ought to be, nearly over. One loses much of the charm of this cotton country towards the end of the year. It should be seen when the tall Indian cornstalk, stilljluscious, is nodding under the weight of its golden pods, and the cottonshrub, still a mass of green, is bursting into white globules, . 'hich play and & "h in the gorgeous sunlight like pearls amidst a frippery of leave But the third round in cotton-picking has now been made, c, all plantations whose labour is well up. to time, over the spreading areas of something red and brown, and dying under maturity and " snaps " of frost into a ground of colour undistinguishable from the earth beneath. Yet there are laggard squads on the cotton-fields, and the planter tells one that he " developed " two hundred pickers yesterday, and expects to " develop" nearly as many to-day (though, to one like me, looking at so much else over so large a territory, it seems some what difficult to find them out); and he rides on, telling Jerry ,-~--h^ ere that it is not ogood to leave the newliv/ -burst boles,' for he will have to go over the space again if he do ; and assuring Jemima there (a sonsy lass with a great profusion of bonnet), that the cotton shed on the ground may actually prove of some use, and be worth picking up. Cotton-picking is really a serious business in these Southern States. I have seen cotton-fields hereabouts that have not been gathered even a first time. But every second bole which Jerry and Jemima gather up is their own, and the force of motive to labour and to all manner of frugal husbandry can no further go. If the negro does not work well now, one must be sorry for him. The planter gives the land, his stock and implements, working capital and credit, his skill, and plodding care and watchfulness from day to day for the chance of half the cotton which his hands may be induced to plant and till, or may think it worth their while to gather when it is ripe.
Our morning's ride may have discovered 500 acres of cotton-field, and when at the gin-house, on our return, we ask what the crop may be, the estimate seems to run betwixt 180 and 200 bales-- the overseer holding out (the weather being so fine) for the big outcome, and the dubious planter, however willing to be con vinced, adhering meantime to the more humble figure. Half a bale to the acre, which has been given me all through the Atlantic States as an average crop, is rather the maximum attain able on any given acre than the actual aggregate result over a whole farm with all the contingencies of soil and season, and sluggard culture, with probably still more sluggard picking. The cotton gathered by the various squads is brought to the gin-house to be cleaned of seed and husk, and partially skutched and pressed into bales. The gin-house is a little embryo factory, in which there is a good deal of mechanical ingenuity. The wool, driven out from the gin like wreaths of

122

TOWN CREEK."

[CH. xviu.

smoke, is a sight to see. The ginning apparatus is sometimes, though rarely, driven by water-power; and the planter, having abundance of mule power in the ginning season, is not very anxious on this point. But the cotton from the gin is neither perfectly cleaned nor perfectly baled. The cotton bale of the plantation is about three times the size of the bale when it receives from steam power, with a touch as seeming light as a feather, its final squeeze in the seaports. If the bale could be despatched from the plantation as compressed as from the seaport, there would be much economy in bagging and in iron ties, and as great a reduction in inland as has occurred in oceanic rates of freight. Though I do not know that there is anything immediately practical in this remark, yet amidst all the buzz of the Southern people about cotton factories, and making yams and cloths for the world, one cannot but think that, if the economical process is to begin, it had better begin at the begin ning, and that any planter who made his bale of cotton the fittest for transport by land and sea, and pure enough for spin ning almost right off, inscribing his name or trademark upon it as warranty, might probably become illustrious, and would cer tainly command 10 or 15 cents a pound more for his product than anybody else! But what a great stretch of imagination may all this be, when the planter cannot get his good land ploughed, or near enough of fence-rails made, or necessary housing put up, and has to content himself with the first rough bruise of the rich agricultural resources wasting around him for want of labour. Near the gin-house is a smithy and a carpen ter's shop, where the mules are shod, and the waggons kept in repair; and there may be also a corn-mill on the place, with good grinding machinery which does valiant service to the neighbourhood. All these departments are filled by black or yellow men of more than common ingenuity. There is a nucleus of mechanic art and manufacture on all large cotton plantations ; but it is obvious that, if progress is to be made, the planter will have to call in a great deal of special white labour, handy me chanics who can drive nails, make gates, mend ploughs and locks, work and right machinery, and put doors on hinges; and dairymen and clairywomen, and herdsmen cunning in stock, by coming South would find many comfortable openings, and rise probably in course of years to considerable fortune.- So the planters begin to think and say.
The live stock on a plantation, with the exception of a few bred horses, still consists for the most part of half-starved cows, and small brown and white two-year-olds which look as haggard and shaky as if they were already threescore and ten--the pro perty of the negroes, and pointed out derisively by the overseer as the " Durhams " of the place. The country lacks the aspect

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of life and substance, therefore, which sheep and cattle give to well-handled farms. But there is one element of stock in which a cotton plantation :' really great. The negro and negress, and the pickaninnies, wh ,re not nearly so numerous as they are said to have been in slaveiy times, have not much comeliness to boast of. The mules, indeed, are handsome enough creatures, with fine traces of blood and culture in their busts and limbs, a preter natural bigness of head, and a long, wispy queue of a tail, quite in the style of a " girl of the period."1^ But for the merry and lively beings of a cotton farm commend me to the hogs. They are of all sizes, shapes, and colours--a small, black, well-rounded Berkshire being the predominant breed. As we take a short cut through the wood, great families of them spring up among our horses' feet; they gallop in groups round the negro quarters ; they meet us in droves in the avenue and under the spreading oaks, and are always cheery, "gleg," and on the move. They have so great an abundance of territory, and so inexhaustible a variety of acorns--white, brown, and grey--to feed upon, that they seem not to know where to settle down, and to be always trotting on to some richer Texas or Colorado in a purely Ameri can spirit of adventure and speculation. The whoop of a negro boy, late in the afternoon, brings troops of them from afar to various points of the plantation for a little feed of Indian corn, which sends them contentedly to bed for the day. But generally this lively animal is the latest heard at night and the earliest afoot in the morning. And in this month of December, when the air is cool and the previous night may have been a little frosty, and " killing-day " comes round, what a gathering of the lame, and aged, and dependent negroes of the plantation is there! Old Sally, herself 20-stones weight, has hurtled down, and has placed herself at the head of a dissecting table; a bright brown woman, who would be comely but for very thick lips, which' she spreads out more unhandsomely still by smoking a 'baccy pipe, and her blind man, who lost his eyes by a powder blast many years ago in his master's service, and has been a pensioner ever since, and all their children; poor old Bibb, whose shoulders are up to his ears, and whose woolly head and beard are quite white as if he were all coming out at last in cotton; and many others who do no work now, all are down on hog-killing day, when there is much fatness about. Every plan tation in possession of the old families has its incumbrance of regro paupers, who are fed out of the produce of the farm, and are treated with all kindness, which may last a generation, and then, probably, disappear in the more sifting relations of free labour.
The preference of the planters for hogs is easily accounted for. They require little tending, find most of their own " grub," multiply rapidly, and are the best meat, except, perhaps, bear,

124

TOWN CREEK.

[OH. xvm.

yet found on this continent. The negroes are very fond of the big fat porkers, while the finer pigs make delicious*, hams. I have been several times asked of late, by tall drover-and-porkbutcher looking men from Kentucky, whether I wanted any meat, meaning hog, to which I have invariably replied, " No, thank you--plenty of that;" and the planters are coming more and more, since the war, to give the same answer, and to want neither meat nor corn from anywhere save their own farms.
Yonder are those large tracts of sedgy weeds, dry and sunny, and swelling wave-like up to the edge of the woods, which one would like to see covered with herds. of dairy-cows and cattle, and flocks of sheep. But they require to be torn up by deep ploughs and clothed by much cultivation with finest verdure, before they can produce the milk and butter and butcher-meat which fetch exorbitant prices all through the South, and, if in creased in quantity, as well as improved in quality, would be a mine of wealth to the Southern farmer. His corn and cottonland and negro labour meanwhile seem to tax the energy and patience of the planter to the utmost. Where the land is not a deep level bottom, one sees the washing effect of the two or three rainy months of the year in a poor stand of cotton along the knolls and slopes, contrasting with the rich crop in the fattened hollows. If the slope be anywise considerable, the rain cuts deep channels and gashes in the soil, and, rushing down, makes a terrible gurgle and commotion at some point where its various courses meet, as if a kennel of hounds had been unearthing a fox. These gullies are the plague and eyesore of the planter. But, after all, they seem mainly the result of shallow ploughing. The ploughs in use, with small shoe-shaped coulters, and horns little bigger than a child's wheelbarrow, turn over two or three inches of the surface, and leave a hard iron trail beneath that frets the roots both of corn and cotton ; and, refusing to absorb the heavy rain when it comes, forces it to fall into a passion, and to act with all this violence. Deep ploughing would no doubt cover a multitude of gullies, and probably double the crop on every upland plantation.
The life of a cotton-planter, with all these cares and in these times, would be barely supportable but for the abundant occu pation it gives to the mind, the opportunities it affords for wholesome exercise and field sport, and the ever fresh and natural charms of the country. The farmers and farmers' sons are all good shots, and they smooth many a difficulty by pulling on their top-boots, and, taking their horse, gun, and pointer, sallying forth to shoot partridges, which are found in coveys of seven or eight in the corn-fields and the woods; or by starting at early dawn to hunt wild geese and ducks round the islands of the Tennessee.

OH. xviii.]

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The plantations hereabouts debouch on the famous Mussel Shoals, which are fifteen miles in length, and have a fall of about 90 feet. The broad river has cut a channel over the flinty limestone, which, following its natural strata on the land, forms a i/agnificent staircase, over which the great volume of waters descends in a series of' gentle cascades. The wearing of the limestone in parts where it is softer than in others has formed what are called " chutes," through which boats pass, as through the eye of a needle, up and down. The roll of the river is heard all over the plantations, and from some points of the bluff the spectacle of what seems a sea of waters, studded with woody islets, swarming with wild fowl, and dancing in the sunbeams to its own shell-like music, sounding and resounding as it skips from one marble floor to another, is altogether exquisite. Many years ago a canal was made along the Shoals on the northern bank, but somehow has been allowed to fall into disuse and ruin. TheJBhoals are a complete obstacle to continuous navigation up river, and it would seem to be by a canal alone that this obstacle can be turned.

CHAPTER XIX.
The Town that Jones built.--Eiot in a Liquor Saloon.--What the Planters complain of.--Pay and Privileges of the Negroes.--The Plantation Bell.-- The doctrine of Equality run to Seed.--Planting discussions in Jonesboro'. --Bad Whisky and other commodities.--Need of Tariff Keforni.
[VALLEY OF THE TENNESSEE.--JONESBOE.O', Dec. 19.]
JONES is one of the greatest founders of towns in America. The present "borough of Jones must be the tenth or eleventh of the same name that have already passed under my observation without provoking a remark; but having wandered here more than once in quest of the postmaster, I may as well, were it only in respect to Jones, make a note of it.
Jonesboro' consists of ten houses, two of which--neat little frame stores--are in course of erection, and cause the people in the neighbourhood to say, when they meet to tell and hear the news, that Jonesboro' is building up rapidly. The ten houses are so arranged as to form a large square, of which the track and depot of the Memphis and Charleston Railroad is one of the sides, with wings of streets from the corners to the right and left. The ten houses of Jonesboro' are disposed, as may be judged, with considerable effect. There are merchants in Jones boro'--grocery, hardware, and dry goods--and one always finds half a dozen well-bred horses hitched in the square, and twice as many mules, saddled or waggoned, and, either way, having the art of standing still without the hitching process which, despite its "cruelty to animals," appears to be one of the institutions of the United States. Bullock teams crawl about with cotton or timber to the depot; strong mounted men come and go, calling for the postmaster, with an air as if it were of little or no conse quence whether they found him or not; and negroes are always dropping in on mules or afoot with little bags full of something, which they carry into the stores, and carry out again mostly empty. There are rich plantations round Jonesboro', but close on the other side of the railway track there are three or four thousand acres of as good and pretty land as one could wish to see, from which every vestige of fence and housing was stripped

CH. xix.]

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127

during the war, and all trace of cultivation has now disappeared; and how the taxes on it are paid no one seems to know or care.
But a great uproar arises in one of the ten houses, which, on being looked at, differs from all the rest, and has the appearance sk'tily of an elongated caravan, raised on little pedestals of red brick 'hat might be mistaken for wheels. The riot in the cara van at length bursts out through one of the ends in a rabble of men--backways, sideways, foreways, and on all fours pell-mell-- yelling and whooping, throwing off their coats, squaring and drawing pistols at each other, and in a very high state of animal excitement. The scene was rather alarming; but I was assured by an " intelligent negro " that it was only a little bad whisky, the gas of which in the head must get off in this way every now and then, and that no harm would arise. oSTor did there; for,
though some shots were fired, nobody was killed or wounded, and in a few minutes afterwards the combatants were embracing one another in the most tender and affectionate manner possible, andin a minute or two more had all, greatly sobered and relieved, slouched back into the caravan. The bacchanalians were white men, of the class of " croppers," who had been trying their luck during the year in a crop of cotton on the waste and semi-ruined plantations about, and were taking the fall out of it in this fashion.
The planters who come to Jonesboro', though not in the most cheery mood just now, are men who take a philosophical and business-like view of their affairs and of the whole situation of the South. The Ml of cotton does not profoundly disconcert them, for the rapidly enlarging crop had prepared them for a descending scale of prices, and the war in Europe is referred to as accounting in some measure for the depth and suddenness of the present decline. There is an opinion in the Northern States that the Southern cotton-growers are an inert, unskilful race. There could hardly be a greater mistake; and the idea that cotton can be grown, and the resources of the soil developed, more successfully than by the men who have been studying and practising these matters all their days, must be discarded as a vain hallucination. One requires only to meet the cotton-plan ters of the South, and to note the energy with which they act, and the care and diligence they apply to their affairs, to feel that strangers coming in to farm, welcomed as they would be, must be largely indebted to the knowledge and experience of the resi dents long engaged in the agricultural pursuits of the country.1

1 Among the planters in this neighbourhood to whom I have been indebted for much valuable conversation, I cannot omit a tribute of admiration to Col. James Saunders, of Rocky Hill, a gentleman of the most extensive informa tion--agricultural, scientific, and political--and whose vast stores of knowledge and experience are not more remarkable than their perfect systematisation, and

128

JONESBORO\

[CH. xix.

The emancipat;iQiL_if_tlie_slayes is aecep^ejl^with^ remarkable

equanimity when one considers~the~bverturn of personal fortune,

and all the bitterness of the war with which it was associated;

and an expression,.o-iLgladness to have now done with slavery,

and to have touched some common ground of civilization, is

often heard. But what the planters are disposed to complain

of is that, while they have lost their slaves, they have-not got

free labourers, in any sense common either in the Northern States

or~m Europe; and, looking round here at Jonesboro', after a

calm and wide survey, one cannot but think that the New Eng

land manufacturer and the Old England farmer must be equally .

astonished at a recital of the relations of land, capital, and labour

as they exist on the cotton plantations of the Southern States.

The wages of the negroes, if such a term can be applied to a

mode of remuneration so unusual and anomalous, consist, as I

have often indicated, of one half the crop of corn and cotton, the

only crops in reality produced. This system of share and share

alike betwixt the planter and the negro I have found to prevail

so generally that any other form of contract is but the exception.

The negro, on the semi-communistic basis thus established, finds

his own rations; but as these are supplied to him by the planter,

or by the planter's notes of credit on the merchants in Jones-



boro', and as much more sometimes as he thinks he needs by

the merchants on his own credit, from the 1st of January onward

through the year, in anticipation of crops which are not market

able till the end of December, he can lose nothing by the failure

or deficient outcome of the crops, and is always sure of his sub

sistence. As a permanent economic relation this would be start

ling anywhere betwixt any classes of men brought together in

the business of life. Applied to agriculture in any other part of

the world, it would be deemed outrageously absurd. But this is

only a part of the "privileges" (a much more accurate term

than "wages") of the negro field-hand. In addition to half of

the crops, he has a free cottage of the kind he seems to like, and

the windows of which he or his wife persistently nail up; he has

abundance of wood from the planter's estate for fuel and for

building his corn cribs and other outhouses, with teams to draw

it from the forest; he is allowed to keep hogs, and milch cows,

and young cattle, which roam and feed with the same right of

pasture as the hogs and cattle of the planter, free of all charge;

the readiness with which he keeps them in command for practical use. Col. Saunders, who is advanced in years, was shot through the lung at the battle
of Murfreesboro', and, that stormy crisis over, has enjoyed very good health
since. He has been for some time conducting experiments in grape culture, and having found in the " Concord " grape a quality congenial to the soil and climate, is at present preparing several acres of new vine-ground. The
" Concord" grape is almost black, of rather thick skin, but juicy and sweet, and possessing considerable native aroma.

en. xix.]

STATE OF ALABAMA.

129

he has the same right of hunting and shooting, with quite as many facilities for exercising the right as anybody else --and he has his dogs and guns, though, as far as I have dis covered, he provides himself with these by purchase or some other i. -T-m of conquest. Though entitled to one-half the crops, yet he is not required to contribute any portion of the seed, nor is he called upon to pay any part of the taxes on the plantation. The only direct tax on the negro is a poll-tax, which is wholly set apart for the education of his children, and which I find to be everywhere in arrear, and in some places in a hopeless chaos of non-payment. Yet, while thus freed from the burden of taxation, the negro has, up to this period of "reconstruction," enjoyed a monopoly of representation, and has had all legislative and executive power moulded to his will by Governors, Senators, and Deputies, who have either been his tools, or of whom he himself has been the dupe. For five years past, the negroes have been King, Lords, and Commons, and something more, in the Southern States/
But, to come back to the economic condition of the planta tions, the negro field-hand, with his right of half-crop and privi leges as described, who works with ordinary diligence, looking only to his own pocket, and gets his crops forward and gathered m due time, is at liberty to go to other plantations to pick cotton, in doing which he may make from two to two and a half dollars a day. For every piece of work outside the crop he does even on his own plantation he must be paid a dollar a day. It may be clearing ditches, or splitting rails, or anything that is just as essential to the crops as the two-inch ploughing and hoeing in which he shambles away his time, but for all this kind of work he must be paid a dollar a day. While the landowner is busy -keeping accounts betwixt himself and his negro hands, ginning their cotton for them, doing all the marketing of produce and supplies of which they have the lion's share, and has hardly a day he can call his own, the " hands " may be earning a dollar a day from him for work which is quite as much theirs as his. Yet the negroes, with all their superabounding privilege on the cotton field, make little of it. A ploughman or a herd in the old country would not exchange his lot for theirs, as it stands and as it appears in all external circumstances. They are almost all in debt; few are able at the end of the year to square accounts with "the merchant;" and it is rarely the planter can point with pride, and with the conscious joy of recording his own profit, to a freedman who, as the result of the year's toil, will have a hun dred or two of dollars to the good. The soul is often crushed out of labour by penury and oppression. Here a soul cannot begin to be infused into it through the sheer excess of privilege and licence with which it is surrounded.
K '

130

JONESBORO\

[CH. xix.

There is a large sweetly-toned bell in the courtyard of one of the plantations here. I would have given a quarter-dollar at any time to hear its soft and melodious peal sounding over the great silent valley, the almost oppressive stillness of which is broken only by the screaming railway engine ; but, save when the overseer went out after the dinner-hour, and gave a tap or two with his finger as a note of admonition to a few of his hench men at hand, the great deep bell of the plantation was voiceless. It appears the negroes represented to " Massa " that the ringing of the bell was too " like slavery times," and should pass away, and so it has passed away accordingly. Poor "Massa" since the war has been humouring and bowing obeisance to " Sambo " in everything, till he scarcely knows whether anything of himself is left. If the negro field-hand were to ask him for his breeches and top-boots--nearly all that remains--there can be little doubt that the indispensable garments would be surrendered !
Yet it must be observed that the negroes on the plantations are by no means an exacting, violent, or menacing race. Their present excess of privilege has been gained almost without an effort on their part. They retain in many instances a genuine attachment and fidelity to " Massa." Their predominant feeling is " to live and let live," but such is their superstitious belief of the power of " Massa " to live largely anyhow that they are but too prone to carry their own living to a point of largeness which involves his entire extinction. A negro servant hereabouts, on approaching " Massa" to announce something, or ask for some supply or other, turns round on his heels in the awful presence, and with " bated breath and whispering humbleness " mumbles out his message in a jargon which nobody but a negro or a " Massa " can understand. The marks of servility are sometimes too deep to be wholesome betwixt one class of fellow-creatures and another. This external demeanour of the negroes, where they have everything their own way down to the possession of the land and its produce, is a considerable proof that they have been elevated by some " patent hoist" unknown to ordinary human experience, and that the complaints of influences and agitations extending from Washington outwards, with which this whole Southern country is ringing, have a substantial foundation. The principle of Eepubliean equality, which, in the days of Washington and Franklin, had a broad and deep political signifi cance, has been hammered out superficially in the United States, till serving another by any useful kind of laboiir in serving one self has become a sort of sin, shame, and disgrace. The incon venience of this demoralization is deeply felt throughout the Northern States. But here, among negroes in the South, where a man will often neither serve himself nor anybody else, the great doctrine of equality has palpably run to seed, and all industrial

CH. xix.]

STATE OF ALABAMA.

131

organization and social progress become well-nigh impossible. The " labour contract" of the negro field-hand on the cotton plantations presents a serious obstacle to the employment of white labour, which is beginning to be recognized as an urgent indt. trial necessity. The_ negro, all in all, is the best labourer injke^tton ^Z&J.he^Sxiuth is ever likely-to have; but if the resources of the plantations are to be developed, and cotton is to be produced wit'h profit at such a price as the world will give for it, the labour of the negro must be largely reinforced by the labour of white men, both in agricultural and mechanical depart ments, for which the black man. has no specialty; and until the negro terms of labour be adjusted, how are the dairymen and dairywomen, the tenders of stock, the steam-ploughers and the artificers, so indispensable, to be placed ?
The planters who come and go about Jonesboro', are deeply moved by such considerations ; but as these spring up in their minds jwith a rush, and are deeply agitating, they generally take some ''narrow ,and intensified form of expression. The prevailing impression of the planter, who finds it doubtful whether he can live on his own free and rich land, seems to be, that enormous thievery must be going on somewhere or everywhere, That he is stolen from, every hour of the day, and through every fibre of -his ways and means, by the negroes, by storemen and advancers of money, by local governors, legislatures, and officials, and by the Federal tariff and taxation, and by the very " free " but meantime " unequal" Government of the United States--all this is a sensation in the planter's mind rapidly hardening into an article of faith. There can be no doubt that the negroes first steal one another's share of the crop, and next the planter's by way of general redress. It does not readily occur here that the condition of slavery, in which the negroes were bred, was not the most favourable to the dawn of ideas of commercial right and obligation on wool-clad brains, and the negro pro pensity to steal is commonly attributed to natural inferiority and propensity of race. On this point, there is probably truth on both sides. But the negroes steal, and when the planter has put his feet on the stove, and commenced to " whittle sticks " with the merchant, and a negro passes by with his bag to the backshop, he gives a poke with his stick at the rib of the merchant, half in fan and half in earnest, and would really like to know whose corn pr cotton that may be. The merchant, with eyes down* cast and the slightest possible purple mantling on his face, makes a semi-poke with his stick towards the rib of the planter, a.nd says that the large crop, and everybody now growing, account for all the difficulties betwixt them. But why, interpolates another planter, if the crop be so large, with not more than a quarter bale an acre on the average over our best lands, should Congress
K2

132

JONESBORO'.

[CH. xix.

maintain the same tariff-duty as when cotton wool was 70 cents the Ib., rendering what was a protection of 40 per cent, to the Massachusetts manufacturer equal to a protection of 180 per cent, now, and thus restrict, by the high price of cotton goods, the consumption of cotton even here at home ? This hold inter rogator, when pushed to the wall, is prepared to swear that the protected cotton manufacturers of the United States have heen struggling hard since the war to use a million bales of cotton a year, and cannot do it, and that there is not a negro on his place who has a cotton shirt to his back, the garment being too expen sive ! These statements are astounding, but are nevertheless well borne out by statistics; and one has hardly patience left for a third planter, void of all political ideas, and his shoulders bent fully down to the ground, who talks of dividing his farms into smaller allotments, concentrating the corn and cotton cribs within arm's grasp, and trying post-rails instead of snake-fences as a protection against the thieving and wasting propensities of the negroes. When the planters at Jonesboro' have warmed themselves with these discussions, there is one common comfort in which they subside at present, and that is that Eobert Lindsay, of the Eoyal burgh of Lochmaben, in Scotland, has been elected Governor of Alabama, and that the State Treasury and State credit, thank Heaven ! are now safe. My own prepos sessions, I confess, are all in favour of the new Governor.1 The triumph of the Democrats in this and other States has been won by hard battles against ignorance and corruption, and marks the return of the white people of the South to a rightful and muchneeded influence in the management of their affairs.
Jonesboro' may grow into a considerable place, but it will always be associated in my memory, I fear, with bad whisky. The liquor sold under this abused name in the United STates is mostly bad, but in places like Jonesboro' it attains its maximum of villanous compound, for which distillers and a class of people here called " rectifiers of spirits," of whose rectitude the gravest doubt may be entertained, should be called to dread account--a dreary drug, in which there is little or no whisky, producing only

1 Mr. Lindsay was educated in the parish school of Torthorwald, and after

studying in the University of St. Andrews, where he had gained a bursary

by competition, emigrated to the United States about the year 1845. He

taught a school for some time in Wilmington, N.C., but, qualifying himself

for the bar, removed to Alabama, and has practised as a lawyer ia that State

for many years. A man of probity, as well as learning and talent, his

election as Governor is honourable alike to himself and to the people of the

State. It is worthy of note that in Alabama before the war, natives only were

eligible to the office of Governor. The Radical party, in giving new consti

tutional laws to the South, abolished this restriction, and opened the highest

j

office in the State to foreign-born citizens. Otherwise Mr. Lindsay could not

"" *"

have been elected, and the Eadicals themselves, perhaps, might have still been

in power.

CH. xix.]

STATE OF ALABAMA.

133

vertigo, and ending, through all forms of violent disorder, in cholera-morbus. Its mildest effect is a little fizzle in the system, followed by an aching void of brain and stomach not to be sup plied, and subsiding through the whole inner man in a sensa tion sl-nply of general despair! Bad whisky, though seldom or never seo. in private houses, presides at the stores in dismal eminence over bad salt, bad knives and forks, bad boots and shoes, and all the varieties of " shoddy," the inferior quality of which is only surpassed by their enormity of price. One requires to live a while in this country to learn the fearful cost a nation pays for the insanity of " protected manufactures.''" While cotton is bought in Liverpool at three or four cents per Ib. above its price on the plantations, anything from Liverpool can only be bought on the plantations at 200 or 300 per cent, above its value there. But there is one article of great repute among the Southern people--" J. & P. Coats' six-cord"--which is found jpjacarded in the stores even of Jonesboro', as in general warranty that there is at least one sound thread left to hold by and to rally round. Were British manufacturers turning their attention to wants in this market, and battling with all the tricks of tariff legislation as the Paisley firm has battled, the scales of monopoly, with which business here is so thickly encrusted,-might be pierced as with a thousand guns, greatly to the benefit of the American people and the advancement of American industry and national wealth.

CHAPTEE XX.
Town of Florence.--Traits of the War.--New Bridge over the Tennessee.-- The Cotton Factory.--Abundance of Water-power.--Tariff Duties on Machinery.--"Possibility of manufacturing Yarn in the South for Export. --Cypress Creek.--Natural Beauties and Characteristics of its Ravines.-- The Dripping Springs.--The Plantations.--Opening for Dairies.--Severe Spell of Frost.
[VALLEY OF THE TENNESSEE.--Florence, Jan. 5.]
FLORENCE, a fine little town on the north bank of the Ten nessee, was a favourite point of occupation by the Federal troops in their raids through the Valley during the latter years of the "war. A seat of courts of law, of churches, of schools and colleges, and surrounded by many flourishing plantations and wealthy families, it was in. ante-war times a centre of learning, refine ment, and prosperous trade, pleasant though rare to see in the Southern interior. The country round having sent to the front nearly every man able to bear arms, the Federals had a war, more or less stirring, with the women; and much of Sherman's famous march must have been as easy as a parade through Broadway. The Confederates, in the weakness of their arms, made the Tennessee for some time a dividing line betwixt them and the invaders; and the great bridge which spanned the river at Florence fell an early prey to the war. There was known to be much cotton and other riches throughout the great Valley, and a command in the Federal army in this all but unmanned and defenceless section of the South opened the path to fortune. The Confederates, as they fell back, adopted the usual war policy, now acknowledged to have been a mistake, of burning what was valuable lest it should fall into the hands of the enemy. Such of the Federal Generals as had an eye to business offered to purchase stores of cotton if the owners would only show where they were, and commercial transactions were entered into betwixt "the wolf and the lamb" on this basis; but the general effect of the action of the opposing forces was destruction, and the darkness of night along the plain was often wildly illuminated by the names of gin-houses and cotton sheds. Every rich planter's house became in turn the head-quarters of

OH. xx.]

STATE OF ALABAMA.

135

some portion of the Federal forces, and the beauty of the site and the excellence of the water were greatly admired by big "Dutch men," who came armed to the teeth, and stayed till there was nothing left to eat, drink, or steal, and the charms of scenery faux ^ to detain these lovers of Nature any longer. The Southern people maintain, as a point of honour betwixt them and the North, that they were conquered by the Germans--by the same military " swanneries " of King William as have all this winter been making mincemeat of the French--and not by the Yankees. Anyhow, the havoc of war hereabouts was complete, and often purposeless. Bridges over creeks, made at great cost and now much missed, were destroyed down to their lowest stone but tresses for no military end that can be conceived, inasmuch as the advance of troops could hardly be arrested by streams that have been forded daily by the country people ever since. And bauds of robbers, called " Tories"--deserters from the armies, and/tther loose and desperate men--whom neither Federals nor Confederates- could control, formed in the hilly regions, and watching their opportunity, came down into the plain and com mitted atrocities more cruel, foul, and bloody than all.1
Florence is gradually recovering from this reign of terror and desolation, and while impressions of woe indelible have been left in the hearts of families,_-one external trace of devastation after another begins to disappear. The Memphis and Charleston Eailway Company, whose road passes along the south bank of the Tennessee, has re-opened a branch from Tuscumbia to Florence, and thrown a high bridge over the river, having a track for its . trains atop, and another for the common traffic of the country underneath--one of the light iron structures by which Mr. Fink, engineer, of Louisville, has acquired much celebrity. The scene from this bridge is very beautiful. The Tennessee, calmed down from its merry dance over the Mussel Shoals into a deep channel a quarter of a mile broad, moves placidly round islands and jutting points of promontories wooded to the water-edge, past

1 The following atrocious outrage, narrated to me by a lady of Florence, a relative of the victims, is one of numerous acts of lawless violence at that troubled period :--A band of these " Tories " or marauders from the hills came one night to the place of an old planter in the neighbourhood of the town who was reputed to be rich, and in breaking into the house shot one young man dead and wounded another--his son and nephew--and then held the old man over a fire till he should tell them, where his money was laid. He described to them, a spot in the garden where he had concealed some money and silver plate. They made a search for it at the place named, but failing to discover it they returned into the house, swearing they had been deceived, and roasted the old man to death. The Federals, who were in power in the district at the time of this horrible event, executed a boy of respectable parentage in Florence, who was proved to have held the horses of the marauders while they were in the planter's house ; but the principals in the outrage made good their escape.

136

FLORENCE.

[CH. xx.

/

massive walls of limestone, which it has worn hut 'cannot move,

and round curving hays stolen from the fat and yielding soil;

hut with the boundary of land/and water always so cleanly cut,

and the river so ample, huoyant, and everywhere filling up the

view, one mighfc almost cherish the illusion that it was not so

much the Tennessee that flowed as the islands and promontories

and polished walls of rock that were afloat. It requires only a

few yachts, with their white wings spread to the hreeze, to give

the picture extraordinary loveliness and animation. But the

railway cars sweep across it several times a day, and steamboats,

except when stopped by low water at the shoals farther down at

Eastport, come up to -the beach at Florence, where the land dips

down into a bottom, and there discharge the wares and take up

the cotton of the town. The Colbert Shoals near Eastport are

not nearly so formidable as the Mussel Shoals, and it is upon

them that the expenditure of the Federal Government is being

made. It was customary in old times to put the cotton into flat

boats on the Tennessee, and float it down to New Orleans at a

cost sometimes of not more than a dollar a bale. With all the

railroad facilities of the present day, transport is much more ex

pensive ; and so magnificent a waterway may be well worthy of

"being opened and improved.

Behind' Florence, which is situated on the edge of a fertile

upland country, flows the Cypress Creek, a stream of spring-like

purity and coolness, through winding ravines of great depth,

and, while of almost enchanting natural beauty, affording the

grandest water-power probably ever seen in the same space of

territory. Here, before the war, three cotton factories, of 23,000

spindles, and supporting a white population of 800 souls, were

established by a prosperous firm, which made money, and never

was more thriving than when the great thunderbolt of civil

strife burst over the United States. The Federal troops burned

down all three factories, leaving only portions of the brick walls

standing, and scattering the twisted machinery about as a

common prey. Heaps of iron rods are still lying on the ground,

and little bits of fine and curious mechanism are seen in the

courtyards of the plantations, and in all the negro cabins of the

neighbourhood. One .reason of the prevailing desire in the

Southern States to set up cotton factories is probably the un

sparing hostility displayed by the Northern armies to this branch

of industry. They destroyed instantly and without remorse every

cotton factory within their reach, and one can hardly harmonize

the pure anti-slavery professions of the war party in the North

with depredations so systematically directed against establish

ments employing only free labour. One of the three ruined

factories has now been rebuilt, and the business resumed with

laudable energy by the sons of one of the former partners, who

CH. xx.]

STATE OF ALABAMA.

137

have furnished the factory with Tatham's self-acting mules and other English machinery. Duties amounting to 8,000 dollars gold were paid on this imported material, and yet with all this dead weight it was deemed cheaper than American machinery. The factory makes shirtings and other common kinds of cotton cloth, k, it its chief trade is yarn, which is sold in considerable quantity to the country people for domestic manufacture. Forms of old-fashioned industry, which, in England would now be labour thrown away, are here the highest marks of thrift and economy. The yarns of the Florence Factory sell wholesale at 34 cents per pound, and pay the manufacturers better than cloth. They assure me that, with labour as cheap and efficient as in the factories of England, they could lay down yarns in Liverpool at about the same price per pound as cotton wool in that market. The saving clause in this statement is so large that one can hardly bring it to any practical test. But the Messrs. Martin at Florence are meanwhile getting twice as much for their yarns as the price of cotton at Liverpool. The English factory operatives have the reputation here of doing twice as much work as the Southern operatives, though the latter are paid two to three dollars a day, and are apparently the same class of persons as fill the factories in the old country, rather impressing one by their sharpness and intelligence, and the delicacy of their manipula tion. While perceiving all the difficulty that besets cotton manufactures, and all other manufacture requiring much capital and labour, in the Southern States--the limited demand for sheet ings and shirtings round a factory here, and the probability, in seeking a market outside and in retaining the necessary skilled labour on the spot, of losing much more than all the advantage in raw material--yet any one, knowing the great currency of yarns' in the markets of Europe and Asia, must own that this question of the production of cotton yarn in the Southern States opens considerations of much interest. The Southern people have a hold of the cotton trade at the root, and the making of yarn runs naturally along the lower reaches of development, of which the first step is the production of wool on the plantations in the greatest manufacturing purity and perfection, which step once attained the other might be quite easy. Such commercial attain ments are not realized without long, patient, and steady effort; but, were there a Sir Robert Peel at the head of affairs in this country, he might probably see in this direction a means by which the Southern States might be developed in twenty ^ or thirty years with greatly more solidity than any Federal march to victory in the days of the war. Still what practical use just now of speculating on the chances of cotton manufacture in the Southern States, when labour has to be paid near a dollar for a shilling in order that the labourer may support a bare existence,

138

FLORENCE.

[en. xx.

and a small cotton factory of some sixty looms .has to pay 8,000 dollars gold on its machinery as a bonus, ineffective even for its avowed purpose, to Northern iron and machine manufacturers ? The same blindness of protective fallacy, that is wiping out shipbuilding, wool culture and manufacture, and other branches of production for the use of the Americans themselves, is, of course, rendering it doubtful whether, with the "cotton belt" in their hands, they can produce with any profit even the raw cotton sqjjreatly needed by others.
The^factory)at Florence is driven by water-power, of which there is Superabundance at all seasons. The dam of the other two factories remains intact beside their ruins, a little higher up the stream. Cypress Creek pursues so intricate a course through the winding ravines, and comes back so often to the point it has so lately left as if loth to leave such lovely sylvan haunts and be lost for ever in the waters of the Tennessee, that it is often difficult to say what part of it is up or down ; but through every successive ravine it flows in volume smooth and deep, forming natural reservoirs of water, which may be utilized to any imaginable extent. The only drawback on the lower reaches of the Creek is the backwater of the Tennessee, when it happens to be in high flood, as it was in 1867. Crossing in a skiff below one of the dams, one is pointed to a board nailed to a tree, marking the rise of the water in the memorable " spate " of that year, probably 20 feet above the usual level of the water. But this is a very unusual occurrence, and the mills and gin-houses do not suffer much damage when it happens. The stream is full of fish, and a " fresh-water salmon" of large size affords exciting sport to the angler, and is a luxury at table. On the warm summer evenings the factory operatives plunge into crystal pools floored with marble under green and spreading boughs, and the farmers' children frolic down the slopes towards the bed of the Creek, and under subsidiary rills have their shower-bath in deep grottoes where no eye sees them, and where all around seems a wilderness of foliage. Threading this maze of cypress ravines, one soon perceives their wonderful formation, and the manifold afflu ence with which Nature, has not only built them up, but seems to lavish upon them, her choicest decorations and sweetest caresses. Along the bed of the Creek, in many parts, the limestone rock is exposed in massive walls, a hundred feet or more in height, with their bedding planes and vertical joints as distinctly marked as lines of masonry, in some places smooth and square as hewn blocks of marble laid a-plumb, and in others carved and rounded from joint to joint like the towers of some Norman donjon. The oppo site bank, whether flat or steep, is sure to be a little peninsula, covered with oaks, poplars, sycamores, walnuts, chestnuts, hicko ries, birches, ashes, maples, as if Dame Woodland had here shaken

CH. xx.]

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out her lap, and said, "There, now, take all." On the massive lime stone bank of the Creek the same abounding wild wood prevails, and twisting its roots round limestone slabs that project far into the stream, besides issuing from crevices high above, sustains a I'Tsty life on what seems all but nothing, and yet mounts up and mitjles with the much lustier life of the table-land overhead. Here and there, on broad open spaces of the limestone wall, the springs bursting from their stony cells, and dripping down in myriad crystal drops, have gathered round them by mysterious chemistry a bejewelled verdure all their own. Numerous varieties of fern fold their feathery sprays, green as emerald, over pillows of velvet mosses, bright as cloth of gold, and " dewy with Nature's teardrops" lambent, as they fall from leaf to leaf, bosom in every opening bud, or form in sparkling rings round tiny buttercups and water-cresses, with the light of diamonds and precious stones ; while spicewood, honeysuckles, trumpet-vines, and countless wildflowers love to come about these fontal shrines, to shed sweet perfume round their borders, and sport in careless festoons to their tinkling music. The deep bed of the Creek in these fairy spots opens out sometimes in wandering glades, sometimes in steep lateral ravines, where the forest trees grow in all their majesty, and prepare one for the magnificent woodland on the higher ground, spreading out now in expanses of copse, and now in green lawns and parks where sheep and oxen browse under ancestral oaks. The oak, of which there are half-a-dozen kinds, nourishes in all splendour here. Some I have measured are 12 feet round the trunk. The parks are so thickly strewn with their leaves that these have to be gathered up and burned. But the pine, the cedar, the laurel, and other evergreens, impart perpetual colour to the woods, and shine with lustre at this season amidst the leafless and ashy branches of other trees. Flowering shrubs of various kinds--among others, " mountain laiirel" and the " white fringe tree" (Chionanthus Virginica), so called from its white fringe-like flowers--spring up along the open banks; mag nolias, ever lovely in their glossy leaves, quite splendid when they send out their bunches of white flower, grow to a large size in the lawns ; and trailing vines are often met with in the woods. The muscadine, in particular, seems to take all the forest into rejoicing fellowship, and, looping its long arms round the lower branches of the great trees, hangs its fruit in tempting glee above the heads of the passers-by. Sometimes a muscadine, springing side by side with another tree, passes into a marriageunion in which the two become one, and, in return for the sup port afforded to its leaping and blending branches, gives a new and often singularly fantastic grace to the whole form and figure of its spouse. The fruit of these wild vines is not without value. The planters' wives and daughters go forth in autumn, with

140

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[en. xx.

/
a negress or two, and literally gather grapes from thorns, as far as any labour of culture is concerned, and make sweet wine that strengthens the heart of man and hoy. I have seen this brilliant scene at the deadest season of the year, but it requires little imagina tion to discover the abounding fertility and fragrance of the land.
The plantations stretch down from the woodland to the Ten nessee, and have many still rich and fertile bottoms ; but much of the soil, though deep and genial enough at heart, has a hard and wasted look--the result of shallow ploughing and constant corn and cotton cropping, without manure, or subsoiling, or any thing to restore exhausted elements. fields, therefore, yields art indifferent^ crop. Even in slavery times oloe"tral'e~t6" the' three acres had come Tio "Ue" an average product, but it is very doubtful whether more_t_han..ajjjmrter hale to the acre isjaqw _produced, taking the plantations of this section through" and through. The land is not efficiently wrought, and the planters see many difficulties in getting it into a better system of cultivation. One often meets with signal instances of failure. On one plantation rented to the negroes for one-fourth the crop, with probably 600 acres under cotton, the proprietor will not get more than 25 bales. The season was too wet in the early part, but the weak culture and the weak system of labour, handed down from the days of slavery, are the chief causes of this poor production. Some of the planters are giving up cotton as a main dependence, and turning their attention to wheat and other small grain. The soil is a good red tilth for wheat, with limestone underneath ; clover also grows luxuriantly, and dairycows might be fed and nourished with great advantage. The relative profit of wheat or cotton to the farmer, at present prices, may be briefly stated. The land, cultivated as it is, yields 20 bushels of wheat per acre, at one dollar per bushel, or 20 dollars an acre; cotton gives 150 Ibs. an acre at 12 cents per lb., or 18 dollars; and Indian corn yields from 25 to 30 bushels an acre at 75 cents per bushel, or from 18| to 22^- dollars. So that cotton, unless the product per acre be much increased, does not compare well with other crops requiring much less labour. It takes the gilt from cotton-culture as a money-making specu lation to learn, further, that the plantations here were bought from the Government in 1818 at a price of 25 dollars an acre, and when put to sale do not bring so much now after much im provement and fifty years of cultivation.
It is to be regretted, when good butter fetches 40 to 50 cents per lb. in towns like Florence, and not very good is brought down from Northern dairies, that the planters do not give more attention to dairy produce. While this neglect goes on from year to year, the people are tickled and amused by Yankee inventors, who are always coming South with some patent mousetrap or other. One

CH. xx.]

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is just now pressing the sale of licences to use a patent for makinr eight pounds of butter out of a gallon of milk from the cow. He has found, in short, "by some admixture, how to con geal the whole body of the milk into make-believe butter. Every plantation might have a dairy, and in cultivating grass and clover, and applying a deep plough and farm-manure, the planters would find new sources of profit, and speedily restore the old fertility in cotton which has so far sensibly declined. Along the Valley east and west from this point there are famous farming lands, all in the same state, and all capable of the same great things. It is deplorable that the country should want anything good to eat from any other place.
The Valley of the Tennessee offers little difficulty to European labour. The heat is not extreme in summer, and a beautiful and temperate fall, lengthening into December, is often fol lowed toy a winter bracing enough. Alfred, a gentle negro-man, who has crept noiselessly into my room at dawn, and lit up his huge log fire, one morning lately ventured up to the window, and arousing me, asked that I should look out at something wonder ful. Snow, that would have been pronounced good snow in the Arctic circle, was falling thick, and to the question whether there were any danger of it reaching above the roof of the house, Albert replied only by a wondering face, and long before night all trace of snowfall had disappeared. But there has been a really Borean spell of frost since. It set in on the 20th, froze up the ponds at the rate of an inch a night, and driving the mocking-birds to the windows, the boys to their skates, and the bon-vivants to their " egg-nog," was really as intensely cold as I have experienced in very northern latitudes. The negroes, for two dollars a day, or as much whisky as they could drink, were persuaded in many cases to fill the ice-houses. As for the " Dripping Springs" on the Greek, they were as completely transformed as if they had been the subject of an incantation. Where the water flowed down in numerous thread-like rills there were now solid pillars of ice; where it distilled like dew there were broad and flashing surfaces like mirrors, resting on bureaux of rock chased as with silver, and windows looking into deep recesses like conservatories, where mosses lay stiff and stark in crispy winding-sheets, and leaves appeared like mere daubs of colour upon glass; while around were pipe-like instruments, with keys and convolutions--organs, it may be, of an " eerie music" that would almost justify the fable of Miinchausen; but as I did not hear the tunes played either when " John Frost" was casting his spell, or when fairer Sprites came and blew a more genial blast, I forego the luxury of an imaginary description. The frozen fabric, at all events, quickly disappeared. The thaw came on the 27th, and the air of spring in two or three days breathed.with balmy warmth over the land.

CHAPTEK XXI.
Corinth in Mississippi.--The Soil and Surroundings.--A Cotton Manufac turing Scheme.--The Country southward on the Mobile and Ohio Bailroad.--The " Prairie Land."--Okolona.--A large Plantation on the " Prairie."--Preference of the Negroes for their old Masters.--The Share and Wages Systems.--The late Eobert Gordon.
[CORINTH AND OKOLONA, MlSS.--Jan. 6-10.]
THE road from North to South Alabama is, meantime, somewhat indirect, the railways not having formed connections through the hilly districts immediately south of the Valley of the Tennessee; and the usual mode of turning this difficulty is to pass along westward to this point in the State of Mississippi, where the Mobile and Ohio Eailroad intersects the Memphis and Charleston. I postpone, therefore, further consideration of the " Alabama claims," until, getting round through a very interesting section, including the famous "prairie land," of Mississippi, I can take them up at another stage.
Corinth was the scene of much strife during the war. The Federal and Confederate hosts surged and resurged round this railway point for several years; and though there was not much heavy fighting at Corinth--the great battle of Shiloh having been fought at some distance--yet the contending troops pushed each other in and out of the little place, and sat dowa all round, and ate and burnt up every green thing. The country over miles on every side is completely stripped of timber. There is abun dance of fair good land, with an immense bed of greensand marl a few feet beneath the surface, thickly charged with fossil remains, and forming almost too strong a manure for raw use, save with the utmost caution. Many of the landowners have been rained, and cultivation is carried on under more than the usual diffi culties of a state of transitional chaos and embarrassment. Some of the plantations are rented out, but to little good account. The renters take a crop, do nothing for the land, and, indeed, not unfrequently bum up the fences before leaving, so that the owners profit little by the three or four dollars an acre, or the one-third or one-fourth the crop, agreed upon as rent. Other plantations are being broken up into small farms, occupied by

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white people, who are taking the cultivation in room of the negr' es, less numerous in this neighbourhood than before the war, mauy having moved down to the richer lands of South Alabama and the Mississippi bottom. From 4;000 to 5,000 bales of cotton are delivered annually from the neighbourhood at the depot in Corinth. The old planters, in trying to sell their lands in order to get extricated from debt, sometimes succeed. Two hundred acres, with valuable improvements, were recently sold at 15 dollars an acre, which were bought many years ago at 12-| dollars. But some of the owners near the town hold out for much larger terms. Every railway junction in this country with a dozen or two of houses is fondly believed, by those who have the deepest interest in so believing, to be the destined seat of a great city; and, by putting up the price of land and houses, they may often indefinitely postpone the desired result.
A "/North Mississippi Cotton and Wool Manufacturing Com pany, ' organized here about eighteen, months ago, was to have a million dollars of capital, to be taken up in 100-dolIar family shares over several adjoining counties, and subscriptions were made to a considerable amount. That in the most desolated districts, where the land cannot be brought into cultivation, for want of capital and Jabour, a proposition should be made to leap at once into cotton manufacture with all its elaborate processes, is a remarkable proof how deeply the manufacturing idea has imbued the minds, and the iron of Northern Protectionist injustice has entered the souls, of the Southern people. It is with regret that one thinks--after all the Southern States have passed through --of the delusions to which this sense of wrong and .fervour of feeling may lead, and the losses and disappointments with which it may be accompanied. The capital of the " North Mississippi Manufacturing Company " has been struck down to a quarter of the sum at first proposed, and this has not yet been wholly sub scribed. A very neat building has been put up for an. office, and the company is busy burning bricks for the future factory, and is in treaty for the supply of- English machinery. The Colonel at the head of the enterprise has a notion that, by taking cotton in the seed, making .cotton-oil, and using " Clement's patent" for cleaning the cotton-wool without ginning on the plantations, the company will be able to produce goods and yarns to beat the world. As there is no water-power here, the factory must do its work by steam, with an uncertain supply of coal from Pittsburg in Pennsylvania, at a monopoly price. The population in and around Corinth is only a few thousands. There is a Confederate Orphan Asylum in the county, in which there are 300 orphans--the children mostly of soldiers killed in the war, many of whom, as they grow up, it is supposed, would make good factory operatives. This institution derives its

U4

OKOLONA.

[on. xxi.

i

revenue from voluntary subscriptions, and appears to have been

most laudably and liberally supported, though some of the

little inmates are taken round the7 country to sing at concerts as

a means of eking out the funds.

The country south of Corinth soon passes into the ordinary

woodland of the American continent, where clearings are going

forward, and comfortable homesteads, with fields of corn and

cotton, and mule and hog pens, are being chopped out of the

primeval forest. There is little swampy ground; the timber is

sound and stately; and the soil, in every opening of the forest,

has an aspect of fertility. The Mobile and Ohio Eailroad, in its

straight track north and south, strikes at every ten to fourteen

miles little towns and villages, often prettily situated, whither

cotton is brought, where country merchandising goes on, and

country acquaintances visit one another at the end of the season

and tell how the " picking " has got on in their respective dis

tricts. But the forest here overshadows all until near Okolona,

seventy miles south from Corinth, where the train suddenly

darts into an open country, in which the woods recede and

all but vanish from the view, and the iron wheels roll with

a more airy sound over an elevated plain, which is the famous

" prairie land " of Mississippi.

Okolona was all but totally destroyed in the war. Only two

or three houses and a few gable-ends were left standing. The

whole place might have been bought for 5,000 dollars on the

surrender of the Confederate forces, but no one believed that

Okolona could be Okolona any more. It is now a well-built

town of two or three thousand inhabitants, with a long street of

brick stores, and many offshoots on the east, towards the railway

depot, and a long avenue westward, with planked sideways and

elegant frame buildings, in which those who aspire to live respect

ably in family know so well here how to reconcile taste and

comfort with the actual situation. Large courtyards behind

several of the stores are filled with cotton bales, and the space

set apart for hitching nags and mules is like a horse-fair on any

market-day in Okolona. One must take a few canters here

abouts in order to know something of the richness of the prairie

land of Mississippi.

The soil is a dry deep red loam--what is called, in the language

of the country, " a buckshot soil," with a good deal of lime in it.

When the overseers and negroes brush it from their pantaloons,

it has a tendency to go up instead of down, and always keeps

hanging about. Underneath there is a great bed of white and

easily pulverized rock, known as " rotten limestone." Every acre

is cultivated or cultivable. Little slips of forest land break

the monotony -of a plain not quite level, but agreeably undulat

ing, and, as one advances from point to point, there is usually a

CH. xxi.]

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rim of woods all round the horizon, but always at a respectful distance, and the landscape opens out freely from all entangle ment /into broad spaces of rich arable territory. This general character of coiintry prevails over thirty to forty miles in length, and probably, as far as I have explored it, half as many in breadth. At Artesia, forty miles south from Okolona, the country passes rapidly into the " piney land " characteristic of so much of the Atlantic slope, and of the southern section of the Gulf States. The " prairie land" of Mississippi, however, is a great cotton region. Prom 10,000 to 12,000 bales are received annually at Okolona alone, but all the railway depots of the dis trict, and indeed of the whole Mobile and Ohio line from Corinth southward, I have found full of cotton bales. The railway com pany, while forwarding cotton northward with all despatch, seems to have difficulty in transporting the much larger quantity destined for the Mobile market and for shipment thence to Europe, and, sure of this freight, allows it to accumulate and lie exposed in the open air till the " more convenient season." One of the first settlers of this part of the country was Eobert Gordon, an emigrant from the province of Galloway, in Scotland, some fifty odd years ago, who, anticipating the action of the Federal Government, negotiated with the Old Queen of the Chickasaws, and became the purchaser of large and choice tracts of land on the " prairie," which he brought into cultivation. Mr. Gordon, before the war, was reported to be worth a million and a half of dollars. Like many other old people of mark in the South, he sank into the grave soon after the close of the great struggle, and was succeeded by his only son, Colonel James Gordon, who, though not so rich a man as his father, has still as much territory in active and productive cultivation as might satisfy a prince. One of his plantations, five or six miles from Okolona, is in fine order, and forms a favourable sample of the fertility and culture of the * prairie." It is 2,000 acres in extent, of which 500 acres are woods completely enclosing the great garden of 1,500 acres, rising and falling in gentle undula tions just enough to spread it out to the sun and rains without being scorched by the one or washed and gullied by -the other. This immense space is a uniform round of corn and cotton divided only by waggon tracks and a few long ditches, the main arteries of the plantation. Save the exterior fence, and the usual snake-fence labyrinth round the buildings, the corn and cotton fields are open, and succeed each other like the patches of various culture in a nursery, the drills being laid off with a sagacious eye to the fall of the ground, so as to let in the sun and secure a natural drainage when heavy rains fall. While the crops are growing, the cattle are kept back or penned in folds; but, when the Indian corn has been gathered, they are let loose, and enjoy

14G

OKOLONA

[CH. xxi.

all winter an abundant pasture. There does not appear to have been a bad patch of cotton on the plantation; the battle with the grass had been fought with great vigour in summer, the soil betwixt the rows being now clean and red as drills in a garden. The consistency of large plantations with good cultivation is well marked on this place. Some four or five hundred acres only of the plantation had not been in crop during the past season, but will be overtaken this year, the supply of labour on this plantation being abundant. The old proprietors have an advantage in this respect over new planters. The negroes seem to prefer their employment, and, after various changes, come back and settle clown to work in their old places; while strangers have often to hire labour from a distance without being sure of its calibre, and are apt to get into dispute and difficulty with labour contractors and overseers. It is a remarkable proof of the progress made towards better management under free labour, that Mr. Gordon lost 24,000 dollars by his cotton crops the year after the war when the price was high, but has been making it better every year since under declining values. The system of paying the negroes by half-share of the crops prevails in this as in other sections, and one negro on this plantation will have a thousand dollars to the good at this time, after settling all claims upon him. But this is a rare exception to the general rule, and the negroes, with opportunities of money-making seldom enjoyed by labour in any part of the world before, scatter all behind them in a careless spirit, and more frequently close the year in debt than with clear books. The " balance in favour," when rarely made, is commonly but a ticket-of-leave for a longer and more spendthrift holiday than would otherwise be possible. The negro is one of the most liberal buyers in the world. Stores exercise a kind of qharm over him, and when he looks round on the wealth of wares he is ready at once to fling every dollar out of his pocket, and to open a credit account with boundless faith in the future. The share system has one merit, inasmuch as the gain of the negro is thoroughly identified with that of the planter. When the negro field-hand gains nothing the planter loses much, and the small, unwrought, and neglected crops that keep the negroes in debt and raggedness utterly break him on the wheel, and "burst him up." The planters have unusual pleasure under the share system in pointing out the good hands that have made a profit at the end of the year. Yet it is doubt ful whether the share system will survive; and if it be swept away, the result will be due to the folly of the negroes. One objection to it here, as elsewhere, is that the negroes will do nothing' but the work immediately about the crops in which they have a share, and that this line is more and more rigorously defined. If cattle stray into the corn and cotton fields, the

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negro will often only drive them from his own part of the crop into that of the neighbouring squad. As for fences in general, fhey are allowed without remorse to go to wreck. The planter, by a considerable extra expenditure on special labour every year, may contrive to keep them up; but where he fails in so doing, the fences go from bad to worse, till the plantation is in danger of being deeply embarrassed or of sinking altogether. The money required to fence a plantation is considerable, and many fine tracts of land have not yet recovered the total destruction of fences with which they were visited during the war. A staff of white mechanics and special outdoor labourers would be necessary to secure to the negro such a share of the crop as would keep him easy and affluent. The only alterna tive of the share system is payment by time wages, and under this arrangement every squad of negro labourers would require an overseer to keep them steadily at work, and get the value of the wages out of them. Otherwise, it is believed, the wages plan would be less profitable even than the share system. The best and most willing negroes seem to have little self-reliance, and never work so well as when they have a white man at their right hand to show them how to do it.
Old Mr. Gordon established his head-quarters at Pontotoc, a little county-town some twenty miles north-east from Okolona, where the Federal Government had its first office for the sale of lands in this State; and there, on a site which had been the residence of the Indian Queen, built a stately mansion of timber sawn from the pine forest by hand. There were no steam saw mills in the country at that time, and it took three years to build the future house of this branch of the Gordons. It is a plain but spacious mansion of fourteen rooms, all very large, and having large cellars stored with the juice of "the hanging grape " --which, here abounding, gave its name in the days of the Bed men to the country round--and stables and offices, garden and vineyard,.and a burying-ground near by under a spreading red elm sacred to family remains. There is a Scotch style about all which strikes every visitor. Mr. Gordon was noted for hospi tality, and the son in this respect is worthy of the sire. There is a large orchard free to all who choose to gather its luscious fruit, and a pack of foxhounds, the best in the United States, that lead many a "tally-ho!" over wide plains and through forest tracks where the war-whoop of the Indian rose on the midnight blast in former times. The Colonel is an enthusiastic sportsman. The walls of his shooting-box are covered with the skins of bears, panthers, wild cats, and other ferce natures of the prodigious sort, the trophies of hunting expeditions on his plan tation in the Mississippi bottom. The glossy plumage of wild fowl serves to soften somewhat these barbarous elements, and
L2

148

.

OKOLONA.

[CH. xxi.

huge deer antlers, while adding to the ornament of the cottage, form useful resting-places for guns and fire-arms of almost every pattern and device. As if hunting "bears and panthers in the cane-brakes of the Mississippi were not enough, I have found the Colonel meditating, well satisfied with the improved working of his plantation, a trip to South Africa, where a Gordon Gum ming and a Chaillu have made themselves famous, and in gorillas and other monsters of the wilderness have discovered subjects of sport worth writing about. Old Mr. Gordon gave his seat at Pontotoc the name of " Lochinvar," in memory of the ancient seat of the Gordons, on the Solway, famed in song and story. The same veteran settler of Mississippi founded the town of Aberdeen, several miles south from Okolona, with a branch road from the Mobile and Ohio. Mr. Gordon would have called this place Dundee, hut a neighbour, meeting him one morning, said, " Wall, Mr. Gordon, I believe you are to call this city ' I)undy.'" " No, I am not," said the offended Scotsman, who saw at once that the pronunciation of Dundee would not transplant to American soil, and so he gave the more northern city the honour of a Transatlantic namesake. Aberdeen is a thriving town of four or five thousand people, and on Saturday--a market day--was astir with country people, hitching up their horses and buggies, buying and selling, and taking general possession of the stores and their contents.
One is struck by the number of active young men who have applied themselves manfully to the cultivation of the farms in this section of the country. They move about in work-day attire over long distances, and display a confident and hopeful spirit. But they say that 15 cents per Ib. for cotton is necessary to pay the expenses of cultivation as affairs are at present manage able. The war is seldom spoken of, and sympathy for the traces of it, everywhere visible in amputated arms and limbs, may sometimes be carried beyond due bounds. Southern gentlemen have a singular habit of wearing their coats without putting their arms in the sleeves. I have caught myself several times in a full flow of tender feeling for the gallant fellows who had lost both arms in the war, when it soon after became clear that the generous emotion was wholly misspent and thrown away.

CHAPTEE XXII.
'Stoppage on the Railway.--" Doctoring" the Engine.--A Word of Advice to Railway Companies.--The Town of Meridian.--Supposed traces of Coal. --The "Ku-Klux-Klan"--its Rise, Progress, and Decline.--Difficulty of finding Teachers of Negro Schools.
[MERIDIAN, Miss.--Jan. 11-13.]
I ARRIVED at Meridian on Sunday morning at half-past four, albeit the train that brought us was due shortly after midnight. The fact is that, the night being somewhat frosty, the engine took a fit of wheezing, and finally stood still, two hours or more, in the woods about thirty miles north from this point. The scene, I admit, was very charming. The track ran along an embankment of moderate elevation, from which the land, on one side, rose in gentle ridges of Indian corn-stalks, and spread away, on the. other, in a plain of woodland, thinned, grassy, and orna mental as a park. The moonlight was clear almost as noonday, and made the lamps in the cars blink like dissipated owls. When an hoiir or two had passed in this delightfully sequestered spot, a vague desire to embrace the shadows of the trees, and follow the unknown but all the more attractive meanderings of the brooks, stole over both mind and body. So a few of us stepped out on to the embankment. The head of the train was a long way ahead, and getting down on a railway track in moonlight scatters a vast amount of imagination and romance. The engine was obviously in a bad way. There was a large escape of steam from the valves, and the engineers had apparently cut several of her ribs out, and laid them along the track, and were now labouring to knock her shoulder-blade out of joint. The swearing at the same time was terrible, and I was glad to stride away from the natural beauties of the situation to my seat under the blinking owls, reflecting mainly on all the British army once did in Flanders. There is a peculiarity, by the way, in much of the swearing in this part of the world which one notes. The whole practice is everywhere abominable, but an emphatic oath under strong passion may command passing respect by its thunder, and, whether or not, immediately apologizes by the fact that it is not to be repeated; whereas a long and never-ending drawl of

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'

[en. xxir.

profane interpolations, running not only into words tut syllables of words, as if the sacred name could not in sufficient contempt be cut into too many pieces, is more revolting than impressive, and as weak as it is utterly inexcusable. Fortunately, the great majority of those who are doomed to hear do not understand a word of it, and for my part I have been always glad to conclude that it is a form of patois which the poor devils who utter it do not understand themselves. How our engine on this occasion got into working order I am unable to explain, but its exploits thus far have been singular. When once fairly in breath, it seemed to get on very well at a rate of five to seven miles an hour; but at the stoppages, which were numerous, the process of re-inflation exceeded the due licence even of a Highland bag pipe, and, besides the usual droning and snorting of that delicious instrument, consisted in a saltatory movement backward and forward, as if the train had to leap a series of five-bar gates .one way and to releap them all over again the other, before getting under weigh at its normal and regulation trot. The Mobile and Ohio Eailroad is just now choked with cotton bales; the freight trains,, one a day, are long and heavy, and the rolling stock inadequate to the occasion; but at a time when the vital struggle of the Southern seaports is to hold a place against the great steam-power suction towards New York, it must surely be worth consideration whether a thorough renewal of their existing lines of inland traffic be not paramount even to new schemes. The Memphis and Charleston, and the Mobile and Ohio, are equally splendid lines of communication. They are being crossed by other lines at various points to their detriment, but their original sweep and convenience of transit remain intact, and yet they are languishing and, to the stockholders, unproductive affairs. It is the part of Charleston and Mobile to consider and be wise. The great advance of the port of Savannah is largely to be ascribed to the ability and vigour with which the old inland lines of Georgia have been conducted, and the judgment with which their connections have been extended far and wide into other States.
Meridian is a lump of a town, sprawling over sandy mounds in a wide open bosom of the forest. The tufty foliage of the yellow pines, covering the ridges, forms the chief ornament of the place. But the town is growing up rapidly, and several large brick warehouses have been recently erected on lines intended to be developed one day into streets. A long row of stores faces the railway, with ample space between for all manner of open-air business. Meridian is the terminus of the Alabama and Chat tanooga Eailroad; and the Mobile and Ohio and the Vicksburg and Montgomery lines also cross at this point. The construction of the Alabama and Chattanooga, which was pushed on from

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Meridian under a superintendent, while Mr. Stanton was busy urging forward the work from the other end, naturally brought a deal of labour, money, and traffic about the little town, and Helped it over its early stages. The negro population is numerous, and much of the storekeeping business is conducted by sharp, active young men of Jewish aspect, who talk German-English, and make no secret of their little bill transactions on cotton liens at the rate of 40 per cent, per annum. These people are sent down by firms in New York and other large towns to sell goods at a profit of 100 to 200 per cent, to the piore impoverished class of planters, and to advance money on cotton at the approach of the picking season at as much interest as they can extort. One firm in New York is said to make half a million of dollars in this lucrative business per annum, after giving, it may be sup posed, a fair share of the spoils to the Hebrew agents, who live on the spot, and bear the heat and burden of the day. About 100,000 bales of cotton are annually passed on from this point, where so many railways meet. The Alabama and Chattanooga, though not completed and opened to through traffic, is working as far into the Alabama interior as Eutaw, and passes at this end through Sumpter and Green counties, and other rich cotton districts of the Alabama " prairie " land.
1 went out several miles with the superintendent of the Alabama and Chattanooga Company here to see mineral traces supposed to be coal, and found them to be thin chips of lignite exposed by a little superficial digging across the bed of a rill trickling down a depression betwixt the deep pine-clad ravines which characterize this locality. Having fallen on the welldeveloped seams of coal and iron at the northern end of the Alabama and Chattanooga Eailroad, I have felt some curiosity in marking the characteristics of the country at its southern extremity; but though this line passes direct through wellknown mineral fields of Alabama over a large portion, of its course, yet the aspect of the country down here in Mississippi differs entirely from the neighbourhood of Lookout Mountain, and the northern interi.or of the intervening State. The highest elevations are simply heaps of sand, clay, and drift. The ravines are of immense depth, and I have not been at the bottom of the lowest of them ; but, in the beds of the creeks we had to cross, no trace of rock was to be seen, and the lazy waters moved over the same sandy slime as was found on the tops of the highest mounds. As one nears the Gulf the rocky strata seem to lie deep out of sight; and lignite and shaly deposits, while highly interesting in a scientific point of view, as showing in embryo how the great coal-beds were formed, do not promise much com mercial result. In this same district copperas has been found, and was wrought to some extent for dyeing purposes during the war.

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One of the Meridian newspapers has announced that the Federal Government has sent detective officers into Mississippi to watch the proceedings of the " Ku-Klux-Klan," and en deavour to bring some of its members to justice. A secret organization under this name spread with amazing rapidity over the South soon after the close of the war, and for some time, by moving in considerable bodies at night, in a peculiar costume, and executing a " wild justice," spread alarm both among Federal soldiers and negroes. For a time the " Ku-Klux" enjoyed the respect, if not the confidence, of the " conquered population ;" but nearly all trace of this mysterious league has now happily disappeared from the country, or, where still extant in any form, its rdle has been taken up by mere marauders, betwixt whom and the white people there is no manner of sym pathy. One day lately three rough men sat round' the stove of a lager-beer saloon in one of the towns of East Tennessee. By and by a man came in dressed in fine broadcloth, and with an air of great briskness about him. He was a member of the legal profession, and his talk with the three rough men, while most familiar and cordial, was all about the extent to which, in certain crises, he would serve a client. It appeared that the legal gentleman was prepared to be very loyal in getting off a thief, and his views of professional honour gave general satisfac tion. " But what is the Ku-Klux-Klan ?" asked one of the trio. " The Ku-Klux," said the man of law, " are the three K's of Greece," from which profound explanation the inquirer did not seem to derive much edification, and he asked again, " What aie they ? who are they ?" The lawyer, dropping his voice into a whisper, replied, "They are Confederate soldiers killed in the war who cannot rest in their graves !" The secret society was, in point of fact, a kind of ghost of the Confederate armies. Its uniform, made of black calico, was called a " shroud." The stuff was sent round to private houses with a request that it should be made into a garment, and fair fingers sewed it up and had it ready for the secret messenger when he returned and gave his tap at the door. The women and young girls had faith in the honour of the "Man," and on its will and ability to protect them. The " Ku-Klux," when out on their missions, also wore a long tapering hat; and a black veil over the face completed theix dis guise. The secret of the membership was kept with remarkable fidelity. In no instance, I believe, has a member of the " KuKlux" been successfully arraigned or punished, though their acts often flew in the face of the " reconstructed authorities," and were not in any sense legal. When they had a long ride at night, they made requisitions for horses at the farmhouses, and the horses were often supplied under a prevailing feeling of assurance that they would be returned on a night following

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without injury. If a company of Federal soldiers stationed in a small town vapoured as to what they would do with the " KuKlux," the men in shrouds paraded in the evening before the 'guard-house in numbers so overwhelming as at once reduced the little garrison to silence. The overt acts of the " Ku-Klux" con sisted for the most part of the (jisarming of dangerous negroes, the infliction of " lynch-law " on notorious offenders, and, above all, in the creation of one'feeling of terror as a counterpoise to another. The white people in the South at the close of the war were alarmed, not so much by the threatened confiscation of their property by the Federal Government, as by the smaller but more present dangers of life and property, virtue and honour, arising from the social anarchy around them. The negroes, after the Confederate surrender, were disorderly. Many of them would not settle down to labour on any terms, but roamed about with arms in their hands and hunger in their bellies; and the governing power, with the usual blind determination of a victo rious party, was thinking only all the while of every device of suffrage and reconstruction by which " the freedmen " might be strengthened, and made, under Northern dictation, the rulingpower in the country. Agitators of the loosest fibre came down among the towns and plantations, and, organizing a Union league, held midnight meetings with the negroes in the woods, and went about uttering sentiments which, to say the least, in all the circumstances were anti-social and destructive. Crimes and outrages increased. The law, which must be always more or less weak in all thinly populated countries, was all'but power less ; and the new Governments in the South, supposing them to have been most willing, were certainly unable to repress dis order, or to spread a general sense of security throughout the community. A real terror reigned for a time among the white people ; and in this situation the " Ku-Klux" started into being. It was one of those secret organizations which spring up in dis ordered states of society, when the bonds of law and government are all but dissolved, and when no confidence is felt in the regular public administration of justice. But the power with which the " Ku-Klux " moved in many parts of the South, the knowledge it displayed of all that was going on, the fidelity with which its secret was kertt, and the complacency with which it was regarded by the general community, gave this mysterious body a prominence and importance seldom attained by such illegal and deplorable associations. Nearly every respectable man in the Southern States was not only disfranchised, but under fear of arrest or confiscation; the old foundations of authority were utterly razed before any new ones had yet been laid, and in the dark and benighted interval the remains of the
Confederate armies--swept, after a long and heroic day of fair

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[en. xxn.

fight, from the field--flitted before the eyes of 'the people in this weird and midnight shape of a " Ku-K.lux-Klan." The negroes were "scared" by the apparition, and many of the "carpet-bag" agitators were run out of the country. Warnings were given, visitations were made in force, criminals taken in flagrante delicto were torn out of the hands of the sheriff and shot or maimed, and more moderate punishments were inflicted which, whether deserved or not, could only be considered outrages. One reign of terror began to rise out of another. But six years of peace have greatly changed all that state of things. The negroes are quiet and orderly, and comparatively industrious; and the white people, more sure of their position under the [Federal laws of reconstruction, are beginning to resume their right of voting, and of controlling the administration of affairs through the ordinary legal channels. Scarcely a trace of the original " Ku-Klux " organization remains, or, if it still exists, it is very seldom brought into action. With the exception of Eobison's county in North Carolina, where the midnight raiders axe known by name and character to be a mere band of ruffians without any political complexion, crimes and acts of violence in the South have this winter been few and far between-- certainly not more numerous than in any very large northern or European city. 1 In this State of Mississippi there has been an ordinary crop of murders arising out of private quarrels, and in one or two instances criminals have been rescued out of the too feeble hands of the sheriff. But the only cases of outrage passing under my observation, in which a trace of "Ku-Klux" origin is recognizable, are not more than two or three in number. When crossingWilliamson's Creek, on my way to Macon in Georgia, the place was under much excitement on account of a barbarou^ murder, or rather murders, perpetrated a few nights before. A band of men, said to be in " Ku-Klux " mask, came to the store of Allan Creich, a grocer, when the inmates were in bed, and, on being answered by the shopman, said it was Creich himself they wanted. Creich at length came down, and was immediately seized, dragged some distance, despatched, and thrown into thecreek, where his body was found. The assassins then proceeded to the house of Allan's brother, where they found only the man's wife and a little boy or girl. The wife declared that her husband was not in the house, but refused to say where he was. The inquisitors then interrogated the child, who was finally induced to tell them where the father was staying the day before. They found him in the house named, where he had been drinking, and forthwith dealt with him as they had dealt with his brother Allan.
1 Since this was written, very serious disturbances have occurred in a county of South Carolina, the excited political feeling in which State, and its causes, I have indicated in passing.

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Such were the accounts given of this atrocious transaction. It appears that Allan had lons*foeen "blamed for resetting goods and produce stolen by the negroes, and had been often warned to desist without avail. The stealings of the negroes are a subject of prevailing and almost wild complaint in many parts of the South; and soon after the war some of the Badical-Negro Legis latures passed laws prohibiting the purchase of produce by storemen after dark. The Legislature of Georgia had, in its last session, repealed this enactment, believing probably that the necessity for it had passed away. About the same period a party of men in masks came to a farmhouse twenty miles from Chattanooga, where a robust negro man lived, who was in the custom of going about with a loaded gun, and saying he would shoot any white man who quarrelled with him. They waked him up in his cabin, made him deliver his gun, and broke it into pieces, but departed without doing him any bodily harm. Some nights afterwards a more numerous body came to the same farm house and demanded horses. The farmer, a Pennsylvania man, was not at home; his wife refused in his absence to comply with the order; and through the intervention of a guest in the house, the tall-hatted men in shimids were induced to go away, some what dissatisfied and undecided. These are the only " Ku-Klux " traces I have found. The institution is dying fast, if not already dead; but it is the deep vice of all such secret leagues to survive, in a more degenerate form, the circumstances which^ could give even a colourable justification to their existence, and to pass finally into the hands of utter scoundrels, with no good motive, and with foul passions of revenge, or plunder, or lust of dread and mysterious power alone in their hearts. There is a tendency in the Northern press to make too much of " Southern crimes and outrages," and by exaggeration and perversion to keep alive the very disloyalty they denounce. It would be matter of deep regret were the Federal Government, by any new schemes of repression or reconstruction, to rekindle distrusts and animosities which are rapidly dying out. The great object is to secure a more efficient administration of justice, without respect to party or colour. The popular and partisan election of Judges, more especially in the present state of Election Law in the South, is a gross abuse, and tends more than anything else to countenance and support every form of taking the law into their own hands, much too prevalent among the people in most parts of the
United States. A Doctor--whether of laAvs, medicine, or divinity, I have not
learned--has made himself famous in the columns of the Eepublican organ here by agreeing to become the teacher of one of the negro schools. It may be inferred from the extravagance of the praise bestowed on the Doctor, that the social position of

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[CH. xxn.

a schoolmaster of the blacks is not high. It may be necessary, indeed, to train negro teachers, of whom there are yet only a very few--all the aspiring coloured men having become Senators and Representatives--ere the education of the masses of negro children can be overtaken. This is one of the ma.ny difficulties of the school question in this country. There is a greater demand for teachers of white schools than can be supplied, and the office of public schoolmaster has sometimes to be filled by any one who offers. Yet fairly liberal salaries are given.

CHAPTEE XXIII.
From Meridian to Eutaw.--Mr. Stanton's failure to pay the Interest due on the A. and C. Bonds.--The Alabama " Prairie " Land.--Bridge over the Tombigbee.--Tuscaloosa.--Decline of Learning in the University.-- River System of Alabama.--The Warrior and Cahawba Coal and Iron Fields.--The Chinese on the Railway Works.
[EuTAW, ALA.--Jan. 14--15.]
EUTAW is a considerable way into the interior of Alabama, ap proaching, as I have done, from the south-west border at Meridian, on the line of what is called the "Alabama and Chattanooga," ' or North-East and South-West Alabama Eailroad. It is some thirty miles or more from Tuscaloosa, the former capital of the State, where the mineral and agricultural resources of Alabama have a common point of meeting, and where " laws and learning," following " wealth and commerce," at one time had their seat. The earthwork of the road has been completed fifteen or eighteen miles beyond this point towards Tuscaloosa; but the trains work only to Eutaw from the south-west end of the line, and to Elyton from Chattanooga in the north-east. This well-designed line is thus, at present date, an unfinished road. But by cars which push ahead from Elyton on one side and Eutaw on the other with railway material, and stages to Tuscaloosa that run twice or thrice a week, one can attain some knowledge of the deeply in teresting country betwixt these points. There was much talk along the line as I passed as to the consequences of the failure of Mr. Stanton, the maker of the road, to pay the January interest due on his State-endorsed bonds, and what the new Governor and Legislature of the State would do in a matter which for the first time threatened to tarnish the spotless credit of Alabama.1
1 The Legislature held an adjourned session at Montgomery in the end of January, and instituted a full inquiry into the Alabama and Chattanooga Rail way bonds, the result of which was that there had been an over-issue of bonds to Stanton and Company, and that, in particular, the previous Governor a,nd Legislature, when State endorsation had already exhausted or surpassed its legal limits, had issued two millions of direct State bonds to the company to enable them to complete the undertaking. These disclosures

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[CH. xxm.

The day is warm, almost hot towards noon, and the motion of the train from Meridian is an agreeable fan as it passes through a good agricultural country of mounds and hollows and natural drainage, where, along the watercourses; the Alabama canebrake, famed in negro song, springs in some luxuriance, and is crunched at all seasons of the year with greedy zest by mules and other " bestial" of the farms. The railway passengers are not numerous, and some have to pay five or six dollars for stage conveyance from Eutaw to Tuscaloosa. At Livingston, a considerable town half-way between Meridian and Eutaw, we get on the edge of the Alabama " prairie " land ; and at Eutaw--a respectable little place, spreading over a rising ground nicely embowered under rows of trees, giving shade to many private residences and streets of stores, and what seem hotels or boarding-houses, where outside not a few blood horses are " hitched up "--the " prairie " land is all around. The Alabama prairies extend across nearly the whole breadth of the State from east to west, and are of varying widths north and south of 60 to 100 miles, forming, with the bottoms along the rivers, the richest agricultural region of Alabama. They are of the same character and structure as the prairie-land of Mississippi, of which they seem a lateral extension, but spread out in much larger compass. The soil is deep and fertile, and rests on. beds of rotten limestone, which afford it elements of perpetual renewal. The railway cuttings reveal the limestone, white as chalk, up to near the surface. The rock throws off a white powder under the slightest pressure of one's finger. The Tombigbee, one of the many navigable rivers of Alabama, is here crossed by a high wooden triangle bridge, and, as the train suddenly sweeps along it, the scene draws forth exclamations in which delight is mingled with surprise. The limestone cliffs on one bank rise 60 to

excited a great deal of public indignation, and for a few days the financial integrity of Alabama seemed to be passing through a severe ordeal. The resolution come to by the House of Representatives, after various animated debates, was that the Governor be authorized to make provision, either by temporary loan or unappropriated money in the treasury, for the payment of the interest due on all bonds loaned or endorsed to the A. and C. Bailroad Company, proved to be in the hands of bond fide purchasers on the 1st of January last, and to proceed to recover in form of law from the defaulting company ; and the interest accordingly, by arrangement of the Governor, was paid in New York during the first week in April. Mr. Stanton has since been completing the road. The (j^use of State credit, and the imposition on the financial world practised in this instance--an abuse and imposition rendered all the more flagrant by a letter that has appeared from the pen of. ex-Governor Smith, arguing strongly that the bonds signed and sealed by himself are illegal, and blaming the Legislature and the Governor for paying the interest on them--have received an effectual check, and the railway liabilities of Alabama will be kept in future to the limit strictly prescribed to them by law. The total obligation of the State, when the various railway projects to which State endorsation is pledged are completed, will amount, I believe, toabout 20,000,000 dollars.

CH. xxin.]

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X
80 feet above the bed of the river, and are carved by the action of the waters with almost sculptural art. Columns resting on chiselled pedestals, with ornamental capitals, and long lines of moulded cornicing over massive walls planed and coursed into regular blocks, are seen along the cliffy bank, as if fairy hands had, with wondrous cunning, erected temples of whitest marble in honour of all the goddesses of the river. The railway, after crossing the bridge, passes, on the other and lower bank, along a trestle 3,800 feet in length, and gets down again among the farms and plantations. Bales of cotton are lying on the bluff along the river-side, waiting for the steamboats; but the river, after the long dry fall, and a winter in which there has been a spell of frost, but hitherto little rain, is unusually low. The surface of the deep soil is not a dead level, but slightly swelling, and is free of swamp or other obstruction to uniform cultivation. Yet the watercourses are sluggish ditches, and at the farmhouses there are large bucket wells, dug down a great depth through the soft limestone to the springs. Slavery was dense in this prairie region in the time before the war, and now there is a great scarcity of free negro labour. A spirit of roving, and the demand for labour on the railways, have carried away the blacks in thousands. The planters have been able to grow but small patches of corn and cotton on their teeming lands. Hundreds of acres on every plantation of rich arable soil are lying idle, and enjoying a long fallow, which will probably make them richer and fatter still, against the time when they may again be brought into use. Yet this prairie land cannot rest, but must always be doing something. When the hand of man ceases to till and dress it, the strong and untamed soil begins to work and wanton in its own way, and is now sending up over large tracts a wild herbage, and, where ditches and watercourses have not been kept clear as formerly, displays a tendency to develop little germs of swamp. So that over wide areas of open land, which one can readily picture a garden full of wealth and people, an aspect of wildness and solitariness reigns.
Tuscaloosa, with its pretty Indian name, so much finer and sweeter than the " Jonesboro's " and " Smithvilles " of a more prosaic race, is as beautiful and spirited a country-town as one could hope to see anywhere. There is a style about it that is marvellous, when one considers how long it has been not only decapitalized, but shut out from railway communication, another word for " the world." Tuscaloosa is the seat of the University of Alabama, where upwards of a hundred students, the flower of the State, were wont to spend or misspend, as the case might be, their golden hours. But the professors, at the close of the war, were put under the ban of political proscription like all other highnesses in the South, and new men of inferior attainments

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were set down in their chairs. The consequence is that Alabama has still a University, with buildings and libraries, and professors, and expenditure, but no students; and one wanders about this beautiful arboury, asking, " Where is the fruit ?" The wise men of the North and East attribute this lack of fruit to the deep and inveterate disloyalty of the South, forgetting that while " one man may lead a horse to water a hundred cannot compel him to drink," and that three-fourths of the disloyalty in the South is the result of a too prolonged course of political injustice. This is a well-worn truism of the Old World, which the American people will probably find out much sooner than it was found out elsewhere. At Tuscaloosa, the Black Warrior Eiver passes from a fall, over its long upper course, of five feet in the mile, to a descent of five inches in the mile through prairie land, and into confluence with other great rivers which search out an everdeepening and concentrated course towards the Gulf. The river system of Alabama forms a subject of study and interest in itself. The Tennessee, diverted at Gunter's Landing, in the north east of the State, from its southward course by the " millstone grit" and carboniferous strata which the force of the subsiding waters would appear to have been unable to scoop out as at Chattanooga and down the great valley betwixt the Lookout and the Eaccoon range of hills, flows westward over the softer sand stone and cretaceous rocks along the northern border of the State, till it pours its great volume of waters with the Ohio into the Mississippi. The low range of hills skirting on the south this westward valley of the Tennessee forms a new watershed, from which all the rivers of Alabama flow southward to the Gulf of Mexico, and converge till they find a common outlet into that Mediterranean of the New World. Within a few miles of the Tennessee the Warrior begins to gather from numerous forks its portly stream, till at Tuscaloosa, hundreds of miles from the Gulf, it becomes a deep and navigable river. Farther west along the Mississippi line the Tombigbee emerges into importance, and is navigable by heavy-laden river-boats a long way above the railway bridge betwixt Livingston and Eutaw. On the north eastern border of the State the Coosa comes down, from its head waters in the hills of Upper Georgia, and is freely navigable from Borne in the latter State to Greenport, fifty miles south from the Tennessee at Gunter's Landing, where, amidst the hard material of the mineral region of Alabama, that turned the greater river westward, it takes a southward course over 150 miles of rapids and other forms of navigable obstruction to its confluence with the Tallapoosa, near Wetumpka, a town some twenty miles or more above Montgomery, the Alabama capital, where it becomes freely navigable again, flowing through, rich agricultural lands amidst deep banks of sandy clay, which, in its winding course,

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it has moulded at various levels into lines of almost architec tural exactness. The Cahawba Eiver, in the middle territory betwixt the Warrior and the Coosa, drains a distinct mineral basin of its own. But all these rivers flow, south-eastward on the one hand and south-westward on the other, through mineral lands, prairie lands, and alluvial bottoms, to form what is called par excellence the Alabama Eiver, a great navigable channel passing through the southern division of the State, and with new tributaries swelling successively into Mobile Eiver and Mobile Bay, till they become one with the Gulf itself, sweeping round the Mexican and Texan shore and the Western Indies, and so mingling
" With a' the pride that loads the tide, And crosses o'er the sultry line."
The river system of Alabama is thus singularly connected and harmonized in all its wide-spread parts; and, with the ex ception of the thirty miles betwixt the Tennessee at Gunter's Landing and the Coosa at Gadsden, forms in reality a complete inland water communication extending far beyond the territory of Alabama, and converging over vast regions towards a common oceanic outlet. Two-thirds of the State of Alabama are traversed by navigable rivers, that are not only parts of a whole within the State itself, but by natural and easily opened connections might be made to extend their power of transport far northward east and west. A small fraction of the money spent to good effect for navi gation purposes alone on twenty miles of the Clyde in Scotland, and a still smaller fraction of the efforts in Pennsylvania to bring coal and iron together, would have sufficed to open up all the copious resources, mineral and agricultural, of this richly endowed State, without the modern invention of railroads. But the railway age is now upon the world here as elsewhere, and great lines, two or three hundred miles in length, are being made through the basins of the Coosa, the Cahawba, and the Warrior, with supreme contempt of water communication; so that any one may place himself in the cars at Euston Square in London, and be duly delivered, if he has nothing else to do by the way, at the foot of any of the numerous coal and iron mountains of Alabama in three weeks, a few hours less or more. Tuscaloosa is in. the Warrior coal-field, and has been mining coal in its own fashion for half a century. The railway is now coming to it, not under the most auspicious financial circumstances, but it is there within a few miles, and will probably modify in a few years, as in other sections of the mineral region of Alabama where the iron horse is pacing, the whole aspect of affairs. The Warrior coal-field, extending from this neighbourhood to the north eastern corner of Alabama, between Lookout Mountain and the
M

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[OH. xzm.

Tennessee Eiver, covers an area of 3,000 square miles. Over tliis wide district coal seams one to three feet thick abound. There are twenty-five localities in the basin of the 'Warrior where the coal crops out, and has been more or less imperfectly mined and
made merchantable. They are scooping it out from the hill-sides^ where it is deposited in horizontal beds of unknown breadth, gathering it on the edges of the roads, and diving for it, by a curious process, in the beds of the Warrior and its forks; and the accumulating material brought into Tuscaloosa in waggons is
put on barges and floated down the river, and sold in Demopolis, Selma, Montgomery, and even as far as Mobile, at a price which puts the Pittsburg black diamond out of joint. It is for the most part a soft bituminous coal, but burns brightly, and can
hardly be excelled for the generation of heat and steam. The production of coal in Alabama, by the primitive processes pur sued without either skill or capital, amounts to about 30,000
tons per annum. The Cahawba coal-field, a little farther south, and in the centre of the State, is still richer in mineral deposits than the Warrior, though of much smaller compass, having an
area only of 700 square miles. Seams of coal have been found there in five or six localities three to eight feet thick, and there also- beds of red haematite iron ore have been disclosed in sur
prising richness. From Bibb county, a few miles south from Tiiscaloosa, to Will's Valley in De Kalb county in the north-east corner of the State, the red fossiliferous iron is found deposited in nodules in the valleys, and seams of haematite look out from the sides, and appear to permeate the interior area, of the hilly ranges. The seams of haematite are at some points seven to fifteen feet in thickness. Over at Elyton, beyond the present gap iii the railway, the Eed Mountain, a long range of hill rising betwixt the basins of the Warrior and the Cahawba, and ex tending north-eastward till it seems to pass into parallel line with the Lookout range culminating in the great peak at Chatta nooga, is charged with thick beds of coal and iron, and has long attracted eager attention as the backbone, so to speak, of the
mineral wealth of Alabama, loosely scattered over 4,000 square miles of territory. Many furnaces had been erected along this coal and iron district before the war, and various ironworks,
such as the Briardale and the Shelby, had attained considerable
eminence when the great armed struggle broke out and threw every work of industry and useful enterprise into difficulty and
confusion. Two or three new companies, with capitals of a million dollars each, had just been formed, had bought up
mineral lands, and commenced operations, when the war came
and reduced them to a state of collapse. The Confederate Government stepped forward, and in some cases, where there
were working powers and appliances, bought up the property,

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STATE OF ALABAMA.

163

or gave financial assistance. The ore at Briarfield, in Bibb county, was converted by a hot-blast furnace into pig, trans ported to Selma, and there cast into heavy rifled guns. But when the war languished on the Southern side, raiding wings of the Federal host forced their way even here into the mineral heart of Alabama, where, though slave labour had never penetrated, free white labour was beginning to raise its head, and blew up the iron furnaces and devastated the ironworks. Northern capitalists have since the war been attempting to repair this ruin with varying success and failure, but the fur naces for the most part remain extinguished, and ruin still spreads its sable wing over great and promising works, the resumption of which, with the railway facilities now extended to them, can only be a question of time.
Who should be here even now, in untrodden valleys where the negro has scarce shown his face, and where the white man, conscious all the while of the riches within easy grasp, trembles in his gait, and the steam-engine seems in fiery fury to have rushed ahead of all other elements of civilization, but our old and classic " citizens of the world," the Chinese. A band of Chinese labourers, 600 to 700 strong, drawn from Cali fornia and the Pacific Eailway, have been employed on this Alabama and Chattanooga road from an early period of its construction. They are lodged in tents at present over on the Elyton side, and are doing the earthwork part passu with the negro, who is not so particular in the matter of tents, and is much more easily moved from one site to another. Anything in the shape of a sleeping-place satisfies the negro, and, if put to it, he will take the shadow of a bush or tree for a few nights, and build up his square box of frames without windows by degrees. The Chinee, who struts even here with a celestial sort of air, must have his tent all nicely fixed up and provided for him. The Chinese navvies are paid 15 dollars gold a month with rations, and the negroes l -75 dollars a day without rations. The terms, as thus arranged, are considered pretty equal; but as the rations of the Chinaman are not extremely expensive, save in the article of tea burdened with duty, the equality of Chinese and Negro wages can only be accounted for by the practical superiority of Negro to Chinese labour. The Chinese came in on this line of railway at Meridian, the southern end, and did not comport themselves to the approval of the superintendent. Their rations were in money-cost 75 cents a day. Their work done in "grading," or earthwork, cost the company 97 cents a yard, when the same labour could have been contracted for at 35 cents a yard. The superintendent at Meridian would not bear it, and the whole band of Chinese were transferred to the Chattanooga end of the works. The testimony borne there by the chief
M2

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EUTAW.

[CH. xxin.

authorities was that the Chinese had not done so well as was expected, that they were not so capable of labour as the Negro, but that their hands were hardening, and they were now o'fi the whole giving satisfaction. As regards the alleged saving and economical habits of the Chinese, it seems certain that on monthly pay-days at Meridian they spent their fifteen dollars in whisky, chickens, and whatever they could buy in the stores, as freely as any other spendthrifts. The Chinese are inveterate gamblers, and Sundays are spent about the railway cuttings in. elaborate efforts of the Celestials to overreach the Infernals at cards or dominoes ; but the Negro, also an adept in play, is not supposed to lose much in these encounters.

CHAPTER XXIV.
The "Vicksburg and Montgomery Railway.--Demopolis.--Despair of the Planters for Labour. -- Negro Women. -- Selma-- its Cotton Mart.-- Reform of the Municipality.--Claims of the Town to be a Railway Centre. --Free School System in Alabama.-- The Negroes and the School or Poll Tax.--Distribution of the School Money.--National Banking.--Patent " Cotton Transplanter."
[SELMA, ALA.--Jem. 15-16.]
BETUENING down the Alabama and Chattanooga road from Eutaw to the little station called York, one gets upon the railway from Vicksburg via Meridian to Montgomery, part of a great line to be carried to Brunswick in Georgia, the Atlantic seaport nearest the Mississippi. Every strategic point in railway com munication is searched out in all this Southern country with a keenness seldom equalled. The old lines may be tolerably serviceable, and may not have traffic more than to make them moderately prosperous; but these considerations do not damp the ardour with which new lines are devised, if two or three hundred miles of distance are to be saved to the Atlantic sea board, and new and fertile tracts to be opened up by the way. The point of departure may be Vicksburg, a small place rising into commercial importance on the Mississippi, and the point of arrival Brunswick, trying to become a seaport, one hundred and thirty miles south of Savannah, because it has three feet or four feet deeper water than any port, save perhaps Norfolk, on the Atlantic coast; but all this poverty of present resource is scarcely deemed a rational impediment, and though the difficulty of raising the necessary loans is great, and the difficulty of obtaining a respect able subscription of capital is greater, yet the idea of an " air line " as direct as birds can fly seizes on the general mind, and, gathering up all the interests at either end, and piecing itself on to existing roads with the rarest ingenuity, gets itself lobbyroiled through the Legislature into a legal shape, and forthwith becomes more or less an accomplished fact. In a few years hence every salient point on the Mississippi will be connected by direct " air-lines" with the Atlantic seaboard, and the great draught by steam and capital to New York of late years, which-,

166

SELMA.

[CH. xxiv.

would speedily become suffocating to the American continent, will be gradually modified and counteracted by railway enter prise, and by the desire of British and Continental manufacturers, ' in the natural course of commerce, to get into the most immediate relation with the producers of their raw material. On any narrower hypothesis the present railway making in the South would seem quite unjustifiable. But the interior and local interest of the new railway projects at the same time is very manifest. The great difficulty of the United States is country roads, and the want of stone and rock. The constant tendency to drop into ruts and puddles both wide and deep wherever wheeled vehicles can pretend to go, is observable from the suburbs of Philadelphia to this point. It is only by the iron track, liberally distributed, that the produce of the Southern States can hope to get to market; and over-numerous as the great lines of communication, made and projected, seem to be, they all pass through wide interior regions of country, thinly peopled indeed, but settled and in working order, and capable of much development.
The railroad from York to Selma passes through Sumpter, Marengo, Perry, and Dallas counties, fertile tracts, yieldingheavy crops of cotton on a soil that is inexhaustible. At Demopolis, a pretty town founded by French refugees, and where the railway again crosses the Tombigbee after its conflueuce with the Warrior, the steep limestone cliffs seem even whiter and finer than near Eutaw. The chalky substance when touched whitens one's fingers, and a penknife cuts it as easily as if it were a piece of cheese. This natural "fertilizer" underlies the whole middle or "prairie" territory of Alabama from east to west, and enriches, mellows, and invigorates the deep upper soil of its own accord. But a great desolation has passed over much of these lands, which the vitality of free labour can but slowly efface; and external marks of wealth, and even comfort, have in many places for the present all but disappeared. Many of the planters have deserted farming in despair, and taken up their abode in the small towns, where they live on the profits of some house property, or of some chopping business of insurance or mer chandise. Tough and weather-worn men, who adhere to their posts in the field, come riding through the depots inquiring eagerly for hands to come and pick their stands of cotton, or drive their teams with the bales already made. A crowd of negroes--mostly girls and young women, not unconscious of certain charms, set off with various brass ornaments and glass beads--are always seen about the railway stations, looking up and down, wondering, and toying out their long holiday. Other negro women, modestly and tidily dressed, come in with little baskets of eggs, and chaffer greedily for the 30 cents per dozen.

CH. xxiv.]

STATE OF ALABAMA.

167

The remark is often heard, that the old negroes, who retain some of the industrial discipline and habit of slavery times, are the only remaining life of the cotton-fields, and that when they are gone the rising generation will not be worth a cent for any useful purpose of labour.
Selma is a town of six to seven thousand inhabitants, and looks as large as if it had as many more. It is an extensive cotton mart. Upwards of 50,000 bales have already been received this season, and the merchants and brokers expect to draw 25,000 more--being within 15,000 bales of the highest receipts before, the war. The .railway must be helping Selma, for the neighbouring plantations have not recovered in this propor tion. There are many fine buildings, several large yards for storing cotton, and two or three broad streets of shops and warerooms where most necessaries and many articles of luxury may be purchased. Two-thirds of the men of business are Germans, many of them of Hebrew extraction. The Jews have settled largely in Southern Alabama, and what with negroes and coloured people, and German and Jewish names, there is a foreign air about Selma. The weather is also, even at this period of the year, sometimes hot and sultry, as if one were approaching sources of. perennial fire, which even torrents of rain neither quench nor cool. There is neither hill nor sea near the town, but the Alabama Biver winds past it in rather beautiful curves under deep- banks of reddish sand, and steamboats call twice or thrice a week and carry down considerable cargoes of cotton to Mobile. The town has slipped for commercial purposes over the edge of the "prairie" and its underlying beds of chalk, on to the expanse of clayey sand, that billows over the southern section of the State; and it suffers some inconveniences in consequence. The negroes in Selma outnumber the whites; but though every man, however black or white, who loafs about the town for three or four months, has a vote, the Democrats, who are here the white and conservative portion of the population, gained by the recent elections the upper hand in the municipality, showing that the negro vote need not always be on one side. The new party in power have re-organized the police force, which consists of fifteen men, four of whom are retained negroes, because they are deemed efficient constables worthy of place and trust. The pretension of the Republicans and Radicals that the negroes can only be safe under their supremacy is gradually crumbling down in the South. There is much congratulation among the business people in Selma on the change of administration. The thieves and burglars are believed to have run away from the town when the Democrats obtained the direction of affairs, and the streets have not seemed so clean for a long time as since the new broom has begun to sweep.

168

SELMA.

[en. xxiv.

Selma is struggling hard to become, aiid lias become to some extent, an important inland railway centre. One does not readily see how, within so short a distance of the capital of the State, a prominent position of this kind can be attained ; for, being on the same line east and west as Montgomery, the town is simply asserting an advantage which Montgomery possesses equally, and the facilities of any new project it may devise Montgomery may more or less equally share. But Selma is farther to the west than Montgomery, and the diagonal lines from north-east to south-west, and south-east to north-west, strike Selma as a point of vantage. Thus a railroad already in operation--" the Alabama and Tennessee" of the maps--passes from Selma through a large space of the mineral land of Alabama to Rome and Dalton in Upper Georgia, and thence goes into connection with the " Virginia and Tennessee," or Lynchburg and Wash ington route north. This completed scheme, of course, involves a direct extension from Selma to New Orleans, the greatest of all the Southern seaports, and the only worthy rival in the south west of New York in the north-east. Selma, by another line of road, is being connected vid Marion and Okolona with Memphis, in order that Memphis, with its great present and future power of cotton seeking the directest route to the manufacturer, may get direct on the road eastward to Brunswick in Georgia., the nearest "air-line" Atlantic seaport. This road is promoted with much energy under the presidentship of General Forrest, and great efforts are being made to obtain liberal subscriptions in the various counties through which it passes. The " Selma and Gulf" road, another project, is designed to connect Selma direct with .Pensacola, the chief timber harbour of Florida. These works are giving Selma an independent place in the railway .system, and, having a large and rich country of its own, it will 'probably become a considerable seat of trade and population in the new era of prosperity calculated upon in Alabama. If the most ample means of communication can do anything to develop great natural riches, there should be a brighter future for this State than probably any other in the Union. The railways made and being made in Alabama open up and intersect the country in every direction. The Memphis and Charleston road sweeps the whole valley of the Tennessee along the northern frontier of the State. The Alabama and Chattanooga passes right across the interior, in the slanting line of the mineral valleys, from the north-east corner to about the middle of the western border line. The South and North goes up from Mont gomery, through the same mineral districts as the Alabama and Chattanooga, which it crosses near Elyton, in the Red Mountain country, to Decatur on the Memphis and Charleston, and the Nashville and Tennessee lines. From Montgomery the same

CH. spiv.]

STATE OF ALABAMA.

169

South and North route is prolonged by the old line from the capital to Mobile, and by a new road recently opened for traffic is carried onward from Mobile to New Orleans. The Mont gomery and Eufala, the Montgomery and West Point, the Selma and I)alton, spread out from the interior eastward to distant points along the frontier of Georgia, and form connection with all the Georgian railways ; while westward, the Montgomery, Meridian, and Vicksburg, the Mobile and Ohio, the Selma, Marion, and Memphis, penetrate by diverse routes the Missis sippi border, and carry the means of communication to the levees of the great river, and to the northern and north-western roads through Kentucky and Ohio. A scheme, projected some years ago, to extend the New Orleans and Jackson Kailvoad to Decatur, in North Alabama, would traverse the only part of the State still shut, out from the iron network; and in the north eastern counties, more especially Sanford and Marion, would traverse mineral districts where the abundance of iron ore is probably as marked as in any other part of Alabama. This State is thus in rapid progress of being thoroughly opened up in all parts, and as amply provided, when not only its railways but its almost unique river system are taken into account, with the means of transit as any country could hope to be, or as any country in the world probably is. It is surprising to see so many great public works pushed forward simultaneously where so comparatively little industry and commerce have yet been developed to support them, and their operation may be attended with some financial trouble ; but they are too far advanced to be arrested by timid considerations now, and when completed and opened to traffic they will afford an opportunity of drawing forth the mineral treasures of Alabama which have long been sought
in vain. The administration of the free school system is the subject of
loud exclamations in Selma, as in many other parts of Alabama. At the close of the present fiscal year the finances of the town will show a deficit of 40,000 dollars, and the school expenditure gets the blame of most of it. There was a common school system, free to all white children in the South before the war, but the addition of the negro children has necessarily demanded more school buildings, more teachers, larger staffs of adminis trators, and a much larger expenditure of every kind. The difficulty of finding qualified teachers, more especially for negro schools, the doubt whether any good is being done commensurate with the expenditure of money, and the lingering unbelief of slavery times as to the capacity of the negro for literary instruc tion, combine with the impatience of taxation to render the free school system less popular than one would desire to find it. The system of administration seems also very faulty, if not

170

SELMA.

,

[CH. xxiv.

corrupt. The late State Superintendent of Education embezzled or misappropriated the funds; and a county superintendent in North Alabama, following so good an example, ran away with several thousand dollars entrusted to him for the payment of the teachers. The schools in that county are being carried on in the interim on fees prepaid by the parents, but many of the children have left off attendance. The school assessment is also partially levied as well as singularly distributed. A poll-tax payable by every male inhabitant over twenty-one and under forty-five years of age, together with some small duties on insurance premiums, have been set apart for the support of the free schools as a supplement to old school funds and trust endowments which appear to have been mismanaged, but for the annual interest of which the State continues religiously to charge itself. The polltax, as assessed on the various counties, amounted for the past year to 162,819 dollars, the duties on insurance premiums to 13,327 dollars--in all, 176,146 dollars. But the total collection of this special assessment for schools is not expected to be more than, if as much as, 100,000 dollars. Nearly half the poll-tax is uncollected. The money thus levied in the counties is sent into the State Treasury, and thence remitted to all the counties in sums proportioned to the number of children of school age in each ; so that defaulting counties, and counties that have many children of school age but do not teach them, get largely of funds which they do not contribute, and very probably abuse and squander; while counties that most honour the taxcollector get greatly less than they pay, and than they need and wish to apply to school purposes. The new Government of Alabama will doubtless proceed without delay to correct abuses and anomalies -which are subjecting the cause of education to an unnecessary strain of public dissatisfaction. One of the most obvious means of alleviating the financial difficulty of providing at once for the education of all the negro children was to exact rigorous payment of the school tax from able-bodied negro men, whose labour is in urgent demand at high wages. The slave holders paid taxes to the State for them as slaves, and when this fiscal resource was cut away by emancipation, it became on general grounds of finance all the more necessary that they should pay for themselves as free labourers. But when the polltax--the only tax to which the negro labourer is liable--was wholly devoted to the education of his own children, the obliga tion upon him to pay became sacred. Yet, in point of fact, the negroes cannot be got to pay this poll-tax for schools, or the collectors hitherto employed are unwilling to exact it from them. In one instance where a planter, when paying his own taxes, offered to pay the State dues of the negroes in his employment, the money was refused, because payment by substitute was a

ci(. xxiv.J

OT^I'S 02? ALABAMA.

171

relic of the slave system, or on some equally frivolous ground, and payment has never since teen asked of the coloured people in question in any more direct form. When qualified teachers, who are scarce, have to pass a board of examiners, composed whollv or in part of negroes who may not know the alphabet themselves, the education question here, with all its solemn sanctions and ennobling associations, seems to receive the last touch of ridicule, and common sense itself is struck completely dumb.
The National Banks authorized by Federal law, and enjoying the privilege of drawing the interest on their capital in Federal bonds deposited in exchange for 90 per cent, of their value in national currency--albeit a great field was opened for them by the crumpling-up of the old State Banks by the war--are not yet very numerous in the South. There is only one in Selma, having, according to an official statement just issued, a capital of 100,000 dollars ; deposits, 241,000 dollars : and cash in hand, 119,327 dollars. The bank, following a rule which experience in Europe has defined as safe and prudent, has thus an unemployed reserve equal to about a third of its liabilities. There are no banking funds visible in such places as Selma adequate to the amount of trade; but the volume of business in cotton and othermerchandise is transacted by credits established in New York, which are only banking in another form.
Our old friend "the patent inventor" is always turning up. I made the acquaintance of him and the celebrated " Cotton Trans planter " at night in the hotel, and on going out in the morning found him on a mound of sand exhibiting his machine in action to a crowd of negroes. The " Cotton Transplanter " consists of a little double-valved spade which is pushed by pedal force into the ground round the plant, and, closing convexly under the latter, lifts it up with as much of the earth as would fill a small flower-pot. The plant thus caught in a trap, may then be carried to a hole prepared for it elsewhere, with as little disturbance of the root as may be conceived. To amateur gardeners and lady florists this latest " Yankee notion " is as nice a little nothing as may be honestly commended, but it has no more relation to the cotton-field than a " B to a bull's foot."

CHAPTER XXV.
Progress of Trade and Population in Montgomery.--Opening of the Mineral Districts by Railways.--Existing Ironworks.--Coal and Iron Seams in the Cahawba Basin.--The Eed Mountain--its Deposits of Haematite.-- Proximity of the Warrior and Cahawba Coal-fields.--Eeeent Survey of Mr. Tait, F.G-.S.--Analyses of Alabama Coal and Iron Ores.--Agricultural Qualities of the Mineral Region.--Probable Geological History.--Eelative Price of Montevallo Coal and Pennsylvania Hay.
[MONTGOMERY, ALA.--Jan. 17-21.]
THE population of the capital of Alabama is about 10,000, being the largest town population in the State, with the exception of Mobile. Huntsville, in the valley of the Tennessee, ranks next to Montgomery and Selma, in the number of inhabitants; but it may not be surprising if--somewhere midway betwixt the Tennessee and the "prairie" land, in the mineral region now for the first time pierced by lines of railway, about Montevallo, Elyton, Oxmoor, or Talladega--a populous place should arise to throw all the interior towns of Alabama into the shade. The capital is built on the Coosa--now, having received the waters of the Tallapoosa, beginning to take the name of the Alabama Eiver--over a swelling surface of hill and dale, that gives a fine picturesque sweep to the semi-rural avenues, shaded by the China tree whose clustered berries are said to make the robinredbreasts drunk, and radiating from a central dial where the hotels, the banking and insurance houses, and the business of the town are gathered, and where Mr. Knock-'em-down, the po pular auctioneer, round a large circular pond or fountain shows off the paces of his mules to purchasing and other admiring negroes, and by his switch laid across the backbone has an art, as he rubs to sharp or flat, of making the animal strike out malignantly from behind or pace gently forward, that seems more than straightly human. Loud laughs burst from the dial of Mont gomery, disturbing the bankers, merchants, and brokers in their calculations, as Mr. Knock-'em-down plays his fiddle in this fashion over the spinal marrow of the mules for sale. The Capitol or State House, occupying a commanding eminence at one extremity of the town, overlooks the scene, and from itscolonnade the eye wanders over a wide expanse of country, in which breadths of "prairie" are lost to view under successive belts of forest.

CH. xxv.]

STATE OF ALABAMA.

173

\

The low price of cotton at Liverpool does not much damp the

business people of Montgomery, who are in good spirit, and

speak only of the progress of trade and population during the

last two years. Out from the central dial, along the business

streets, an active country trade goes on all day long. The

steamboats come to a high but sloping bluff near the warehouses

and cotton yards, where the cotton bales are rolled down easily

to the water-edge, and taken on board. The railway depots are

in the same vicinity, and carry off large quantities of cotton to

Savannah and other seaports beyond the limits of the State.

But the steamers continue to do. a good amount of business from

Montgomery and Selma to Mobile, at a rate of freight from a

dollar to a dollar and a half a bale.

The superiority of Alabama as a cotton-growing State is well

established, and so long as its " prairies " last can suffer little

diminution. But that which gives unparalleled importance to

this section of the South, and is at present exciting the deepest

interest, is its mineral wealth. The Warrior and Cahawba

coal-fields and iron beds are easily reached from Selma by

the Alabama and Tennessee, and from Montgomery by the

North and South, railroads. From Selma, a journey of forty or

fifty miles in the cars carries one to the Briarfield Ironworks,

in Bibb county, where there is a large establishment for mining

and manufacturing iron. The ore is brown haematite, and is

gathered over five or six hundred acres in sufficient quantities to

keep eight furnaces going. The mineral industry of Alabama is

still so entirely in its infancy that little or no attempt has been

made, even in the largest operations, to work the seams of

liEematite in the hilly ridges. Enough of ore is found embedded

in the low ground, and in fragments and outcroppings scattered

about, to enable costly mining work to be dispensed with.

Veins of bituminous coal, five and seven feet thick, are found

within a short distance of the furnaces at Briarfield. A few

miles farther, on the same line of railway, are the Shelby Iron

works, which, though not so extensive nor so completely re

stored from the devastation suffered in the war, command a

large and easy supply of superior brown hamatite. In the same

vicinity are the Montevallo coal-fields, which are annually send

ing a considerable, supply of bituminous coal into the local

markets. Betwixt Briarfield and Shelby Ironworks are the

Shelby lime-kilns, which first redeemed Alabama from the

disgrace of importing lime from Maine, in the far North, while

possessing inexhaustible supplies of the finest limestone for

calcination in the world. Alabama lime is now in repute out

side the State. There is in this small district, therefore, a field

of industry and wealth of the deepest interest. The railway has

here brought us full on the Cahawba coal basin. The river flows

174

MONTGOMERY. *

. [CH. xxv.

through Shelby, Perry, and Dallas counties, till it joins tfhe Alabama at Cahawba. Over a series of low hilly ridges, within a short distance north-westward, is the much larger coal and mineral field of the Black Warrior. At Centreville, in the heart of Bibb county, where the limestone projects from the banks of the river, and the older fossiliferous rocks of Alabama seem to find their southern extremity, the Cahawba coal-field may be said to terminate, though traces of the coal measures have been found in Perry county, south of Bibb. From Centreville the coal-field of the Cahawba extends north-eastward over a long anti-clinal valley to Murphreesville, upwards of a hundred miles, and spreads eastward over Shelby and Glair counties towards the Coosa river, which has a very interesting mineral development of its own, and. for more than twenty years has been sending down coal and iron to Montgomery and Mobile. From Centreville to Murphreesville, along the course of the Cahawba, numerous beds of haematite ore have been disclosed, of varying thickness, in some places fifteen to twenty feet, and in others thinning down to one or two feet. At the lime-kilns betwixt the Shelby Ironworks and the Montevallo coal mines, the Alabama and Tennessee Railroad passes eastward to Talladega on the Coosa, where, on Talladega Creek, as well as on Cane Creek at Polkville, furnaces were in operation as longago as 1849, and a large amount of iron has been made without really opening the seams or doing more than gathering up the superficial and fragmentary deposits of ore. But, dropping at Lime Station into the cars of the North and South Railroad from Montgomery, which there, in its direct course north to Decatur, intersects the " Alabama and Tennessee," one is brought in a few minutes to Elyton, where the greatest wonder of all appears in the Red Mountain, so called because of the beds of red haema tite found in great thickness both on its north-western and south-eastern sides. The Red Mountain is a long range of heights traversing the eastern border of Jefferson county, and passing out north-eastward into St. Glair county, till it fades and loses its name in the Lookout range, stretching down from Chat tanooga through De Kalb county in the north-eastern corner of the State. It is broken at various points by gaps and cross valleys, and is flanked by parallel ranges of lower heights, called Sand Mountains, which are in reality composed of the " millstone grit," so closely allied here with the coal measures. Murphrees Valley, at the head of the Cahawba coal-fields, opens upon it from the north; and it trends north-east towards a long tract of valley ground, through which the Alabama and Chattanooga Railroad takes its course, called after "Jones," or " Roup," or other celebrity, at various stages, till it becomes "Will's Valley," some miles of which I travelled from the Chattanooga end.

CH. XX^'.J

STATE OF ALABAMA.

175

Over all this district the records of iron ore are as numerous as they are authentic, and rude furnaces appear to have been erected at every few miles, and to have bloomed for a season, arid then perished, under the difficulties of communication and such seasons- of stagnation as have often brought the great iron districts of England and Scotland themselves into straits. But the name of "lied Mountain" is more strictly applied to the hilly range from where it approaches Elyton, the small county town of Jefferson, and extends some twenty or thirty miles into St. Glair county. The development of hasmatite is here very rich. At Grade's Gap, near Elyton, ironworks were established during the war, and two furnaces erected and put in blast, but they are silent now, though the iron ore is on the spot in large deposits. Eight miles farther north-east, the Irondale Works were begun in the second year of the war, and made a great deal of iron, but were burned down by the Federal troops, and have since been taken up by a Northern company, who are building a new furnace and a rolling mill and machine shops. The red haematite is at this point also in great quantity. The beds of haematite in the Ked Mountain, and appearing on both sides of it, are in some parts ten to fifteen feet in thickness, though this cannot be pro nounced uniform. The aspect of the country is that of mild volcanic upheaval, followed by a long course of denudation, in which the loosened materials have been swept away by the receding ocean and by the erosive action of the rivers, leaving a wavy and irregular stratification, in which the coal and iron beds are often cut and wasted, and, while traced over considerable spaces along the withstanding ridges, are deposited in fragments through the valleys, and reappear in the channels of the streams and branches. The dip of the strata-at Red Mountain is south east, and the ascent on that side is gradual; while on the north west the face of the ridge is more sharp and abrupt. The geological formation is much the same as at Lookout. There is the same crown of sandstone along the ridges above seams of red and brown ore, resting on beds of yellow clay, with the Silurian limestones uplifted in the valleys, and passing under the carbo niferous strata and millstone grit of the hills. The sandstone and carboniferous limestone are often dyed red by oxide of iron, and strata of silicious conglomerate are met with, in which innumerable pebbles seem to have been blended into a tough and compact mass by metallic influence. I have not discovered that seams of coal have been opened on the face of the Eed Mountain, immediately under or above the haematite, as I found on the Eaccoon range near Chattanooga, but the striking pecu liarity of the Eed Mountain is, that it divides by a narrow strip the Warrior and Cahawba coal-fields, stretching over hundreds of square miles on either side of it, and approaching so close

176

MONTGOMERY.

[CH. xxv.

together that the coal measurers of the two basins 'bound some of the narrow valleys. The Cahawba coal mines and the Southern coal mines are in operation within a few miles of the Red Mountain. A company, called " The Bed Mountain Iron and Coal Company," was organized before the war, with a capital of a million dollars, and acquired a large tract of the Red and Sand Mountains and the Cahawba coal-fields. They formed a little town settlement at the base of the Red Mountain, called " Oxmoor," where the iron stratum is very rich, and proceeded to open veins of coal on their coal-field. Seventeen veins of coal have been discovered on the company's property, eight of which are two to four feet thick. But the war paralysed the operations of the company, and left it disorganized and im poverished to an extent from which it has been unable to recover, though coal continues to be produced from the out-crops in considerable quantity. This property, which remains in the hands of some of the most substantial men of Alabama and Georgia, could probably be purchased at a fourth of its cost; or the proprietors would take an interest to that amount with any practical mining company who would bring an equal value to the ' development of the coal and iron. The lands of the company are about 8,000 acres in exten1, all accurately defined in the Government survey. Mr. Tait, of Montgomery, a Fellow of the Geological Society of London, proceeded last fall, at the instance of the North and South Railroad, to survey the section of country on both sides of the railway from Boyle's Gap, where it cuts the Sand Mountains, to where it crosses the Warrior River. The average distance from the Sand Hills to the Warrior River is about fifteen miles. Mr. Tait had only the most ordinary means of excavation at command, and he explored chiefly along the channels of the creeks, and cleared and measured wherever prac ticable tKe seams of coal observable to the eye. His conclusion was, that there are five distinct coal-beds in the upper portion of the area, varying in thickness from thirty to sixty-six inches, and at no considerable depth below the surface. The bed of the Warrior, where the railway crosses, he found composed of car boniferous shale, which he supposes to be the roof of coal strata occupying a lower position than those found along the channels of the smaller tributaries. The seams of the Warrior basin, examined by Mr. Tait, have a slight north-west dip, seldom exceeding ten degrees; whereas the seams of the adjoining Cahawba coal-field have a south-east inclination of forty-five degrees. The "strike" of the seams, however, is the same in both areas, and Mr. Tait's opinion is, that the volcanic force passing on its anti-clinal axis along the Jones Valley, betwixt the two coal-fields, where the Silurian rocks out-crop in uniform ridges, exerted a lateral force in a south-easterly direction, and1

OH. xxv.] 1

STATS OF ALABAMA.

177

raised u.p the Cahawba strata to the high angle at which it is found; - but that the two basins were originally one common plain, having the same general geological formation. Mr. Tait pronounces all the coal seen by him to be an excellent semibituminous coal, without any iron pyrites or visible trace of decomposition when subjected to the microscope. The coal and iron ores of Alabama have undergone many chemical analyses. In the coal of the Warrior there is a little sulphur, while in the Cahawba there is none, or only the slightest trace. Professor Mallet, who now occupies the Chair of Chemistry in the Uni versity of Virginia, and who probably knows more of the mineral resources of Alabama from a scientific point than any other person living, found the coal of the Warrior, near Tuscaloosa, to be composed as follows:--

Volatile combustible matter Fixed carbon
Ashes .... Moisture .... Sulphur ....

40-60 541--0079
1-18 1-06

100-00

The Cahawba coal, according to the same analyst, has the following elements:--

Volatile combustible matter .... Fixed carbon .......
Ashes ........ Moisture ........ Sulphur ........

36'68 57'23
5-30 079 Trace.

100-00
In a table drawn by Sir Charles Lyell, Alabama coal occupies the front rank of coals for producing steam.
Analyses of the Alabama iron ores show from fifty to eighty parts of peroxide of iron, with varying but usually small pro portion of lime, alumina, magnesia, and phosphoric acid. Their production of metallic iron is from 36 to 58 per cent.
The country in which these mineral treasures are found pos sesses considerable agricultural value. The soil produces corn and cotton, is well adapted for wheat and other small grain, is watered by numerous streams, and in its agreeable blending of hill and valley would form not only a temperate and wholesome place of residence, but might be made to produce abundance of bread and meat and milk and fruits. Yet it is still, over a great part, practically a desert. There are no negroes, little population of any kind, and the hunter often finds wolves and ottier wild animals which have disappeared from other parts of the State. While this absence of population involves the necessity of im-

178

MONTGOMERY.

[CH. xxv.

porting labour--an operation which, considering the industry to be pursued, would be necessary in any circumstances--it has'the advantage of obviating all social entanglements and antagonism. The mineral settlers would be free to create a society of their own, and as rapidly as bands of miners and iron workers invaded these mineral solitudes of Alabama they would be followed by a white farming population to cultivate the soil and minister to their wants.
The coal and iron deposits of this State are now, when the railways have cut through them in all directions, by far the most deeply interesting material fact on the American Continent. Of the extent or depth of these deposits I should be loth to speak in any exaggerated terms. The seams, so far as revealed, are not of any remarkable thickness, and the slight and superficial degree in which they have be.en mined, as well as their geological pecu liarities, forbid imaginary estimates from a business point of view of their cubical contents and probable commercial outcome. But they everywhere obtrude themselves on the most cursory obser vation over thousands of Square miles, and coal and iron are found in such immediate juxtaposition, and are raised from the bowels of the earth into such elevations of surface, as must render their commercial development much more easy than coal and iron can be developed in most other parts of the world. The coal of Alabama is marked by impressions of lepidodendrum and other magnificent flora found in the coal measures of Europe, and there can be no doubt that a high tropical vegetation at one time flourished over all this mineral region of Alabama, and was sub merged and covered with deposits of sand, since hardened into rock, under which, save for a volcanic force that has tilted up the underlying rocks, and broken as on a wheel an arid sandy plain into hill arid valley and fertilising streams, and the alluvium and mould of a later world, both the coal and iron would have re mained for ever concealed, or could only have been extracted with enormous difficulty. All this subterranean wealth, exposed to the eye, is now brought within easy reach; and not only the railways of Alabama, but the great lines of road which are being pushed with extraordinary energy through the vast States and. territories of the AVest to the shores of the Pacific, as well as into Mexico and Central America, and the growing steam marine of the Gulf, are opening an almost boundless demand on the spot for both coal and iron. I take with me specimens -of hematites from the Red Mountain district, of manganese from the neighbourhood of Chattanooga, and of the coal of Montevallo. The hematite yields 56 per cent, of metallic iron ; and having seen the finest hematites of Cumberland and the North of Spain, I am mistaken if the Alabama ore does not compare favourably with them all.

CH. xxv-.]

STATE OF ALABAMA.

179

,Montevallo coal is sold in Montgomery at fifty cents per lOOlbs. The coal of Philadelphia cannot be laid down at less than a dollar per 100 IDS., and is no doubt a richer coal. The coal of Alabama is lighter and more bituminous than the similar coal of England and Scotland; but it is pure and bright, and if efficiently mined could be profitably sold at probably not more than five dollars per ton, or one-fourth the value here of the coal of Pennsylvania.
The dependence of the South on the North extends to com modities even more strange than coal and iron, of which there is here in their raw state such abundance. Though Montgomery is surrounded by the prairie land of the State, bales of very coarse hay are transported all the way from Kentucky, Pennsyl vania, and Maine, and fetch two cents a pound, or four times more than the price of the Montevallo coal. The Southern planters know little of rearing and feeding stock, or saving grass and fodder ; or knowing and feeling the necessity of developing such elements of economy and profit since the negroes have ceased to figure as property in the balance-sheets of the plan tations, they experience no common difficulties of capital and labour in introducing a new system. Such stock as existed on the farms, including even the hogs, was swept away in the war. Planters who had a thousand swine on their lands were left in some cases almost without one. Recovery in such circumstances can only be a gradual process, even where there are the best intentions and the greatest energy. Mr. Ross, a Scotchman who had spent the early part of his life in a tropical clime, bought a plantation thirty miles south of Montgomery, a year or two ago, at twelve dollars an acre. He complains of the difficulty of cultivating his land by negro labour, of the inferior quality and high price of goods and articles of ordinary consumption, and the danger of falling into lawsuits with overseers and labourcontractors. Since the war, husbandry has been playing chiefly on the old string, and the abundance of the cotton crop shows that this string has been played with surprising success. Some say it has been played out. The receipts of cotton in Mont.gomery in 1869-70 were 75,000 bales. This year nearly as many bales have been received already, and a great increase on the crop of the previous year is anticipated before the end of the season. The failure of the planters to make any profit at present prices of cotton will most probably give a great impulse to other strings of husbandry which have so far, under free negro labour, been too much neglected.

CHAPTEE XXVI.
Night Journey to Mobile. -- The Timber Region.--Tensaw River.--Emigrants.-- Obstacles to Shipping in the Bay.--Extension of Railway Connections.-- Exports of Cotton and Lumber.--Increase of the trade in Coffee.--Want of Capital.--Banks.--Paper Manufacture.--Cotton Oil Mills--Lesson to Planters.--The late Elections.--Health and Amusements.
[MOBILE, ALA.--Jan. 22-24.]
IT is only by actual travel in the United States that one attains to any adequate conception of the vastness of the territory. Figures, however deep and large, fall flat on the imagination; but when new tens of thousands of square miles spread out before one's eyes weekly, as they have been doing steadily before mine for several months, the impression of magnitude becomes real, lasting, and all but overwhelming. I have been working in and round the State of Alabama since the beginning of December, often taking long stretches of a hundred miles or more at a time, and at Montgomery, the labour of travel in Alabama might have been supposed to be about finished. Yet, from Montgomery, the capital, to Mobile, the seaport of the State, is one hundred and eighty miles, or from twelve to fifteen hours by railway. The total area of Great Britain and Ireland is 122,091 square, miles. The area of Alabama is 50,272 square miles; so that this one State alone is nearly equal in superficial extent to one-half of the United Kingdom, and is divided so comprehensively and almost so equally into stock and agricultural region, cotton region, mineral and manufacturing region, and timber region, as to constitute, in natural resoivrces, a little empire in itself. Whatever the future of Alabama (and it seems most promising) may be, it is certain that the increase of its population in the ten years before the war was greater than the increase of population in Massachusetts, about equal to the increase in Pennsylvania, and double the in crease in Virginia in the same period. The census of 1870, so far as it can be relied upon, accredits Alabama with a somewhat larger population than in 1860 ; and if the development of the great resources of the State should now take a fresh start, there can be no doubt that Mobile will share its prosperity. This city is the common point to which all the southward river communica-

CH. xxvi.j

STATS OF ALABAMA.

181

tions converge on the Gulf; and, besides, is well dovetailed into the railway circle. The railroads east and west draw off a great portion of the produce of Alabama to Savannah on the one hand, and to New Orleans on the other; but Mobile, while capable of sharing much of this traffic, must always be the point of import to Alabama from Mexico, the West Indies, and South America, and the outlet of coal and iron to the Gulf.
Having taken a night journey from Montgomery to Mobile in the " Pullman Sleeping Car "--all the comforts of which seem comprised in one relief, viz. horizontal position--I found myself at dawn in fine but heavy pine woods--the "timber region " of Alabama extending deep into the southern region of the State along the whole Gulf Coast--remarkably free from swamp or underwood, and with a green, dry sward under the trees. The ' railroad stops at a few shanties on the Tensaw River, whence the passengers and goods are meantime carried by steamboat twentytwo miles to Mobile. The Tensaw is in reality a bayou, issuing by one or more of its affluents from the Alabama River, and flowing back again into the same waters at the head of the Bay of Mobile. The boat moved down smooth waters, spreading and opening into various channels, and amidst tongue.8 of land covered with heavy white reeds, till definition became lost in the embouchure . to the bay. A good breakfast was spread on board the steamer for the people, among whom was a considerable number of emigrants from the wide and pleasant but poor lands of Georgia, bound for the still wider, probably less pleasant, but, alleged to be, much richer lands of Texas. They had already travelled hundreds of miles. From Mobile to New Orleans is upwards of a hundred miles more, and from New Orleans to Texas is five hundred or a thousand or two miles, just as one may be inclined. They were working country-people, the same kind of folk as one sees passing from all parts of Europe through the British seaports to New York. This movement from east to west goes on con stantly. Nothing stops it. Among these groups, but not of them, I espied a sturdy, sandy-haired young man, whom I fancied to be a countryman of my own. He told me he was from " Aber deen awa'," and was the son of a small farmer. He had been working on a farm in the State of New York, and, after makingsome little money, was now emigrating in general. He had no point of arrival. Soon after breakfast, a Georgian youth, much more weather-beaten than the Aberdonian, roamed round all parts of the floating castle in a state of semi-distraction. The ambition of this young man seemed to be to have a whole county, some where in Texas, all to himself. The stockades driven into the approaches of the harbour of Mobile to ward off Federal gunboats during the war still remain, and steamers have to thread warily a zigzag course through

182

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[CH. xxvi.

little forests of piles before getting alongside the. wharves. It might have been supposed that the Federal Government, so zealous hitherto in reconstructing the South, would have long since effaced these marks of rebellion. Only the lighter class of sailing Vessels come up to the city, the navigation being obstructed not only by such effete warlike defences, but by the natural bar at the mouth of the bay. The heavy cotton ships, that must have 3,000 bales with et ceteras, lie off, and receive their cargoes from lighters, twenty to thirty miles from the city. Yet the captains like this distance from port, as a protection from the demoralisa tion and "skedaddling" of their hands, who for the most part are engaged out and in. The office of the British Consul, Mr. Credland, is thronged at this period with skippers in search of runaway seamen; and Captain Semmes, of the Alabama, who is settled here as official attorney of Mobile, has often to give legal .advice and assistance in captures of a totally different kind from those to which in his more heroic days he was accustomed. " Jack" does not like to be deprived of his land frolic by the dodge of anchoring twenty miles from port, and gets up scuffles at night on board ship, and, in the darkness and confusion, jumps overboard and pretends to be drowned, when, by a boat at hand, he has made ashore. The captains, judging from the frequency of such es capades, reason how much worse matters would be were their ships nearer the city, and rather like the wise provision Nature has made by the bar. But if " Jack " were more at liberty in port, he very probably would have less tendency first to drown himself, and then to run away. Mobile is not a place one can. easily escape from, unless prepared to undertake a very long journey. It appears that foreign seamen in this free country cannot be arrested for breach of contract, but if they steal the ship's boats, or maim or kill the mate, they may, when caught, be made amenable to law and equity in some degree.
The chief topics of interest among the merchants, keenly alive to the necessity of keeping abreast of the movements in other ports, are the opening and deepening of the harbour, and the ex tension of the railway connections of Mobile with the interior. There is a prospect of the former being attended to ere long, and though the present railway communications of Mobile are by no means contemptible, a meeting of citizens has just been held to promote a great new line, to be called the " Mobile and NorthWestern." There are already three lines of railroad in operation, viz. the Mobile and Ohio, extending to Columbus on the Missis sippi Eiver, and there falling into connection with other roads north and west--the Mobile and Montgomery, and the Mobile and New Orleans; and there is in process of construction the Mobile and Alabama Grand Trunk, which will place this seaport in direct communication with the mineral region of the State on

CH. xxvi.]

STATE OF ALASAMA.

183

to Chattanooga. But the line at present obtaining the suffrages ' of the citizens is different from all these, and is proposed to go to Jackson by a route twenty-four miles shorter than the road from New Orleans to Jackson, from Jackson into the Yazoo Val ley in the heart of the most fertile region of Mississippi, where large quantities of cotton are involved in annual difficulties of carriage by boat and bayou, and from Yazoo one hundred and twenty miles farther to Helena in Arkansas, where it will connect with roads giving a shorter run to St. Louis and Missouri than any meantime available. Mobile is fired, like so many other places, with the ambition of being the eastern terminus of the great Pacific lines, which will probably begin to be of some commercial value a hundred years hence, but is keeping a wake ful eye all the time on more local and attainable advantages. The splendour of conception with which railway lines are mapped out in this part of the world exceeds belief; nor can one declare, considering the deplorable circumstances of the interior in the matter of common roads, and the facility of railway construction over a soft and level surface with superabundance of timber, that the splendour is without a strong basis of practical utility, albeit there is a wide difference always betwixt conceiving and exe cuting. The " Mobile and North-Western " involves a distance of some four hundred miles, and is estimated to cost four millions of dollars, though a million or two more may perhaps be safely added. Mobile engages to subscribe half a million of dollars, and the under taking is legitimate enough both for subscribers and lenders ; but the promoters must be aware that the resource of State bonds is for the present played out in Alabama, and that an ample sub scription along the proposed line cannot fail to prove a conditionprecedent of its success. The merchants of Mobile feel that the question of interior communication is one of vital necessity to them. Savannah, by the great railway activity in Georgia, has been encroaching largely in what was wont to be their fields of operation both in Alabama and Mississippi, while New Orleans, with its vast waterways, always turns up on its feet; and it is only by pushing new roads into productive territories hitherto unvisited by the iron horse, and thus obtaining a control of cotton and other country produce, and of the return trade of agricultural supplies, that Mobile can hope to maintain its old place. The exports of cotton from Mobile exhibit considerable fluctuation since the close of the war. From upwards of 400,000 bales in 1865-6, they fell to 251,000 bales the following year, when there was a general failure of production under the new system of labour; rose to 358,000 bales in 1867-8, and fell again to 247,000 bales in 1868-9. The total exports last year were 298,523 bales, and, judging from the receipts up to this date, are expected to amount this year to 375,000 bales. The exports of lumber from this por

184

MOBILE. , '

.[CH;. xxvi.

last year were 3,859,000 feet. The importation of foreign goods direct into Mobile amounted to 1,350,000 dollars, being probably not a thirtieth part of the value of its total exports, though com paring very favourably with Savannah in direct foreign trade, where, notwithstanding the great traffic in cotton, direct transaction with the sources of foreign supply appears to be reduced to the lowest ebb. As an instance of what mercantile energy might do in many various forms to revive trade and independence in the Southern seaports, the importation of coffee from Rio to Mobile has increased in two or three years from 8,000 to 75,000 bags, and is likely to go on increasing, as the trade, of course, is much more direct and rapid and the charges of transportation much less from Mobile to the North-West, than from New York or Baltimore. But Mobile, like the other Southern seaports, labours, after the huge losses of the war, under a disability in want of capital. There are only three banks, and these of very limited means, in the city--the Bank of Mobile with a capital of 500,000 dollars, the- Southern Bank of Alabama and the First National Bank, with capitals respectively of 300,000 dollars. But for the insur ance companies, which have prospered greatly since the war, and which invest their surplus means in commercial paper to an amount exceeding the total capital of the banks, trade would have been much more crippled than it has been ; and, of course, a com modity, so scarce in proportion to the work to be done as money here, is only obtainable on very high terms.
There are no manufactures of any consequence in Mobile. If a cotton factory may thrive anywhere in the South, one would suppose that it must be in a town like this, of 40,000 inhabitants, among whom there is always a large class of white people to whom indoor labour is of vital consequence, and where the most active agencies of sale and distribution are to be found without cost or seeking on the spot. Paper is made in the neighbourhood, but the water on the deltas of the Gulf is ,-too turbid for this manufacture, and there are many places of natural water-power and pure running streams in this State where paper, which, unlike cotton, fetches three times the price of the raw material, might be manufactured with much greater success. There is a vast amount of cotton waste in every gin-house which a paper mill would gather up at little cost; and, not to speak of much other fibre wasting in the fields, there is a tall plant almost peculiar to Alabama called Okra, which I have seen growing in the gardens, and which is capable of field culture, that makes excellent paper pulp--root, stem, and branches. Very good " news" has been made from Okra in a mill at Tuscaloosa. Rags are among the few things to which the tariff of the United States extends the privilege of free import, and the American paper makers, with a continent in their hands overflowing with paper

CH. xxvi.]

STATE OF ALABAMA.

185

fibre, and trusting to every device of law and taxation rather than exercise their own ingenuity, and gather up the wealth profusely growing at their feet, have been poaching on the raw material of paper, all too scarce, of other countries, and throwing upon other countries, of course, an amount of brain work and commercial activity in the discovery and development of paper material which is neither equal, republican, nor even, on the most indulgent theory, commonly civilized. They have verily been trying to im port Esparto grass all the way from Spain, as if the United States did not contain within themselves the resources of this kind, ten times told, of all the Spains; and because it does not pay to make paper for the intelligent and reading people of America from grass grown in Spain, they would immediately inflict a much higher duty, already from 20 to 25 per cent., on all foreign paper, and, of course, an equally increased amount of disgrace and despite on all American grass and American paper manufacture. The Southern people, who have heretofore suffered deeply from this system, and are crushed to the ground under it still, with the further bitterness, war-born., of being proscribed and misgoverned from Washington as " rebels," have no sympathy with the sui cidal and incomprehensible follies of tariff legislation ; and one cannot but think that were the North once weaned from the lust of protection, misdirecting and perverting all its great commercial and political energies, and making Republican institutions themselves a hollow sham and imposture as regards true material development, American spirit and ingenuity would soon search out the ways and means, and places too. for making paper as well as much more besides, not only enough for the United States, but to spare for export to less favoured countries.
One branch of manufacture established at Mobile since the war is worthy of notice. The " Mobile Cotton Oil Mills " is a large establishment, employing a good many hands, and having, in buildings and machinery, probably near a hundred thousand dollars. Cotton seed, forming the larger bulk of the cotton fruit, was in the old times deemed of little or no account. The planters seldom took the trouble even of returning it. to the land as manure. It is now bought up from the plantations at from 10 to 12 dollars a ton, and is manufactured in this Mobile mill, and in similar works rapidly extending in the Southern towns, into cotton oil, cotton-seed cake, and cotton-seed manure. It is first carefully separated from the hull and wool in -which it is encased, the latter being gathered up and baled as merchantable cotton. The pure seed is then ground into meal, which is put into little narrow rectangular bags of a strong and peculiar texture. These are next placed in the pigeon-holes of a powerful hydraulic press, which expresses the oil. The bags are then drawn, and their contents are the cotton-seed cake. The oil flows down from the press into

186

MOBILE. >

[CH. xxvi.

tanks, whence it is pumped into an upper story, and undergoes a regular process of refining. When manure is to be made, the seed-cake is ground by the same stones as grind the seed, and the meal is mixed with bone-dust or other preparations of lime, treated with chemicals, and becomes a "fertiliser" as good, some say, as Peruvian guano. It is sold to the farmers at 50 to 60 dollars per ton. The seed-cake is also exported in hundreds of tons, chiefly to England, for feeding cattle ; and large quantities of cotton seed of the Southern States pass by the mills on the spot to the same destination, where it undergoes a similar process of oil-making. The cotton oil does not seem to have yet established any very legitimate place in commerce, and fluctuates some what mysteriously round olive oil and linseed oil. It is be lieved that cotton-seed oil is beginning to figure largely on our tables under a certain veil as " first-rate salad oil." It is a very pure and beautiful oil as refined in the Mobile mill, and there can be no doubt of its nutritious qualities. A good agriculturist must demur to so much valuable material being taken away from the soil with so little chance of its ever returning to it. The manufacturers, of course, afford every facility to planters of exchanging cotton seed for seed-cake and manure, and whether their trade is to be an enduring one or not, there can be no doubt of the valuable lesson they are reading the planters as to the economisation of the materials about them. If the seed-cake with the oil expressed be good for fattening cattle, the seed, with all the oil in it, must be a much richer feed, and go much further in admixture with other stuffs ; while it is certain that there is no part of the world where there is so much room for profitable stock-feeding as on the cotton plantations of the South. There are little machines, to be bought for 150 or 200 dollars, by which any planter may separate the wool and the hull from the seed, and realize in his own farm-yard nearly all the economical results of these elaborate and extensive oil mills.
The citizens of Mobile, taking the bull of misrule by the horns, have in the late elections rooted out the traders on the negro vote from the Municipal Government, and aided the general movement that has given a Conservative-Democratic Governor and House of Representatives to the State. By the singular device of putting fish-hooks, when passing the ballot box. into the coats of the " repeaters "--as the hired negroes addicted to voting several times over in the various "precincts" are called--an effectual check was given early on the day of the poll to a practice that had formerly perverted the elections. The white people are in great heart at the change made in their government; and, among other advantages of their political situation, boast of having in Mr. John Forsyth, editor of the Daily Register, one of the ablest writers in the United States. The Mobilians, remarkable to say,

CH/XXVI.]

STATE OF ALABAMA.

187

1

own a pride in their " able editors " as in any other pillars and

ornaments of the city.

The people of Mobile exhibit a little nervousness on the subject

of the public health of the city. They have had this season a

visitation of the old plague of yellow fever, which, owing to the

lateness of the first frost, had a more than usual protracted rule,

and retarded the return of the cotton-buyers and the progress of

business. The number of cases was certainly very large--at one

time as high as 1,500--and yet the total mortality from yellow-

fever proper is stated to have been not more than 216. But there

is no thorough health organization in Mobile, and no systematic

vital statistics, which is a mistake, even in the lowest point of

view; for the effect of the strictest supervision and registration

has always been in such cases to diminish, rather than increase,

alarm. There is nothing so terrible, nothing so sure to run riot

in the imagination, as the unknown. The people who stay all

year in the city think but little of this scourge, and the British

Consul, who is one of the " can't-get-aways," considers it very

capable of successful treatment. There is much swampy and un

wholesome ground.along the head and eastern shore of the bay

about the delta and bayous of the river. But the town is built

on the western shore outwards to a more pleasant country.

Government Street is a magnificent avenue, two or three miles

long, of pleasant residences, and grounds adorned with magnolias

and other Southern plants which here bloom and flower in all

their perfection. Farther out and round the edge of the forest

there are also many fine houses, built on firm dry soil, under the

shade of the trees, and open to the sea-breezes. And now, when

business is again in full progress, and health and pleasure seem to

meet, the Mobilians are as gay and lively a community as one

could wish to see. The " Can't-get-Away" Club, which has

greatly distinguished itself by its philanthropy in the history of

Mobile, and is said, to have spent 30,000 dollars in the late epi

demic, had an amateur performance the other night in the theatre,

for the purpose of recuperating its funds ; and what a gathering of

beauty and fashion was there ! In five minutes after the opening

of the doors the whole pit and boxes of the theatre were filled

with brilliant ladies, who more than shared with the amateurs on

the stage, I suspect, the admiration of the male portion of the

audience.

CHAPTER XXVII.
The New Road from Mobile to New Orleans.--Singular character of the Country.--The " Iron Horse " crossing Bays, Lakes, and Lagoons. -- The "Rigolets."--First Impressions of New Orleans.--Goods on the Levee.--The Custom House.--The Streets and Avenues.--The Shell Eoad. --Weather in January.--Vegetation.--Sunday in a City of "All Nations."
[NEW ORLEANS, LA.--Jan. 25 to Feb. 14.]
THE opening- of the Mobile and New Orleans Uailway has not only reduced the journey betwixt the two cities to less than onehalf the time consumed by the steamers, but opened a most curious country to observation. The road sweeps diagonally across the tract of Alabama, between Mobile Bay and the Mississippi State line, along the edge of an evergreen forest, where the yellow pine, as in its home and birthplace, grows tall and strong, while straight and taper as a fishing-rod: and where the number of little shanty towns growing up, and steam saw-mills puffing their white smoke into the bright sunny air, shows that an increasing lumber trade, with the iron track so near, is being carried on. The narrow strips of land, cleared of wood, are also being brought into cultivation, and the negro and the mule are following close in the wake of the woodsman with his axe and teams of heavy oxen. The railway, after crossing the Mississippian border, dips, down to the shore of the Mississippi Sound, with its many long and narrow strips of island shutting out a view of the Gulf, and seeming as if it were no Sound at all, but merely an extension seaward of the bays, lagoons, and shallow oozes of many-mouthed rivers, in which the road now becomes enveloped as in an undefined maze of land and water. Pascayoulas, Beloxi, and Bay St. Louis are points at which the rails are carried by trestles across arms of the Sound, on which over long distances one never seems to lose hold of land, and yet is always above water, as if the country for miles round were under some temporary inundation. Yet the white sails of vessels are seen on both sides of the line, like the wings of sea gulls that have wandered far from both sea and shore. Several rivers, flowing towards a common embouchure, produce in the

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STATE OF LOUISIANA.

189

low flat land this labyrinth of channels and marshy pools, and are met half-way by the salt waters of the Sound. At Bay St. Louis the train crosses over at least two miles of deep water on a strong but open trestle, of which the iron rails are the topmost lines, and on which the cars seem to hang as by a thread that the first tornado perchance may snap, and what then ? Yet in fair weather the passage is very pleasant, not in anywise alarm ing, glides rapidly once more upon expanses of dry land, where there are sweet-orange groves and bounteous orchards, and where Ocean Springs, Mississippi City, and other watering-places of fantastic names afford summer shade and recreation to citizens of Mobile and New Orleans; and then bounds into a broad savannah--dry and deeply grassy plains--on which a thousand herds of oxen might pasture, so far extending that the forest at length disappears, arid only becomes visible again on some elevation of surface like a vapoury battlement in the distant sky. There is little human or animal life on this savannah, which is a mere bagatelle to the far greater " prairies " of the West, and it is easy to perceive that the American Eagle, in the universal spread of its wings, is but pecking feebly with its bill at the vastnesses round its borders. But, though by what agency or for what purpose is not to be defined, this savannah has at various points been set on fire, and the flames, licking up the long grass, and glowing scarlet-red even in the sunlight, with their smoke and trail of blackened soil and ashes, form a striking feature in the landscape as the train sweeps past. Then come the " trembling prairie," and new watery mazes spreading on all sides, till they seem to block the way, and render advance a mystery. The cars up to this point have been going at the rate of nearly thirty miles an hour, with a smooth and easy motion, as of wings rather than of wheels; but the palpitating' ti'ack of the "trembling prairie" brings the prudent engine to a more temperate speed. Over many miles the road on this section has been made by excavating the soil on either side, and throwing it over among heavy layers of timber on the track. But as rapidly as the dredging machines scooped out the earth the broad ditches thus made filled with water, so that the narrow iron road passes along parallel canals now on this side and now on that, and sometimes on both sides together, and ever and again comes to places where lagoons expand over miles of territory, and rivers seem to lose themselves in unseen channels amidst the weltering waters. Little bits of land and human habitations appear in the distance above the flood and marshes, and one looks abroad with curious wonder on the scene at the stations whither floating houses have penetrated by patient navi gation from some dry shore with goods and groceries, powder and shot; and where men and boys are always jumping into

190

NEW ORLEANS. , .

. [OH. xxvn.

canoes half-filled with wooden ducks, and paddling their way in all directions, no one knows where by name, for their game. The train passes on, and as one glances ahead along the shining rails, with their flanking canals, it seems to be running direct into the sea, which appears to swell up into communion with the sky on. the bright horizon; and over parts of the sea, sure enough, it has oftentimes to pass on crutches; but as it dashes on, the sea retires, and stretches of "trembling prairie" reappear, and one begins to look for the spires of New Orleans. Away to the north-west a speck is seen on the sky, and the glass brings out a flag-staff and pennon. It is Fort Pike, on Lake Pontchartrain, and in a few minutes more, while one is looking eagerly for Pearl River, and thinking that it must have lost itself somewhere, the train bounds upon the bridge over the Rigolets, a deep channel in which a strong current flows from Lake Pontchartrain to Lake Borgne, in the Sound, swallowing up the waters of the Pearl in its course, and forming the line of navigation from Lakeport in Pontchartrain for the New Orleans steamers and coasters trading with Mobile and other Gulf ports. The railway works span the Rigolets slantwise, and have a drawbridge in the centre for the navigation 100 feet wide, complained of as not being large enough. Yet still more lakes and serpentines! What a country for duck-shooting! Animated nature here consists of amphibious beings, with ducks at one end of the scale, and men bent on their destruction at the other. On crossing by a trestle work farther on the southern end of Lake Catherine--one of those smaller fresh-water seas, but considerable lakes, that fill up more than one-half the space betwixt the great Pontchartrain, the Sound, and the Mississippi River, and would seem to show, if experience did not establish the fact that the deluge is sub siding, how easily all might blend into one, and the whole country be placed under sea once more--the surface of the water is covered with myriads of wild ducks, and many shots are fired at them from the cars, but being from pocket-pistols do very little execution, though many of the ducks are quite within range, and do not appear to be anywise alarmed by the noise of the train. They are so numerous, indeed, that one does not see very well how they could get away even if they were scared. Leaving lakes and ducks behind, the railway now passes into a scraggy country, where the wheels of the cars have a firmer ring, and where hoary cypresses stand in pools of water covered with miasmal moss, hanging like gigantic beards from every branch and twig, and giving to the melancholy trees most melancholy and weird-like shapes, with undergrowths of canebrake twenty feet high, and lowly palmettos growing in fan-like tufts along the shallow swamps. The species of orchis seen depending from the trees in all marshy places in the South, when

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gathered and skutched, is found to consist of a bright tough fibrej the finest imitation of horsehair ever seen, and now coming into use in upholstery.
At length the engine slows, the train-bell tolls, and the cars, as the familiar fashion of American railways is, pass through suburban streets, round markets and vast warehouses, and along the levee, amidst acres upon acres of sugar barrels and cotton bales on one hand and a forest of ships on the other, to the axis on which all the whirl of life in the city of New Orleans
revolves. Formerly the merchandise of New Orleans used to be piled on
the broad open levee, and probably did not come by much harm. The cotton bales, as soon as landed from the river boats, had to be drayed to the cotton yards and steam-presses, and were not moved again till the ships were ready to take them as cargo. The molasses, barming under a hot sun, probably suffered most. But of recent years a company has been incorporated, with com pulsory powers, to erect sheds, and place all produce intended to lie and be sold on the levee under cover, and has already exer cised its powers to a large extent, not without murmurs of dissatisfaction from the merchants, ill at ease under this innova tion on their ancient freedom and habitudes of business. The barrels of sugar and molasses newly landed on the levee have a tendency to be the first sold, and those in the sheds to become old stock; and, moreover, the shedding process adds to the charges on imports and exports, which have increased, are increasing, and,' if the prosperity of the port is to be regarded, must be diminished. It may be remarked, by way of dismissing a wide subject, that in the great burst of enterprise and temp tation to " grab" since the war in many parts of the South, powers of improvement have been seized and engineered through corrupt Legislatures by private companies, which are essentially public and municipal powers, and that a city corporation or river trust, carrying out the same in the public behoof, while imposing a new charge, would dissolve a host of discontents by reducing from the accruing profits either this or various other charges of a like kind. The Mississippi Hiver is here the largest commercial interest; and, on stepping down from the levee to have a straight look at the " Father of Waters "--the drainage of 3,000 miles of territory in length, not to speak of breadth--one sees that he is only a little broader than the Thames betwixt Westminster and Blackfriars, and really flows in a calm, slow, majestic current, as if he did not mean to overflow anybody or sweep anything away. But when one inquires the depth of the Mississippi at New Orleans, the answer is "160 feet!" New Orleans is built on one of the great loops of this enormous volume of water. It has the Mississippi in front, the Mississippi on both flanks, and lakes

-J

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[CH. xxvu.

or seas Pontchartrain and Maurepas. overhanging it in the rear. The builders have gone quite- methodically to work, and have erected streets behind streets across the segment of a circle along the river front--great marts of cotton, sugar, hides, tallow, oil, and groceries--and as rapidly as they have built behind, the Mississippi in its grand and silent way, without negro labour or charges of any kind, has been forming for them new land and sites in front. Streets which, no farther gone than thirty years ago, were No. 1 on the levee, are now No. 3 or 4, so busily has the Mississippi been working out the fortune of New Orleans, while New Orleans herself may not have been turning it all to the best account.
Shooting straight up from the levee into the loop is Canal Street --a broad, noble thoroughfare, with ample carriage ways and ban quettes for pedestrians on either side, and a dais in the middle, partly carpeted with grass, on which all the city cars have a common rendezvous--a street of fine stores and warerooms, where any stranger has a key at hand to all parts of New Orleans. At the corner of Canal Street, close on the levee, is the Custom House --an enormous pile of Maine granite, imposing, but somewhat out of character with the place--Custom House, Post-office, and Law Courts all in one, with a gaunt and vacant interior, art unfinished roof, and settling down under the weight of its granite blocks on its soft foundation. Even in the matter of colour, mottled grey and red, it is not in harmony with the light and aerial structures or the "floating castles " around it. The architecture of the Custom House seems a mistake at once of taste and finance. But there are many other grand buildings in New Orleans, which it is scarcely my province to describe. Branching off from one side of Canal Street are narrow but fine old streets, bearing royal French names of the ancient Bourbon era, with an air of Gallic tidiness about them, and all the choicer wares of France in their shops--the original town of New Orleans when Louisiana was a French possession, and still largely the French quarter of the city. On the other side are Magazin Street, where the latest literature is doubtless on sale; St. Charles Street, where the magnificent St. Charles Hotel is to be found; Carondelet Street, where large business is done in cotton and tobacco, and Shylock and Antonio meet together on the plain-stones to negotiate a great variety of loans; and Baronne Street farther on, where a Legislature of negroes and political adventurers, sitting in the Mechanics' Institution, are popularly supposed to be legislating in the most stupid fashion, and selling the community all round. In the same locality is the Medical College--an institution of a different kind--that, with all the stability and humanity of science, and the social fame of wise and skilled physicians whom Pro-Consul Butler, though he tried

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imprisonment, could no more shake from their orbits than he could blot out the stars, holds on its benign course amidst revolution and commercial convulsion, as if it were an angel from heaven sent down in infinite love and mercy to suffering man kind. The streets branching out from the " all-nations " side of Canal Street extend a long way across the loop, and at the end of every block have their busy and almost equally prominent intersections ; but owing to the old custom in Louisiana of takingpossession by " arpents " from the river front, as well as to the semicircular character of the river definition, it has been impos sible to give to New Orleans. the parallelogram formation so fondly cherished by the planners of American cities. Yet, by a gentle twist or curve, the " all-nations " streets of New Orleans do, witk a shock of the city cars affecting slightly the spinal curve of the passengers, get into new and long suburban avenues --named after the nine Muses, and other heathen goddesses to boot--rows of fine sweet timber dwellings, with verandahs and balconies, flower-plots, and tower-like cisterns, and sometimes a whole acre of white clover, with plum, peach, and fig-trees all round, where the family life of New Orleans blooms in no common quietness and natural splendour. These avenues--albeit New Orleans is much better paved in its business parts with broad dressed blocks a foot or eighteen inches square than the imperial city of New York, save, perhaps, on the levee, where after rain there is a curdled depth of ooze, in which Sambo and his mules are in momentary danger of losing themselves--stretch away into mere wilderness and swamp. But running across the head of the loop to Lake Pontchartrain, is the famous Shell Eoad, seven or eight miles long, straight as an arrow, hard as flint, and smooth as a backgammon board, along which the "bloods" of New Orleans drive their fine horses and buggies with marvellous celerity. Many quiet parties also take advantage of this splendid drive. The racecourses of New Orleans, where the fastest horses are put to their mettle twice a year, are on its side, and half-way houses invite a halt amidst the swamp on plots of sweet verdure, and under fragrant bowers, where a score or two of buggies are always hitched up, and cocktails and sherry-cobblers are dis pensed to thirsty souls secundum artem.
The weather in New Orleans, in the last days of January, is warm, bright, almost fiercely sunny ; but when the air is clear, and the heavens high, one basks in it with all the delight of contrast to some other parts of the world at the same time of the year. On the other hand, when the clouds, vapoury exhalations of sea and lake, gather over the city, the atmosphere becomes close and sultry, and one prays that the leaden heavens may crack, and that Sol, though it were in hottest anger, may show himself again. And, by and by, the prayer is heard--the rain
o

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[en.

falls in a plump, peals of .thunder roll along the sky, and sheets of blue lightning flash through the darkening air; but the sul triness does not abate yet a little while. One goes to bed amidst peals of thunder and heavy splashes of rain, and towards morning, dreaming of a railway train, is startled by a tremendous crash, as if the engine had exploded, and the rails, turning up on end, were tearing the cars into ribands. Throwing open the casement, the street is seen to be several feet deep in flood; the square slab-laid gutter on either side, that seemed large enough to admit a Liliputian flotilla into the city, is buried under the deluge, and a smooth canal-like surface of water overspreads the avenue from croup to croup. But the rain is falling more gently; the artillery of the heavens has discharged its last round; a current becomes perceptible to the eye, and it is evident the waters are flowing away somewhere; the sun breaks out, and in a few hours all the streets of the city are dry, clean, and sweet, and the solar rays falling with golden splendour on tower and spire, and lighting up the nooks and crannies of a crowded town, New Orleans becomes loveable again. The drainage of this curiously situated city flows back from the river towards the interior of the loop, where it is helped on by steam-pumps into the swamp--im perfect, but as good as can easily be devised. The deposition of moisture in the intervals of rain and sunshine is very heavy, covering the lobbies, staircases, and all the interiors with a clammy sweat as of oil. At the same time vegetation is endued with extraordinary force. The blooms of early fruit-trees unfold themselves with a motion almost visible. But in the gardens there is a curious worker in the dark. A crawfish raises a little tumulus, with a hole in the middle of it, that grows night after night, till in its spiral formation it becomes a small Tower of Babel; the cunning artificer of which, however, is unseen, retiring on its line of retreat to the depths beneath with masterly skill. 1 have put the question whether, under all the phenomena, New Orleans may not be a floating island; but this supposition is stoutly contested in argument, and only by force of humour, in geography no force at all, is an admission obtained that " New Orleans does mayhap swing a little! "
Sabbath morn, after the traffic and amusement of the week, nightly balls and operas, pleasant card-parties, and masked assemblies, dawns over New Orleans with sacred calm and serenity. Every place of business is closed, labour is suspended, and, save the quiet trot and jingle of the city cars conveying visitors from the centre to the circumference, and worshippers from the circumference to the churches and chapels in the centre --the Presbyterians, unmincing Calvinists, next to the Roman Catholics the most prominent--peace and quietness prevail. It is remarkable, considering the mixture of races and nation-

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alities, with their widely different up-bringing and temperament, how becomingly, and with what mutual esteem and respect, all creeds and denominations here proceed on the Sabbath-day to worship God in their own forms, and to sit devoutly under their own vines and fig-trees. The Scotch Presbyterian can observe the Sabbath as calmly and undisturbedly in New Orleans as in his native glen; and were it possible, setting aside all scep tical " gallimaufry " on the one hand and all austere mechanical formality on the other, to enter fully into the Divine idea of the day " made for man," what a sublime rest--what a refreshing and composing draught from the fountains of Eternal Truth and Knowledge--would it be to all bodies politic!

o2

CHAPTEE XXVIII.
Population of New Orleans.--Natural Resources.--Eevival of Business since the War.--Cotton.--Sugar.--Tobacco.--Kice and Grain.--Financial Disability.--Disproportion, of Imports to Exports.--Great Decline of Imports of Coffee and Internal Trade.
[NEW ORLEANS.--Jan. 25 to Felt. 14]
NEW OKLEANS, when one has seen round it all, is a large city, large not only as it is, but large also because it might be so much larger. The population, according to the census, in which no one here or elsewhere implicitly believes--such is the chasm betwixt public confidence and the simplest acts of adminis tration--is 140,920 white, and 50,499 black and coloured per sons. But I am informed by a statist of some authority that 40,000 or 50,000 may be added to this result of a lackadaisical enumeration with some confidence. The number of voters polled in New Orleans in great election times is within a few hundreds of 40,000, and since the adult males can hardly be more than one in five or six, New Orleans on that criterion may be taken as having, in round numbers, a quarter of a million of inhabitants. Yet it is not extent of population that strikes attention so much here as the great compass of rich territory, with rare and varied resources of production, and the easy and abounding means of transit by an extraordinary combination of navigable rivers, seas, and lakes.
The late war fell with as severe a blight on New Orleans as on other parts of the South. Though the early occupation of the city by the Federal forces saved it, as well as Louisiana, from much of the mere powder-and-shot devastation of war, that in the case of a more obstinate defence, simply impossible, might have fallen upon it; and though General Butler, while busying himself in domiciliary visits to the houses of planters and other wealthy " rebels '' with no strictly pure intent, employed the negroes, clamorous for food, in making a branch way to the Shell Hoad and cutting one more canal through the city, with sanitary results which, however largely reported and believed in the North, must be accepted cum grano salis on the spot: yet the normal life of New Orleans was as completely suspended as if its throat had been cut; its most vigorous men were drafted a

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thousand miles away into the Confederate Army; little or no cotton was brought to market, and the cultivation of the sugarcane was almost totally abandoned; mercantile capital and bank and insurance stock were consumed as in a furnace; and much of the solid house property, worthless for the time, rotted where it stood, aiid passed like furze under the harrows of a general destruction and decay. It must ever be a wonder how rapidly New Orleans, after this terrible ordeal, 'has become what she is now.
The rapid re-establishment of business in. New Orleans is in no branch more marked than in cotton, and to understand the full significance of this fact it "must be borne in mind that New Orleans is a. full geographical degree south of the Cotton Belt, and that little, cotton is grown within a hundred miles of the Crescent City. But in virtue of its commanding situation on the Mississippi and its tributaries, flowing through the richest lands, penetrating east and west to every cultivated field up to the northern limits of the cotton region, and yet so near the mouth of the great river as to give rapid export to the Gulf and the Atlantic, New Orleans has been enabled, in face of intersecting lines of railroads giving power and reach to other markets, and rendering this magnificent water-communication, as might be supposed, of less and less account, to become again the mart of about one-third of all the cotton grown in the United States. The export of cotton from New Orleans in 1860-61 reached the enormous total of 1,915,852 bales, which was somewhat ex ceptional, but still showing, when a large crop comes, where its overflowing is sure to be. As soon as the war closed, the accus tomed pre-eminence of New Orleans began to appear. Her export of cotton in 1865-6 was 768,545, and last year (1869-70) it increased to 1,185,050 bales, of which half a million went to Liverpool, a quarter of a million to Havre, 115,000 to New York, 53,000 to Boston, and 70,000 to Bremen, with smaller quantities to nearly every manufacturing centre from St. Peters burg to Vera Cruz. This year already, with only one-haif the season gone, 850,000 bales of cotton have been landed on the levee. The great flow of cotton New Orleans-ward has all the more probability of continuing, seeing that the tendency of in creased cultivation is to shift from the East to the West, bringing the bulk of the product more and more upon the Mississippi and the Western rivers, by which its transport to New Orleans is so natural and easy. The finer and longer stapled cotton grown in Mississippi and Louisiana has naturally made New Orleans a special market for this description, and the classification here has hitherto not only been very minute, but always a grade or two above the cotton bearing similar titles in Liverpool. The general deterioration of quality, however, since the war, remarked else-

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[CH. xxvin.

where, is also complained of here; and orders from Continental spinners for New Orleans "middling" and upwards can with difficulty be filled this season. The relaxed control of labour under negro emancipation, consequent slovenly cultivation and
untimely picking, and the large number of sporadic growers with no permanent interest in their farms or even in cotton-growing as a life-industry, are no doubt the chief causes of a downward tendency of quality, under which " ordinary" becomes but the "low ordinary" of former times, and the highest grades are more and more scarce. The general belief is that the best-con ditioned cotton, both upland and bottom land, is grown by small white farmers who plant a few acres as a mere element in their general system of husbandry, and cultivate and pick the crop with the labour chiefly of their own families. The change
passing over the cotton-planting industry affords a fair oppor tunity for adopting a common standard of quality, and making the Liverpool classification, with probably some little extension
at either end, the general rule, whereby all purposes would be met, and transactions be greatly simplified and assured. A new Cotton Exchange Board, being organized in New Orleans, may aid in introducing this and other desirable improvements in the system of dealing. The merchants and cotton-factors of New
Orleans, on resuming business after the war, adopted the old system of making advances to cotton planters at a great distance from their centre; but, under the serious difficulties of disor ganized labour and want of capital, did not find such a policy to answer, and a new class of houses are springing up, mostly Jews, who, by establishing stores in the little towns near the planta tions, are becoming middlemen through whose hands the cotton passes from the growers into the market of New Orleans, and whose conditions of advance are almost necessarily marked by a degree of rigour that was unknown in former times, and that will probably grind and impoverish the mass of poorer culti vators, white and black, for a long period to come.
While New Orleans is thus holding its old place so well in cotton, it is very striking that in sugar, the chief staple of Louisiana, the leeway of the war should be very slowly and
feebly recovered. The exports of sugar and molasses from New Orleans do not affoid any criterion of general progress as in the case of cotton, because the sugar of Louisiana goes chiefly into
domestic consumption, not in New Orleans and Louisiana alone, but by " up-river " traffic in all parts of the West where New
Orleans has natural and indisputable commercial relations. The
consumption of sugar in other parts of the United States is supplied by the raw sugars of Cuba and the West Indies, brought into New York and other Northern and Eastern ports
io be refined, and thence distributed to all parts of the Union,

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the -Western field, of Louisiana included. The exports of sugar and molasses from New Orleans are thus only such fragments of the native product as, in the eccentricity of commerce, find their way into the Atlantic seaports, and are not suggestive of any general: result beyond the fact that they are there saleable, and take a place beside the sugars of the Northern refineries. In 1866-7 there were thus exported 2,529 hhds. and 2,199 barrels of sugar, and 21,893 barrels of molasses; and, in 1869-70. 1,805 hhds. and 4,094 barrels of sugar, and 42,212 barrels of molasses. But from a report, published here with the acceptance of the trade,,1 I am enabled to give the following results, which let one see down to the roots of sugar production in Louisiana before and since the war. The produce of sugar in 1861-2 under the "old process " of open kettles was 389,264 hhds., and under the " refining and clarifying " process, 70,146 hhds.--or in all, 528,321,500 Ibs. In 1869-70, the produce of sugar under "old process" was 73,471 hhds., and of "refined and clarified" 13,619 hhds.--or in all, only 99,452,946 Ibs. So that while the production of cotton in the Southern States has in five years about reached the level it had attained under slave labour before the war, the production of sugar is still barely one-fifth what it was in 1861-2, and had almost been, with some fluctuations, several years before. The contrast is so remarkable, and so clearly not to be accounted for by any " free labour difficulty," as to indicate some special obstacles affecting this branch of pro duction in Louisiana, and requiring to be carefully investigated.
The tobacco market in JSIew Orleans, though with more ap parent reason, also recovers But slowly the position it held before the war. The receipts of tobacco at this port in 1859-60 were 80,955 hhds. In 1867-8 they had, from almost total disappear ance during the war, risen only to 15,304 hhds.; in 1868-9 they increased to 28,026 hhds.; and they again fell in 1869-70'to 19,093 hhds. The receipts and exports of tobacco at New Orleans remain lower than, with the exception of the war years, they have been at any period for half a century. The merchants of New York, by pushing their capital among the Western growers when New Orleans was closed by the blockade, obtained an ascendency which they continue to hold with tenacity; and Louisville, profiting by the same state of things, has become one of the greatest tobacco markets in the United States. But the merchants of New Orleans are giving due attention to this ancient branch of the trade of the city; the official inspections are conducted with great efficiency; and there is much confidence that by a good regular market and reduced charges New Orleans will win back, in course of time, a great portion of this almost lost traffic. The tobacco of New Orleans is drawn chiefly from
1 " Statement of Sugar and Rice Crops," "by L. Bouchereau.

200

NEW ORLEANS). '

[OH. xxvin.

Kentucky, Missouri, Illinois, and Tennessee. Very little is said of Louisianian tobacco; and the production of the State, I imagine, must be very limited. But the soil of Louisiana yields prime tobacco, and any keen smoker who has had a course of the " hay and stubble " of the inland towns of the South relishes with almost Elysian fervour the " perique " of New Orleans, so fine in flavour, and yet so strong in all genuine properties. There can be no doubt that were tobacco steadily cultivated in Louis iana, the trade of New Orleans in this commodity would take all the sooner a fresh start, and that the native product would come to be in large demand for export, more especially to Eng land and Scotland, where there are no Government monopolies^ and where people who smoke like to get, with as little circum locution as possible, at the Nicotine in its best and highest form.
Eice is a rapidly increasing product in Louisiana since the close of the war, and is declared in fifteen parishes, where it is now successfully cultivated as well as prepared in first-class mills, to have reached during the past year 100,748 barrels of 200 Ibs. The receipts of flour at New Orleans are very large, amounting in 1869-70 to 1,641,477 barrels, of which 556,823 barrels were exported; but the efforts made during the last two or three years, including the erection of a patent elevator after the style of Chicago, and forming a prominent architectural feature on the levee, to divert some of the many millions of bushels of wheat of the North-West, destined for Liverpool and other British ports, by the southern, river route to the seaboard, have so far been attended with only partial success. The exports of wheat during the past season were under half a million of bushels.
. It is obvious that whether in recovering trade lost or diverted by the war, or in conquering a share of new trade that may be more naturally and economically directed from this point than from anywhere else, New Orleans must labour under great dis advantages from the destruction which passed over its mercantile and banking capital in the disastrous years from 1860 to 1865 ; and this fact meets one at every turn in the survey of the com mercial situation. Where New York, travelling out of its sphere, supplanted New Orleans by large and free capital, and by naval and military power during the war, the " Imperial City," of course, continues to hold the new relations thus established by force of its superior monetary resources, and by a pressure on canals and railways, carried to the last degree of stringency, nay even to theft,1 in pursuance of purely local interests, and in disregard of the only patriotic idea, viz. an equally developed and perfectly harmonized Union ; and if New Orleans, by strain ing her utmost means, can with difficulty and but partially recover lost ground, with how much greater difficulty, or where-
1 Erie Railway,

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withal, shall she lie able to take her proper share of the new sources of wealth and commerce always being developed ? The prosperity of New Orleans, so far, consists in the handling of the raw products, commanding world-wide markets, of extended and fertile regions of which she is the natural and unavoidable em porium ; and, more than likely, it is only because the great demand for cotton is outside the United States, where the com mercial interests are. rich and strong enough to operate, without any roundabout, in all the chief centres of supply, that the Crescent City-has been so rapidly reinstated in this branch of commerce. Wherever the Northern cities successfully took up the trade of New Orleans during the war, they have continued more or less to prevail; and from the start thus made are the better able, with their conserved capital and profits, to make fresh incursions and conquests even now when New Orleans is again free and at work, but with greatly dilapidated resources. The magnitude of business here is seen only in the export of domestic products : in the import of foreign commodities, whether for domestic consumption or for re-export, as well as in all branches of manufacture, or partial manufacture, for which New Orleans has any peculiar advantage, it dwindles into marked disproportion. The value of domestic products exported from New Orleans to foreign countries last fiscal year was 107,658,042 dollars; but the value of merchandise imported from foreign countries was only 14,992,754 dollars. The duties collected on foreign mer chandise in the same year amounted to 5,441,825 dollars, con siderably more than a third of the value of the goods, showing the severity with which the tariff of the United States represses all reciprocal exchange. The great bulk of the Customs duties of the United States is collected in the modest building in Wall Street of New York. The imposing Maine granite Custom House of New Orleans must have been designed when different ideas and interests prevailed, and when New Orleans was both presently and prospectively one of the chief sources of this branch of revenue, which, no doubt, under a wise polity, she might still become. As it is, New Orleans cannot be supposed to supply direct the extensive countries from which she draws her immense quantities of cotton, sugar and molasses, hides, and other raw products, with more than a tithe of the foreign mer chandise they consume, of which she is the.proper and most economical port of entry. A considerable proportion of her limited imports consists of commodities which must be almost reckoned exceptional. Looking over a list, in the office of the British Consul, of vessels entered, about one in every four or five was a vessel from Cardiff or some other port in Wales with English rails, rendered necessary by the great pressure of railway projects; and a still larger proportion in ballast. Steamers and

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[CH. xxvm.

sailing ships, after discharging their foreign cargoes in New York, come round here for cotton in ballast--an incumbrance which, in some phases of the market, might present itself to American protectionists as a little spoiling of the Egyptians in Lancashire, but which in the meantime can only be an aggra vation of the withering effects of present prices on the Southern planters and negroes. The foreign commodities re-exported from New Orleans, amounting in 1869-70 to only 446,418 dollars value, exhibit as strongly as anything else at once the maimed condition of trade and the great opportunities which under better auspices might present themselves. The immediate proximity of this Southern port to Cuba, Mexico, and Brazil gives it peculiar facilities for an intermediary traffic betwixt these coun tries and Europe ; while of their staples--sugar, coffee, and other produce--it is the pre-eminently qualified entrepot for all the southern and western regions of the United States. Yet in this lucrative field .New Orleans has lost ground. In the ten years before the war she imported 3,293,881 bags of coffee--a full third of all the coffee imported into the United States ; whereas in the four years after the war she imported only 444,115 bags, or less than one-tenth of the total import of coffee into the Union. While of the sugar of Cuba alone New York imported last year 219,713 tons, New Orleans appears to have taken of Cuban sugar and molasses only 58,195 boxes, barrels, and hogsheads, and from other places than Cuba her imports of sugar and molasses were insignificant. Beyond the native pro duct of Louisiana, New Orleans supplies or refines little sugar for any part of the country. The immense trade in foreign sugar and molasses in the United States--about six or seven times more than the home product--has gone round to New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Boston, and other north-eastern ports. The volume of New Orleans trade with the interior, north and up-river to the west, is no doubt, apart from foreign commodities, immense. Yet even here the weak side of the Crescent City appears ; for in all the return traffic of dry goods, hardware, boots, and other articles of consumption, the merchants of St. Louis and Louisville, strong in purse and enterprise from the safety which covered them during the war, are making their hand largely felt, putting steamboats of their own on the Missis sippi, and not only passing over Memphis and trading up the Arkansas and Red Rivers, but shooting over the head of New Orleans itself hundreds of miles into Texas, and selling to the furthest south-western limits of the Union not only American manufactures, but foreign goods imported at New York, and thence passed with cumulating profits through many hands, which could be quite as conveniently laid down on the levees of the Mississippi as on the shores of the Hudson, and hence dis-

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tributed to the consumers with much less cost and trouble.
There does not appear to be any want of perception of this, or of the necessary energy and determination to correct it, among the merchants and business people of New Orleans. It is to be
ascribed mainly to the laming effects of the war upon this as upon other Southern seaports, and to a South-destroying system of import duties ; and the tendency, however slow, must be for it to pass away. The natural laws of trade, superior to temporary misfortune and even to fiscal impolicy, will in course of time assert their power; the products of human industry will find their best channels of inlet and outlet; and while this happy consummation may be brought about more rapidly by wise and impartial legislation in the United States, it cannot fail to receive an impulse also from the general attention and observation of the
mercantile world.

CHAPTER. XXIX.
Grievances.--Review of the Tariff--its baneful Effects on the Producing Classes.--Deficiency of Mercantile and Banking Capital.--The " National ' Bants."--Severity of Taxation.--Importance of a Revision of the Fiscal System of the United States.
[NEW ORLEANS.--Jan. 25 to Feb. 14.]
THEEE are various grievances, affecting deeply the commercial prosperity of the Southern States, and brought into striking prominence in New Orleans, which it may be well, before going out into the country among the sugar plantations, to refer to as concisely as so extensive a subject admits. Remarks on this head may be conveniently arranged under Tariff, Deficiency of Capital, and Excessive Taxation with Misgovernment, an " illmatched pair " of which the evils are noisome and prolific.
The Tariff. of the .United States,, always more or less pro tectionist, has, under the financial exigencies entailed by the war, attained, a prohibitory and vexatious rigour which is without parallel, and gives the United States the .curious distinction of being--China or Japan scarce excepted--the most anti-com mercial country in the world. It is strange that a great people, fallingTTerFTrom its British stock "to all the ages "--carrying forward year by year its great destiny by large accessions of European capital and labour, and called as it were by Providence to solve on a new and splendid field many knotty problems of human government and polity--should put forth in its Acts of Congress this intense hostility to commerce, which is not only its own soul and vital spark, in the most natural sense, but among material forces operating on the progress of humanity is now generally recognised as the most pervading, transforming, and benignly moral and social of all. There was a period in the history of the American Republic--when its foot was newly on the ice--when its " Declaration, of Independence" sounded almost in its own ears as a kind of treason, and when the resolution to live within itself, to cover the workmen and manufacturers who came through much difficulty to its shores with all manner of protection, was not unjustified in reason, and was fortified by precedent in practice; but now, when it is

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great; when itL hasjiot^eyen a. supposed enemy in the. world; when the inventions in arts and mechanism, the science and literature, and the surplus capital and labour of Europe are at its command; when the Atlantic itself has been bridged by the ocean ships of the " foreigner," skilled and ingenious artisans abound in its territories, and great cities and rural farms hare grown up over the vast continent to vie with those of any part of the world, this tariff-enmity to reciprocity of trade--this narrow, exclusive, and self-degrading war of the American Eepublic against foreign commodities, seems, in the light of economical science shining so brightly everywhere else, to obscure and dwarf its otherwise resplendent greatness. It is impossible; in the nature of things, that such rooted infidelity to one of the first principles of modern progress should not inflict its own punishment; and the result is seen in the gradual withering of all commercial enterprises in the United States save that of spreading European immigrants over vast spaces of wilderness, where hopes of distant independence are, alas! too often buried under a load of social discomforts and infinite per sonal regrets. The_guestion of free trade is here, as all the world over, the interest "of tEe consumer, who is everybody, against the interest of knots and _" rings." .of monopolists who, despite their questionable gains and law-made importance, are in reality nobody. But Congress, in its Tariff Acts, has, with considerable ingenuity, supported the notion that its fiscal intentions cover a really substantial groundwork of American prosperity.
The Tariff of the United States is arranged alphabetically, and is nearly as large as a Johnson's or a Walker's Dictionary. Commencing with A and the "Acetates," one finds that the United States have a solid antipathy to chemicals, weighing from 20 to 150 cents per lb., and extending, on turning over the pages, to Z and the "Valerianate of Zinc" which is strange enough, considering the great need in this country, in all its nascent manufactures, for the elaborate scientific products of older and wealthier lands ; but what is almost as strange, there is one exception to this universal proscription of chemicals, and " arsenic" --arsenic of all things--is declared free, surely an ominous exemption, and typical, were one to go no further, of the poisonous and suicidal properties of the whole document. Yet there is one feature of the Tariff which cannot but strike any student who looks into it--a feature, however, not peculiar to the South, but equally marked in the West, and indeed over nine-tenths of the whole American soil--and that is, that, with a single exception to be mentioned presently, there is no interest of any account in the South which enjoys its so-called protection, while it robs and maims all interests in the South, giving every

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Southern man a direct blow in the face under the several letters of the alphabet, and falling in its totality from A to Z like a sledge-hammer on the whole Southern region, with a cruelty of oppression enough to " raise the stones to mutiny " among any people less loyally American than the Southern people appear to have aways been. The same unjust and one-sided legislation tried, say on Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, would in twentyfour hours convert these hives of Northern patriots into nests of rebels, ready to break up the Union and the Universe rather than submit. It was only lately that cotton was exempted from an internal tax of three cents per lb., without precedent even in the United States, and inflicted at a crisis when the planta tions were in a state of desolation, without fences or stock, and when the planters, rich and poor, were harried and impoverished by the war. But taking the Tariff as it stands now in all its relations to the South, what does it show? A closely manipu lated system of Custom duties, repressing trade and industry and the development of capital--the sources of all revenue--over the entire South and West, in order that " rings " of people in the Northern towns, inflated by indefinite ideas of American fertility, may extort from the industry of the fields a thousand fold more than passes into the Federal treasury. Second letter of the alphabet, for example, boots and shoes, the last things which makers think of exporting anywhere, 35 per cent, of duty. Leather, for the protection of which there is no excuse--the United States having more than enough of the best hides and skins in the world, with hundreds of thousands of acres of oak woods, which rise and fall without being of use to their owners --35 per cent. On blankets there is not only the usual 35 per cent, ad valorem, but from 20 to 50 cents per lb. in addition, for which monstrous aggravation there is no dis coverable reason. The wool and goat-hair business, raw and manufactured, in the United States has fallen into deep per plexity from sheer excess of protectionist stupefaction; for the wool-growers, seeing that the woollen manufacturers were so profusely protected, petitioned to have a share of the plunder, and were at once gratified with duties on foreign wool of 11 per cent, ad valorem, and 10 cents per lb. in access, with special provisions that wool of sheep, alpaca, or any other like animal, when mixed with " dirt or any other foreign substance,"--all dirt of any kind being legislatively pronounced "foreign,"--be sub jected to twice the amount of duty otherwise exigible. It does not seem to occur to the legislative wisdom of this Kepublic that when " dirt," foreign or domestic, is mixed with any commodity, the dealers on the spot are infinitely surer detectors and punishers of the same than any number of Solons, with probably little commercial experience, can pretend by any general enactment to

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be. Tlie result of the double attempt to protect the woolgrowers and the woollen manufacturers has been to reduce both to discomfort, for the wools of Buenos Ayres, Australia, and New Zealand being placed under embargo and forced to seek a more free and open market, foreign woollens are cheaper than ever, the woollen manufacturers are in a state of distraction, and the wool-growers do not find even so good a market as they had before.1 Passing from B and blankets to C and cottons, one is thrown into a thicket of details hard to understand. Cotton wool itself, to begin with, is declared " free," for which the poor ryots of India and fellahs of -Egypt are doubtless thank ful. But on cottons, when unbleached, with large exceptions there are five cents per yard, when bleached with ditto five-anda-half cents, and when coloured or printed, with ditto again, fiveand-a-half cents, and 10 per cent, ad valorem thrown in as a crusher ; and so this Holy Inquisition against the freedom of commercial exchange goes, every new turn of the screw racking the joints of South and West to the very marrow, till at length at 7-J- cents per yard, and 30 cents per lb., and 20 to 35 cents ad valorem, the poor, hateful, and worthless thing called "cotton trade " may be supposed to die, or to fly to other realms where, if it do not happen to receive more friendly treatment, one-half of the United States to-morrow may not be worth the price of an old song. After this, D and "Dowlas," E and "Essences," F and " Feather Beds," G and " Glass Bottles," H and " Hats," I and " Inkstands," &o. &c., are an utter weariness of the flesh. But, to be short, and passing over the duties on iron manufactures, which no iron manufacturer probably in the world would trouble his head in attempting to folio w, suffice to say that all linen, muslin, paper, shawl, silk, and woollen goods are under import duties in the United States of from 35 to 100 or more per cent. That European manufacturers should dream of studying the needs, tastes, and fashions of a market so baiTed against them is one of the passing popular delusions which help to countenance and support all the monstrous enactments of the tariff. The matchless fabrics of Glasgow, Belfast, and Bradford, and the silks and broadcloths of England and France, are seen in some of the great warehouses here, but save at second-hand and in clothes actually made in London, Paris, and New York, they make but a small figure in the vast trade of the place. It is one of the incidents of high Customs duties that they not only dis courage all enterprise and ingenuity on the part of the foreign producer as regards any special market, but burden the foreign product itself in the first exchange with double the amount of the

1 See Fourth Eeport of Mr. Wells, late United States Commissioner on Bevenue,

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impost. I have it on good authority that dry goods, not much proscribed beyond the "constitutional" 35 per cent, duty, are seldom cleared at New Orleans under 70 to 80 per cent, duty and charges. Then, there are the profits of jobbers and retailers before the goods get to the consumers, which are not only rated, of course, on the duty and charges paid as well as the value, but are often carried much beyond any fair or reasonable line. The Federal law having set the example of proscribing foreign goods, and rendering them as difficult to get as possible, the retailers, when they have them in their stores, are tempted to do like wise, to fondle them as precious rarities, and make a great thing out of them. The foreign liquor trade, which I mention because it is supposed to be overdone, is an example of the enormous cost thus heaped on the consumer--the price per bottle being usually about what a gallon might be sold for, duty paid, with fair profit to all parties--to the end only of stimulating the worst practices of domestic distillers and " rectifiers," whose frauds and trickeries give the Inland Revenue department and Congress a world of trouble, without any correction of the pitiable evils, personal and social, arising from a profuse distribution of the most dele terious drugs. The robbery of consumers in mere dollars under this system, extended alphabetically through the whole sphere of commerce, is manifest though incalculable. 1'oreign goods cannot be excluded in this quick and lively community of SaxonCeltic people, and if they could be more effectually excluded than they are, the internal evils would only be so much the greater. The earthenware of Britain and France is imported direct into ISew Orleans and other Southern seaports, though subject to duties, from "brown and common" to "white and cream-coloured," of from 25 to 40 per cent European fabrics and tissues of clothIng and dress find a market whatever their price may be. But while the trade of the South in foreign goods is reduced to the veriest minimum, the robbery does not end with the actual consumption of these forbidden wares, but is carried on through every article of domestic manufacture which any one here, however rich or poor, may need, from an anchor to a needle, from a plough to a paletot; and the people who have to sell their products abroad become the down-trodden thralls and slaves of those who sell theirs at home. All owners and cultivators of the soil, all who hope to live by their own fair means and industry in these Southern parts, are literally mobbed by Tariff Acts of Congress, knocked down in every purchase they make by Federal "knuckle-dusters," fleeced when down of every cent in their pockets, and when sprawling up again are told to " G' long for rebels, or it will be much worse for them!" People in Europe, when they consider all this, will begin to perceive how it is that

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the .present prices of cotton, which seem to them so handsome, are here simply ruinous, and that to grow wheat, cotton, tobacco, ramie, or any other vegetable thing conceivable for export on this virgin and sun-brightened soil of America, with any profit or satisfaetion to the grower, is becoming a most doubtful issue. As for New Orleans itself, the operation of the Tariff can only be likened to a stroke of paralysis, smiting down through the whole half of the organic frame from the brain to the big-toe, and leaving both sides, whole and smitten, in an almost indistinguishable state of peculiar disability. How the great town wags on in this paralysis, sunning itself all the while under the bright Louisianian skies, with no end of cotton and molasses, is quite wonderful to any observer of nature. But there is one interest in the South as already hinted, which enjoys a full breeze of .Tariff Pro tection. The sugar of Louisiana has an advantage of two to four cents per Ib. oveFalT^CTuBan and other foreign raw sugars; but as if to point conclusively the argument__of_^Free-trade versus Protection ^TrTTfhe^tJniTed States, the__sugar-growing interest in Louisianais._the_ only interest in the South fhat has made little or no headway since the close of the war, and would seem now, like other much more heavily " protected interests," to require almost boundless public largess to keep afloat in this charfless sea. The United States have had, since the war, to levy annually immense sums of money, but it is bad policy in the name of public revenue to extirpate root and branch the sources of private revenue, and, a large Customs revenue being indispen sable, the only just and wise course is to select a few general branches of indirect taxation falling equally on all parts of the community, without affording any section of the country or class of citizens an opportunity of plundering the rest, as under the progress of economic knowledge has been and is being done in other parts of the world. Great Britain, while purging her tariff of the last dregs of monopoly and protection, lias never seen her Customs revenue declining, but, on the contrary, flourishing more and more every year.
The deficiency of capital in New Orleans for the commercial demands and resources of the port can only be referred to with a certain reserve; and it must be remarked, both in justice to the relative merits of the case and in legitimate reduction of a too inflated idea abroad as to what Northern capital and enter prise may now be expected to do in the South, that deficiency of capital is written over all parts of the Union as well as the South, and that, save in some few localities where a long course of almost fanatical Protectionist policy has developed an outlay of hard money and entailed a perennial public sacrifice disproportioned to their natural value, there is scarcely any section of this immense continent in which
p

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land, labour, and productive resource are not greatly in excess of the capital necessary to employ and cultivate them. There has never been any great country so hostile in its commercial legislation to other countries, while so dependent on other countries for its most essential means of progress, as the United States. But in the South, so lately desolated by war, the deficiency of capital is more marked than elsewhere. The British and other European houses that Seal'in exchange, bring great resources to bear on moving the cotton crop. The effective purchasing power at the other end overcomes all obstacles to its purpose. Yet it is observable that from September to January, when this movement is at its height, the pressure for funds is usually severe, and in the course of the present season, aggravated somewhat probably by the war in Europe, as much as two per cent, per month has been paid on good mercantile paper. It appears from an official Bank statement just published that there are eleven banking companies in operation in New Orleans, of which the total paid-up capital is 7,497,182 dollars, or about a million and a half sterling; and the total deposits 15,039,499 dollars, or three millions sterling. The banks of New Orleans are constituted on different foundations, some, like the Citizens' and Canal Banks, being of old corporate standing, and others being of more recent formation under the u free banking law," or as "national banks " under the Federal banking polity since the war. But their mode of business is much the same. Save some small portions of old outlying notes, amounting in all to little more than 200,000 dollars, they have no "circulation" of their own, and use wholly greenback or national currency, which has come, from its uniformity and stability, and in contrast with the multiform and sometimes worthless currencies of past times, to enjoy great public confidence and to be much liked, so that it may really be regarded as a particular advantage accruing to the United States from a great national debt. The banks in New Orleans all observe the rule of retaining a reserve in " specie and current funds," equal at lowest to one-third of their liabilities. Thus, while the total "movement" liabilities shown in this statement are 17,598,035 dollars, the "specie and current funds " in hand are 6,807,978; but, if the capital of the banks were added to the liabilities, the reserve would be as 7 to 24. The total liabilities, exclusive of capital, are 17,597,935 dollars, and the total assets 26,944,732 dollars, giving, with the capital of 7,497,182 superadded to the liabilities, a clear surplus of 1,849,615 dollars. But this surplus is very unequally dis tributed. The old institutions represented by the Citizens' and the Canal Banks have 815,523 dollars of it, the remaining million being divided among the other nine--the Bank of America, which enjoys the largest run of business and popu-

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larity, and pays the largest dividends, sailing closer to the wind - apparently than any of them, its total liabilities with capital being 4,055,857 dollars, and its total assets 4,066,617 dollars. There is no interest paid on deposits, and until banking institutions and society in all its parts attain a more firm consolidation, this stimulus to the economisation of monetary resources by the general community, urban and rural, in the United States is only tentatively practicable. But it appears in the aggregate that a banking company in Sew Orleans can always calculate on deposits without interest equal to double the amount of its capital. Banking is consequently very profitable, without having more than, or probably even as much as the ordinary risks of banking transactions in other parts of the world. The Citizens' Bank divides 16 per cent, the Bank of New Orleans 15,' the Southern Bank 9, the Bank of America 30 per cent, per annum. The Bank of America, with a capital of half a million some odd dollars, has three millions and a half of deposits without interest, which are the source of its extraordinary profits. The Germania " National " Bank, the most prosperous of that class, divides 20 per cent, per annum. " National" banks, based on a small capital, are increasing in New Orleans; but though enjoying much privilege in the legalised deposit of Federal bonds for currency, with running interest to the bank from the bonds, and capable of very profitable management, are yet, as the creations of public privilege, so subject to the political discussions and dissensions of the Eepublic, to constant change of conditions by Congress or by the Secretary of the Treasury alone, and to sweeping Federal control, that they cannot be said to be anywise popular among men of business. One of the first of the " national" banks instituted in Louisiana, having fallen under mismanagement, was seized by the Federal authority for some security of its own and forcibly wound up, with great loss to the creditors, under a state of the bank's affairs which is declared to have shown assets sufficient for all its liabilities. This event has tended to swell the deeper currents of objection to " national" banks, and it is more than doubtful whether any companies under this form of constitution can overtake the vacant ground in any great place like New Orleans.
The halcyon days of light taxation have gone from this country, possibly not soon to return. Taxation in the United States is now, after, the -great, wax, .necessarily heavy,.while unnecessarily excruciating. Here in New Orleans, where tariff legislation
represses every mercantile faculty, and prevents capital, so deficient, from multiplying, one feels this deeply. Against the Federal revenue there is no use to protest, save in the one cardinal point of how most lightly and equally to raise it--a branch of study heretofore happily not needing in the United
p2

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States to be ranch studied--but behind Federal revenue there are State revenue and City revenue, Alp on Alp, with confidence in the taxing power of State and City sinking almost to zero. State and City taxes in the South have been mounting up, since the war, to an altitude only short of that of the Federal taxes, with little or no power on the part of the taxpayers to help themselves and with, loud complaints of stealing and corruption that are in the main wholesome, since they show that the spirit of liberty and self-government are by no means dead in this country. The total infliction is without doubt very severe. Take a mer chant or manufacturer in New Orleans, with a capital (say) of 10,000 dollars, a hous? worth 6,000, and furniture worth 2,000 dollars. In the first place he pays a licence duty to the State, for the mere liberty to pursue his avocation, of 100 dollars ; and another licence duty to the City, varying somewhat, but still to him 100 dollars. If selling spirituous liquors be any part of his business, he must pay another 100 dollars of licence duty to the Federal Government, and if he be one who professes to be a " rectifier," very few can have any bowels left for him at this point of the screw. But he pays, besides, direct taxes on his capital in business, on the value of his house, and on his furniture and personal effects of every kind, minus 500 dollars--in all to the amount of 4-f per cent. At the same rate he is taxed on money outside his business, if he have any, at interest, or in ships or sailing craft, or railway and other stocks. When all his means and substance have thus been taxed, a demand is made upon him for 2-|- per cent, to -the United States on his income from all sources, and he must thus part with a portion of his stock and of its annual produce at the same time. There are also stamp duties on bills and promissory notes of 5 cents per 100 dollars, on cheques 2 cents each irrespective of amount, and on deeds and instruments of every kind. His consumption of dutiable goods also .pours heavy sums every hour of the day into the various treasuries. Assuming his profits of trade to be 6,000 dollars, which is supposing him to be very prosperous, he will have paid during the year in direct taxes alone at least 1,500 dollars if he make an honest return. If he is not so prosperous, if his profits be little or nothing at all, his capital will have been shorn and cut down by the inexorable shears of taxation on means and substance. Any rapid increase of capital among the citizens of New Orleans is thus unpromising ; for many of the most fortu nate are glad to remove as soon as possible to some clime where they will run the risk of being taxed to death no more. There is a practice in the United States of assessing real estate on its capi tal value instead of its annual rental, which has some unfavourable consequences, discouraging extensions and improvements of house property, and keeping many of the streets where a large traffic

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isv carried on in an inconvenient and semi-dilapidated condition. Owners of house property are more averse to enter into the im provements needed by the occupiers when their assessment on capital is sure to be increased pro rata by the whole cost of the improvement than they would be were taxation confined to the increased rent al, and shared with them equally by the occupiers. The result is that the owners are apt to stipulate for an increase of rent so disproportion ed to the capital outlay as to stagger the occupiers, and prevent the desired operations.
The facts I have stated are enough to show that Taxation, without dwelling on the Misgovernment which is declared by so many witnesses to be its only return, is indeed severe and ex hausting, and that the whole fiscal polity of the United States will have to be carefully revised and adjusted if New Orleans is to rise to the level of her great commercial position, if her cap tivity is to pass away "like streams of water in the South," and, going forth with precious seed, she is to return with sheares in harvest joy and gladness.

CHAPTER XXX.
Trip in the Bradish Johnson down Eiver.--The Sugar Plantations.--Biver Traffic.--Passengers.--The Scenery.
[NEW ORLEANS. -- Jan. 25 to Feb. 14.]
THE Sradish Johnson, though only a plantation boat, and in dimension much inferior to the floating palaces on the up-river navigation of the Mississippi, is yet a gem of its kind, and, while swallowing barrels of sugar and molasses with wondrous capacity on her flat lower deck two or three feet above water, opens on her second story in such a creamy brightness and gilded luxury of saloon, boudoir, and sleeping chambers as might befit a king and queen of the East with their brilliant train of courtiers. The barge of Cleopatra, save in a few mere poetical embellishments of Shakespeare, was not more gay, more soft and silken, or more burnished in its equipments, than the middle region of the river steamers on the Mississippi. The upper story, seldom visited, is not so agreeable ; but the genius of the American shipbuilders has here devised a watch-tower for the steersman, and an ornamental cupola with azure roof and golden minarets, bright as the colours of the Southern sky, and giving to a white exterior without line of beauty an aspect of stately grandeur, as if there were a Nabob somewhere in the interior of the curious three-decker. For a combination of rough, raw, ready traffic, with pleasure and luxury of accommodation to passengers, no structures have been put on the waters to compare with the Mississippi steamers. But for an unhappy tendency to take fire or to burst their boilers, which can only be the result of careless ness, they would be perfect.1 The Brackish Johnson is an instance here, simply because it was in that steamer, at the courteous invitation of Mr. Bradish Johnson, her owner--a gentleman known alike in New Orleans and New Tork as a great sugar-planter and merchant in one--that I passed down some fifty miles from the city among the sugar plantations; and
1 Six or seven Mississippi steamers, within about as many weeks, have come to a bad end this winter.

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though the circumstance, I fear, will not give her any immor tality yet in passing one must touch, however lightly, on what one sees.
The sun was shimmering warmly over the levees and waters of the Mississippi, with the buildings on either side, at noon. All in the distance was so low that the funnels of the steamers looked even taller than they were, and a sensation of being too near the furnaces stole over one in an atmosphere quivering with heat. It was only when the Bradish Johnson pulled in her ropes, and her paddle-wheels began to revolve, that one wakened up to the delights of sailing on the Mississippi in periods of the year when the sun must be much more fierce. The vast body of cool deep water, and the great fan of air produced by a movement of ten miles an hour, cannot fail to render the famous second story of the steamers the most pleasant of retreats in mid summer. The scenery, indeed, is not very captivating, because it is so monotonous. But the Bradish Johnson has no sooner got under way, now in the current and now among the drift wood, than she begins to row, in fine commercial cadence, betwixt great ferry-boats as big as herself, from one side of the river to the other--taking in a drove of lean Texan cattle on this, and giving out barrels of flour and sundry parcels on that, and sweeping bravely on, though making little progress as one thinks, through the great bends of the river. Large ships were moored to both banks; a revenue-cutter or two were in the stream ; and a couple of Monitors, their brown iron decks lying as squat on the water, and much the same in shape, as the backs of a couple of soles, with a round-house only above the wave, where the guns are, and the crew conceal themselves, with under-water passage to works below, giving, very likely, hidden powers of motion--most singular marine reptiles, which, since there is nothing to snoot at, must be run down and crushed with an iron foot if their sting is ever to be extracted. An American patriot points out a monument in commemoration of a great swamp where President Jackson, at the head of the Federal army, repulsed a British infantry expedition, and killed a considerable number of Highland soldiers marching bravely to death, at the word of command, without the ships that were an essential part of their line of battle, a whole month after peace had been happily concluded in London betwixt "father and son;" and, quite close to the monument there is a vast sugar-mill, with thousands of acres of plantation in a state of dilapidation and decay. But the river environs of New Orleans have more agreeable objects of contemplation. The signs of manufacture native and proper to the city are not very marked, cotton-oil works being the most prominent; but there are many fine residences, and a Federal barracks under trees, with groups of

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*;
happy children playing on the clover lawns among sweet-scented shrubs, and long planked walks to the water edge, where maidens in white robes and i'ascinating curls, blonde and dark, come down to bid adieu to parting or welcome arriving friends. There was on this occasion, as usual in these river boats, a large number of passengers, ladies as well as gentlemen--fine old French seigneurs with all the polite affability of the olden time, with other civilized persons of probably as ancient lineage, but of .quite a modern monetary aspect, as if bent, on looking narrowly into the securities--and stout honest ditchers, going down among the plantations to negotiate a contract. There were also many negroes, or at least coloured people of various hues, the men in tweed trousers and jackets, and the women in modestly draped serge or printed calico, according to taste or age, with emblems of mourning not infrequent; some of the younger and sprier fellows wearing pegtop pants with high-heeled boots and cane, repro ducing the costume of Bond Street dandies many long years ago with remarkable exactness; and, in the matter of heel, longcultivated in the South, giving to the Darwinian theory a quite disturbing confirmation. One old portly woman of colour, who had bound her head in a kerchief with hanging loops over the ears, and mutton-chop whiskers of natirral or artificial wool "brought down over her broad brown cheeks, and who was always running about, on saloon deck and lower deck, upstairs and downstairs, everywhere one happened to be, with something eatable in her hands, and munching something similar in her mouth with a strong and apparently unappeasable appetite--was, in the first place, amusing, and in the second, suspicious or even hateful. The first impression was that this old lady must have some supreme connection with the cooking department, and that the dinners of the ship were disappearing rapidly; and this impression grew in exact ratio as any one on board wished to have anything to eat. Birt it was a delusion. A very choice dinner was served in due time in the saloon, with a supply of good claret to the white people, while the negroes had their meal under an awning on the saloon deck, where they had been sauntering freely all day; and the old negro woman, shade of Barmecide, turned out to be a genial old soul who keeps a shop somewhere on the levees of New Orleans, and spends most of her time on the river, up and down, executing small commissions with the most trustworthy accuracy, and speaking French and English to the genteel families with a fluency equal to her fine gastronomic qualities. An intimate and cordial acquaintance ship prevails all through this riverain territory ; and the banks of the Mississippi south of New Orleans--so numerous are the plantations, and the people on them brought into so frequent intercourse by the river traffic-^-are in reality a great rural town,

fc

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where all classes, high and low, know one another better, and live in a more social spirit than in the streets of large cities.
The Mississippi at this point is scarce half a mile broad, with a slow and placid flow, yet full of the latent power and majesty of waters that run deep, and, as the sun falls on its surface, revealing rolling volumes of the most various colours, from bright red .to brown and milky, as if a]l the great rivers swallowed up in this common channel were being twisted, like the strands of a cable, into union, and yet remaining separate and intact. The banks are so low as to lip the edge of the stream, with a fringe here and there of long willow saplings ; and the horizon on either side is bounded by a dark grey wood, bursting at this period into streaks of green, at a distance of a mile to three-quarters of a mile from the batture; the sugar-cane fields, sometimes lower than the river, filling up the middle space. The Mississippi, in its progress, describes a series of curves round one great tongue of land after another, and as one looks forward athwart these windings, all that is of bank and forest fades down in the bright sunshine till it seems.but mere drift-wood floating on the surface of the waters. But as the steamer ploughs its way round the curves, there is no want of life and cultivation along the margins of this swelling channel. Every sugar plantation is a little village in itself. The planter's mansion--sometimes elegant, always comfortable, seated amidst bright orange groves and fields of white clover, more radiantly green in its new spring growth than can be described--is flanked by rows of negro framecottages, windowed and painted white, with verandahs extending along the whole front, while close at hand is the sugar factory, with its great square chimney-stalk, broad shingled roof, and numerous outworks. Back from the river, more than half way to the wood, there is on most of the plantations a small building with a chimney-stalk, where a steam-pump helps the drainage of the fields out into the swamp. The planters have brought down the leaves of the sugar-canes to the batture in fronf, and behind the bank thus garnished there is usually a large heap of coals, transported by boats from the Ohio, and drayed by the mules as needed to the sugar-house. As the steamer presses its heavy bulk against this dry and yielding beach, one notes how admirably the Mississippi vessels are con structed for the work they have to do. The open lower deck laps the water edge of the batture, and with the help of a heavy plank, and sometimes without, the most easy entrance and exit are made for goods and passengers. On approaching, the steamer wheels round, turning her prow to the stream; backing out makes another semicircle, carrying her into the middle of the river, and nearly half-way to the landing on the other side, where she goes through a similar movement: and thus, describing in

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many series the figure 8, she steams, with heavy but fluid grace, her waltz-like dance along the Mississippi. Down river from New Orleans there isjiot much freight to give out, but as there is always a message or demijohn to deliver on one side, and an old negro woman who has hoisted her cotton handkerchief as a signal to be taken up on the other, the calls one has to make are numerous, if not universal. On the up voyage it is different, and nearly every plantation on both banks has barrels of sugar and molasses at this season to be shipped--the planters who have the best lands generally being most behind-hand in their prearrangements for the steamer. One planter, having the finest oval of a farm ever seen, descending in high and dry furrows spaciously to the river, no steam-pump necessary, after keeping us more than two hours under a hot sun--his barrels of molasses all uncorked, and his sugar hogsheads to be waggoned two by two from the sugar-house, more than half a mile away--when the steamer at last moved off, took a furious gallop to himself on his brown gelding across the fields, by way of making up for the delay so unconscionably inflicted on his neighbours and fellowcreatures. The Rev. Mr. Peregrin, Episcopal Methodist minister of Cincinnati, observed to me the sad want of churches and schools along this great sugar-growing and sugar-making causeway, and was sure a small skeleton temple theHradish Johnson-was approach ing must be one of those blessed fruits of Northern gospel spirit and philanthropic principle everywhere since the war spreading over and regenerating the Southern States. JBut the " skeleton " turned out to be a Roman Catholic place of worship. The white population along this Mississippian territory is largely of French origin, and Roman Catholic; the Church of Rome, more over, from New Orleans southwards, is one of the limst of ecclesiastical communities. And thus the day wears on, the sun declines more and more towards the West, and all terrestrial out look assumes a more strange and unaccustomed shape. Towards sunset, when the orb of day is sinking on one bank of the river, and the full moon rising on the other, pale, ghostlike--the faintest adumbration of a heavenly body--and sun, moon, and intervening sky are brought so very near that in fancy one could almost touch them, an idea of proximity to the line of the Equator--the outmost bulge of "the orange flattening towards the poles"--steals over the imagination, till, as the shades of night gather round, the land on all sides slopes down out of sight, and nothing is left above the narrow horizon but the Mississippi, with this great water-fowl of a steamboat skimming, as it were, with heavy white wing over some deep and reed-bound tarn in the bosom of eternal shadows, and in the birthday of time when light and dry land began to be. The sun sets in these parts with startling rapidity. One moment a round fiery disc

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glows in the- West, as if it were big, fierce, and profound enough to set the universe in a blaze, and the next it has disappeared, leaving only an effulgence of gold and purple along the western sky, as soft, and inexpressibly beautiful to behold, though a million times as grand, as any tropical flower. And the orb of night, with almost equal suddenness, advances from its pale outline to fiery red, from red to pure silvery brightness, and then casts a sheen over the waters, palpitating with every ripple, and broadening as it palpitates, till the great river gleams and shines like a lake of liquid ore. The plantation houses flash out now and again in the moonlight from the darkened banks, and great fires, of whose existence there was no trace during the day save in trails of smoke hanging like specks of vapoury cloud in the sky, flare up in the night air, telling that far beyond the plan tations and the woods there are savannahs and prairies trembling amidst swamps and bayous, where vagrant negroes may be snatching some pasture land from the wilderness by flames, or keen and eager hunters by like means beating up their prey.
The Sradisli Johnson, left New Orleans at twelve noon, and arrived at. Woodlands Plantation--forty-five miles of river--at eight p.m. But one-half the time must have been consumed in crossings and stoppages at the various landings.

CHAPTER XXXI.
Woodlands, Point Celeste, and Magnolia Plantations.--The Sugar Mills.-- Sugar-refining Apparatus.--Culture of the Sugar-Canes.--Fowler's Steam Ploughs.--Thomson's Road and Field Steamer.--Large Fixed Capital of Sugar Estates in Louisiana.--Chinese Labour.
[NEW ORLEANS.--Jam. 25 to Feb. 14.]
MR. JOHNSON lias two large plantations--Woodlands and Point Celeste ; and marching with them along the river front, and extending round one of the river curves, is Magnolia Plantation, the property of his neighbour, Mr. Lawrence. These plantations are among the finest sugar estates in Louisiana, and their mills and refineries are on a scale of the most liberal amplitude. The reader may please to step in for a minute or two to the sugarhouse at Woodlands--an immense fabric covering more ground than most town factories--a mill and refinery in one. First is the sugar-mill, where the canes, carted in from the fields, are carried by an endless rail under two ponderous rollers, seven feet long, probably more than half as much in diameter, and have the saccharine juice expressed from them; and where the bruised and fibry refuse, or " baggasse," as it is called, on issuing from the rollers, is taken up again by the endless rail, and carried direct into a furnace, in which it is burned, and makes part of the steam-power necessary to drive the great iron wheel of the mill. It is worthy of note, as part of the economy of the process, that the " baggasse" makes steam enough to drive the mill proper, and that the canes, as far as steam-power is concerned, really express their own juice without other fuel. On goingdown to the ashpit of the furnace, what remains of the cane there is as like the coke of coal as two things can be. For the steam required by the refining processes, in which it is largely consumed, there is another furnace and set of boilers fed with coal. The juice as expressed by the rollers is an impure and turbid liquor, with much earthy and vegetable matter in it, needing to be quickly looked after, else the liquor will sour and spoil. When one cuts a sugar-cane through the middle and looks at the juice welling out from the interior pores and arteries, nothing could seem more pure, more like spirit of ether itself,

CH. xxxi.]

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than this saccharine essence; and if it could be sucked out as perfectly as it is every hour of the day in the cane-fields by the masterly and exquisite lips of the negroes it would crystallize and be the finest sugar immediately. But though great inge nuity^--English, French, and Spanish--has been exerted on this mechanical problem, and the sugar-growers are bewildered by new processes and new modifications of old ones, yet nothingequal to or resembling the mouth of a vigorous negro boy or girl has up to this time been invented. So, upon the juice and other matter crushed out by the rollers, the clarifying process, repeated and developed to the last stages of refinement, has to begin and be carried out with an elaboration and outlay of capital to be seen in all our large refineries, and marvellous to find here within a lew paces of the fields where the sugar-cane itself is grown. The juice passes through a series of open trays, with steam-pipes, copper or iron, coiled along the bottom, where the scum sent to the surface by the heat is taken off; then through bag filters and "bone-black" filters (the latter being large round pans filled with burnt bone-dust, through which the liquor percolates with excellent clarifying result); then through " evaporators." differing little in appearance from the clarifying trays, but bringing the liquor to a lower degree of heat; through ' bone-black " again, and next into the vacuum pans--large tower-like vessels, in which, from the lower tem perature at which the syrup granulates in vacuo, the grain begins to be perfectly formed, and is completed either by being passed into long rectangular wooden troughs or " coolers," or into semicylindrical vessels of the, same capacity as the vacuum pans, with slowly revolving paddles to keep the sugar in its half-liquid state until it gets (o the centrifugal machines, the last touch of all-- little round shallow vessels, cased with two or three layers of the finest copper wire-net that can be made, through which, by revolutions of 1,200 in a minute, and mere force of whirl, every drop of molasses or liquid still incorporated with the sugar is squirted out, leaving only the dry sugar of commerce, to be put into hogsheads, sent to market, and sold to the highest bidder. The sugar thus produced on Woodlands is the finest powder sugar of the market; but were it put through the " centrifugals" again, with some water added, it would come forth in the purest crystals, to be , moulded into snow-white loaves if necessary. The molasses cast off are, by pipe and sub-floor arrangement, lapped up and re-boiled, and sent through the centrifugals again to make " seconds " and even " thirds," with molasses still over, which are not to be confounded by any means in the market with the prevailing molasses of Kew Orleans. Even the " boneHack," once used, is put through a kiln and re-burnt, and sent back to the filters, so that no economy appears to be overlooked.

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[CH. xxxi.

The sugar-house on Magnolia differs little, save in mere detail, from the general process on Woodlands. The sugar-mill, instead of two great rollers, has three of somewhat smaller dimensions, giving a second squeeze to the canes, which is believed to be beneficial, and may as well be given as not. The whole arrange ment of the factory is admirable; and from an office upstairs in the centre, one looks down through the mill on the one hand, and the refinery on the other, with, the eyes of an Argus. The reader has only to consider the maze of various mechanism underlying every square yard of every floor of the sugar-house, and extending outward in cisterns, boilers, and furnaces, which all this process involves, in order to perceive what an elaborate combination or complication of chemistry, manufacture, and agriculture sugarmaking on the great scale in Louisiana must be.
Going over the fields on Woodlands, there are large spaces of rich open land, ribbed with the furrows of last year, nntilled, but ready, with little labour, to receive a new course of seed-canes. Labour is at present at a stand. The negroes, enjoying a long holiday since Christmas, are chaffering with the planters, sugar falling, for higher terms. They had sixteen dollars a month last year, and rations equal to five--twenty-one dollars a month, or rather more than a pound sterling per week. The planters, to make short dispute, have offered a round dollar a day without rations, or twenty-six dollars, or 51. 4s. Qd. a month ; but the negroes, thinking there is something in "rations," doubt whether last year's terms may not be better after all. The great law of demand and supply in the matter of labour operates here under curious difficulties, the supply neither knowing what it is worth nor what it wants, and the demand, having no other shift, forced to try all kinds of dodges, offering sometimes less or more in^ differently, in order to get the supply to begin, which is the main thing for both. The perplexity of this state of affairs, especially to men accustomed to the system of slave labour, with its fixed quantity of rations and clothing, must be taken into account in all questions of Southern production, with a large consideration in favour of employers in the South, who, under the abolition of an old and bad system, have yet to grope in the dark for the elements of a new and better without exactly finding them. There is no sharing of crops with the negroes on the sugar as on the cotton plantations, the large outlay of capital in the sugarmill and refinery, and the amount of white labour necessary in this branch of industry, forbidding that simple but questionable solution of immediate difficulties. The soil on Woodlands is cultivated much the same as, but with stronger mules and some what deeper ploughs than, in the cotton districts. The plantation, almost level, is intersected by waggon-roads and broad drains, more like canals than ditches. When the water flows down

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through .these channels to the Mississippi it is well; but when it "backs-the other way there is a steam-boiler house, driving not so much a pump as a broad-feathered wheel or revolving fan set in the canal, which lifts the water five feet, and sends it out into the wood and swamp behind. Vast swarms of blackbirds--not of the singing species--cover the Indian corn patches, doing little harm on the sugar plantations, but very plaguy customers on the rice farms, to b-s rabbled off by a smaller swarm of negro boys, only a little less black and voracious than themselves ; and, on this occasion, a deiise wing of the countless army had settled down on a mound covered with straw on the cane-fields, not far from one of various wooden sheds, where the workers run for shelter in a heavy shower. In this and similar mounds the sugar seed-canes of the year are treasured--fine, carefully-selected, purply-coloured, stalks, six to eight feet long, and about as thick as one's wrist, with ring-joints at every six or eight inches, from which heart-shaped buds, two or even three round the joint, are springing, and clinging while they spring. The sugar-cane, as thus seen, is quite a picture of beauty in colour, art-symmetry, and modestly-budding vitality. When the drills are opened, the tall seed-canes are laid in twos or threes laterally along the bed --the great object of the sugar-planter being to bring up as many canes as possible; and, on the whole, the cultivation of the sugar-cane is less elaborate, minute, and troublesome than that of the cotton-plant. Kiding down one of the waggon-roads of Woodlands to the common way along the ~battur6, there was a fine breeze under a cloud-tempered sun rippling the great river, which was six or eight inches higher than the day before, and as it laved the roots of tiie moss-draped trees on the one hand, and the soft air rustled ths leaves of the orange-groves round the blacksmiths' shops and the villas and hostelries on the other-- the said groves yielding to people in these parts, with little trouble beyond the original cost of planting, some thousands of dollars per annum--a sensation of health and pleasure vibrated through one's whole frame, and in its full glow I was met by the doctor of these plantations, who reported a fairly clean bill of health, but three loving wives, prominent ladies of the district, had died since last fall, and their decease had cast a gloom over the whole district. On the other side of the river a small town with notable buildings was visible, to which people have to go to worship on Sundays, and to sue and be sued on other days of the week, crossing the Mississippi in boats--the head town of the " parish " ; for the Louisianians, following old tradition, call their counties " parishes," the minor divisions being mere wards and sub-divisions of parishes, and this trace of ancient nomen clature makes one feel a little more at home. But if anything could recall the memory of Old England here, it ought to be

224

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.

[CH. xxxi.

" Magnolia" plantation, spreading round a loop of the river in a firm, dry, and well-braced semicircle, and yet in parts divided into square lots as level as a bowling-green, where two sets of Fowler's stationary-engine steam-ploughs, costing 15,000 dollars each, were turning over the soil 2 feet deep, and laying furrows so straight and handsome that mule and negro-ploughing in comparison must be pronounced the most barbarous workman ship. In the courtyard was an enormous grubber, or cultivator, of the same manufacture, with prongs a yard long, and so adjusted as to pass down on either side betwixt the sugar-canes, and stir up the soil round them afresh. There was also in one of the ditches a machine for scooping out the gathering mud and decaying vegetable matter without hand-labour, but from some defect in the motive-power, it had come into passing desuetude. One cannot but admire the splendid courage and enterprise ot bringing all these costly mechanical inventions to the hard and necessary work of the soil. Mr. Lawrence, in conversation, dis covered a contempt for Thomson's road and field steamer, ploughing only eight inches deep, and sticking fast at the end of the furrows ; so unlike Fowler's, which works with perfect balance and so much deeper. Mr. Johnson, though not finan cially committed to steam-ploughing, yet observant, could as little conceal his regret that the trial of Thomson's engine lately in Jersey State was a failure, and that the ploughs, inextricable at the ends of the field, had to work round in a circle.1 And Dr. Wilkinson, as old and vigilant a planter probably as either, observed that Thomson's steamer, were there no ploughing in the matter, would be worth its cost (some 5,000 dollars) on the sugar-plantations for nothing more than hauling in the sugarcanes to the mill, which is one half the battle. These questions of steam-power applied to agriculture--nowhere more important than in the Southern States--must be left to experience. But, putting agriculture aside, too much complicated as it is on sugarestates with manufacture, what have we ? Magnolia, from 600 acres of cane, has manufactured 850 hogsheads of sugar in two months in its sugar-house, the cost of which latter cannot be estimated at less than from 200,000 to 250,000 dollars ; the

1 It must be observed that the trial of Thomson's engine in New Jersey was not a trial of its adaptation to ploughing at all. Only an engine had
been sent to New York. There was no ploughing apparatus attached to it, and the trial was made with a seven-gang plough, consisting of the ordinary
ploughs of the country. For ploughing, Thomson's engine requires such a special ploughing apparatus as Lord Dunmore has applied in Scotland.
Mr. Thomson's patent right in the United States has been transferred to Mr. Williamson of New York, who is producing a seven-gang plough that
Will lift quite easily at the end of the furrows, arid cover a narrower surface than was possible to the improvised ploughs in New Jersey--about eight feet wide.

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sugar-house on Woodlands must have cost about as much, and that on Point Celeste probably not much, less ; and Mr. Johnson, if he has got his canes into the mills with, the usual expedition, will have made about 1,500 hogsheads of sugar. So that, within four or five s-niJes of one another, three perfectly equipped sugarmills and refineries, costing probably near a million of dollars, have made some 2,300 hogsheads of sugar for the year, which they have done in two months, standing idle, with the necessary staff of skilled labour, all the other ten months of the year, and wearing down in idleness probably near as much, as if they were all the while in active operation. This is the system of develop ment on which sugar culture in Louisiana has hitherto proceeded. No other system can yet be said to have emerged under the assumed necessity of having the best sugar-making apparatus close at hand on the cane-fields, so that the canes, when ripe, may be treated and sugar made before they are injured by the first touches of frost. But it is not a desirable system. It is a system which betrays a great defect somewhere, whether in mechanical invention or in division of labour, and is burdened with a weight and waste of capital that must be hazardous, I greatly fear, to the proprietors, as well as a formidable obstacle to any rapid recovery and extension of sugar-cane culture in Louisiana.
The scarcity of field labour appears to be a source of much anxiety to the sugar-planters, and hence the readiness to intro duce steam-ploughs and other labour-saving machines, were their practical fitness assured and their cost within reasonable bounds. But the difficulty of engaging hands is not greater than I have found in many cotton districts, while the terms of remuneration are not so high. One planter on this Mississippi coast has entered into a contract with twenty-five Chinamen for three years, and squads of that race are found at work in various capacities in the neighbourhood of New Orleans. The Chinese element is just so extant as that a few pigtails may be seen any day in the streets of the city ; and efforts are being made from time to time to induce a larger immigration from the " Flowery Land."

CHAPTER XXXII.
Matters of General Interest in New Orleans.--The " Negro Legislature."-- The Negroes and the Poll or School Tax.--More about Sugar-growing and Sugar-making.--Cost of Louisianian Sugar-making .Machinery.-- Comparison with Prices of Glasgow Machinery for Sugar Plantations.-- The " Sugar Concretor."--Probable Causes of backward state of Sugarculture in Louisiana.
[NEW ORLEANS.--Jan. 25 to Feb. 14.]
THIS city of the South is large and lively enough to present the most varied objects of interest to a traveller. If his object be information, there are a hundred branches of inquiry in which the knowledge to be obtained is alike new and valuable; if he seek amusement, he can be well amused; and if any one would write a history of New Orleans, social, political, and commercial, he must make up his mind to stay a long time, and produce a large volume. But almost the first question put to a stranger, is, whether he has seen " the Negro Legislature ?" and the Legislative Assembly of the State, as at present constituted, seems to be regarded much in the light of a joke by most of the citizens.
I went to see the Legislature of Louisiana. There were a few carriages, and some knots of people round the door of the Mechanics' Hall, in which the Legislative Body sits. The lobbies were crowded with negro men and lads " from the country," with a sprinkling of more white and sharp-visaged townsmen; and negro women were selling cakes, oranges, and lollipops up to the door of the Chamber of Representatives. Within the Chamber itself were seated in semicircle round the Speaker's chair, with little fixed desks and drawers full of papers before them, a body of men as sedate and civilized in appearance as a convention of miners' delegates in Scotland or the North of England. On close inspection, a few Africans were visible, but yellow men seemed to predominate. The Senate differed little in general aspect or composition, but was presided over by Lieutenant-G-overnor Dunn. a really black man as far as could be seen in the shadow, and was being addressed by an honour able white Senator of an intellectual cast of head and face, who appears to have gained more notoriety than all the rest by marrying a "black woman. There is no supreme law of taste,

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and .negro suffrage and love together combine to produce occa sional startling effects. But having seen a few coloured men sitting among a great majority of whites in the House of Repre sentatives, and two gentlemen of decided African blood in the Senate of Virginia, with no want of cordiality and honest political intent. I am not disposed to attach radical importance to the " incompatibilities of colour " in legislation, albeit the spectacle of a majority of coloured and negro-worshipping and negromarrying legislators in Louisiana and South Carolina be matter of passing amazement and regret. It is strange, abnormal, and unfit that a Negro Legislature should deal, as the Legislature of Louisiana has been dealing, with the gravest commercial and financial interests, dispensing not only the State taxes and patronage, but the levees of the Mississippi, and the sugar sheds, warehousing, and cattle marketing of New Orleans to private companies, with unlimited powers of-compulsion and taxation over the community of merchants, planters, and white people of business and industry, who, though a numerical majority of the population, have as little power in the government as if they were inhabitants of another sphere, and are forced to speak of it only as a grim jest, or as a playful though melancholy jibe. This state of things is not any advancement of the negro. It is only his exaltation, through the exigencies of Federal politics since the war, into a delirium of folly and corruption, which, under the action of parties at Washington, will assuredly, soon or late, be reduced by two inevitable amendments, nowise incon sistent in principle with the " fifteenth," viz. the restoration of proscribed people in the South to their equal rights under the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and the limitation of the suffrage to citizens, white and black, who have a local habitation and pay their taxes. It is not so much universal suffrage that misgoverns the United States as a loose misconception and strong-handed abuse, wherever practicable, of what universal suffrage, even on the broadest theory of repre sentative democracy, really is. The poll-tax--the only tax levied on the negro masses--seems still worse paid in Louisiana than in other Southern States. " At present," says Mr. Graham, the Auditor, in his report for the session of 1871, " it is paid by a comparatively small number of those who are subject to no other State tax. Except in comparatively rare cases, it is paid only by property holders." And the expenses of collection, he shows, exceed by a hundred and forty per cent, the net proceeds of the poll-tax paid into the Treasury. The poll-tax is set apart to the supporrof free schools, chiefly, though not wholly, for the negro children. The tens of thousands of negroes who fail to pay the poll-tax, vote not only once, but occasionally several times over in the same election, and no one seems to think that
Q2

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[CH. xxxn.

the exercise of political right over the life, liberty, and property of the whole community has anything to do with the discharge of political duty to the community, in the direct line even of absolute personal and parental'responsibility. While this is the state of the poll-tax on negroes for schools, what is the action of the Education Department ? The State Superintendent, said to be a Northern Baptist minister, is enforcing a rule, that has received some sanction from the Legislature, for what he calls " mixed education," and the sitting of white and black children on the same school benches, and being taught in the same classes. The rule is as little desired by the coloured people as by the white; it is open to the gravest technical difficulty and objection in respect of the mere art of school instruction; and even though it were sacred in principle and morality, yet it is not within a thousand miles of the legitimate sphere of compulsory
legislation. The rule, of course, cannot be enforced practically save as a mere disturbing wedge ; but the savour of it destroys confidence, and New Orleans, which before the war had "a muni ficent free school system for its white children, and was going gladly on to give the same to the children of the negroes, is drifting back into private schools in connection with the various Churches--Presbyterian, Episcopalian, and Roman Catholic-- maintained by the subscriptions and fees of those who have to pay the whole, their own and the negroes' shares included, of the free school taxation. This source of public discontent-- paying for one's black neighbour and for oneself twice over, and
spoiling a noble national work in the process--is kept full steam up by a reign of Federal misrule, which can only be of the most temporary character. The American people must be acute enough to perceive that, in this and various ways in the South, they are not only imperilling the unity and indivisibility of the Republic, but putting the fool's cap on Republican principle.
The Governor of Louisiana, Warmoth, is a young man of spirit and ability, who came down to New Orleans at the close of the war, and by dexterously "fugling" the negro vote, got himself advanced to this high position, in which he seems to be growing wiser if richer, and is tacking about, not without skill, in the present calm. The outcry against him has been loud and deep; but all that can be said is, that whereas he was once poor, he is now very rich, and that his wealth, if the wages of cor ruption, has been so deftly acquired that no one can lay his finger on the foul spot, it is not uncommon to hear in New
Orleans that Dunn, the negro Lieutenant-Governor, is a more trustworthy man than his superior in office; and while there is no doubt that the fair Desdemona of the State has been foully wronged, it seems a puzzle whether Othello or lago be the more to blame. The New Orleans Chamber of Commerce succeeded

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by ah Act and "self-denying ordinance" of the Legislature, last session, to get decree^that the State debt shall not exceed twenty-five millions or dollars. The coloured legislators in the Mechanics' Hall are " pottering" over bills three millions beyond'the prescribed maximum ; but lenders on State security in Louisiana are not without warning.
Have you been at the French market on a Sunday morning betwixt four and five o'clock ? at the Opera House ? at the Masked Ball? .at the ------ where "youth and pleasure" (and sometimes age and misery) meet ? at the Cemeteries ? are questions which follow in rapid succession, as one hears the miscellaneous voices of New Orleans. I have been chiefly pleased by the success with which, amidst abounding temp tations, a quiet and happy social intercourse is cultivated by the people of New Orleans. But the great and serious interest here, amidst all distractions whether of politics or pleasure, reverts mainly, and by natural gravitation, to sugar; and to that sub ject 1 shall briefly revert.
Woodlands, Point Celeste, and Magnolia plantations, as I have described, are "model" plantations. They are plan tations on which what is called " the steam train " is brought into operation in all its completeness. But almost every form and modification of process, from the old arrangement of wooden rollers and horse mills, adopted when the Jesuits first introduced the cultivation of the sugar-cane about the middle of the last century, to the higher and later improvements, are to be foundt in this and other sugar-growing regions of the American Union. Horse and mule power in the mills, indeed, has rapidly given place to steam, and now remains in only 153 plantations, while steam-power claims possession of 664. The old process, how ever, of boiling in " open kettles," to which the fire is directly applied with much waste of fuel, as well as darkening of the colour of the sugar and other economical disadvantages, prevails in no fewer than 683 of the Louisianian sugar plantations ; on 81 there are " open pans," giving evaporation under lower tem perature, and improving on the "kettles" pure and simple, but the saccharine matter from which has to be put into hogsheads with perforated bottoms to let the molasses drip out, so that in making up two hogsheads of merchantable sugar a third is required from which to fill up the other two, as the percolation proceeds; and in only 53 of the Louisianian plantations have "vacuum pans," equal to, or resembling the splendid sugar houses of Mr. Johnson or Mr. Lawrence, been introduced. The " open kettles" make excellent sugar, though in smaller quantity from the same weight of cane than " the steam train and vacuum pans;" and they yield molasse exceeding as much in quality
as in quantity the final molasse of the " centrifugals" in the

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NEW ORLEANS. .

[en. xxxn.

more expensive refineries, and fetching from 40 to 60 cents per gallon in the market, while the other goes at 15 to 25. Still, molasse in sugar-making is only leakage more or less perfectly recovered from total loss. There can be no doubt that the " open kettle " process is a rude process, and does not give the planter the full saccharine juice grown in his fields. Yet,_such is the burdening effect of large outlays of capital in machinery for which there is only a few weeks' work in the year, that the " open kettle " people seem to get on as well as, if not better and safer than, their more advanced neighbours. There is a large foundry at New Orleans which has survived all the changes of forty-five years, employing from 300 to 400 hands at three to four dollars a day, and is at the top in sugar-making apparatus and other branches of ironwork. From Mr. Mitchell, the work ing chief of this establishment, I have received some valuable information as to the cost of the various kinds of machinery in use on the plantations. The old horse-mills, but with iron rollers, cost, according to dimensions, from 450 to 900 dollars, exclusive of wooden frame and erections. The cost of the boiling apparatus used in connection with one of these mills, and con sisting generally of four semi-spherical cast-iron kettles--capable of boiling, say three or four hogsheads of sugar per twenty-four hours--is about 300 dollars, exclusive of erection, costing about as much. The mills, on the other hand, driven by a steamengine, with necessary pipes and appurtenances, are made for prices ranging from 3,000 to 25,000 dollars, according to size, making from four to forty hogsheads per twenty-four hours. The cost of kettles suitable to the steam-mills, similar to the foregoing but larger, and generally used in sets of six (when more than twelve hogsheads a day are required two sets are employed), is about 1,000 dollars per set, exclusive of erection. The kettles, where steam-power has been introduced, are fre quently modified by the use of a steam granulating pan or " batterie," generally of copper, the cost of which, with coil of pipes, valves, and tanks, is usually about 2,000 dollars. Then comes the open steam-train process, by which the kettles are dispensed with, and the price of which, with suitable boilers, varies from 10,000 to 30,000 dollars. If a vacuum pan be added, with pumps and centrifugals, a further expense is made, according to capacity, of from 8,000 to 28,000 dollars. There is another process effected in what is called " the Billieu apparatus," costing from 20,000 to 50,000 dollars. It will be observed how rapidly the absorption of fixed capital proceeds as the process of refining sugar on the plantations is pursued from one improve
ment to another, and that if there are defects in the ruder processes at the one end, there are drawbacks no less serious in the higher processes at the other. This is the more worthy of

CH. xxxn.]

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consideration, since the production of sugar in Louisiana does not thrive as could be?wished, and makes little or no progress towards the development attained before the war, though the reason does not appear on the surface. Soil and climate are suitable. - Improved sugar lands can be bought for 25 to 40 dollars an acre. The newer and cheaper the soil, it is often the more vigorously fertile, and the growth of the sugar-canes has to be retarded rather 'than stimulated. But on the old soils, a crop of field peas ploughed down gives them a new power for the growth of the canes. The average produce is 1J hhds. (1,100 Ibs. to the hhd.) of sugar with molasses per acre--say 1,500 Ibs. of sugar at 8 cents per lb., equal to 120 dollars, and 80 gallons of molasses at 25 cents per gallon, equal to 20 dollars--in all 140 dollars of produce per acre, contrasting favourably with the 200 Ibs. of cotton lint at 12 cents per lb., or 24 dollars per acre, of the cotton fields. Yet how different the progress of these two great branches of Southern production since the war! Were tranquillity to be restored to Cuba, or that island to be annexed to the United States, the sugar-planting interest in Louisiana, under its present conditions, would probably be placed in peril. The Cuban insurrection, by disturbing the system of slave labour, can only have been a help to the Louisianian planters, while the duty on Cuban and other foreign raw sugars is like so much money put into their pockets by the Federal Government, which Congress at any hour has the power to withdraw. There may be little time to lose in probing the difficulties of sugar-production in Louisiana to the foundation, and in removing the defects under which it labours, the chief of which appear to be an inefficient extraction of the juice of the cane alike where the fixed capital-is small or moderate; greatly too costly machinery and apparatus where the process is more perfect; and the diffi culty, not peculiar to sugar-culture here, of attempting to do on the plantations what had better be done, under other capital and responsibility, in the refineries of the large towns. 1

1 I am not sufficiently informed on the culture of sugar in Cuba or the British West Indies to compare it in any way with the sugar culture of
Louisiana. The processes of sugar-making are very probably as varied and as little determined to any common basis of economy in the West Indies as in Louisiana. But the great activity of trade in sugar-making apparatus, more
especially in Glasgow, for many years, and the great amount of skill and ingenuity exerted in the adaptation of apparatus to every size of estate, and to various degrees of sugar-refining, are sufficient proofs that outside the
United States very close and eager attention is being paid by planters to this question. I have been courteously supplied by Messrs. Mirrlees and Tait, of
Glasgow, with their "prices of machinery for sugar plantations," from which a comparison may be made between the outlay that a planter in Cuba or Demerara makes in machinery and the similar outlay of a planter in Louisiana.
Discarding the cattle mills and old " open kettles," which are clearly behind
the times, and avoiding, on the other hand, the "vacuum pans" and

232

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[CH. xxxn.

An apparatus has been patented by a large refining firm in Manchester, called " the Sugar Coticretor," and not unknown though not yet in use here, which, with much economy of fuel and labour, concentrates the whole juice of the cane, after the ordinary defecation, into a concrete mass, without making molasses, and preserving, in fact, both sugar and molasses in one bulk -for the operations of the refiner. Something of this kind, if moderate in cost, economical, and labour-saving, would seem suitable for the many sugar plantations of Louisiana that cannot be brought into culture from the twofold difficulty of labour and want of capital. There are one or two refineries in New Orleans, but they are of little account in the sugar-making of the State; and it is surprising, while the town of Greenock, for example, on the distant Clyde, has such a multitude of refining establishments, adding largely to its wealth and population, that New Orleans, with an almost boundless sugar-growing region of its own, and within a few days' sail of the Sugar Islands, should make so little figure in this growing and profitable branch of trade.

" centrifugals," which belong more to the sugar refiner than the sugar planter, and taking, as the most suitable to Louisiana, with its numerous uncultivated sugar estates, the machinery where steam is introduced both for driving and boiling, the results are as follow :--In Louisiana a sugar mill driven by steam,
sufficient to make four hogsheads, or 4,400 Ibs. of sugar in twenty-four hours, or 183 Ibs. an hour, costs 3,000 dois. ; set of kettles to suit 1,000 dols.--in all 4,000 dols, equal, at an exchange of 4f dols. for the pound sterling, to 8421. In Glasgow the price of a steam sugar mill, sufficient to make a ton, or 2,240 Ibs. a day of ten hours, or 224 Ibs. an hour, with set of pans (600 gals.) and a steam clarifier (400 gals.) to suit, complete, and at the highest value they are made, is 4:501. It will be observed that the Glasgow apparatus, at a cost of 450J., makes 224 Ibs. of sugar an hour, while the Louisiana apparatus, at a cost of 8421., makes 183 Ibs. of sugar an hour. Yet the .Louisiana apparatus does not include a " steam clarifier," as the Glasgow apparatus does, and it is usual in Louisiana to add to the " kettles " a " steam granulating pan," which costs 2,000 dols. more. These results, as near a common point of comparison as can be approached, support more than a doubt whether the Americans, by the tariff and its tendency to exclude all inter action of commerce and industry with other countries, are not starving their
foundries and stemming back the development of their sugar estates at the same time.

CHAPTEE XXXIII,
Mineral Traces in Louisiana. --Discovery of Book Salt.--Rich Deposit of Crystalline Sulphur.--Ramie.--Ladies' Costume in New Orleans.--Tea.-- Health Statistics of New Orleans.--Carrolton.--Stroll on the Bank of the Mississippi.--Fine Art " Remains,"--Floral Development in February.
[NEW ORLEANS.--Jan. 25 to Jfeb. 14.]
THE resources of Louisiana lie so profuse on the surface in the remarkable vegetative power of her river lands that it seems an almost useless digression to speak of mineral deposits, which may here, indeed, be as inconsiderable in value as they are unnecessary to the attainment of the highest prosperity. Mr. Bigney, the enlightened editor of the New Orleans Times, has shown me specimens of lignite found on the Ouachita (Washita) River, and another specimen, more strongly carboniferous, black and glossy like coal, though very light, found by Mr. Todd, a Scotchman, on the Red River, in a seam three feet deep. Also, a small cake of quartzose-brecchia impregnated with metallic specks, and evidently bound together by the action of oxide of iron on pebbly or flinty beds. But the presence of such conglomerates is not always an indication of seams of ore, and any one who has examined the undoubted mineral regions of the South in Alabama and Tennessee and parts of North Georgia, and seen the hilly ranges, traversed by layers of coal and iron, yet cloven in two, and washed into valleys, can be at no loss to conceive how widely the mineral treasures, thus broken up, may have been dispersed, and falling slowly and irregularly from the waters in which they were suspended, may have left their traces on many a distant landmark. Yet there are two remarkable mineral developments in Louisiana, which seem capable of immediate and profitable utilisation. The first is a discovery of rock salt on an island within a few miles of Vermilion Bay, an arm of the Gulf. This rock salt is found by chemical analysis to be almost a pure chloride of sodium. It has been mined, and reduced to the grain of Liverpool coarse salt; and has been brought in large quantity to market, where it has com manded general acceptance. The price of Liverpool salt in New Orleans was If dollars per sack of 210 Ibs. The Louisiana was

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' [OH., xxxin.

offered at 1'35 dollars, and the Liverpool was at once reduced to, and still remains at, the same figure, though, the production of the Louisiana, from some hitch betwixt the interests concerned, appears to have suffered a temporary interruption. The Federal Congress, with its usual opaqueness on commercial matters, has imposed an enormous duty (18 to 24 cents per 100 Ibs.) on foreign salt, the whole benefit of which goes to a single salt manu factory somewhere in the North, and all the loss to the American people; but the development of this mine of salt on the Bayou Petite Anse, for curing and packing purposes, would be a great advantage to Texas and Louisiana, The second mineral dis covery is what from all accounts appears to be a rich deposit of crystalline sulphur on the Calcasieu River in the south-western part of the State. The strata are peculiar. There is first a bed of yellow clay 160 feet deep, then grey and yellow sand 173 feet, next a blue sandy limestone 48 feet, under which there is a deposit of pure crystalline sulphur 108 feet thick. This is followed by successive beds .of gypsum containing sulphur and of pure crystalline sulphur, to a depth, so far as bored, of more than a thousand feet from the surface. The land was leased to oore for oil, sulphur was found instead, and a litigation, of course, ensued ; but so valuable a discovery can hardly be long locked up "in Chancery."
Straying through. Carondelet Street one finds the " new riches " of Louisiana displayed on every hand. There was a sale one day of Ramie--a plant whose fibre is incomparably superior to flax or cotton, and only inferior, if inferior, to silk, and though of Japanese origin is attracting some speculative attention here and in Alabama--and so I went into the sale-room, found it was a sale of a few boxes of roots, and understood at once that Sarnie is for the present in the introductory and planting stage, and will have to pass through a long and severe ordeal. Ramie has hitherto been inquired after chiefly by the manufacturers of Bradford, a fact in itself conclusive of its fate, for the liamie fabrics as soon as they appear will be discountenanced and depressed in the market by Federal duties, and the belles of New Orleans, whose Southern patriotism is only surpassed by their exquisite taste in matters of costume, will be compelled, much against their will, to array themselves in silk. I could not help remarking to Paterfamilias, " How richly, and yet how taste fully, your ladies dress ! Considering the enormous price of every article of apparel in this country, I could hardly have deemed it possible." "Yes," he replied, "you probably think they dress only too well. As Kepublicans, we endeavour to repress this feminine frivolity as much as we can, and heap on duties in the hope or the pretence of compelling a general sim plicity of attire. But I am afraid this is one of those wars

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235

against Nature which not only defeat their own objectvjbut increase the very evil \ae,y profess to war against." I was tickled by the nawetti, as well as the wisdom, of this observation ; for the fair sex all in all are not insensible to economy, and if there be any remedy for the so-called weakness of women it must be in spreading before them as great a profusion of ribbons, laces, silks, and ramies as possible, every new beauty more cheaply beautiful than another. Taste and even tasteless desire become wonderfully bewildering amid great variety of choice, and are most sure to be driven back on the right course when economy is on the side of what is most pretty and becoming. Sarnie is a new sensation in the market, while tea is quite an old one. Yet, the cultivation of tea is also commanding some attention in Louisiana, and thousands of seeds and plants are being distri buted by the Department of Agriculture at Washington for the propagation of this new industry in the Southern States, But I confess I have been more engaged by the arrival in the Mis sissippi of a cargo of tea direct from China than by all these enterprising efforts of General Capron. The Southern people have been plied so long by the vilest corruptions of green tea, and the saving " it will do for the Southern market " is so common in the tea streets of New York when a particularly bad invoice turns up, that the consumption of the Chinese beverage has been rapidly going out as the " Heathen.Chinee " themselves have been coming in, and a direct importation of sound'tea into New Orleans would probably make more satisfactory progress than the importation of pigtails. For if coffee be good in the morning, tea is an agreeable change in the afternoon; and in these hot climates cold tea lemonade, iced, is declared by the few who have tried it to be more fragrant and refreshing than the most liberal libations of soda-water or other effervescing liquids.
The city of New Orleans, amidst all its wants, has now got one thing which suits it exactly--an ice factory--the sweetest, cleanest, most scientific, artistic, and beautiful of all factories ever seen or imagined, where 72 tons of ice a day are manufac tured from distilled Mississippi water by fire and steam-power, in a general atmosphere equable and temperate. This marvel has been accomplished by Carre's apparatus, founded on Fara day's discovery of the intense cold produced by the volatilisation of liquified ammoniacal gas; and the commercial agent here has been a company, with half a million of dollars capital, who have reduced the price of ice from 40 and sometimes 60 dollars to 15 dollars per ton, and dividing 25 per cent, of profits, to the utter dismay and confusion of the Northern ice importers. The ice is brought out from the machines in the purest rectangular slabs, which, on being placed one on top of another, become a solid mass. It is somewhat more porous than the " Wenham Lake "

236

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[err. xxxm.

product, and is not so fit in the bar-rooms of being poured out of one glass in which it has been once used into a clean one; but this is a difference on which the bar-keepers maintain a discreet reserve, for only to few of the frequenters of these establishments is it known that they are served with ice that has been sucked in a sherry-cobbler, or mouthed in a cocktail, by previous votaries of Bacchus. The success of the ice factory in New Orleans is spreading the same scientific adaptation into the Southern towns, from Atlanta to Shreveport.
The Board of Health in New Orleans publishes an annual report. Though statistics in this country have no very exact basis, yet they are always interesting and instructive. I asked the President of the St. Andrew's Society--where in the wide world is there not a "thin red line " of Scots ?--what good work the St. Andrew's, having the night before jovially celebrated the anniversary of Burns, has done, or was in the act or intention of doing; and his reply was--" The St. Andrew's Society, Sir, during my incumbency, has built a cemetery, which, let me tell you, is one of the first necessities of life in New Orleans." But this was said with a smile neither grim nor Sardonic, and with. a happy soul in his eyes shining through and overflowing his spectacles from such a depth of genial and lustrous humour as proved at once that he did not mean what lie was saying, albeit the St.Andrew's Cemetery is a fact. The unhealthiness of the Southern cities, I still think, is generally exaggerated. The total number of deaths in New Orleans last year, excluding still born children (449) was 6,942, which, on the basis of population given by the census, is about one in 28 of the inhabitants. But New Orleans is just as likely to have 250,000 souls as 191,512 ; and there are included the " blacks and mulattoes/' 50,499 by the census, among whom the recorded deaths in 1870 are 2,560, or one in 20, swelling in the total the apparent mortality of the whites, among whom the number of deaths on the census basis is not more than one in 30. The deaths from yellow fever in 1870 were 587; but the sacrifices of that occasional plague are exceeded by the more permanent burnt-offering of consumption, which had 757 victims; and small-pox, ravaging chiefly the negroes, carried off 528, almost as many as yellow fever. Of other deadly fevers there was scarcely any trace. Of natives of Scotland 31 died, of natives of England 99, of natives of Ireland 551--the Irish being next to the negroes the most mortal.
During the hot sickly season in New Orleans, people go away as most people try to do in other large cities of the world; while in the pleasant and healthy periods, such as now, few care to leave the gay and busy town, although there are retreats at hand when they happen to have such a desire. There is, for one, the suburb of Carrolton, up river on the levee, where Dan

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Hikcok, a retired .Mississippi captain, lias " fixed upr" an hotel and gardens withv"much taste, and whither the city cars go and come every hour of the day. On getting into the shell road towards Dan's hostelry; no one can fail to observe the comfort and elegance of the residences on either side, and the white clover covering all the banquettes with the brightest green carpet, and springing up even under the iron rails as if traffic itself were to be defied by sheer power of the most sweet and succulent verdure. The day of my visit was one of those mildest of April in England when great patches of white light are spread over a cloudy sky, and Nature, withdrawing herself behind veils and .draperies, seems poising with easy wing betwixt the poles of an infinite variety. The deep winding river was smooth and bright as a mirror under broad and steady gleams of light from the heavens, while its flow was not more perceptible than the breath of a sleeping chiH. Yet let us not be deceived--there is a latent force in that mild current greater than the force of 1en thousand giants. See the depth of the levee towards the land, and how far you have to descend to the stores and shanties on that side ! If the Mississippi in its rise, or in the action of its many currents, were to overflow or pierce the bank, or (since the levees are now a public interest and ''under government") through any jobbery, or corruption, or want of watchfulness on the part of the State, to make a '' crevasse " in the mud wall, the enormous volume of water would rush through the breach with the roar and violence of a cataract, and submerge in total ruin the vineyards and vegetable gardens in which a multitude of plodding Germans are supplying by daily toil the demands of the New Orleans market. How sad if, in the very place where Government should be as reliable as a second Providence, it should prove utterly at fault! But there was nothing on the levee to suggest such disquieting reflections. Big geese were gabbling and flapping their wings along the bank, and slim negroes were talking French with the grimace, vivacity, and repartee of Parisians. A broken statue of pure marble lay on the side walk, a human male figure obviously, with back upper most--truncated--head, arms, and limbs nowhere. On turning it round, not without serious damage to a pair of dog-skin gloves that cost me exactly 11^-d. in the old country, and that I had begun from long and faithful service to look upon as no mean work of art in themselves, behold! a breast of Hercules modelled with almost divine art of sculpture. What could this be, where did it come from ? Searching about, fragments of the same marble statuary were found--the draped limbs of a Venus, the head and neck of a greyhound with a finely chiselled collar--serving the " base use" of curbstones in one of the deep square gutters common here. All the information I could gather about these

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' [CH. xxxm.

fine-art relics was that they were dug out of the levee some twenty years ago, and that the tradition then was that they were part of the luxury of some grand French seigneur whose mansion and parterres were swept down in the fury of a crevasse! Strolling away from the unprofitable sentimentality of such a revelation into Mr. Hickok's conservatory, a splendid Byclmonia Venosta, or " Mexican Trumpet Vine," flowering from Christmas to March, and stretching like a curtain with bright yellow fringes of flower along the whole glass-house, consoled me a good deal. Peaches, grapes, figs (a slip of which put into the ground grows in a year or two into a goodly tree) were all vital, and plum-trees already in blossom. Roses, in great variety, come out towards the end of February, and when they are in their first full blow the " Knights of Comus " and other " mystic ties " of New Orleans will, on the annual festival of Mardi-Gras. be covering the stage of the Opera House, and descending into the streets, with gorgeous processions and tableaux vivants in all the gay and demonstrative spirit of their race.

CHAPTER H~
Incidents at Summit.--Want of Towns in the Inteiioj1 of Mississippi.--Mr. Solomon's Account of his Commercial Relations with the Planters and Negroes.--The Law of Lien.--Usury.--The Free-trade Question.--Some Characteristics of the Dram and Drug Shops.
[SUMMIT, Miss.--Feb. 15-16.]
IT were idle for a traveller to attempt to find in the names of places some index of their general qualities, and such an attempt would be especially inappropriate in the United States, where country towns are for the most part named after individual founders, the ubiquitous Jones carrying off a large share of such landmarks. But Summit, near the southern border of the State of Mississippi, really indicates an ascent from the low level lacustrine region about New Orleans to the gently elevated table land that distinguishes more than two-thirds of the State from its famously fertile but sickly mortal bottom-land along the course of the great river. In another sense Summit may be so called, because it may be taken as presenting a fair sample of the summit of all that is wrong, adverse, difficult, and uncom fortable in the reconstructed Southern States. Strangers from afar seldom find their way to such a part of the American Union as this, or, passing through it in the night train, remain unconscious alike of its existence and its circumstances. On entering my name and country in the hotel book, I became an object of affectionate solicitude to the clerk, a grave, elderly man of the race known in America as " Scots-Irish," who wondered what had brought me here, still more what could possibly induce me to stay, and who seriously advised me to think better of it than to remain ! There was not the slightest trace of inhospitaKty in these remarks. The old man seemed to speak from the depths of a brotherly heart. Life and property, he assured rne, were not particularly secure in Southern Mississippi; there was no industry of any kind but growing cotton and hogs; the planters were very poor, and had many grievances against which they exclaimed night and day; and the white man had become as like the negro as two peas, only a little more so. Yet, to show what

240

SUMMIT.

' [CH. xxxiv.

different estimates of the relative advantages of distant countries in ay circulate side by side, a youthful cavalier, with leather riding gloves of the pattern of the reign of Charles I., was ready to bet me a hundred-dollar bill that I would never see Scotland again, for " Scotland was the poorest country on the face of the whole earth." It would have been a pity to strip this young man of his hundred-dollar greenback, of which denomination of currency it did not seem likely that he had many to spare. Besides, it was so easy for him, with the help of his revolver, to win! In all the circumstances, I declined the bet, and shame fully allowed the honour of " Auld Scotland" to go to the hogs.
In a State of such territorial magnitude as Mississippi, never one-tenth part peopled and occupied, the attraction of settlers is naturally towards the best and most fertile districts--towards the " bottom," where the fertility is great, or the " prairie land," where, with scarcely inferior powers of production, there are superior sanitary conditions ; while inferior territory--such as the land from this point along the lines of the New Orleans and Jack son and Mississippi Central Kailways to Memphis--receives, with few exceptions, only subordinate attention, and presents society in a more rough and straggling condition than in many other parts of the same State. Thus, it often happens along the whole west ward wave of population, North no doubt as well as South, that rude and almost inchoate elements of society are found in com paratively near propinquity to considerable developments of wealth and civilization. Looking out from Summit, there is visible only an expanse of not very majestic forest land, with few traces of culture or population on any side. The farms and plantations, of which there are many, seem to have been picked out, far apart from one another, in the recesses of the woods, without making any great impression on the natural wildness of the country. Summit is 105 miles from New Orleans and 120 from Vicksburg, which latter city, after sustaining a long siege during the war from its formidable bluff on the Mississippi, is now growing into a commercial emporium of more and more impor tance. The greater towns are the lights of industry in such regions as this, giving to the cultivators of the soil, markets, sympathy, encouragement, and help in the prosecution of their labours. The great distance betwixt such towns and the agricul tural settlements is like a break in the chain of communication with the outer world, throwing the country-people back so far into barbarism, with all its passions of greed, rapine, and impos ture. The planters of Mississippi, a large proportion of whom must feel the weight of this isolation, held a convention recently, in which they passed resolutions setting forth their grievances, chief among which is the enormous usury to which they are subjected in the, purchase of their supplies and the sale of their

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produce, and sighing for closer and director relations with the spinners of cotton, and for some participation in the ordinary rales and usages of mercantile civilization. The change that has passed over the Slave States has in the meantime dislocated the conditions of credit. When the planter was an owner of slaves, and had along with that ownership and fund of property, now swept away, an unlimited control over the labour necessary to bring his crop into market, he enjoyed great credit in the river towns and seaports. That is now gone, and the opening thus made is occupied by Jewish storekeepers, mostly young men pushed forward by an unseen force in the large cities, and opera ting with great power over the plantations, though themselves poor enough, and kept tight by the head at the farther end. It is doubtless owing to the greater distance of many Mississippi cotton-fields from towns and village centres of wealth and credit, where old local merchants of repute have survived the war, that this peculiar development is more conspicuous here than else where ; and that the system of paying the negro field-hands in part by rations is more prevalent in Mississippi than in any of the more eastern cotton States, where the liberal concession to the negroes of one-half the crop without rations, instead of one-third the crop with rations, has become the prevailing rule. The system of business here has been so well explained by Mr. Solomon--a wide-awake but ingenuous Jewish trader, who makes no secret of his transactions, and is animated by a humane spirit quite engaging--that I cannot do better than produce our conversation.
The monthly ration of a negro field-hand, Mr. Solomon assures me, is one bushel of corn meal, the first price of which is 75 cents, the second 1.50 dol.; 16 Ibs. of bacon, the first price of which is 13 cents, the second 25 cents, per lb.; and one gallon of molasses, the first price of which is 50 cents, the second one dollar.
" But, Mr. Solomon, is not 100 per cent, of retail profit too much?"
" It ish large profit, but it ish profit in de books, not profit in
de pocket."
" How so ?"
" Why, de white planter is very poor, and de negro, who some times raises crop for himself, is very idle, and knows no accounts. He comes to me and says he will raise, crop if he is fed and gets clothes, and we say, ' Well, raise crop and we shall see.'"
" And how do you do ?" " Do ? We do great deal. I have three horses riding on saddle --my own one of de best pacers in de country; and when Sunday comes I say to my clerks, ' Go you dis way and dat,' and I go de other, and we see how de work is going on; and if negro is doing nothing we put them all," with a wave of his hand, "outside."

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[CH. xxxiv.

" Beg your pardon, Mr. Solomon, but what do you mean by putting them all outside ? "
" Outside, ish it ?--outside de store, of course. De store ish de inside of de plantation. If de negro wants bacon or molasses, we give him half de quantity or none, and planter de same. His wife wants silk gown; we give her cotton one or none."
" Do you mean to .say, Mr. Solomon, that there are white Christian people, possessors of large landed estates, in this
bondage to you?" " Christians did you say ? Many of dem, too many for de
books. Christians ! Dey eat swine's flesh three times a day, and call it goot living. Ah! you are joking about Christians ! But many white men in de war are sold--father, mother, child, the very clothes on their backs, all sold. What is lien on de land ? It brings no monish. White planter is la cavalier, but black man must eat, and if he not work we put him outside with lien on his crop."
Mr. Solomon, for the rations and goods which he supplies, and on which he has 100 per cent, of profit, takes under his lien the cotton, hides, and other produce of the farms at prices which en able him to turn them over with another profit in New Orleans or Memphis, where very probably he himself is under stringent obligations. But in two or three years he ought to be very rich. Yet these local Jew traders often run away, leaving their city friends in the lurch. For, as Mr. Solomon truly says in extenu ation of this offence, as well as of the hard and usurious conditions on which the business is conducted, the large profits are often only in the books, and the few industrious and successful planters and negroes, who are squeezed to the last cent, do not always compensate the trader for the many unable at the end of the season to square their accounts. It is difficult to get the negro, who is now on the front either as a cultivator or a partnership-cultivator of the soil, to comprehend the ordinary principles of commercial obligation. When he enters into treaty with a local merchant for supplies, giving p&r contra abundant lien on the produce of his labour, he goes on rejoicingly for the year; but the treaty, in his opinion, ends with the year, and if the merchant has then a balance on the wrong side, the negro thinks that it is fairly "quits" between them--that the contra side of his account is obliterated by the natural roll of the seasons, and that the new year begins with new and clean paper. Yet Mr. Solomon shows me many debit balances carried over in his ledger, shaking his head, and adding his usual ejaculation of " profit in de books," which, as distinguished from " profit in de pocket," seems to him like the dividing line betwixt light and darkness, order and chaos. The law of lien in the Southern States has assumed a some what complex character. At .New Orleans and other ocean

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ports there is a vendor's right to seize produce even when shipped in the harbour, if the original purchase-money has not teen paid, which is evidently conceived in the interest of the planters, and which the banks, in becoming interested by discounting on bills of lading, can only surmount by seeing that the vendor's right has been legally discharged. In the present state of affairs, the law of lien is more frequently brought against the planter than in his favour. At the same time, as regards the land itself, the law assumes alien in favour of the seller till the purchase-money has been paid ; and land rights are as carefully guarded, and titles as consecutively registered, as in any other part of the civilized world, although an inattention to precise conditions of the law leads to complications, feuds, and sometimes acts of violence of the like of which we read in the history of the old country two or three hundred years ago. As regards a lien on the agricultural crop, even where the negroes sole are the cultivators, under such arrangements as those of Mr. Solomon, with three saddled ponies in weekly service, it is all plain sailing, and the holder of the lien will get the whole crop, save in so far as Sambo may surrep titiously sell parts of it to somebody else! But in the more common case, where the negro, though a labourer, is a partnership-cultivator with the planter, it does not seem to matter much whether the planter undertakes to supply his negroes with rations, or, by surrendering to them a larger share of the crops, leaves them to provide their own commissariat, for in the latter case he gives hia lines to the storekeeper for what the negroes want, and thereby becomes responsible for the final discharge. The storekeepers like the planter's " line," because it gives them another eye over the plantation, and an additional element of security. But where the planter gives his "line," there is now lien upon lien--the whole crop is his till he has settled up his " lines " with the negroes; and curious scenes arise when an outside storekeeper, not observing strictly the rule of the plantation, sends his waggon to lift the share o'' the crop of a negro on whom he says he has a " lien," and th planter interposes, and, giving the preference to his own "lines" and the foregoing lien on which they are founded, endeavours to carry out a division on a basis of common honesty throughout. How the books on the plantations are kept I do not know ; but. the share-crop system, though much favoured by many in the South as the only means of obtaining reasonable service from the negro freedrnan, seems liable to grave objection, and inferior in various points of view, as regards the true freedom and independence of labour, to the system of definite wages for work done.
There is no banking accommodation in this and many otherdistricts of the State of Mississippi worthy of the name. Yet planters of means and substance can sometimes obtain loans on their personal notes at an interest of 20 to 30 per cent, per
B2

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[OH. xxxiv.

annum; and, deplorable as this may seem, until country gentle men in the South show more attention to their notes when due by personal appearance, even at the expense of a ten or fifteen
miles' ride on horseback, it must be vain for them to think of coming under the reign of ordinary monetary usance. Complaints of bank and note collectors as to the cavalier indifference of the
onerous parties are very common, even where no doubt is enter tained of ultimate payment.
Mr. Solomon, in his contract of supplying "rations" to keep the plantations going, confines his obligation to meal, bacon, and molasses--the primal necessaries of life, -which, as direct products of the soil, are abundant and cheap in the United States, and which he sells at nearly double their cost--but it is not to be supposed that the wants of the cultivators of the soil are confined to these simple elements of existence. The " Dry Goods and Notions Store," in which line Mr. Solomon himself has a department, flourishes here as elsewhere in the United States, and dispenses its heavily protected or heavily tariffed wares at prices 200 to 300 per cent, above their real value. A pair of coarse negro boots, one of the cheapest articles in the stores, is charged five dollars. The Northern manufac turers themselves are sometimes astonished at the retail prices of their goods in the South, and a boot and shoe manufac turer of New York informs me that it has been in consideration by his trade in the North to open dep6ts in the South, with a retail department, to "force the running," to use a phrase of the Turf, in retail prices. Very good ; but I could not help asking him whether it would not be well to begin by abolishing Customs duties both on leather and on boots and shoes, and thus promote at the foundation the descent from an inflation and exorbitance of prices which, in relation to other great commercial countries, must prove fatal to American prosperity. He remarked that large quantities of the best English and French leather are imported into New York; and this is quite true. The com mercial aristocracy of New York are able and willing to pay any sum asked for the best articles of clothing the world can produce, and New York, being the great port of entry, where foreign goods pass into manufacture and consumption with the utmost facility, they have little beyond a mere 50 or 100 per cent, extra--to them a small matter--to complain of. But this does not meet the case of the great American Republic of citizen farmers and negro freedmen, living or attempting to live in the remotest parts of a vast territory, where the effect of monopolies and artificial restrictions is to bring the article wanted to the poorer consumer at a price to him much more severe. The Boot and Shoe, Reporter, a manufacturers' organ, meets the complaints of dear boots and shoes by referring to the high price

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of hides, in which, indeed, trade has been active for six or eight months past at a rise of two to three cents per Ib. But this trifle, while giving to Mr. Solomon or his constituents a better return for part of their raw produce, is obviously insufficient to account for the excessive dearness of manufactures of leather. The retailers, it is true, do lay on their figures very heavy, and will only resile from high profits under some strong necessity ; for they do not seem to see that they gain nothing; that what they exact from others, others exact from them; and that they are simply engaged in limiting business and making it unsound throughout. The baneful effect of high monopoly prices of articles of consumption on what is the main interest of the United States--the successful occupancy and cultivation of the land--and how difficult they must render the growing of cotton with profit at the price that cotton is now likely to command, are applications of this question that must be plain to every understanding.
" Let us liquor," says an American friend on whom I have been pressing these observations; and "liquor" we attempt to do.
" Is this brandy French brandy, or brandy from the juice of the grape?"
" No, sare," quoth the honest barman. " It is applejack from Massachusetts, and quite as good as brandy."
" Humph! A little of your best whisky, and be sure it is whisky without compound of turpentine, or benzoin, or fusil oil, or any more noxious ingredient."
" This whisky, sirree," rejoins the barman, " comes from the rectifiers."
" Hang your rectifiers! Good malt spirit, man, requires no rectification except plenty of cold spring water."
And the jolly barman, now put to his mettle, shakes up his black bottle with its gold legend of "Bourbon" or "Eobeson County," and shakes it again to make the liquor sparkle; but it is the sparkle, the glitter, of a snake. " It biteth like a serpent and stingeth like an adder." In no part of the world probably is liquor-drinking held in greater social disesteem than in the Southern States; the ladies regard it with horror: and strong drink seems all but banished from private houses. But there is much drinking, nevertheless, about the bar-rooms and liquor saloons, and the effect of the whisky of the country on the wild youths and loafing negroes of Mississippi is a caution for any one to see. It makes them rage and bellow like bulls of Bashan, and in the reaction and prostration of excess the consequences must be terrific. A bar-room in America, with its long rows of labelled bottles, its piles of drinking vessels, its odours of phar macy, and its varied paraphernalia, as if for operating medically

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on the human system, has always looked to me like a drug shop. On the other hand, the drug stores in the smallest towns are the neatest, most attractive, sweetly perfumed, and restaurant-like places of that kind to be seen in any country; and in hot weather they really do dispense spiced and cooling drinks of a refreshing quality. I do not know whether the frauds and vices of the drinking system have anything to do with the pros perity of the drug trade, but the sale of quack medicines has attained a magnitude to be found nowhere else. It is more than probable that people who begin by taking drugs in the bar-rooms, and refreshments in the drug shops, proceed to doctor themselves in the light of the quack advertisements, and thus by one false step at the outset, inverting the ordinary rule of life, are carried on for the cure of the more inveterate disorders to such firms as " Circumventible & Co., India Herb Doctors "--a style-and-title, by the way, that is no invention of mine, but is copied from an actual signboard in Chattanooga.

CHAPTEB XXXV.
The Capital of Mississippi.--Interview with Governor Alcorn.--Average Product of Cotton per Acre in the "Mississippi Bottom."--Vital and Economic Statistics.--Comparison of White and Negro Births and Mar riages.--Value of Farms in 1860 and 1870.--Proposed Payment of the Old State Debt.
[JACKSON, Miss.--Feb. 17-20.]
ONE is struck, in passing through the central region of the State of Mississippi, by the roughness of the country. Lazy yellow creeks flow through a sandy clay soil of much the same kind as that of the Atlantic States; greenish pools rot the roots of the trees in the woods; the ditches, on the cultivated parts are overgrown with weeds and bashes, and the fields after rain are saturated with water. To this general character there are some exceptions, and the country improves as one advances north ward towards Memphis; but want of settlers and of the hand of fertilising and civilizing industry is conspicuous throughout. Yet as a field of white labour this wilderness is probably more con genial than the fat bottom lands, where, with marvellous pro ductiveness, there is more than equal natural wildness, and a malaria fatal to European constitutions. It is observed of the German Freehold Associations in the North and West, which are just beginning to turn their attention southward, that they do not look at rich lands, but rather at those depreciated by the natives, on which, through good and careful husbandry, a com fortable and independent result may be attained. The negroes, under free labour, are drawn off from such regions to places where cotton grows more abundantly with less toil, and where in the matter of health they have no competitors, and conse quently have easy masters. The cry of want of labour is thus universal; but supposing that white labourers could be brought here to work under planters and fanners, which is somewhat chimerical, there is an insuperable obstacle in the want of such housing as white men could be expected to occupy, as well as in the high rate of negro remuneration. If negroes cannot be retained with all the reward and privilege offered them, which

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' ' [CH. xxxv.

are just about as much as they like to ask, what terms are to be made with white labourers? Nevertheless, there is a continuous line of railway communication through all this central part of the State, and the lands in this respect are within the available limits of occupation. The New Orleans and Jackson and the Mississippi Central, uniting at Canton, are managed under trust, and in " maintenance of way" are by no means perfect; but they keep the country and means of transit with due regularity open.
Jackson, the capital of the State, is a town of 5,000 inha bitants. There is a spacious State House, like nearly all State Houses in the South, under repair, a commodious mansion house for the Governor, a city hall, several churches, and many private residences denoting a large proportion of people of taste and culture. The business part of the town, in cluding a large hotel, was burned down in the war, but has since been rebuilt, and goodly streets of stores and offices have risen up, with fewer foreign, that is German or Jewish, names than I have observed in some other inland Southern towns. I sought an interview with the Governor, Mr. Alcorn, who is a man not only of much social consequence in the State, but of great mark in the politics of the Federal Union, and was politely received by him in his rooms at the Capitol. Mr. Alcorn, in the times before the war, was what is called an " Old-line Whig," and was thus opposed in the political contests of Mississippi to Mr. Jefferson Davis, who was a Democrat. Like many more in the South, while disapproving or but faintly and doubtfully approving the " secession ordinances," Mr. Alcorn felt the force or his allegiance to the State, and, I believe, took up arms with his compatriots. But the old difference betwixt him and Mr. Davis would seem to have been too much for harmonious action in the new state of affairs, and an apparent slight on the part of the President of the Confederation in the distribution of military commands, caused Mr. Alcorn to retire at an early period of the war. When the struggle closed, Mr. Alcorn naturally came to the front, and, applying himself to the reconstruction question with all his practical ability, was elected Governor of Mississippi, to the satisfaction of the "Radical party and the negroes, while at the same time his position in the State as an eminent lawyer and an extensive planter rendered him more acceptable to the conquered Southerners than many of the State Governors who rose into power on the tremendous reactionary wave that followed " the surrender." Mr. Alcorn is past middle age, but in the full vigour of his facul ties. I found his Excellency busy in the discharge of the duties of his office; and in the casual business of the hour, such as the ap pointment of county treasurers under proper sureties, the displace ment of sheriffs who had allowed riotous assemblies to insult law

CH. xxxv.]

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24

and order in their districts, and the adoption of measures for organ izing and' calling out the militia in support of the civil power where it was too weak, had some insight into the details that devolve on the Governor of a Southern State. Mr. Alcorn was ill enough pleased at the prevalence of murder and homicide in Mississippi, but maintained that the powers of Government within the State wer.e amply sufficient to enforce an impartial execution of the law, and complained chiefly of the difficulty on the border lines of the State, where violent and lawless persons had an opportunity of organizing and perpetrating crimes, and escaping from justice with provoking facility. I had just read in the papers an account of a fire which a few days before had broken out in the large gin-house on Mr. Alcorn's plantation at Friars' Point on the Mississippi, by which 500 bales of cotton were consumed in a few minutes, and two gins and saw and grist mills, furnished with the best steam-power machinery, were reduced to a heap of ruins--the people, who were all busily at work, having barely time to escape. The fire was purely accidental. The destruction of property had been roughly estimated at 100,000 to 150,000 dollars. Mr. Alcorn admitted that his loss would probably not be less than 70,000 dollars. The policy of insurance had expired only a day or two before, and the Governor, busy in the capital, had allowed this essential matter of private business a few hours' grace. He was in the act, indeed, of directing a renewal of the policy when the news of the calamity reached him. The negroes on Mr. Alcorn's plantation are paid by one-third the crop with rations, and he has a store, of course, with salesmen and clerks, and a large establishment in which there must be overseers, mechanics, and other white persons paid by salaries. I asked him whether the negroes, having a common property in the crop, would not bear with him the loss from the fire to the extent at least of one-third of the 500 bales of cotton. His reply was that, in point of legal right., that question would depend on whether a discharge for the year had taken place betwixt the planter and the negroes anterior to the accident. The rule was for the planters to sell the whole crop, and to credit one-third of the proceeds as "wages " to the negroes in the books ; but this might be done as soon as the crop was gathered, or at a later period. I understood from Mr. Alcorn that, having settled with his negro labourers for the year, the loss would fall wholly upon him, which is a strong corroboration of what I have more than once indicated, namely, that while the existing pact of capital and labour on the Southern cotton plantations partakes of the largest communism probably ever attempted in any part of the civilized world, it is not an adjusted system, in which the labourer shares with the planter the losses as well as the profits of the common enterprise. The

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[CH. XXXT.

negro is in one sense more, and in another sense less, than a partner. Desirous to have the opinion of a gentleman of practical knowledge and experience on a point on which glowing state ments are usually made, I asked Mr. Alcorn what the average production of cotton on the Mississippi " bottom " might be.
is answer was that planters were disposed to talk of the large crop on their acres, but what they did grow was not so dis coverable, nor when discovered was it always equal to the*ir own assumed standard. Take an acre, or ten acres, of the. best bottom land, and try by experiment what it would yield, the result, attending to nothing else, would be great--a whole bale, or even more, per acre. But this was little else than theory, and two-thirds of a bale (of from 400 to 450 Ibs.) was a very favour able crop over the best plantations in "the bottom." Some conversation followed on political affairs, in which I alluded to "what I had heard outside, that Mr. Alcorn might probably be the next Vice-President of the Eepublic. The Governor did not express himself as a man enamoured of political life even in its most attractive guises. He had done his duty to the State of Mississippi ; the office of Governor had nothing to confer upon him for the personal sacrifices which an efficient discharge of its duties involved; and as for the Vice-Presidentship, he did not think the Northern people would consent to elect any Southern man to so high a post in the Republic. Mr. Alcorn was probably somewhat depressed by his recent loss, as he might well be from its suddenness and magnitude, and was thinking more of the permanent interests of his family than of any personal ambition. But events must prove. Mr. Alcorn impressed me as a gentle man of sincere politeness, extensive culture, and much adminis trative ability.
I did not leave the Governor without congratulating him on the great pains he had taken in his Message, recently delivered, to illustrate by statistics the moral, social, and vital condition of the population, and more especially of the negroes, which is a department of the public interest worthy of the closest attention in the Southern States, as elsewhere, or even more than anywhere else. Some of the facts educed in this Message deserve notice.1 Mr. Alcorn, while confessing his misgivings and apprehensions as to some results, moral and social, of negro emancipation, is, nevertheless, from his full acceptance of the new order of things and his political responsibility, favourably disposed to the negro in his present state, not of personal freedom only, but of electoral power and privilege--more inclined, indeed, to discover a virtue than to insinuate a fault, and to prophesy well than ill--a state of mind that, if somewhat unique in the Southern States, only
1 Annual Message of Governor James L. Alcorn to the Mississippi Legisture, Session of 1871.

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augments the value of his testimony. From thirty-one counties of Mississippi that have returned full answers to his interroga tories, Governor Alcorn is enabled to state that the number of marriage licences issued to coloured people, which in 1865--the first year of emancipation--was only 564, rose in the following year to 3,679, and, with the exception of 1868, when it fell to 2,802, has kept very near that mark ever since. The number of marriage licences to negroes in 1870 was 3,427. The Governor considers this manifestation of adherence by the negroes to the legal formulas of marriage the more surprising, since, up to the close of the war, they were incapable of making a marriage contract, by which incapability, of course, he no doubt means an incapability without the consent of their owners, who mated them, and kept them to their marital duty; and, in an inversion of moral obligation, did for them in this respect what they were supposed, like children, to be unable to do or to care to do for themselves. It is not the less gratifying that the negroes, when freed from all contibl, should have entered into the marriage state of their own accord at this ample rate, more especially as the cost of a marriage licence bad been increased from one dollar under the old system to three dollars under the new--a tax on virtue at the critical moment, which the Governor unhesitatingly and indignantly condemns--and social history will probably be searched in%ya>n for any more striking proof that marriage and other lawsjswhen. based on nature, duty, and religion, command an unfailing homage from the humblest understandings. The whites in these thirty-one counties of Mississippi do not appear to marry in nearly equal proportion to the blacks; but while the superior number of marriages may fairly be taken as a proof of virtue in the one case, an inferior number must not be pronounced a proof of less virtue or greater vice in the other; for, as the Governor himself hints, the negroes had many old and bygone marriages to ratify, and the circum stances since the end of the war may not have been so productive of that exuberance of spirit so favourable to the married relation ship in the case of the white people as of the negroes. Taking 1870, though not a fair annual mean, the number of marriage licences issued to a white population of 189,645 was 2,204; the number issued to a coloured population of 239,930 was 3,427. In the whole six years since the war, 1865 and 1870 included, the number of marriage licences issued to the white people in thirty-one counties of Mississippi was in the proportion of T61per hundred, and to the coloured people in the same counties in the proportion of 1'22 per hundred per annum. Though this result does not convey the same impression as the Governor's Message, which is lhat of a larger number of marriage licences among the blacks than the whites, yet it is the same statistic, and

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[CH. xxxv.

the only difference arises from the various ways in which figures may, with all integrity, be presented. I find that in the United Kingdom in 1869 the number of registered marriages was only in the proportion of 0'73 per hundred of the population, and so it would appear that both whites and blacks in Missis sippi are going on, in the matter of marriage, much more favour ably than even the " most favoured nations." Yet marriage is one thing, and the observance of virtue before and after marriage is another; and so the Governor, in his Message, advances from marriages to births, and from conjugal love to its offspring in population. But the inquiry at this stage drops down from thirty-one counties to six, from which only statistics are available. In the six counties thus selected, the number of children born to white parents was in the proportion of 6'02 per hundred of a white population of 33,092 ; while the number of children born to coloured parents was as high as 7'30 per hundred of a coloured population of 43,748. There is no division in Missis sippi statistics betwixt " legitimate" and " illegitimate" births, which with so much particularity gives so much pain in the old countries, and in this matter of births we are no doubt travelling more or less out of the marriage record. The number of regis tered births in the United Kingdom in 1869 was in the pro portion of 3'37 of the population, 1 which is so much less than the proportion of births to population in the six counties of Mississippi as to sink the question betwixt whites and negroes into comparative insignificance, and to show that as both races are far ahead of the old country in the proportion of marriages to population, they are still farther ahead in the matter of births. Though these results in their first impression almost tempt a doubt of the accuracy of the Mississippi statistics, yet they are probably, with defaults of statistics on both sides to be taken into account, not more different than might be reasonably expected from an old country on the one hand, and a virgin country on the other; and coming back to Governor Alcorn's point of view, which is that of Mississippi per se, there is no contest of the principle that the number of births per cent, of the population is a fair general test of virtue, and even on the lower ground of material interests is not without a strong recommenda tion, seeing that there is no want in the Southern States more apparent than the want of population. It must be remarked of the South, as of other parts of America, that anxiety as to how to maintain children is not so notable as in the Old World, and that parental solicitude more usually takes the form of caring how the children, when grown up, will choose to dispose of
1 It may "be well to state that the data here of marriages and "births in the United Kingdom are taken from the " Statistical Abstract for the United Kingdom," Parliamentary Eeturn, 1870.

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themselves--a prolblem to which the very abundance of openings and resources for young people in this country seems to give an unfavourable solution. American youth do not evince quite as much disposition to avail themselves of their opportunities of a happy and successful life as the youth of countries where there is greater competition for places in the world and a more anxious training. It is hardly to be imagined, however, that the negroes are, meanwhile, much controlled in their marriages and births by refined considerations of prudence, and therefore Governor Alcorn, after " a tribute of justice " to the tender nursing faculty of.slavery, proceeds to the question of saving infant life, and shows, as conclusively as arithmetic can make it, from the census returns of the six counties, that 6'02 per cent, of white births .giving 10*52 of white children of one to five years of age, 7'31 of negro births ought in like proportion to give 12'89 per cent, of negro children of one to five years of age; whereas the number of negro children of that period of life is only 11'16 per cent.; the negro population thus losing in greater infant mortality more than it gains in greater proportion of births. There can be no doubt that this is the great defect in the vital condition of the negro under freedom. However he may propa gate, he cannot preserve life as well as the white man. Yet the statistics adduced by Governor Alcorn in regard to negro mar riages and births are encouraging, and show how idle may be the predictions of a speedy extinction of the black race in the South. Other results in this Message are no less gratifying. The number of churches for a coloured population of 179,677 has been increased from 105 in 1865 to 283 in 1870; the number of preachers employed by a coloured population of 163,733 has increased in the same period from 73 to 263. The number of schools open to a coloured population of 180,527 has increased from 19 in 1865 to 148 in 1870; the number of teachers employed by a coloured population of 167,421 has increased in the same period from 18 to 170. There is thus proof of a wholesome activity among the negroes5 since the abolition of slavery, in founding churches and schools and pro viding the means of moral and intellectual improvement The statistics of the material condition of the State are by no means so satisfactory, and, notwithstanding an annual progress from the desolation of 1865, only go to prove how much poorer and wilder Mississippi must be now than it was before the war. Governor Alcorn takes six counties from which returns are available as a basis ; but as these extend across the middle belt of the State, embracing bottomland, upland, ridge, and prairie-- all varieties of soil, as well as all proportions of white and negro population--they may be regarded as a fair representation of the whole State. The value of farms in these six counties has fallen

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[CH. xxxv.

from 20,946,075 dollars in 1860 to 6,415,161 dollars in 1870, being a decrease of 69 per cent.; the production of cotton from 115,865 to 42,880 bales of 450 Ibs,--a decrease of 63 per cent.; of Indian corn, from 3,367,140 to 1,159,458 bushels --a decrease of 65 per cent. ; while of swine there is also a difference betwixt the two periods of 65 per cent. Of minor products, such as wheat, peas and beans, potatoes, cheese, honey, and orchard fruits, the decline is still more enormous; and probably cotton, the quantity of which this season is much larger than in 1869-70, has made more progress to the ante-war level than any other product of the soil of Mississippi. Governor Alcorn finds some consolation for these melancholy figures in the great increase since before the war of general stores and of shoe makers' and smiths' shops ; and his explanation, no doubt correct, is, that the breaking-up of the close system of business under slavery has enabled a much larger number of tradesmen, by serving the public instead of an individual, to establish a business for themselves. But the freedom which enables the negroes to do well in so many respects, enables them also to do ill in some others, and the number of dram-shops has increased greatly more since 1860 than the smiths' or the shoemakers'. At the same time there are significant indications that some of the better class of negroes are rising in wealth and independence. In twenty-three counties 40,561 bales of cotton were produced in 1869, and 50,978 bales in 1870, by coloured tenant-farmers. In twenty counties 6,141 bales of cotton were produced in 1870 by coloured owners of the soil.
There is a proposal afoot just now likely to attract much attention beyond as well as within the State--viz. to redeem the old repudiated debt of Mississippi, amounting to 20,000,000 dollars. Many, afraid of the jobbery with which the operation may be attended, and still more perhaps of the formidable addi tion it would make to the taxes, shrug their shoulders at the mention of this scheme; but Repudiation is happily everywhere felt to be so complete a bar to the credit and prosperity of a community, that it may not be surprising if Mississippi, following the example of some other defaulting States, should one day make a serious effort in this direction. The revenue of the State shows some signs of elasticity. The receipts at the Treasury in 1870 were 1,066,092 dollars, while the disbursements were 1,061,249 dollars, showing an almost even balance; but the Auditor, in his estimate for 1871, anticipates a revenue of 1,536,500 dollars, and an expenditure of 1,319,626 dollars, which would give a surplus of 216,874 dollars.

CHAPTER XXXVI.
The " Mississippi Bottom."--Plantation at Austin.--Obstacles to Cultivation.
[AUSTIN, Miss.--Feb. 24.]
'AUSTIN is a small town with a jail and court-house, on the Mississippi Eiver, and in the " bottom land." It was much knocked about during the war, the jail having been burned ; but the place still retains the form and semblance of a village, where the steamers, on being signalled, call and take up passen gers from the plantations in the neighbourhood. The river at this point describes an almost circular ben'd, and within memory has greatly changed its course, leaving dry much of what was formerly its channel. A little farther down on the opposite bank it receives the waters of the St. Francis flow ing from Lake St. Francis, in the north-eastern corner of Arkansas.
The " bottom land " of Mississippi extends from Memphis to Vicksburg, a length of near three hundred miles, and is about thirty miles deep from the river bank. Much of " the bottom " is traversed by an interior river system, the chief member of which, the Yazoo, or "River of Death," as it was called by the Indians in their usual picturesque way, flows over a great part of its course much farther in the interior of the State than the thirty-mile verge of the " Mississippi Bottom," and has many large tracts of rich bottom land of its own partially occupied and cultivated. But three-fifths of the bottom land along the Mississippi Eiver- are not in cultivation, "and cannot be cultivated on account of their liability to floods, both ordinary and extra ordinary. The ordinary annual flood covers large spaces of the soil with deep water, and when it subsides and the hot sun begins to act on the slime, insects spring up in a pestiferous abundance that is fatal to the cotton crop. The insect life of this region is amazing. Horses and oxen are often worried to death in a few hours by swarms of venomous flies; and the greatest care has to be taken at certain periods of the year for the preservation of stock. A plantation near by was bought by an experienced planter attracted from his so-called "worn-out "

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AUSTIN.

[CH. xxxvi.

land elsewhere to the fat virgin soil of " the bottom," in 1860, when war was scarcely yet credible, and when he could transport his negro slavps along with him as a guarantee of labour. The price was 30 dollars an acre, with 300 acres cleared, a loghouse, and a few cabins. All the rest of the plantation was forest and cane-brake. The cotton-tree, oaks, hackberries, sassafras, and persimmon-trees prevail most in the woods. A few red deer are found in the forest. The cane-brake seems to grow over all parts of the ground not cultivated, very dense, often to a great height, and is the haunt of small black bears, and even panthers. There is a half-moon lake behind the cleared land called " Beaver Dam Lake," in which there may at one time have been beavers, but the chief inhabitants of which at present are swans, pelicans, and other wild birds, with probably some trout, and certainly a few alligators, that are occasionally seen plunging among the reeds in the lake or basking in the sand and mud of the shore. Fruit-trees flourish well when planted, but there is very little indigenous fruit; and flowers and aromaticplants must be introduced and tended round the farmhouse. There was a great stand of cotton on this plantation in 1861, eight to ten feet high, but not a great crop of lint. The next year there was a very large crop, but the hurly-burly of armed men had by this time approached even Austin, and the plantation was rendered useless during the rest of the war. After 1865, the planter and his family having been driven away by chills and fevers, the plantation was let out at an annual rent, and has since been sold to an active and unencumbered man who is prepared, for sake of the extra fertility in cotton, to encounter all the difficulties of the situation. This is the general course of plantation-property in " the bottom." There are a few great proprietors, like Governor Alcorn, who, without residing on their farms, carry on the work of cultivation with vigour and direct responsibility; and there are others who, being not so rich or independent, live on the spot, and make the best they can of the soil and climate; but many more have abandoned iheir plantations to negro and other tenants, and one not unfrequently finds that a planter ruined by the war and sold out of his homestead in some more healthy part of the South, while still in the prime of life, has settled in " the bottom " with the hope of working up a new freehold estate at any risk or sacrifice to himself and his family. A plantation m the " Mississippi bottom " is regarded by others in the light of a speculation; and energetic men, with command of more or less money, throw themselves into the breach, and, without wholly giving np their domicile elsewhere, superintend their crops and operations with a home-retreat to run to as often as may be necessary. Too often, even in such cases, a

CH. xxxvi;]

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glowing account of the crop is accompanied with complaints of some sacrifice of health. The negroes, after two or three years of acclimatisation, agree better with "the bottom" than
white people; but their contracts end -with the year, and such of them as have a surplus earning take sanitary excursions over hundreds of miles, like their employers, and there is a scramble to engage the necessary number of good hands for the next season. With all these disadvantages, the wonderful agricultural productiveness of " the bottom" is beyond all dispute. Heavy crops of wheat come, by a little scratching of the soil, under trees the sap of which has been turned off by a scarification of the bark round the trunk in the gradual process
of clearing. As for cotton, on the cleared ground, it is difficult to t say when the picking season begins or ends. There is the tendency of all rank soil to give more stalk and fibre than
proportionable fruit, but there is not so much fear here that bolls may not mature as in many other parts of the " Cotton Belt/' and it may be said generally that in the "Mississippi bottom" cotton wool conies earlier and ripens to a later period than elsewhere. The picking season extends far into the new year, and at this date planters, weary or hopeless of gathering all their cotton, are turning cattle or sending negroes with bill hooks into fields still partially white in order that they may
prepare the next crop. The reclamation of the "bottom land" in Mississippi is a
work of time, and the efforts made, in the spirit of American adventure, will render it by successive stages much more habitable than it is at present. Yet one must look at existing conditions, and, in the light of these, it must be owned that the superior productiveness per acre of such regions as this is attended with some formidable disadvantages. One often hears of the " sharp intelligent countenances " of the American people, and the mass of Americans have that superior kind of aspect. But a large proportion of the faces one sees in these parts, with all the " sharp intelligence " desirable, seem intellectualized not
a little by heat and sickness, and sharpened by hardship and
suffering.

CHAPTER XXXVII.
Progress of Memphis.--Receipts of Cotton.--Buying on Spinners' Orders.-- Through Bills of Lading.--Import of Foreign Goods at Memphis.--Politics and Railways of Arkansas.--Extensive River Communications.--Definition of " the Cotton Belt."--Banking and Insurance Capital.--Jefferson Davis. --The Southern Presbyterians and the Free Church of Scotland.
[MEMPHIS, TEOT.--Feb. 25-30.]
ANYONE whose impression of Memphis has been formed from the accounts of its condition at the close of the war, would be agreeably surprised by its present well-built, well-paved, and comfortable condition. The city, from its high bluff on the Mississippi, overlooks the surrounding country, embracing great parts of Tennessee, Mississippi, and Arkansas. Its local lines of river steamers, carrying upwards of 10,000 tons, not only conduct a regular traffic with the plantations on the Mississippi, but, ascending the branch rivers, penetrate into the interior west ward over distances as great as many sea voyages. Its railway connections are also very advantageous, placing it on all the great routes north and eastward; but, not satisfied with present attainments in this respect, Memphis is as strongly moved by the enterprise of opening new lines of railway as other Southern towns. It is pushing to get down direct by rail on the mineral region of Alabama; to shorten its communications with Savan nah, Charleston, and Norfolk; and the question as to the future Atlantic seaport par excellence has been as keenly canvassed here as in other great cotton centres of the Southern interior. The Chamber of Commerce has come to the conclusion that Port Eoyal, an embryo port in South Carolina betwixt Charleston and Savannah, may be the destined " gateway of Memphis to the sea," because the distance is only 728 miles, as against 959 from Memphis to Norfolk in Virginia, and may be reduced by a projected short-cut betwixt Atlanta and Decatur to 658 miles in all; and so the Chamber looks with favour on the line working .along from Port Eoyal in the lowlands of Carolina to Augusta in Georgia. "While, thus glancing eagerly and far into the future eastward, Memphis is not unmindful of the great country behind it to the West, from which it draws immediate support, and

on. xxxvii.J

STATE OF TENNESSEE.

259

which is bound from year to year to swell its prosperity and raise it ultimately into one of the great cities of the American continent A line is now open from Memphis to Little Rock, the capital of Arkansas, and others are projected through that State to Fulton on the borders of Texas, and to Fort Smith in the Indian territory. That there is a rich harvest to be gathered by Memphis from the gradual development of the great agricultural resources of Arkansas is already seen in the rapid progress of the city. Its population, which was 22,623 in 1860, is now given at 40,230 by the census taken last summer, when a large number of the inhabitants were absent. The probability is that the population of Memphis has fully doubled in ten years --five of these being years of war and devastation--and has thus made good an increase of inhabitants which has nowhere been surpassed, if equalled.
The total receipts of cotton at Memphis in the season 1869-70 were 290,737 bales. The receipts already this season have been 386,149 bales. The receipts at same date last year were 212,818 bales, showing an increase this year of no less than 81 per cent., which is greatly more in proportion than the total increase of receipts at the United States ports this year as compared with last--the figures being, total receipts this year, to Feb. 25th, 2,786,149 bales, and last year to same date 2,113,533 bales, an increase of 32 per cent. The total increase of cotton at United States ports at this date being 672,616 bales, and the total increase at Memphis 173,331 bales, the consequence is that Memphis has above 25 per cent, at this time of the whole increase on last year at all the great outlets of cotton. 1 This.. result ^speaks favourably, in the first .place^ jpjLth,e_increased pl'olluctlon^'of cotton on the Mississippi Eiver, in the State of ATkansas, and the Tennesseean and other districts round Mem phis ; and, in the secoai,plaGe,,!4]ie_e_n,e|gy.,,and:,..a_dvantage for sellers, and. buyers. with,which the,..ia^ejb^hjre>Mis_jconducted. The classification of cotton in Memphis is the same as in New Orleans--the two markets being supplied from almost precisely the same varieties of soil and climate--but the Liverpool standard is the prevailing basis of transactions. The cotton of Memphis, till within the last two or three years, was almost wholly sent to the Atlantic seaports to be there resold; but the establishment
1 It is hardly necessary to exhibit statistical results, which will appear more properly at the end of the season through all the ordinary channels of intelli gence. But it may be worth while to state the percentages of increased receipts of cotton, so far as developed, at all the ports, as a passing landmark. They are as follow:--Texan,'2 per cent.; New Orleans, 16; Mobile, 24; North Carolina, 41; Virginia, 43|; Charleston, 48 ; Savannah, 52; Memphis, 81; other ports, 9 per cent. At New York the increase is 76 per cent., but as the New York receipts pass through, and are mostly recorded in, the Southern ports, they do not enter essentially into this comparison.
S2

260

MEMPHIS.

[CH. xxxvu.

of through bills of lading by the various railroad companies in connection with the ocean steamship lines from New York has introduced a new mode of business, which promises to have important results. The present freight rate of through bills of lading is seven-eighths of a penny per Ib. of cotton from Memphis to Liverpool. Insurance for the whole route is also effected in one transaction with the English companies at three-fourths per cent:.; so that a spinner or merchant in England can buy in Memphis at first hand from the producer, with all the selection of grades the market affords, and have the cotton delivered to him in Liverpool by rail and steamship within three or four, weeks of the purchase, not only with advantages of freight, but without the cotton being handled, tared, or stolen at any inter mediate point, and with no more than one series of necessary com mission charges--viz., at the place of purchase. The advantage of this mode of business has been found considerable enough to be now giving it some play; and having heard the cry of the planters in Mississippi for more direct relations with the spinners, I can scarcely conceive how, in present circumstances, this object can, with equal benefit to producer and consumer, be better realized. Memphis, as the greatest inland mart of cotton, has been the first to feel the force of this movement, hut there is no reason why at any point amidst the plantations, with means of transit, the same class of operations may not be carried out. One or two of the cotton brokers in Memphis began, after the war, to turn their attention to the execution of direct orders from Liverpool; and so contagious is a good example, that already, I am told, onethird of all the cotton business in Memphis is done on this principle. The telegraph gives the buyer in England the power of controlling his orders, reducing or extending his margin, or closing it up, and regulating his shipment of cotton per week or month, in the nicest adaptation to his views of the course of the market or to his manufacturing wants. It is gratifying to find such proofs of closer commercial relationship betwixt parties working to each other at such vast distances; and yet, beneficial as this directness of trade betwixt the planter and spinner must be in the matter of cotton, there is not less ground of rejoicing in the smaller fact at present as estimated by dollars, that Memphis, availing itself of an Act of Congress by which it has been made a port of entry, and under rather hard conditions of inland transit, may pay its own import duties on the spot, instead of in New York or Boston, has in the year ending 30th June last paid 41,140 dollars in duties on European goods imported direct to the order of its own merchants. The cotton growers may rely that, sub stantial as the advantage may be of a more direct disposal of their product to the manufacturers of Europe, it is not a hun dredth fraction of the advantage which would accrue if the laws

CH. xxxvn.]

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of the United States allowed to Europe anything like equal liberty of paying them its products in return, which products, as measured in the exchanges of the two continents, are in reality, whatever the laws of the United States may enact or prescribe, the price of cotton to them. The fact that Memphis, notwith standing the severity of the tariff and the restrictions with, which the removal of goods in bond to inland ports of entry is accompanied, 1 should have paid so much as 41,140 dollars of Customs duties in the past year, is no insignificant proof of the mercantile spirit and enterprise of the city; and if so much has been done under existing difficulties at Memphis, it becomes the more obvious how greatly a free exchange would increase the volume of trade with the Old World, how much larger and better value the United States would receive for its exported produce, and what a healthy and invigorating influence would be exerted on American industry and manufactures to the farthest limits of the Union.
The politics of Arkansas would appear, from an extraordinary struggle going on at Little Kock for possession of the governor ship, to be in one of those tumults which are too frequent under universal negro suffrage. Governor Clayton, who has been elected one of the Senators of the State in Congress, and is willing to go to Washington, should Jay down the one office before entering upon the other, but refuses to do so because his lawful successor in the governorship, while one of his own party, has of late been somewhat too independent, and is not likely to continue with due succession the Clayton dynasty and rule. The partisans on both sides are greatly excited, threatening armed force against each other; and, reading the Little Bock newspapers, one would conclude that the capital of Arkansas must inevitably be drowned in blood. But these political frays seldom fulfil either their threats or their promises, and the crisis will probably end in some trick or intrigue that will raise a hearty laugh on one side or the other. Memphis looks with deep interest on the wide and fertile State over against it on the west bank of the Mississippi, of which it is the gate to the East ; and, notwithstanding the unsatisfactory condition of government in Arkansas, the increasing production of the State is annually conferring on Memphis increasing advantages. A stream of white emigrants, though chiefly from other cotton States, is slowly occupying its richer lands ; the cotton of Arkansas comes in larger quantity and of superior quality to market; and whatever

1 The new warehousing regulations require, among other provisions, that goods in bond conveyed to inland towns named be conveyed in cars of iron, that the cars be doubly locked, that they be locked by a particular patent lock, and that they be under the constant inspection of officers appointed for
the purpose.

262

MEMPHIS.

[OH. xxxvn.

present difficulties may Tbe, there is that confidence in the future, buoying the American community more than any other in the world, which, however slow and elusory in its particular realiza tion, has in the aggregate lines of history and experience all the assurance and stability of destiny. There is a general testimony as to the fertility of the lands along the rivers in Arkansas. Until the projected lines of railway are completed, the State will labour under no common, difficulties of transit. In the mean while, the rivers are the chief means of communication, and the extent to which steam-vessels thread the narrow and sinuous channels of this inland navigation is wonderful enough, in some of its most general facts, to be worthy of record. Steamboats regularly leave Memphis to the mouth of White Elver, down the Mississippi, and thence ascend to Jacksonport, which is 700 miles by this waterway from Memphis, while the distance overland, by " air-line," from Memphis to Jacksonport is only 75 miles. Some of the boats on the White Eiver go to Pocahontas, 150 miles farther than Jacksonport, and within 15 miles of the Missouri line, or only 85 miles overland from Memphis. But the navigation of the Upper White Eiver above Jacksonport is only practicable at irregular seasons. Though the railway from Memphis to Little Eock is now open, steamboats continue to make trips from Memphis to Little Eock by the Arkansas Eiver in six days, and this line of navigation is pursued from Little Eock by the Arkansas Eiver as far as Fort Gibson in the Indian territory. But this is not all. Fifty miles south from Little Eock, and 200 miles from Memphis, is Archidelphia on the Washita (Ouachita) Kiver, which joins with the Eed Eiver away down in Louisiana before the confluence of the latter with the Mississippi, and is thus more within the navigable sphere of New Orleans than of Memphis. Steamboats, carrying 2,000 to 3,000 bales of cotton, penetrate from New Orleans by the Eed Eiver to Camden on the Washita in Arkansas, 700 miles; and at Camden other boats of lighter draft, carrying 400 to 500 bales of cotton, go up and down the Washita to Archidelphia. which is but 55 miles from Little Eock, where there is an "air-line" railroad to Memphis. This is only an Arkansas branch of the New Orleans river steam navigation. Pursuing the main Eed Eiver channel, the New Orleans boats traverse a distance of 1,100 miles. Pulton in Arkansas is the general head of navigation on Eed Eiver. but the steamers, by getting round through the bayous a raft formed by drift timber in the upper waters, occasionally reach still more distant points. All the principal branches of Eed Eiver, such as Bartholomew, Saline, and Mason bayous, are also regularly visited by boats from New Orleans. Cotton bears a freight over this vast river route of sometimes eleven dollars a bale. The steamers, indeed, passing as they do along the rivers

CH. xxxvn.]

STATE OF TENNESSEE.

263

where the farms and plantations mostly are, perform a minute service of traffic and convenience which railways themselves, however important, are not so able to discharge. The masters of river steamers one meets with at Memphis and New Orleans are generally men of fine disposition and of great intelligence, social and agreeable to strangers, and liking nothing better than to see and be useful to families of European settlers.
At this point one may take a glance, by way of definition, at the " Cotton Belt" of the Southern States. Memphis is a little north of the line of 35 deg.; it is nearly a whole degree north of Wilmington in North Carolina, and it is in North Carolina, with the exception of some border counties of Virginia, where one travelling South first comes on flourishing fields of cotton. Memphis, therefore, albeit from its situation on the rich bottom lands of Mississippi and Arkansas one might fancy differently without looking at the map, is very near the northern limit of the cotton region, which is usually held to be 35J deg., while its southern limit is now recognized to be 31 deg., or, to take a local point, say the mouth of the Red River. Though the cultivation of cotton may not be strictly confined to precise lines of latitude, yet there are natural causes which tend to hold it within these limits. Beyond the northern limit of 35| deg. short seasons and early frosts are apt to rob the crop of the means of full maturity; while below the southern limit of 31 deg. its liability to be devoured by worm and rot is no less adverse to its successful culture. The slow result of experience, indeed, has been to reduce the southern limit of the cotton belt greatly more than the northern limit. There was a time when, under the prevailing impression that longer seasons, more and more sun, and absence of frost, were the all-essential conditions of the cotton plant, Natchez, or about the line of 32 deg., was deemed the centre of the American cotton belt, but few would probably now venture to place the centre line farther south than the mouth of the Arkansas River, or 34 deg. On the southern limit cotton comes into rivalry with the sugar-cane, whereas on the northern limit it has only the production of northern climes to contend with ; and it seems true of cotton as of wheat and other products of the soil, that they yield as well with necessary care on their northern verge as on any other part of their congenial space. Hence cotton clings much more closely and steadfastly to its technical northern limit, and beyond it, than to its southern limit, which is so far a diminishing quantity; till passing the equator line, in South America, a new and reverse series of natural con ditions come into operation. The product of cotton in the southern latitudes of Texas does not present in these days any result approaching to the expansion in North Carolina, or even Virginia.
The total capital of the "National" and other banks in

264

MEMPHIS.

[CH. xxxvu.

Memphis is 1,700,781 dollars, which is a small amount in proportion to the commercial interests of the city, but does not compare so badly as in other Southern cities with the banking capital before the war. The bank capital of Memphis in 1860 was given in round numbers at 2,000,000. The bank deposits are 2,226,919 dollars, being considerably less than the proportion of deposits to banking capital in New Orleans. The native fire and life insurance companies, which in Memphis have a total capital of three millions of dollars, employ their funds in various modes which practically relieve the pressure upon the banks, and help out a deficiency of banking means which would otherwise be severely felt. The fire and life insurance companies es tablished since the war are usually prosperous. The stock of the Planters' Company, a fire office established eighteen months ago, is at 15 per cent, premium, and the dividends have been 50 per cent, on the money paid up. This company lends on various classes of security at one per cent, a month. Though divi dends of this amount are only too good, yet a large portion of the savings of the community is likely to be invested in insurance companies in the South, where the operations of foreign companies are extensive. The capital of foreign life companies represented at Memphis is 73 millions, and of foreign fire companies 41 millions of dollars.
Mr. Jefferson Davis, who is at the head of one of the large American insurance companies, lives very quietly here in the Peabody Hotel, and, save when the negroes get a hold of him in the street or on the landing-stage at the river, and make him the object of an ovation, is seldom heard of in public. The popu larity of Mr. Davis among the negroes is a fact which cannot be easily explained, and in Abolition circles would probably not be readily understood if it could. Tji^e^sinuch_geace and good feelmg in .Memphis among, ..all .classe^oflBHTISipuIaSohT" "So fewer than five daily newspapers are published in the city, and, judging from the well-organized staff of the Avalanche, must be well qualified to inform and enlighten the community. Among the novelties of manufacture, one of the two gas companies of the town supplies gasoline made by vaporisation from the mineral oil of Pennsylvania, and giving as pure and bright a light as the best cannel coal gas. The fame of this experiment has spread so far as to bring a deputation all the way from Milwaukee on Lake Michigan, who are much pleased with the result. But the second gas company of Memphis, who look askance on gasoline, say that with coals at 75 cents a barrel, and the high price got for the cinders and tar, there is little margin of economy. Either way, I daresay, gas supply is a profitable business in the Southern towns. The price of gas to the consumer is four to five dollars per thousand cubic feet.

CH. xxxvnj

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I attended divine service in the Second Presbyterian Church of Memphis on the Sunday, as it happened to be, before Com munion. The minister, Mr. Boggs, at the close of the services, having occasion to urge the claims of the Sustentation Fund of the Southern Presbyterian Church, remarked that it was founded on the model of the Sustentation Fund of the Free Church of Scotland, which, with much eulogy of Dr. Chalmers and the Free Church, he finally declared to have been contributed by " the poorest classes of that poorest of all ccnmtries, Scotland." I do not know how, though flattering to them in one sense, the thrifty and wealthy people north the Tweed may be disposed to receive such a com pliment. There was a time, in the days of Dr. Samuel Johnson perhaps, or probably earlier, when Scotland, in working out the redemption of Protestant Europe, and laying on the common altar a great deal more than her reasonable share, might have been pronounced a comparatively poor country among the countries of Europe. But all this has passed away, and it sounds strange in European ears to hear the richest people, head by head, in the world--America not excluded--proclaimed from the pulpit the poorest of all peoples, and the Free Church, the " Hero Church " of the Scotch, the poorest of this poor. The truth is, I believe that there is little or no communion betwixt the Presbyterians of Scotland and the Presbyterians of the Southern States. The Southern Presbyterians complain that, under some unaccountable monopoly of disposition in favour of the Northern Presbyterian Church, they are deliberately excluded from correspondence and representation in the General Assemblies of the parent Churches in Scotland, which, if true (as I have no doubt it is), appears., without any further explanation, to balance the account, and to reveal that the Free Church of Scotland is probably about as imperfect in knowledge of Presbyterianism in America as any Southern Presbyterian ministers may be of the material condition of the Scotch people.

CHAPTER XXXVIII.
West and Middle Tennessee.--Backwardness of Rural Labour.--Proportion of Corn and Cotton Crops.--Spring like " Glorious Summer."--Necessity of an approved Botation of Crops in the Cotton States.--Similarity of Cotton and Turnip Husbandry.--City of Nashville.--Disorder of the State Finances.--Farming in Tennessee.--Fallacy in the question of Free v. Slave Labour.--Conclusions as to the Prospects of Cotton Culture.
[NASHVILLE, TBNN.--March 1-15.]
. THE citizens of Memphis who love to have a country house, going to and from town by rail for business, have built residences along both sides of the Memphis and Charleston road, several miles out from the city, on fine dry sites, with well-kept gardens and lawns, and amidst much pretty sylvan scenery. On leaving these environs the train passes into the ordinary American land scape, with wild forest roughness as its principal characteristic. Butj.n West and Middle.Tennesseethere js..a.large amount of Agricultural industry, and the nearer one approaches Nashville the country becomes more fine and cultivated. Maury County, in the middle region of the State, is probably unsurpassed in the beauty of its scenery and the variety of its agricultural products. Grass, more natural than farther south, is more cared for ; stock is more abundant; and broad fields of clover and winter wheat, the latter sown in the fall on the Indian corn-fields of the previous year, clothe the soil with brilliant verdure. But at this point north, one is passing rapidly out of the " Cotton Belt;" and along the southern Tennessee border line, where cotton and Indian corn are the sole agricultural staples, there is more natural roughness and absence of busy rural life at this period of the year than in more northern parts of the State.
Over a hundred miles of such country only one plough, a singlehorse, was seen at work, and the corn and cotton fields lay as they had been at the close of last year. There is a hesitation on !thejpartj)f planters as to what to do this seasoh7TrowTnany'hands ito engage," andrwhat proportions of the two great crops to plant. ]Therejwill be less cotton and more corn, if the resolutions-passed from"ifiau.tl JQ mouth can be trusted. A very common proportion of die two crops last year on the larger plantations was two-thirds

OH. xxxvm.]

STATE OF TENNESSEE.

267

cotton and one-third corn--a proportion that, when the price.of cotton is higher relatively than corn, is profitable owing to the abundance and cheapness with which com is usually supplied from the North-Western farms, but, when the price of cotton is low, and the needful " staff of life " from other States has to be paid for in cash which the cotton proceeds do not yield, is un economical and insupportable. There will be a change this year to at least one-half corn and one-half cotton, save on small farms, where the proportion of corn was probably at no time lower than ' one-half. But the slowness in preparing the land for either one crop or other is remarkable. The .cotton plant may not be ad vanced by early sowing, since heavy falls of rain or sudden blasts of cold wind may be injurious to a too early growth; but the preparation of the soil is another matter, and if the fields had been well ploughed even before the keen frost of last winter, it were contrary to all experience not to find them greatly improved by the process in the destruction of insects, and in their refinement and invigoration by the atmosphere. The weather along the northern limit of the cotton region in early March is what one may call "magnificent spring; '' and yet this euphuism may fail to convey an adequate conception of its favourableness for agri culture to many whose experience of spring has been confined to more northern climes. Spring in the South is " glorious summer," with occasional brief but heavy falls of rain that flood the creeks and swell the great rivers, and tornado-like winds that sweep along a narrow space in breadth, but over great distance in length. Helena in Arkansas and Pocahontas on the northern border of Mississippi appear to have been blown down in one night by a wind which at Memphis was scarcely perceptible. Yet these are but incidental phenomena, and Nature is now bursting forth with copious energy. The peach-trees, rushing into fruit before they have put forth their leaves, are in full bloom, and the wild plums along the country roads and in clumps in the fields are covered with cream-coloured blossoms as thick as English hawthorn in May. The vines are warping themselves with new life round the fences and up the stems of the sassafras and thorn trees, while the winter-reft and winter-soiled edges of the forest, splashed in colour as with the clayey mud of the ditches, become more bright every day, the brilliant light green of the willows in particular touching the landscape with hues of Eden. The transparency of the atmosphere probably moves one more than all--an effluence of ether in which the wing of a gnat is visible to the eye, and the gay blue or scarlet plumage of the shyish birds, as they fly into the recesses of the woods, or flutter in the air, is more flashing and more exquisite than the silken coquetry of a drawing-room. This, as one walks or rides along amidst the deep silence of these parts, without heat or glare of sun anywise oppressive, and with

268

NASHFILLE.

[CH. xxxvm.

an. exhilaration of lung and spirit, imbibing only what Nature shows and gives, is a source of felicitous sensation which one would rather not attempt to analyse or describe.
To do for farming in the Cotton States of the South, under negro emancipation, what rotation and green-cropping have done for farming in England and Scotland under free trade--to give it some regular plan or order of cultivation fitted to develop all the best qualities of the soil, and to attain the great ends of per' manent profit and improvement--is an object now. of the first importance, alike to the good of the Southern country and to the future of cotton supply. The old system of corn and cotton for ever on the same fields in uncertain proportions can no longer suffice to give a stable interest to the land; and if a large area and low price of cotton one year are to be followed by a small area and high price the next, and gambling in the cotton-market is to be complicated by gambling in the growth of the staple, a most unfavourable blow will be given to cotton manufactures throughout the world. It was the property in slaves that gave to the Southern plantations permanence of value and regularity of crop before the war: the substance that a British farmer possesses in his sheep and cattle, and that remains behind what ever reverses of yield or price may befall the crops of a year, the Southern planter had in his negroes ; but this property in human beings having now been swept away, the cotton farmers of the South must seek to fill up the gap by live stock of another kind, and stock-raising and stock-feeding imply much variety of culture, and may be said, indeed, to open an entirely new agricultural problem in the Southern States. One sees, though rarely, a small flock of whitefaced sheep or merinoes on the cotton planta tions, but usually lean, and with few lambs in proportion to the flock. The heat of summer spreads a desolation over grass which it does not speedily recover, and the want of moisture is un favourable to turnip culture. But the fertility of clover, and the small modicum of care and labour by which the tender blades of rye or barley are brought away in abundance all winter and spring, seem to cover much other defect, and to afford means of nutritious feeding to sheep and cows. On asking a gentleman, who has made Southern agriculture a life-long practical study,1 what crop there is or may be to occupy the same place in a sys tem of rotation in the South as turnip culture in England, I was agreeably surprised by his reply, that cotton is the counterpart of green crops in England, seeing that it requires the same careful preparation of the soil, the same weeding and hoeing, subserves the same purpose of cleaning the land, and is the point in rotation where manure may be profitably applied. The idea was so sug-

1 Colonel Saunders, North Alabama. Sec note p. 127.

CH. XXXVIIL]

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gestive, and so obviously apposite, that I asked further what his rotation would be, and to this question his answer was--" Two years of clover, one of Indian corn, one of wheat or other small grain, and one of cotton." It would follow from this arrangement that one-fourth of the ploughed land on a plantation would be in cotton, instead of two-thirds or one-half; that the yield of cotton per acre would be so much greater as to render the smaller area nearly equal in productive power to the larger; and that the market price of cotton, seeing that the planter had various sources of return, would be less trying and fateful than it is, and the supply more regular and assured than it can be, under the present system of flighty and fluctuating adventure. Changes of this magnitude, amounting to revolution, in agriculture, and mixed up in the Southern States with difficulties of labour greater than in most other parts, are only slowly accomplished. But that men of intelligence, with interests in the soil, should approve and conclude on some line of action having the promise of lasting prosperity and improvement, is fraught, in the present circum stances of the South, with unusual importance.
A commanding view is obtained from the State House here of the surrounding country, with the Cumberland River sweeping round the city. People are still living who came to Nashville when it was only an advanced post in the wilderness, with a change house and a store or two. It is now a large and prosperous town. The inhabitants tell of the rejoicing that took place when the boat made the trip to New Orleans in ninety days; but the captain, in returning thanks for the compli ment paid him on that occasion, said the time would come when the trip would be done in as many hours; and the prophecy has been about fulfilled.
The dictatorship of Parson Brownlow, who was Governor of Tennessee during, and for some time after, the war, has passed away like a nightmare. Mr. Senter, the present Governor--a Eepublican, but a prudent and temperate man--will be suc ceeded this year by Mr. Brown, a Democrat. Until within the last six months not more than one white man in five had a vote in Tennessee. The result of the restoration of the respectable inhabitants to their political rights is a complete change in the State administration. The Secretary of State was an officer in the Confederate army ; the Comptroller of the Treasury was also a Confederate ; and--as an old citizen of Nashville, of the same side of politics, said to me, when ascending the steps of the Capitol, with all the corrupt and terrorising rule of past years in his memory--" We are now getting up-stairs pretty well at last" seems to be the general feeling of the white people of Tennessee. Among other forms of misrule, the Brownlowites
threw the finances of the State into utter disorder. State bonds

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[CH. xxxvm.

and State endorsations of bonds were issued with a lavish hand, and voted away in some cases to persons and corporations unworthy of confidence. In one instance bonds to the amount of two millions of dollars were issued for a railway in the eastern section of the State, not a mile of which has been made, and the money, so far as realized from the bonds, has been embezzled and squandered. Some idea of the corruption that prevailed, and of the dishonest persons who got into public office and trust, may be formed from the statement of the Comptroller of the Treasury in his report dated December 1870, that the collected taxes in the hands of defaulting and delinquent tax-collectors amount to 1,283,115 dollars, and that the trouble of getting them out of the hands of collectors is not less than that of getting them fairly assessed and levied from the tax payers. Much of the public revenue thus intercepted " is held for private speculation by collectors and their sureties." Nor are the assessors any better than the collectors. The Comptroller declares three-fourths of them to be utterly incompetent. The tax rolls exhibit the most scandalous exemptions and under valuations. The real estate of Davidson County, while set down in the United States Marshal's books at over 22,000,000 dollars, appears in the State books for only 8,000,000. The Comptroller insists on a cure of all these evils, and on an assessment of 75 cents per hundred dollars of real estate, which even on the valuation of 1870--252.882,874 dollars--would bring in near two millions to the Treasury. Though the disorder left by the Radicals is great, and to cleanse their Augean stable would seem to require the might of a Hercules, yet the process of reform has begun--the State Government is reducing the State debt, and would ere now have been resuming the payment of interest but for the necessity of first redeeming the circulation of the Bank of Tennessee. The total debt of the State--chiefly railroad and turnpike debt--is 38,539,802 dollars ; but from this amount has to be deducted the resources of the railroads, many being sub stantial and prosperous concerns, and some already in process of retiring their bonds--the estimate of which resources available to the reduction of the debt is 21,982,844 dollars. Though the new Legislature is a great improvement on its recent predecessors, yet the railway interest is largely represented in it, and there may be some little danger that this influence may be exerted to impede the measures necessary to restore the credit of the State. But it is gratifying to see the spirit of honour by which the new Governments rising in the South are actuated, and the determi nation evinced, alike by the Executives and the Legislatures, to maintain the strictest economy and good faith in the finances.
Nashville enjoys, what is rare in many parts of the United States, an abundance of hard stone. Stratified limestone, of a

CH. xxxviu..]

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bluish-grey colour, is plentiful under the site of the town, and in elevated bluffs around it. The State Capitol--an imposing edifice of the Ionic order--is built of stone quarried on the spot, and with paved streets in the city there are good macadamized roads in the environs. Round the base of the Capitol numerous squads of convicts from the penitentiary, mostly negroes, clothed in a common dress of striped stuff, are employed in breaking stones, making new roads, and other hard labour, with men armed with loaded guns on guard at the various points of exit from the place of work. The chance of escape is small, and the convicts, nearly all stout young fellows, apply themselves to their task with a commendable spirit of diligence and resignation.
The farmers of Tennessee have gone more extensively into the culture of cotton, under the stimulus of high prices than was probably prudent, and Nashville of late years has been a brisk cotton market. The reduction of price this season will send many of the growers back to grain and stock, for which the soil and climate are well qualified. Yet the cultivators of the soil in Tennessee, as in other parts of America not supremely adapted by nature to the growth of any peculiar product for which there is a great demand in foreign markets, have difficulty in apportioning their crops, and are always ready to introduce or ex tend whatever promises a better return. The Tennesseean farmers began some time ago to grow broom-corn--a wild grass of great length and tenacity of fibre, requiring a strong soil, of which house brooms, very neatly got up, are made--and found it profitable a year or two, while there were comparatively few growers. But this season there has been an over-supply of broom-corn, and the price has fallen below the remunerative point. The circumstances cannot be much different in the great agricultural regions of the West, where, wheat grows luxuriantly, but grows luxuriantly in so many other vast spaces of the globe that in meeting the changes of the foreign market and the expenses of transportation it often yields to the Western farmer only a petty return. The superabundance of land in America, and the ease with which, under its now advanced stage of occupation, any ordinary pro duct may be supplied beyond the limits of profit, form the great difficulty of agriculture in the United States; and the British farmer, with a rent to pay, but with a demand round his steading for everything he produces always in excess of his supply, labours under but a milder form of the evil which besets the American farmer, with the soil his own or given to him for nothing, yet forced to look to distant countries for a market for his staple produce, and uncertain whether he will find one that will repay him anywhere. The cultivation of the soil in the United States has thus a much more speculative character than

272

NASHFILLK

[CH. xxxvin.

in Europe; and as the American farmer is not content by hard manual labour to earn a rough livelihood only, but seeks to grow richer as he works on, there is more changing from one system of crops and from one tract of land to another than, and probably quite as much dissatisfaction in the result as, in most other countries.
In the cotton region, with the exception of a certain stead fastness imparted by the staple produce, there is a full share of the uncertainty and indeterminateness that mark the general condition of American agriculture, together with some unsolved perplexities of its own. There is a competition betwixt " ex hausted" land and new land, and betwixt the poorer soils of the Atlantic slope and the richer bottom soils of the West, inviting change and migration, and discouraging improvement in many fine parts of the country where cotton has long been produced. The system of labour presents some singular anomalies--par taking, on the one hand, of a communism extended to the negro freedman in the despair that followed the war, and a pauper dependence, on the other, that belonged to the freedman when he was a slave--and cannot be said to be yet established on' any settled basis. And more remarkable than all, because exhibited in juxtaposition on the same tracts of country as well as fraught with much weight of practical result in the future, is the compe tition that has arisen betwixt the larger plantations, on which the negroes are chiefly employed, and the smaller farms culti vated by white people under their own hands, with as little negro labour as possible. This feature of cotton planting in the South is at present conspicuous; for I hold it, from obser vation as well as testimony, to be certain that the larger propor tion of the annual expansions of the cotton crop since the war is due to the energy, on small farms, in gardens, and in crops taken on waste and unoccupied plantations, of white labour. Some few of the negroes no doubt contribute independently to this small-farm movement; but the ad captandum mode of arguing the superior efficiency of free negro labour--viz. that so many negroes perished in the war, that negro women do not now work in the field, that negro children are put to school, and that never theless the crop being all but equal to what it was under slavery, it follows that the negroes free must produce greatly better than when slaves--is superficial, and does not touch the substantial merits
of the question. It does not embrace the fact that scarcely any of the plantations on which cotton was grown under slavery are nearly up to the mark of production before the war; and it leaves out of view the great number of small white farmers who, under the disability of the former growers, have begun for the first time to raise cotton, the numerous bands of white labourers who have availed themselves of the abundant opportunities of renting

CH. xxxviii.]

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and cropping from year to year, the white villagers who have thrown their sickles into the common harvest--though small their patches individually, yet considerable in the aggregate-- and the cloud of white planters and their families, reduced to poverty, who have been the foremost to go down into the Western bottoms, and there and elsewhere have bent with noble fortitude and ardour to labour in the fields. It would be a mis apprehension to take the cotton crop now as the product of negro labour in the same sense as it was before the war. The inter mixture of white labour in the cotton culture of the South is already large, and though the forms under which the lands are cultivated are various yet the general distinction betwixt large plantations wrought by negroes under white employers, and small farms wrought chiefly by white people, remains a promi nent feature of the new state of things, the practical force of which is felt more year by year. The economical conditions of the two forms of culture may be briefly stated thus :--The large planter looks almost wholly to cotton as his paying crop, whereas the small farmer, making sure of meat and bread, milk and butter, fruit and vegetables as his chief means of livelihood, raises a small crop of cotton as an extra rather than a main element of profit or subsistence. The large planter depends almost entirely on negro labour, and must take it with all its qualifications, and pay for it, as the arrangement now is, by ad vances equal to one-half the value of his crops; whereas the small farmer is less dependent on this negro-communism, may even save his cotton crop by the labour of his family and white people about him, and, when needful, have as good an opportunity as the large planter of engaging negro labour at wages for work done. So that while the one must recoup all his expenses, including his payments in dollars for special work done on the plantation, from his 500 acres of cotton, the other, without anything like a similar ratio of charges, looks only to the produce of his 10 or 20 acres, whatever price it may bring, as the means of obtaining a little ready money to pay for coffee, sugar, and other extras in the village stores. The value of cotton in the market is thus a much more crucial point to the large planter than to the small farmer, and in any severe depre ciation one might expect to find the latter keeping afield longer than the former. The discouragement from the reduction of the price of cotton this season, as a point of fact, is more marked among the large planters than the small farmers. It would be unreasonable, indeed--and pitiable if it were reasonable--to despair of the large cotton farms of the South, which continue to be the main root of cotton production, as well as; the main centres of free negro labour ; but they cannot meanwhile be pronounced in a satisfactory condition. The larger planters may always, in
T

274

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[CH. xxxvm.

any great fall of cotton, improve their affairs by adopting greater variety of culture, and rendering themselves less dependent on external supplies, while economising more fully the resources of their lands, although even in this direction the extraordinary compromise made with negro labour operates as a serious obstacle. The most powerful instrument of improvement on large planta tions would be a steam plough, neither too costly nor mechanically elaborate, to break up the waste lands and prepare the soil for crops so much better than the negro-and-mule can do, or rather what they cannot do at all, and to give the planter some power over the direction of labour on his property. In such mechanical means, and in the development of stock and varied produce, the Southern planters have hitherto unopened sources of recuperation and sustainment. With these improvements, more especially backed by a just and genial Federal policy, advantages great and signal would arise to all classes in the Southern country : without them, one may doubt the result.

CHAPTER XXXIX.
Concluding Remarks.
[WASHINGTON.--March 20.]
AT Nashville, travelling north, one loses sight of the " Cotton Belt," and the task I had set myself is now about accomplished. North Tennessee and Kentucky is a country of grains, grasses, and stock--of an undulating surface with good natural drainage, and elevated ridges often fantastical in shape--much more thinly wooded than the cotton region, an undergrowth of verdure gleaming brightly under the trees. There are considerable breadths of winter wheat, which, though said to be somewhat backward this season, is thriving in appearance, and gives a grateful aspect of cultivation and plenty to the land. A degree or two north of Nashville the difference of temperature is quite perceptible, and while the weather in the middle of March is genial and pleasant, the morning air is rawer, the sky more grey, and there is a colder nip in the winds than farther south. The farm-housing is mostly all of a more substantial character than on the cotton plantations, but, save on some tobacco farms of Kentucky, inferior to the steadings on the farms of England or Scotland; and it is obvious that, owing to the difference of climate, the protection of stock from the weather is a matter of much less concern to the American than to the British farmer. Pens are sometimes built with a flat wattled roof covered with loose straw, and where such contrivances are wanting the cattle eat their way through the middle of large stacks of fodder, leaving an arch of straw or hay overhead that forms a shelter in the storm. On many of the fields of winter-sown wheat the Indian corn-stalks of the last summer are still standing, and probably serve some useful purpose to the growing crop; but their protracted occu pation is scarcely consistent with the careful preparation of the soil for crops of wheat that prevails in the most advanced parts of Europe. Agriculture in the United States is altogether less elaborate, and more easy, not to say careless, in its modes than, in the thickly peopled countries of the Old World, Yet I have
T2

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[OH. xxxix.

not found that the yield of wheat per acre in these parts, while more easily produced, is nearly equal to the yield per acre in the more highly cultivated wheat lands of the United
Kingdom.
Lebanon in Kentucky, inclosed on two sides by an amphi theatre of conical hills, covered with cedars, is one of the many charming spots in that rich and lusty State. The Mammoth Cave, within thirty or forty miles, is a constant attraction, as it must always be, to streams of visitors both of the holiday and scientific orders; but any description of its wondrous natural curiosities would be out of place here. There is in Lebanon one of the largest and most completely equipped steam flour-mjlls ever seen in any small country place, producing 300 barrels of wheat flour per day of ten hours. With wheat-growing all
round,, the supply of grain is purchased with every advantage; but what is chiefly notable in a work of the most recent origin is the facility with which a profitable market has been found for the product, the flour of the Lebanon mill being entirely absorbed by a single town in Georgia.
Approaching Louisville, the largest city in Kentucky, and one
of the most flourishing seats of trade in the West, a traveller cannot but mark one proof more of the vast extent of American territory in the rough and all but waste condition of fat and level soil up to the environs of -the town. It is only on entering the suburbs that one becomes apprised of a large and thriving population by numerous clearances, staked off in building lots, indicating a rapid increase of handsome suburban residences. The popula tion of Louisville is now 120,000. The city has prospered much since the war. The merchants of Louisville held out a helping hand to the planters and storekeepers of the South, and estab lished a character of friendliness and enterprise that will long give them a favourable position in the Southern trade. The sale of heavy bagging for cotton bales has here attained con
siderable magnitude; and the favour of the planters, under the high prices of cotton wool, for the heaviest bagging that can be made has led to a great extension of domestic manufacture of this
material, with which the heavy cloth of Calcutta alone seems to compete. There are 390 power-looms in the United States
making 250 yards each of flax-and-jute bagging, 2 to 2 Ibs. per yard a day, or, at 250 working days say in the year, 24,375,000 yards per annum. There are besides 95 hand-looms
making cloth of Kentucky hemp, 2 Ibs. per yard, at the rate of
128 yards a day, or 2,968,750 yards per annum. Of both kinds there is thus a total domestic supply of 27,343,750 yards, which in the proportion of six yards to each bale of cotton is adequate to cover 4,557,291 bales, or more than the whole crop of this season. Of the Calcutta cloth similarly used the impor-

CH. xxxix.]

CONCLUDING REMARKS.

277

tation this year is said to be 25.000 bales, or enough to cover a million and a half bales of cotton. There is thus an over supply: prices have been drooping during the season, and the domestic manufacturers are probably not too well satisfied with the pro spect. But,: as long as the demand of the planters is for the strongest heavy material, the looms of the United States will supply the main part of this special branch of the trade in bag ging. For the lighter descriptions of cloth for grain, cotton-seed, manure and other bags, the use of which is annually extending, the jute factories of Dundee and Glasgow have an advantage which they may long retain. The tobacco market of Louisville presents the commerce of the city perhaps in its grandest aspect. There are six or seven tobacco " houses " or salerooms, placed in the same street, where the hogsheads are presented daily, and the dealers pass with the auctioneer from one "house" to the other. The tobacco undergoes a strict official inspection, the samples bearing the official seal; but before sale the hogsheads are thrown open, spikes driven into the mass at various points, and the tobacco seen from the top to the bottom as the auctioneer is crying his bids. The rapidity with which all this is done, the presence of buyers from all parts of America and Europe, and the large amount of business transacted in a few hours of the day, convey a very animated and favourable impression of the tobacco trade of Louisville. The sales of tobacco last year in Louisville amounted to about four million dollars.
The falls of the Ohio at Louisville spread the waters of the river over an imposing breadth, and among the various interest ing sights of the city the first and grandest is the iron railway and foot-bridge, connecting the two States of Ohio and Indiana, and the Louisville and Indianapolis with the Louisville and Nashville and the Memphis and Louisville railroads--the chefel' asuvre of Mr. Albert Fink, whose railway bridges at Florence, Decatur, and other points of the South cannot fail to attract the attention of every passenger. The bridges built by Mr, Fink are of two kinds--the triangular and suspension truss--and have largely contributed towards removing the prejudice against iron as a material for bridges, and advancing the introduction of iron bridges on the American railroads. Of the suspension truss the bridge at Louisville is the most recent and the most important illustration. The total length of the bridge superstructure is one mile and 14 feet; the number of piers and abutments twenty-eight; and the length of the spans from 30 to 400 feet. The height of the track above high water is about 50 feet. The quantity of iron in the structure amounts to 8,"723,000 Ibs. The work, from the laying of the first stone to its comple tion for the passage of trains, was done in two years and a half at a cost of a million and a half of dollars. The great compass

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[OH. xxxix.

c

of the bridge, the lightness of its structure resting OTer the stone piers like threads of gossamer in the wide landscape, and the facility of adaptation with which the channels of navigation have "been kept open, are very striking, and well entitle Mr. Fink to the highest estimate as an engineer.
From Louisville to Cincinnati one has choice of going by rail or river, and the latter, though longer in point of time, will not disappoint any one whose object is to introduce as much variety into American travel as possible. The approach to Cincinnati at early dawn with chaos brooding over the morning, many tall chimneys belching out columns of smoke more dense than the clouds of night in gradual process of dispersion, and the Ohio not so much flowing as smoothly agitated, like a river of oil, under the paddle wheels, is quite as moving to the spirit as sun set from Louisville the previous day. On nearing the mooringplace of the steamboats a long line of lights, like stars in the sky, arrests attention ; and on coming to anchor these are found to be simply the lamps of the suspension bridge, probably one of the most remarkable works of the kind in existence. As these lights in the dawn had perplexed me a little, and put all my astronomy out of reckoning, I did not fail to make some inquiry after them during the day. The Cincinnati Suspension Bridge is the work of Mr. J. A. Roebling, the celebrated engineer to whom the world is indebted for the Niagara Bridge, the Alleghany, and various other notable works of the same kind on the American continent. But in the bridge over the Ohio, connecting Cincin nati with Covington on the Kentucky bank, Mr. Eoebling may be said to have brought his principles of wire-cable for suspension bridges to the highest perfection. To conciliate objection on the part of the river steamboat interest, a finely turned arch has been thrown over the whole breadth of the Ohio at low water, fully 1,000 feet from tower to tower, with flanking spans over highwater space, giving an easy ascent from the streets on either side. The bridge floor, consisting of a strong wrought-iron frame, over laid with heavy planking, is hung by suspenders at every five feet to two wire cables, composed each of 5,180 wires laid parallel to each other, forming a cylinder 12| inches in diameter, with stays of the same material marvellously increasing the general support and strength of the structure. The bridge is used for teams and foot passengers, but it is believed that very little more strengthening would adapt it to the passage of railway trains. The great bridge at Cincinnati seems a model for suspension bridges elsewhere under much more easy natural conditions, and there can be no doubt that few objects will be found more interesting in a city that is very solidly and scientifically built throughout, full of life and trade, and presenting many sub stantial attractions to any curious passer-by.

OH. xxxix.]

CONCLUDING REMARKS.

279

I left Cincinnati on Saturday night a little before ten o'clock on my way to Washington by the Ohio and Baltimore road, and arrived at Parkersburg at day-break, where a great bridge laid on solid stone piers has just been opened over the Ohio ; thence passed into Western Virginia, and having entered the Southern States on the eastern side, was glad to hail the limits of the " Old Commonwealth " again. The country is marked by mound-like hills with narrow ravines, where humble farmers extract such scanty livelihood as the peasants of Wales or the Highlands of Scotland from the milk of a few cows and from Indian corn-stalks scarcely bigger than an ordinary walking stick. But in this poorish land, mineral traces begin to appear, and the oil-field, outcropping from Pennsylvania, has received considerable development in Western Virginia--:one place being so marked in its supply of oil as to have received the name of " Petroleum." The railway, while pursuing a devious route in the ravines, gradually ascends by steep gradients a hilly region watered by saffron-coloured streams. The hills, of no greater height at first than 500 to 1,000 feet, increase in bulk till on the Shoot, a dark and rapid river, they become stupendous ; and the road being cut along their sides, the ravines below seem as deep as the rounded crags are high above. The people are mining coal and iron among these sandstone rocks, and tracks of rail, passing sometimes sheer down the steep and sometimes parallel to the railway, are often seen. The line of road strikes the head waters of the Potomac, and a canal to Baltimore, the Potomac, and the Kailroad, pass over a large tract of country through the same defiles. Piedmont, the centre of a great mining industry, with railway machine-shops, long lines of coal trucks, and. many young and spirited mechanics from the "oldcountry"--Cumber land, a much larger town of similar fibre, on leaving which one catches on the western horizon the Northern lineament of the great mountain range of the same name, the farthest Southern' spurs of which were seen in Georgia--Martinsburg, where on a lower geological level sandstone hill and mountain disappear,, and the buildings of the town seem as if carved out of the lime stone rock--and Harper's Ferry, where there is a singular con centration alike of striking geographical features and equally, striking historical reminiscences--are all points on this Ohio and Baltimore route that are highly interesting, but must here be touched in the most cursory fashion. The train arrived in Washington at 11.15 p.m. on Sunday night, March 19--a dis tance from Cincinnati of 610 miles accomplished in twenty-five hours some odd minutes.
It was about the same day of October last I began in the American capital these remarks, now to be brought to a, close in, a few sentences.

280

WASHINGTON.

[ca. xxxix.

The last year's crop of cotton in the Southern States lias abundantly demonstrated their great power of increasing supply under the stimulus of a high range of value. Yet this power may suddenly contract when the expectation of price has not been realized; and the last year's experience has brought the extent of cotton culture in the South to a passing ordeal. The Southern planters can always modify their agriculture, under the vicissitudes of the market, by growing smaller or larger propor tions of corn and cotton. Yet this goes but a small way towards a satisfactory condition of agrarian industry; the farms require to be more efficiently cultivated, more abundantly stocked, and to be made the arena of a more varied husbandry, in order to supply the loss of former profit arising from the abolition of slave pro perty, in order even to give desirable permanence and success to the culture of cotton; and hence the revolution in the South, though the vast changes it has made are in full and so far hope ful progress, cannot be said to have spent its force or to have reached a complete or durable settlement.
The system of free labour has been attended with a degree of success to which the planters themselves are the most forward of all in the Southern community to bear testimony. Complaints are rife enough of negro legislators, negro lieutenant-governors and office-bearers, and of the undue political elevation given to the coloured people by the transitional state of government through which the country has been passing since the war ; and even on this effervescing- siibject I have found it necessary to distinguish, on the one hand, betwixt the outcries of the bar-rooms and the street-corners--the echoes too often, it may be feared, of undone slave-traders and overseers--and, on the other, the true public opinion of the white population; but apart from this vexed question of politics, on which there are substantial grounds of grievance, I can scarcely recall an instance in which any planter or other employer of negro labour has not said that the result of emancipation, in its industrial bearings, has been much more favourable than could have been anticipated, or who has not added an expression of satisfaction that slavery, however roughly, has been finally effaced. Yet now proceeding on my own obser vation, the introduction of free labour in the Southern States has been bound up with such novel relations betwixt employer and employed, in particular the payment of the field-labourers by one-half the produce of the land, that I confess I have had the greatest difficulty in attempting to reconcile them with any sound principle. One may understand how an agricultural communism among a group of people on a farm might be carried out; but the project would require an economy and mutuality of arrange ment betwixt the members of the group to which there is no resemblance in the existing conditions of a Southern cotton plan-

CH. xxxix.]

CONCLUDING REMARKS.

281

tation.1 While payment by share of the crops affords the careful and hard-working labourer an opportunity of doing well, in which his employer participates, it tends to introduce a confusion of sense as regards right and duty, and an uncertainty and fluctuation of reward for labour, that are more likely to be adverse than favour able to the formation of steady industrious habits among a race so lately freed from the most absolute dependence. The few negroes who are wise enough to thrive under this system take advantage of the abundance of land to rent and crop for themselves, while the planter is left to struggle with the mass who abuse the opportu nities and privileges they possess ; so that the worst results of the system are apt to be reproduced, if not aggravated, from year to year oti the great majority of the farms. The share system is so stoutly defended by many persons? of practical experience that it requires some hardihood of conviction to avow an opposite opinion ; but the judgment I have formed must be given, how ever deferentially. I cannot think that the payment of fieldhands by shares of the crop, however liberal, is consistent either with the well-being of the negroes or with the agricultural de velopment of the South. It is more like a half-way slavery than any relation of capital and labour of an advanced type; and its incompatibility with progress will be seen more and more clearly as the Southern farmers proceed to keep live stock, to introduce deep or steam ploughing, to diversify their crops, or to carry out any improvement on their lands.
Though the weight of taxation in the Southern States is an obstacle to their prosperity that forces itself on attention, yet as in some respects inevitable, and as lying within the political action of the people and the governments, it is one on which I have wished to touch as lightly as possible. The Federal revenue, swelled beyond all American experience or anticipation by the gigantic war, must be borne by the South in common with other sections of the Union. But the State and other local revenues of the South, owing, on the one hand, to the immense collapse of assessable property resulting from the furious struggle, and, on the other, to the new demands of expenditure arising, such as the building and endowment of free schools for the whole population, railways, and other public works, have become much more onerous in proportion to the assessable basis than in any other part of the United States, and require all careful and prudent
i Metayage, a mode of letting farms prevailing over a great part of the South of Europe, under which the proprietor furnishes part of the means of cultivation and shares the produce with the cultivator or metayer, is somewhat similar to the share system of the cotton plantations. But metayage, so far from being beneficial, has an inferior reputation, both as regards the culture of the soil and the well-being of the cultivators. Yet the share-arrangement of the cotton planters in the Southern States is not even so well planned ass metayage, and differs from it in some essential points for the worse.

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WASHINGTON.

JCH. xxxix.

consideration. Heavy as these burdens would have been under any circumstances, the State and other local taxation of the South has been grossly abused by a corrupt and reckless admi nistration since the war, which, under the reviving control of the taxpayers, is now receiving a check likely to be permanent and effective. The Federal taxation, I will observe, is rendered un necessarily oppressive and injurious by the American weakness of "protection to native industry," and the American ambition of " paying oiF the National Debt," both purposes involving some of the highest principles of political economy and finance, in re gard to which there is a wide field of controversy. Bemarks on the tariff of the United States can only be made by a British writer under a certain amount of restraint, as indeed all criticism from without on the internal affairs of any country can in any case be. The American Protectionists have a short and easy way of closing every demonstration of the international advantages of .free trade . by declaring, especially to a British advocate, that the laws of the United States are to be made not for the interests of Eng land or any other foreign country, but for the interests of the United States themselves. This argument, however captivating to a narrow patriotism, too often circumscribed within the still more limited circle of personal interest, has little intrinsic weight; since, taking it at its strongest point, the fact is that England having thirty years ago--a long period in the history even of nations--solved this quest!on for herself, with some of her greatest interests more threatened by the action of free trade than the greatest interests of any other country in the world can well be, it comes with ill grace from American citizens to exclude on a fallaciously selfish or doubtful plea any wisdom which the example or attainments of England in commercial polity may afford. And, indeed, the question of free trade betwixt America and Europe engages incomparably greater interest among the people of the United States than among even the manufacturers and merchants of England, who appear to entertain extremely little concern on the subject, save as one among many other principles affecting the general progress and civilization of the world. If free trade cannot commend itself on American soil in the interests of America alone, there is an end, of course, to the question there. The United States' policy of " paying off the National Debt" of two to three thousand millions of dollars, by monthly instal ments of a million dollars or less, brought into association with the question of the tariff through the common nexus- of taxation, if it err at all, most surely errs " on virtue's side," and it becomes foreign criticism to be more abstinent on this point than even on the other. The Secretary of the Treasury deems or finds it necessary, in carrying out this policy, to have 100 millions of a surplus always on hand; and as the only way of conveying to

CH. xxxix.]

CONCLUDING REMARKS.

283

people in Great Britain a faint conception of the importance given to this question by the American people, I am forced to ask what they would think if Mr. Gladstone or Mr. Lowe were to insist, after providing for all the expenses and obligations of the year, on levying twenty-odd millions sterling under the profession of paying off the National Debt, with the national taxation increasing in amount and weight during the process, instead of annually diminishing, which is the common object to be desired and attained? There are three ways of reducing the burden of a National Debt. First, paying off the principal; secondly, converting portions of the principal, as favourable occasions arise, into a lower rate of interest; and, thirdly, giving such play and freedom to the development of national wealth as, even without touching the National Debt or its rate of interest, must infallibly reduce its burden by a simple rule of proportion. The American Government has pursued the two first of these courses with inflexible integrity and with more or less success since the war ; but the third it has not only not pursued, but has pressed the first two so closely as to run directly counter to it, and to have all but produced the dilemma that the more determined the nation seems to pay off the Debt, the less able it becomes. These questions, opening a wealth of observation, are canvassed with such spirit and ability by the leading American newspapers, and in some instances with such admirable indepen dence of party, that very few who, like myself, have lived in the country for some months, but must own that they have derived greatly more from, than they can hope to contribute to, the discussion.
I trust that in these pages I have given no partial view of the many topics that have passed under review, and that as respects the general condition of the Southern States I have not failed to afford to many the means of a fuller and exacter understanding-- at least a nearer and more intimate view--than they had before. If I have given strong expression to convictions on such contro versial ground as that of legislation or politics, there seems an ample vindication of this freedom in the chief desire and aim of the American people, of all political parties, themselves. The polity of the United States that may be said to surmount all others, and to be national in the highest sense, is that of attracting in copious volume the surplus labour and capital of Europe ; and the wisdom of this polity is indisputable, since, while directlybuilding up their own greatness, it is the course in which the United States may render the greatest service to the world. But it were unwise to rest this movement on the basis of mere political or social discontent in other countries, while neglecting sources manifold of discontent at home; the conditions of free and equal government, as well as of social prosperity, have made

284

WASHINGTON.

CH. xxxix.

much progress in the Old World ; and the more thoroughly emigrants, especially of the United Kingdom, feel at home in the New World, under just and wise laws and all the blessings of a well-ordered society, the greater their number, the better their character, and the more lasting their usefulness as citizens of the United States may be expected to be. Betwixt the Tariff, in particular, and the main polity and interest of the United States, there appears to be a palpable contradiction, since it directly shuts out the capital of other countries, and renders the land of America less attractive to and less tenable by foreign immi grants. It is this consideration that has chiefly inspired any little political criticism in this book. I have been writing of States which, though not sharing hitherto in any equal degree with other sections of the Union the stream of labour and capital from Europe to America, present under fair legislation, and good government a peculiarly rich and interesting field for immigra tion, agriculture, commerce, and the development of many branches of industry; and were the balance in this respect now to be redressed in favour of the South, there would be in such good fortune a result no less gratifying to all American citizens than responsive to the deep interest which an heroic, not too wise, and unavailing struggle for independence excited throughout the world.

INDEX.

A. Abuses, governmental, 16, 35, 41-3, 59,
97-8, 186, 212-3, 227-8, 261, 269-70, 281-3. Agriculture, 64, 69-72, 119-24, 127-9, 140, 144, 179, 254, 256-7, 266-9, 271-2, 275 ; use of manures, 15 ; dis coveries of phosphates, 25, 46-8.
B. Banks and Banking, 45, 54-5, 72, 79,
171, 210-12, 2S4.
C.
Census, alleged inaccuracies of, 19, 96, 196.
Cotton, average production per acre of, 61, 64, 121, 140, 250; buying and selling of, 63, 260; increase ofgrowers of, 65, 119, 121, 272; competition of large and small growers of, 272-4; comparative value per acre of, 143 ; place of cotton in rotation of crops, 268-9-; selection of seed, 64-5; geo graphical limits of "Cotton Belt," 263.
H. frealth, statistics of, 52-3, 78,187, 236,
251-3.
K. Kn-Klux-Klan, alleged outrages, rise
and decline of, 35, 152-5.

L. Land, abundance and cheapness of,
21-2, 65, 85, 114-15,142-3, 159,179, 240, 255, 262-3.
M. Manufactures, cotton, 66, 91, 136-7,
143 ; paper, 184-5 ; cotton-seed oil, 185-6. Minerals, coal and iron, 106-9, 154, 162-3, 173-8 ; rock salt, 233; crys talline sulphur, 234. Money, change of value of, 33, 77 ; ex orbitant rate of interest, 57, 79, 151, 210, 241-3.
N. Negroes, testimony borne under free
labour concerning, 17, 30, 58-9, 65, 76, 131, 163, 167, 280 ; merits of paying by wages or share of crops the, 31, 60, 128-9, 146-7, 249, 280-1; migration from country to town of, 36, 52-3, 74, 96; plantation privi leges of, 128-30; moral and social progress under freedom of, 250-4 ; question as to comparative produc tiveness of free and slave labour, 58-9, 272-3.
E. Railways, cost of construction of, 31,
35, 88, 188-90, 262 ; projected lines of, 34, 58, 81-2, 165-6, 168-9,182-3, 258-9 ; State endorsement of bonds of, 88-90, 157-8, 270; management of, 82-3, 149-50.

286

INDEX.

,,

S. '

T.

Tariff, bad effects of the, 132-3, 137,

Seaports, trade of, 75-6, 183-4, 197-203,

204-9, 234-5, 244-5, 260-1, 283.

259. Schools, white and coloured, 19, 51,

98-9, 253 ; want of teachers of, 155-6,

w-

169 ; taxation for, 169-70, 227-8.

"Wages, rates and relative purchasing

Sugar, culture and manufacture of, power of, 17-18, 36, 77, 92.

220-5, 229-32.

Waj^maJsmLloSses inflicted by the,

" Sugar Concretor," 232.

----=57^7114, 134-5, 142, 144, 196-7,

Sugar Plantations, 217.

254.

THE END.

S. CLAY, SONS, AND TAYIOB, PEINTEES, Bp.r,,',D STEEET HlLt, LONDON.

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