ACTUAL WEALTH

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the last ten years the South has seen a wonderful advance in railroad transportation. States like Louisiana and Georgia are fairly gridironed with railroads, and new ones building all the time: indeed, in the “Delta” of Mississippi a railroad can live on local business if it has a belt of its own twelve miles wide.Nevertheless, the present railroad system in the South, comprising about 80,000 miles, has been mostly built since 1880. This system includes several lines from the Middle West to the seaboard, so that Baltimore, the James River ports, New Orleans, and Galveston are enriched by commerce passing through their ports to regions outside the Southern states. Nevertheless, as will be seen in the next chapter, this means that the great distributing centers in the Union are outside the limits of the South.

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

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

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

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

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