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THE SOUTHLAND

In what do the Southern States differ as to extent and climate from other parts of the United States? First of all, what does the Southland include? Previous to the Civil War, when people said “the South” they usually meant the fifteen states in which slavery was established. Since 1865 some inroads and additions to that group have been made. Maryland is rather a middle state than a Southern; West Virginia has been cut off from the South, and is now essentially Western, as is Missouri; but the new State of Oklahoma is a community imbued with a distinct Southern spirit. For many reasons the Northern tier of former slave-holding states differ from their Southern neighbors; and in this book less attention will be given to Virginia, North Carolina, Kentucky, and Tennessee than to their South-lying neighbors, because they are becoming to a considerable degree mineral and manufacturing communities, in which the negro problem is of diminishing significance. The true Southland, the region in which conditions are most disturbed and an adjustment of races is most necessary, where cotton is most significant, is the belt of seven states from South Carolina to Texas, to which the term “Lower South” has often been applied.

Physically, the Southern States differ much both from their Northeastern and their Northwestern neighbors. No broken country like New England reaches down to the coast; no rocky headlands flank deep natural harbors; there are, except in central Alabama and in Texas, no treeless prairies. Three of these states, South Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama, include mountain regions which, though interesting in themselves, are little related to the great problem of race relations and of race hostility. Physically, they protect the cotton belt from the North, and thus affect the climate; and they are fountains of water power as yet little developed. South of the mountains and thence westward through northern Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas, is a hill region which is from every point of view one of the parts of the South most interesting and at the same time least known by Northerners. This is the traditional home of the Poor Whites; whose backwardness is in itself a problem; whose industry contributes much more than the world has been prone to allow to the wealth of the South; and whose progress is one of the most encouraging things in the present situation, for they furnish the major part of the Southern voters. The hills are still heavily wooded, as was the whole face of the country as far as central Texas, when it was first opened up by Europeans. The hill region is also the theater of most of the manufacturing in the South, and especially of the cotton mills.

Below the hills is a stretch of land, much of it alluvial, extending from lower North Carolina to central Texas, which is the most characteristic part of the South, because it is the approved area of cotton planting, the site of great plantations, and the home of the densest negro population. The central part of it is commonly called The Black Belt originally because of the color of the soil, more recently as a tribute to the color of the tillers of the soil, for here may be found counties in which the Negroes are ten to one, and areas in which they are a hundred to one. It includes some prosperous cities, like Montgomery and Shreveport, and many thriving and increasing towns; but it is preëminently an agricultural region, in which is to be settled the momentous question whether the Negro is to stay on the land, and can progress as an agricultural laborer.

The seacoast, along the Atlantic and Gulf, is again different from the Black Belt. It abounds in islands, some of which, especially the Sea Islands of South Carolina and Georgia, present the most interesting negro conditions to be found in the South. In this strip lie also the Southern ports, of which the principal ones are Norfolk, Wilmington, Charleston, Savannah, Brunswick, Jacksonville, Pensacola, Mobile, New Orleans, and Galveston. With the exception of Atlanta, Montgomery, Birmingham, and Memphis, and the Texan cities, this list includes nearly all the populous cities of the Lower South. The ports are supported not from the productions of their neighborhood, but as out-ports from the interior. Three of them, Savannah, New Orleans, and Galveston, have a large European commerce; the others depend upon the coasting trade, the fruit industry, and the beginnings of the commerce to the Isthmus of Panama, which everybody in the South expects is to become enormous.

In one respect the Southland and the Northland were originally alike, namely, that they were both carpeted with a growth of heavy timber, the pine and its brethren in some localities, hard woods in others. Here a divergence has come about which has many effects on the South; by 1860, outside the mountains, there was little uncleared land in the North, while most of the hill region, and large parts of the Black Belt and coast, in the South were still untouched by the ax. In the last twenty-five years great inroads have been made on the Southern forests, and clearing is going on everywhere on a large scale. Nevertheless, a very considerable proportion of the Southern Whites and many Negroes still live in the woods, and have retained some of the habits of the frontier. Population is commonly sparse; pretentious names of villages on the map prove to mark hamlets of two or three houses; nearly all the country churches are simply set down at crossroads, as are the schoolhouses and mournful little cemeteries. The good effects of frontier life are there, genuine democracy, neighborhood feeling, hospitality, courage, and honesty; but along with them are seen the drawbacks of the frontier: ignorance, uncouthness, boisterousness, lawlessness, a lack of enterprise, and contempt for the experience of older communities.

One of the characteristics not only of the lower classes, but of all sections of the South, is the love of open-air life; the commonest thing on the roads in any part of the South is the man with a sporting gun, and a frequent sight is a pack of dogs escorting men on horseback who are going out to beat up deer. In some parts of the back country and in many parts of the Black Belt the roads are undrivable several months of the year, and people have to find their way on horseback. So common is the habit of horseback riding that a mountain girl to whom a Northern lady lent a book on etiquette returned it with the remark: “Hit seems a right smart sort of a book, but hit is so simple; why, hit tells you how to sit on a horse!” As will be seen in the next chapter, the frontier is ceasing to be, but many of its consequences will long be left impressed upon Southern character. Meanwhile the woods are turning into dollars, and a farming community is emerging not unlike that of the hill regions of western Pennsylvania or southern Ohio.

The physical respects in which the South most differs from the North are its climate and its products. The South enjoys an unusual combination of climatic conditions; it is a subtropical country in which can be raised cotton, rice, sugar, yams, and citrous fruits; it is abundantly watered with copious rainfall and consequent streams; at the same time, it is subject to occasional frosts which, however destructive of the hopes of orange growers, are supposed to be favorable to cotton. Not one of the Southern crops is a monopoly, even in the United States; they are raising cotton and oranges in California, rice in the Philippines, sugar in Porto Rico, and tobacco in Connecticut; but the South is better fitted for these staples than any other section of the Union, and in addition can raise every Northern crop, except maple sugar, including corn, oats, buckwheat, considerable quantities of wheat, barley, rye, and garden fruits. Every year trucking—that is, the raising of vegetables—grows more important in the South; and Texas still remains a great cattle state. There is, however, little dairying anywhere, and it cannot be too clearly kept in mind that the great agricultural staple, the dramatic center of Southern life, is “making cotton.”

Though agriculture is the predominant interest in the South, it is coming forward rapidly in other pursuits, and is putting an end to differences which for near a century have marked off the two sections. Down to the Civil War the South hardly touched its subterranean wealth in coal and iron, and knew nothing of its petroleum or its stores of phosphate rock. Mining has now become a great industry, especially in Alabama, and the states north and northwestward to Virginia. The manufacture of iron has kept pace, and indeed has stimulated the development of the mines; and Birmingham is one of the world’s centers in the iron trade. Cotton mills also have sprung up; and, as will be shown later, think they are disputing the supremacy of New England. Though the Black Belt shares little in these industries, or in the city building which comes along with them, it has two local industries, namely, the ginning of cotton and the manufacture of cotton-seed oil, together with a large fertilizer industry.

The South is not without drawbacks such as all over the world are the penalty for the fruitfulness of semi-tropical regions. While, with the exception of the lower Mississippi, perhaps no day in the summer is as hot as some New York days, the heat in the Lower South is steady and unyielding; and though the Negroes and white laborers keep on with little interruption and sunstrokes are almost unknown, the heat affects the powers, at least of the Whites, to give their best service. Colleges and schools find it harder to keep up systematic study throughout the academic year than in similar Northern institutions.

The South is much more infested by poisonous snakes, ticks, fleas, and other like pests than the North, and though the climate is so favorable for an all-the-year-round outdoor life these creatures put some limitations on free movement. The low country also abounds in swamps, many of them miles in extent, which if drained might make the most fertile soil in the world; but, as they lie, are haunts of mosquitoes, and therefore of malaria. Deaths by malarial fever, which are almost unknown in the North, mount up to some hundreds in Southern cities, and in the lowlands, particularly of the Mississippi and the Sea Islands, every white new-comer must pay the penalty of fever before he can live comfortably. The people accept these drawbacks good-humoredly and often ignore them, but they make life different from that of most parts of the North.

On the other hand, the rivers of the South, flowing from the wide extended mountains with their abundant rainfall, make a series of abundant water powers. In the upper mountains there are a few waterfalls of a height from twenty to two hundred feet, but the great source of power is where the considerable streams reach the “fall line,” below which they run unimpeded to the sea. Places like Spartanburg and Columbia in South Carolina, and Augusta and Columbus in Georgia, have large powers which are making them great manufacturing centers. No part of the United States east of the Rocky Mountains is so rich in undeveloped water powers as is the South.

This prosperity extends also to the smaller cities which are now springing up in profusion throughout the South. Even in the Black Belt there are centers of local trade; and forwarding points like Monroe in Louisiana, Greenville in Mississippi, and Americus in Georgia, are concentrators of accumulating wealth and also of new means of education and refinement. In this respect, as in many others, the South is going through the experience of the Northwestern states forty years ago; and although its urban population is not likely ever to be so large in proportion as in those states, a change is coming over the habits of thought and the means of livelihood of the whole Southern people.

In Southern cities large and small, new and old, the visitor is attracted by the excellent architectural taste of most of the public buildings, of many of the new hotels and modern business blocks, and of the stately colonnaded private houses. Texas boasts a superb capitol at Austin, one of the most notable buildings of the country, which will perhaps be thought abnormal in some parts of the North, since it was built without jobbery and brought with it no train of criminal suits against the state officers who supervised its erection. The less progressive state of Mississippi has a new marble capitol at Jackson, which is as attractive as the beautiful statehouse at Providence. The same sense of proportion and dignity is shown in many smaller places, such as Opelika, Alabama, or Shreveport, Louisiana, which contain beautiful churches and county buildings appropriate and dignified.

The cities in many ways affect the white race, chiefly for the better; they furnish the appliances of intellectual growth, tolerable common schools, public high schools, public libraries, and a body of educated and thinking people. In the cities are found most of the new business and professional class who are doing much to rejuvenate the South. The interior cities much more than in former times are centers for the planting areas in their neighborhood; and through the cities are promoted those relations of place with place, of state with state, of section with section, of nation with nation, which broaden human life. Unfortunately in the cities, although their negro population is less in proportion than in the open country, the race feeling is bitter; and some of the most serious race disturbances during the last twenty years have been in large places; although the presence of a police force ought to keep such trouble in check.

Still the South remains a rural community. Leaving out of account Louisville, Baltimore, and St. Louis, which, although within the boundaries of slave-holding states, were built up chiefly by middle-state or western state trade, the ante-bellum South contained only three notable cities: Richmond, Charleston, and New Orleans. As late as 1880 out of eight million people in the lower South only half a million lived in cities of eight thousand inhabitants and upward. In 1900, though a third of the people of the whole United States lived in cities, the urban population of the states extending from South Carolina to Texas was only about a ninth. Since that time the cities have been going forward more rapidly; but the drift out of the open country is less marked than the similar movement in the Northern states, and the influence of foreign immigration is negligible.

Nevertheless the cities have become a distinct feature of the New South; and their healthy growth is one of the most hopeful tokens of prosperity. The largest is of course New Orleans, which has now passed the three hundred thousand mark and, in the estimation of its people, is on the way to surpass New York City. What else does it mean when the Southern port in one year ships more wheat than the Northern? But New Orleans is only the fourteenth in size of the American cities, and the Lower South has only one other, Atlanta, which goes into the list of the fifty largest cities of the Union.

Though these figures show conclusively that the South is not an urban region, they do not set forth the activity, the civic life, and the prospective growth of the Southern cities. Charleston is still the most attractive place of pilgrimage on the North American continent, beautiful in situation, romantic in association, abounding in people of mind, and much more active in a business way than the world supposes; Savannah is a seaport, with a few incidental manufactures, but one of the busiest places on the Atlantic coast; Mobile has become metropolitan in its handsome buildings, and in a spirit of enterprise which the Yankees have not always been willing to admit to be a Southern trait. Atlanta is the clearing house of many financial enterprises, such as the great life insurance companies and trust companies, and has become a wholesale center. While three other interior cities of this region, Columbia, Montgomery, and Birmingham, are among the active and progressive places of the country. In Texas there is certain to be a large urban population, and Houston, San Antonio, and Dallas have not yet decided among themselves which is to be the Chicago of the South.