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.