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AT THE DALLAS, TEXAS, STATE FAIR, ON THE 26TH OF OCTOBER, 1887, MR.
GRADY WAS THE ORATOR OF THE DAY. HE SAID:
“Who saves his country, saves all things, and all things saved
will bless him. Who lets his country die, lets all things die,
and all things dying curse him.”
These words are graven on the statue of Benjamin H. Hill in the city of
Atlanta, and in their spirit I shall speak to you to-day.
Mr. President and Fellow-Citizens: I salute the first city of the
grandest State of the greatest government on this earth. In paying
earnest compliment to this thriving city, and this generous multitude, I
need not cumber speech with argument or statistics. It is enough to say
that my friends and myself make obeisance this morning to the chief
metropolis of the State of Texas. If it but holds this pre-eminence—and
who can doubt in this auspicious presence that it will—the uprising
tides of Texas’s prosperity will carry it to glories unspeakable. For I
say in soberness, the future of this marvelous and amazing empire, that
gives broader and deeper significance to statehood by accepting its
modest naming, the mind of man can neither measure nor comprehend.
I shall be pardoned for resisting the inspiration of this presence and
adhering to-day to blunt and rigorous speech—for there are times when
fine words are paltry, and this seems to me to be such a time. So I
shall turn away from the thunders of the political battle upon which
every American hangs intent, and repress the ardor that at this time
rises in every American heart—for there are issues that strike deeper
than any political theory has reached, and conditions of which
partisanry has taken, and can take, but little account. Let me,
therefore, with studied plainness, and with such precision as is
possible—in a spirit of fraternity that is broader than party
limitations, and deeper than political motive—discuss with you certain
problems upon the wise and prompt solution of which depends the glory
and prosperity of the South.
But why—for let us make our way slowly—why “the South.” In an
indivisible union—in a republic against the integrity of which sword
shall never be drawn or mortal hand uplifted, and in which the rich
blood gathering at the common heart is sent throbbing into every part of
the body politic—why is one section held separated from the rest in
alien consideration? We can understand why this should be so in a city
that has a community of local interests; or in a State still clothed in
that sovereignty of which the debates of peace and the storm of war has
not stripped her. But why should a number of States, stretching from
Richmond to Galveston, bound together by no local interests, held in no
autonomy, be thus combined and drawn to a common center? That man would
be absurd who declaimed in Buffalo against the wrongs of the Middle
States, or who demanded in Chicago a convention for the West to consider
the needs of that section. If then it be provincialism that holds the
South together, let us outgrow it; if it be sectionalism, let us root it
out of our hearts; but if it be something deeper than these and
essential to our system, let us declare it with frankness, consider it
with respect, defend it with firmness, and in dignity abide its
consequence. What is it that holds the southern States—though true in
thought and deed to the Union—so closely bound in sympathy to-day? For a
century these States championed a governmental theory—but that, having
triumphed in every forum, fell at last by the sword. They maintained an
institution—but that, having been administered in the fullest wisdom of
man, fell at last in the higher wisdom of God. They fought a war—but the
prejudices of that war have died, its sympathies have broadened, and its
memories are already the priceless treasure of the republic that is
cemented forever with its blood. They looked out together upon the ashes
of their homes and the desolation of their fields—but out of pitiful
resource they have fashioned their homes anew, and plenty rides on the
springing harvests. In all the past there is nothing to draw them into
essential or lasting alliance—nothing in all that heroic record that
cannot be rendered unfearing from provincial hands into the keeping of
American history.
But the future holds a problem, in solving which the South must stand
alone; in dealing with which, she must come closer together than
ambition or despair have driven her, and on the outcome of which her
very existence depends. This problem is to carry within her body politic
two separate races, and nearly equal in numbers. She must carry these
races in peace—for discord means ruin. She must carry them
separately—for assimilation means debasement. She must carry them in
equal justice—for to this she is pledged in honor and in gratitude. She
must carry them even unto the end, for in human probability she will
never be quit of either.
This burden no other people bears to-day—on none hath it ever rested.
Without precedent or companionship, the South must bear this problem,
the awful responsibility of which should win the sympathy of all human
kind, and the protecting watchfulness of God—alone, even unto the end.
Set by this problem apart from all other peoples of the earth, and her
unique position emphasized rather than relieved, as I shall show
hereafter, by her material conditions, it is not only fit but it is
essential that she should hold her brotherhood unimpaired, quicken her
sympathies, and in the light or in the shadows of this surpassing
problem work out her own salvation in the fear of God—but of God alone.
What shall the South do to be saved? Through what paths shall she reach
the end? Through what travail, or what splendors, shall she give to the
Union this section, its wealth garnered, its resources utilized, and its
rehabilitation complete—and restore to the world this problem solved in
such justice as the finite mind can measure, or finite hands administer?
In dealing with this I shall dwell on two points.
First, the duty of the South in its relation to the race problem.
Second, the duty of the South in relation to its no less unique and
important industrial problem.
I approach this discussion with a sense of consecration. I beg your
patient and cordial sympathy. And I invoke the Almighty God, that having
showered on this people His fullest riches has put their hands to this
task, that He will draw near unto us, as He drew near to troubled
Israel, and lead us in the ways of honor and uprightness, even through a
pillar of cloud by day, and a pillar of fire by night.
What of the negro? This of him. I want no better friend than the black
boy who was raised by my side, and who is now trudging patiently with
downcast eyes and shambling figure through his lowly way in life. I want
no sweeter music than the crooning of my old “mammy,” now dead and gone
to rest, as I heard it when she held me in her loving arms, and bending
her old black face above me stole the cares from my brain, and led me
smiling into sleep. I want no truer soul than that which moved the
trusty slave, who for four years while my father fought with the armies
that barred his freedom, slept every night at my mother’s chamber door,
holding her and her children as safe as if her husband stood guard, and
ready to lay down his humble life on her threshold. History has no
parallel to the faith kept by the negro in the South during the war.
Often five hundred negroes to a single white man, and yet through these
dusky throngs the women and children walked in safety, and the
unprotected homes rested in peace. Unmarshaled, the black battalions
moved patiently to the fields in the morning to feed the armies their
idleness would have starved, and at night gathered anxiously at the big
house to “hear the news from marster,” though conscious that his victory
made their chains enduring. Everywhere humble and kindly; the bodyguard
of the helpless; the rough companion of the little ones; the observant
friend; the silent sentry in his lowly cabin; the shrewd counselor. And
when the dead came home, a mourner at the open grave. A thousand torches
would have disbanded every Southern army, but not one was lighted. When
the master going to a war in which slavery was involved said to his
slave, “I leave my home and loved ones in your charge,” the tenderness
between man and master stood disclosed. And when the slave held that
charge sacred through storm and temptation, he gave new meaning to faith
and loyalty. I rejoice that when freedom came to him after years of
waiting, it was all the sweeter because the black hands from which the
shackles fell were stainless of a single crime against the helpless ones
confided to his care.
From this root, imbedded in a century of kind and constant
companionship, has sprung some foliage. As no race had ever lived in
such unresisting bondage, none was ever hurried with such swiftness
through freedom into power. Into hands still trembling from the blow
that broke the shackles, was thrust the ballot. In less than twelve
months from the day he walked down the furrow a slave, the negro
dictated in legislative halls from which Davis and Calhoun had gone
forth, the policy of twelve commonwealths. When his late master
protested against his misrule, the federal drum-beat rolled around his
strong-holds, and from a hedge of federal bayonets he grinned in
good-natured insolence. From the proven incapacity of that day has he
far advanced? Simple, credulous, impulsive—easily led and too often
easily bought, is he a safer, more intelligent citizen now than then? Is
this mass of votes, loosed from old restraints, inviting alliance or
awaiting opportunity, less menacing than when its purpose was plain and
its way direct?
My countrymen, right here the South must make a decision on which very
much depends. Many wise men hold that the white vote of the South should
divide, the color line be beaten down, and the southern States ranged on
economic or moral questions as interest or belief demands. I am
compelled to dissent from this view. The worst thing in my opinion that
could happen is that the white people of the South should stand in
opposing factions, with the vast mass of ignorant or purchasable negro
votes between. Consider such a status. If the negroes were skillfully
led,—and leaders would not be lacking,—it would give them the balance of
power—a thing not to be considered. If their vote was not compacted, it
would invite the debauching bid of factions, and drift surely to that
which was the most corrupt and cunning. With the shiftless habit and
irresolution of slavery days still possessing him, the negro voter will
not in this generation, adrift from war issues, become a steadfast
partisan through conscience or conviction. In every community there are
colored men who redeem their race from this reproach, and who vote under
reason. Perhaps in time the bulk of this race may thus adjust itself.
But, through what long and monstrous periods of political debauchery
this status would be reached, no tongue can tell.
The clear and unmistakable domination of the white race, dominating not
through violence, not through party alliance, but through the integrity
of its own vote and the largeness of its sympathy and justice through
which it shall compel the support of the better classes of the colored
race,—that is the hope and assurance of the South. Otherwise, the negro
would be bandied from one faction to another. His credulity would be
played upon, his cupidity tempted, his impulses misdirected, his
passions inflamed. He would be forever in alliance with that faction
which was most desperate and unscrupulous. Such a state would be worse
than reconstruction, for then intelligence was banded, and its speedy
triumph assured. But with intelligence and property divided—bidding and
overbidding for place and patronage—irritation increasing with each
conflict—the bitterness and desperation seizing every heart—political
debauchery deepening, as each faction staked its all in the miserable
game—there would be no end to this, until our suffrage was hopelessly
sullied, our people forever divided, and our most sacred rights
surrendered.
One thing further should be said in perfect frankness. Up to this point
we have dealt with ignorance and corruption—but beyond this point a
deeper issue confronts us. Ignorance may struggle to enlightenment, out
of corruption may come the incorruptible. God speed the day when,—every
true man will work and pray for its coming,—the negro must be led to
know and through sympathy to confess that his interests and the
interests of the people of the South are identical. The men who, from
afar off, view this subject through the cold eye of speculation or see
it distorted through partisan glasses, insist that, directly or
indirectly, the negro race shall be in control of the affairs of the
South. We have no fears of this; already we are attaching to us the best
elements of that race, and as we proceed our alliance will broaden;
external pressure but irritates and impedes. Those who would put the
negro race in supremacy would work against infallible decree, for the
white race can never submit to its domination, because the white race is
the superior race. But the supremacy of the white race of the South must
be maintained forever, and the domination of the negro race resisted at
all points and at all hazards—because the white race is the superior
race. This is the declaration of no new truth. It has abided forever in
the marrow of our bones, and shall run forever with the blood that feeds
Anglo-Saxon hearts.
In political compliance the South has evaded the truth, and men have
drifted from their convictions. But we cannot escape this issue. It
faces us wherever we turn. It is an issue that has been, and will be.
The races and tribes of earth are of Divine origin. Behind the laws of
man and the decrees of war, stands the law of God. What God hath
separated let no man join together. The Indian, the Malay, the Negro,
the Caucasian, these types stand as markers of God’s will. Let not man
tinker with the work of the Almighty. Unity of civilization, no more
than unity of faith, will never be witnessed on earth. No race has
risen, or will rise, above its ordained place. Here is the pivotal fact
of this great matter—two races are made equal in law, and in political
rights, between whom the caste of race has set an impassable gulf. This
gulf is bridged by a statute, and the races are urged to cross thereon.
This cannot be. The fiat of the Almighty has gone forth, and in eighteen
centuries of history it is written. We would escape this issue if we
could. From the depths of its soul the South invokes from heaven “peace
on earth, and good will to man.” She would not, if she could, cast this
race back into the condition from which it was righteously raised. She
would not deny its smallest or abridge its fullest privilege. Not to
lift this burden forever from her people, would she do the least of
these things. She must walk through the valley of the shadow, for God
has so ordained. But he has ordained that she shall walk in that
integrity of race, that created in His wisdom has been perpetuated in
His strength. Standing in the presence of this multitude, sobered with
the responsibility of the message I deliver to the young men of the
South, I declare that the truth above all others to be worn unsullied
and sacred in your hearts, to be surrendered to no force, sold for no
price, compromised in no necessity, but cherished and defended as the
covenant of your prosperity, and the pledge of peace to your children,
is that the white race must dominate forever in the South, because it is
the white race, and superior to that race by which its supremacy is
threatened.
It is a race issue. Let us come to this point, and stand here. Here the
air is pure and the light is clear, and here honor and peace abide.
Juggling and evasion deceives not a man. Compromise and subservience has
carried not a point. There is not a white man North or South who does
not feel it stir in the gray matter of his brain and throb in his heart.
Not a negro who does not feel its power. It is not a sectional issue. It
speaks in Ohio, and in Georgia. It speaks wherever the Anglo-Saxon
touches an alien race. It has just spoken in universally approved
legislation in excluding the Chinaman from our gates, not for his
ignorance, vice or corruption, but because he sought to establish an
inferior race in a republic fashioned in the wisdom and defended by the
blood of a homogeneous people.
The Anglo-Saxon blood has dominated always and everywhere. It fed Alfred
when he wrote the charter of English liberty; it gathered about Hampden
as he stood beneath the oak; it thundered in Cromwell’s veins as he
fought his king; it humbled Napoleon at Waterloo; it has touched the
desert and jungle with undying glory; it carried the drumbeat of England
around the world and spread on every continent the gospel of liberty and
of God: it established this republic, carved it from the wilderness,
conquered it from the Indians, wrested it from England, and at last,
stilling its own tumult, consecrated it forever as the home of the
Anglo-Saxon, and the theater of his transcending achievement. Never one
foot of it can be surrendered while that blood lives in American veins,
and feeds American hearts, to the domination of an alien and inferior
race.
And yet that is just what is proposed. Not in twenty years have we seen
a day so pregnant with fate to this section as the sixth of next
November. If President Cleveland is then defeated, which God forbid, I
believe these States will be led through sorrows compared to which the
woes of reconstruction will be as the fading dews of morning to the
roaring flood. To dominate these States through the colored vote, with
such aid as federal patronage may debauch or federal power deter, and
thus through its chosen instruments perpetuate its rule, is in my
opinion the settled purpose of the Republican party. I am appalled when
I measure the passion in which this negro problem is judged by the
leaders of the party. Fifteen years ago Vice-President Wilson said—and I
honor his memory as that of a courageous man: “We shall not have
finished with the South until we force its people to change their
thought, and think as we think.” I repeat these words, for I heard them
when a boy, and they fell on my ears as the knell of my people’s
rights—“to change their thought, and make them think as we think.” Not
enough to have conquered our armies—to have decimated our ranks, to have
desolated our fields and reduced us to poverty, to have struck the
ballot from our hands and enfranchised our slaves—to have held us
prostrate under bayonets while the insolent mocked and thieves
plundered—but their very souls must be rifled of their faiths, their
sacred traditions cudgeled from memory, and their immortal minds beaten
into subjection until thought had lost its integrity, and we were forced
“to think as they think.” And just now General Sherman has said, and I
honor him as a soldier:
“The negro must be allowed to vote, and his vote must be
counted; otherwise, so sure as there is a God in heaven, you
will have another war, more cruel than the last, when the torch
and dagger will take the place of the muskets of well-ordered
battalions. Should the negro strike that blow, in seeming
justice, there will be millions to assist them.”
And this General took Johnston’s sword in surrender! He looked upon the
thin and ragged battalions in gray, that for four years had held his
teeming and heroic legions at bay. Facing them, he read their courage in
their depleted ranks, and gave them a soldier’s parole. When he found it
in his heart to taunt these heroes with this threat, why—careless as he
was twenty years ago with fire, he is even more careless now with his
words. If we could hope that this problem would be settled within our
lives I would appeal from neither madness nor unmanliness. But when I
know that, strive as I may, I must at last render this awful heritage
into the untried hands of my son, already dearer to me than my life, and
that he must in turn bequeath it unsolved to his children, I cry out
against the inhumanity that deepens its difficulties with this
incendiary threat, and beclouds its real issue with inflaming passion.
This problem is not only enduring, but it is widening. The exclusion of
the Chinese is the first step in the revolution that shall save liberty
and law and religion to this land, and in peace and order, not enforced
on the gallows or at the bayonet’s end, but proceeding from the heart of
an harmonious people, shall secure in the enjoyment of these rights, and
the control of this republic, the homogeneous people that established
and has maintained it. The next step will be taken when some brave
statesman, looking Demagogy in the face, shall move to call to the
stranger at our gates, “Who comes here?” admitting every man who seeks a
home, or honors our institutions, and whose habit and blood will run
with the native current; but excluding all who seek to plant anarchy or
to establish alien men or measures on our soil; and will then demand
that the standard of our citizenship be lifted and the right of
acquiring our suffrage be abridged. When that day comes, and God speed
its coming, the position of the South will be fully understood, and
everywhere approved. Until then, let us—giving the negro every right,
civil and political, measured in that fullness the strong should always
accord the weak—holding him in closer friendship and sympathy than he is
held by those who would crucify us for his sake—realizing that on his
prosperity ours depends—let us resolve that never by external pressure,
or internal division, shall he establish domination, directly or
indirectly, over that race that everywhere has maintained its supremacy.
Let this resolution be cast on the lines of equity and justice. Let it
be the pledge of honest, safe and impartial administration, and we shall
command the support of the colored race itself, more dependent than any
other on the bounty and protection of government. Let us be wise and
patient, and we shall secure through its acquiescence what otherwise we
should win through conflict, and hold in insecurity.
All this is no unkindness to the negro—but rather that he may be led in
equal rights and in peace to his uttermost good. Not in sectionalism—for
my heart beats true to the Union, to the glory of which your life and
heart is pledged. Not in disregard of the world’s opinion—for to render
back this problem in the world’s approval is the sum of my ambition, and
the height of human achievement. Not in reactionary spirit—but rather to
make clear that new and grander way up which the South is marching to
higher destiny, and on which I would not halt her for all the spoils
that have been gathered unto parties since Catiline conspired, and Cæsar
fought. Not in passion, my countrymen, but in reason—not in narrowness,
but in breadth—that we may solve this problem in calmness and in truth,
and lifting its shadows let perpetual sunshine pour down on two races,
walking together in peace and contentment. Then shall this problem have
proved our blessing, and the race that threatened our ruin work our
salvation as it fills our fields with the best peasantry the world has
ever seen. Then the South—putting behind her all the achievements of her
past—and in war and in peace they beggar eulogy—may stand upright among
the nations and challenge the judgment of man and the approval of God,
in having worked out in their sympathy, and in His guidance, this last
and surpassing miracle of human government.
What of the South’s industrial problem? When we remember that amazement
followed the payment by thirty-seven million Frenchmen of a billion
dollars indemnity to Germany, that the five million whites of the South
rendered to the torch and sword three billions of property—that thirty
million dollars a year, or six hundred million dollars in twenty years,
has been given willingly of our poverty as pensions for Northern
soldiers, the wonder is that we are here at all. There is a figure with
which history has dealt lightly, but that, standing pathetic and heroic
in the genesis of our new growth, has interested me greatly—our
soldier-farmer of ’65. What chance had he for the future as he wandered
amid his empty barns, his stock, labor, and implements gone—gathered up
the fragments of his wreck—urging kindly his borrowed mule—paying sixty
per cent. for all that he bought, and buying all on credit—his crop
mortgaged before it was planted—his children in want, his neighborhood
in chaos—working under new conditions and retrieving every error by a
costly year—plodding all day down the furrow, hopeless and adrift, save
when at night he went back to his broken home, where his wife, cheerful
even then, renewed his courage, while she ministered to him in loving
tenderness. Who would have thought as during those lonely and terrible
days he walked behind the plow, locking the sunshine in the glory of his
harvest, and spreading the showers and the verdure of his field—no
friend near save nature that smiled at his earnest touch, and God that
sent him the message of good cheer through the passing breeze and the
whispering leaves—that he would in twenty years, having carried these
burdens uncomplaining, make a crop of $800,000,000. Yet this he has
done, and from his bounty the South has rebuilded her cities, and
recouped her losses. While we exult in his splendid achievement, let us
take account of his standing.
Whence this enormous growth? For ten years the world has been at peace.
The pioneer has now replaced the soldier. Commerce has whitened new
seas, and the merchant has occupied new areas. Steam has made of the
earth a chess-board, on which men play for markets. Our western
wheat-grower competes in London with the Russian and the East Indian.
The Ohio wool grower watches the Australian shepherd, and the bleat of
the now historic sheep of Vermont is answered from the steppes of Asia.
The herds that emerge from the dust of your amazing prairies might hear
in their pauses the hoof-beats of antipodean herds marching to meet
them. Under Holland’s dykes, the cheese and butter makers fight American
dairies. The hen cackles around the world. California challenges
vine-clad France. The dark continent is disclosed through meshes of
light. There is competition everywhere. The husbandman, driven from his
market, balances price against starvation, and undercuts his rival. This
conflict often runs to panic, and profit vanishes. The Iowa farmer
burning his corn for fuel is not an unusual type.
Amid this universal conflict, where stands the South? While the producer
of everything we eat or wear, in every land, is fighting through glutted
markets for bare existence, what of the southern farmer? In his
industrial as in his political problem he is set apart—not in doubt, but
in assured independence. Cotton makes him king. Not the fleeces that
Jason sought can rival the richness of this plant, as it unfurls its
banners in our fields. It is gold from the instant it puts forth its
tiny shoot. The shower that whispers to it is heard around the world.
The trespass of a worm on its green leaf means more to England than the
advance of the Russians on her Asiatic outposts. When its fibre, current
in every bank, is marketed, it renders back to the South $350,000,000
every year. Its seed will yield $60,000,000 worth of oil to the press
and $40,000,000 in food for soil and beast, making the stupendous total
of $450,000,000 annual income from this crop. And now, under the
Tompkins patent, from its stalk—news paper is to be made at two cents
per pound. Edward Atkinson once said: “If New England could grow the
cotton plant, without lint, it would make her richest crop; if she held
monopoly of cotton lint and seed she would control the commerce of the
world.”
But is our monopoly, threatened from Egypt, India and Brazil, sure and
permanent? Let the record answer. In ’72 the American supply of cotton
was 3,241,000 bales,—foreign supply 3,036,000. We led our rivals by less
than 200,000 bales. This year the American supply is 8,000,000
bales—from foreign sources, 2,100,000, expressed in bales of four
hundred pounds each. In spite of new areas elsewhere, of fuller
experience, of better transportation, and unlimited money spent in
experiment, the supply of foreign cotton has decreased since ’72 nearly
1,000,000 bales, while that of the South has increased nearly 5,000,000.
Further than this: Since 1872, population in Europe has increased 13 per
cent., and cotton consumption in Europe has increased 50 per cent. Still
further: Since 1880 cotton consumption in Europe has increased 28 per
cent., wool only 4 per cent., and flax has decreased 11 per cent. As for
new areas, the uttermost missionary woos the heathen with a cotton shirt
in one hand and the Bible in the other, and no savage I believe has ever
been converted to one, without adopting the other. To summarize: Our
American fibre has increased its product nearly three-fold, while it has
seen the product of its rival decrease one-third. It has enlarged its
dominion in the old centers of population, supplanting flax and wool,
and it peeps from the satchel of every business and religious evangelist
that trots the globe. In three years the American crop has increased
1,400,000 bales, and yet there is less cotton in the world to-day than
at any time for twenty years. The dominion of our king is established;
this princely revenue assured, not for a year, but for all time. It is
the heritage that God gave us when he arched our skies, established our
mountains, girt us about with the ocean, tempered the sunshine, and
measured the rain—ours and our children’s forever.
Not alone in cotton, but in iron, does the South excel. The Hon. Mr.
Norton, who honors this platform with his presence, once said to me: “An
Englishman of the highest character predicted that the Atlantic will be
whitened within our lives with sails carrying American iron and coal to
England.” When he made that prediction the English miners were
exhausting the coal in long tunnels above which the ocean thundered.
Having ores and coal stored in exhaustless quantity, in such richness,
and in such adjustment, that iron can be made and manufacturing done
cheaper than elsewhere on this continent, is to now command, and at last
control, the world’s market for iron. The South now sells iron, through
Pittsburg, in New York. She has driven Scotch iron first from the
interior, and finally from American ports. Within our lives she will
cross the Atlantic, and fulfill the Englishman’s prophecy. In 1880 the
South made 212,000 tons of iron. In 1887, 845,000 tons. She is now
actually building, or has finished this year, furnaces that will produce
more than her entire product of last year. Birmingham alone will produce
more iron in 1889 than the entire South produced in 1887. Our coal
supply is exhaustless, Texas alone having 6000 square miles. In marble
and granite we have no rivals, as to quantity or quality. In lumber our
riches are even vaster. More than fifty per cent. of our entire area is
in forests, making the South the best timbered region of the world. We
have enough merchantable yellow pine to bring, in money,
$2,500,000,000—a sum the vastness of which can only be understood when I
say it nearly equaled the assessed value of the entire South, including
cities, forests, farms, mines, factories and personal property of every
description whatsoever. Back of this our forests of hard woods, and
measureless swamps of cypress and gum. Think of it. In cotton a
monopoly. In iron and coal establishing swift mastery. In granite and
marble developing equal advantage and resource. In yellow pine and hard
woods the world’s treasury. Surely the basis of the South’s wealth and
power is laid by the hand of the Almighty God, and its prosperity has
been established by divine law which work in eternal justice and not by
taxes levied on its neighbors through human statutes. Paying tribute for
fifty years that under artificial conditions other sections might reach
a prosperity impossible under natural laws, it has grown apace—and its
growth shall endure if its people are ruled by two maxims, that reach
deeper than legislative enactment, and the operation of which cannot be
limited by artificial restraint, and but little hastened by artificial
stimulus.
First. No one crop will make a people prosperous. If cotton held its
monopoly under conditions that made other crops impossible—or under
allurements that made other crops exceptional—its dominion would be
despotism.
Whenever the greed for a money crop unbalances the wisdom of husbandry,
the money crop is a curse. When it stimulates the general economy of the
farm, it is the profiting of farming. In an unprosperous strip of
Carolina, when asked the cause of their poverty, the people say,
“Tobacco—for it is our only crop.” In Lancaster, Pa., the richest
American county by the census, when asked the cause of their prosperity,
they say, “Tobacco—for it is the golden crown of a diversified
agriculture.” The soil that produces cotton invites the grains and
grasses, the orchard and the vine. Clover, corn, cotton, wheat, and
barley thrive in the same inclosure; the peach, the apple, the apricot,
and the Siberian crab in the same orchard. Herds and flocks graze ten
months every year in the meadows over which winter is but a passing
breath, and in which spring and autumn meet in summer’s heart.
Sugar-cane and oats, rice and potatoes, are extremes that come together
under our skies. To raise cotton and send its princely revenues to the
west for supplies, and to the east for usury, would be misfortune if
soil and climate forced such a curse. When both invite independence, to
remain in slavery is a crime. To mortgage our farms in Boston for money
with which to buy meat and bread from western cribs and smokehouses, is
folly unspeakable. I rejoice that Texas is less open to this charge than
others of the cotton States. With her eighty million bushels of grain,
and her sixteen million head of stock, she is rapidly learning that
diversified agriculture means prosperity. Indeed, the South is rapidly
learning the same lesson; and learned through years of debt and
dependence it will never be forgotten. The best thing Georgia has done
in twenty years was to raise her oat crop in one season from two million
to nine million bushels, without losing a bale of her cotton. It is more
for the South that she has increased her crop of corn—that best of
grains, of which Samuel J. Tilden said, “It will be the staple food of
the future, and men will be stronger and better when that day comes”—by
forty-three million bushels this year, than to have won a pivotal battle
in the late war. In this one item she keeps at home this year a sum
equal to the entire cotton crop of my State that last year went to the
west.
This is the road to prosperity. It is the way to manliness and
sturdiness of character. When every farmer in the South shall eat bread
from his own fields and meat from his own pastures, and disturbed by no
creditor, and enslaved by no debt, shall sit amid his teeming gardens,
and orchards, and vineyards, and dairies, and barnyards, pitching his
crops in his own wisdom, and growing them in independence, making cotton
his clean surplus, and selling it in his own time, and in his chosen
market, and not at a master’s bidding—getting his pay in cash and not in
a receipted mortgage that discharges his debt, but does not restore his
freedom—then shall be breaking the fullness of our day. Great is King
Cotton! But to lie at his feet while the usurer and grain-raiser bind us
in subjection, is to invite the contempt of man and the reproach of God.
But to stand up before him and amid the crops and smokehouses wrest from
him the magna charta of our independence, and to establish in his name
an ample and diversified agriculture, that shall honor him while it
enriches us—this is to carry us as far in the way of happiness and
independence as the farmer, working in the fullest wisdom, and in the
richest field, can carry any people.
But agriculture alone—no matter how rich or varied its resources—cannot
establish or maintain a people’s prosperity. There is a lesson in this
that Texas may learn with profit. No commonwealth ever came to greatness
by producing raw material. Less can this be possible in the future than
in the past. The Comstock lode is the richest spot on earth. And yet the
miners, gasping for breath fifteen hundred feet below the earth’s
surface, get bare existence out of the splendor they dig from the earth.
It goes to carry the commerce and uphold the industry of distant lands,
of which the men who produce it get but dim report. Hardly more is the
South profited when, stripping the harvest of her cotton fields, or
striking her teeming hills, or leveling her superb forests, she sends
the raw material to augment the wealth and power of distant communities.
Texas produces a million and a half bales of cotton, which yield her
$60,000,000. That cotton, woven into common goods, would add $75,000,000
to Texas’s income from this crop, and employ 220,000 operatives, who
would spend within her borders more than $30,000,000 in wages.
Massachusetts manufactures 575,000 bales of cotton, for which she pays
$31,000,000, and sells for $72,000,000, adding a value nearly equal to
Texas’s gross revenue from cotton, and yet Texas has a clean advantage
for manufacturing this cotton of one per cent a pound over
Massachusetts. The little village of Grand Rapids began manufacturing
furniture simply because it was set in a timber district. It is now a
great city and sells $10,000,000 worth of furniture every year, in
making which 125,000 men are employed, and a population of 40,000 people
supported. The best pine districts of the world are in eastern Texas.
With less competition and wider markets than Grand Rapids has, will she
ship her forests at prices that barely support the wood-chopper and
sawyer, to be returned in the making of which great cities are built or
maintained? When her farmers and herdsmen draw from her cities
$126,000,000 as the price of their annual produce, shall this enormous
wealth be scattered through distant shops and factories, leaving in the
hands of Texas no more than the sustenance, support, and the narrow
brokerage between buyer and seller? As one-crop farming cannot support
the country, neither can a resource of commercial exchange support a
city. Texas wants immigrants—she needs them—for if every human being in
Texas were placed at equi-distant points through the State no Texan
could hear the sound of a human voice in your broad areas.
So how can you best attract immigration? By furnishing work for the
artisan and mechanic if you meet the demand of your population for
cheaper and essential manufactured articles. One-half million workers
would be needed for this, and with their families would double the
population of your State. In these mechanics and their dependents
farmers would find a market for not only their staple crops but for the
truck that they now despise to raise or sell, but is at least the cream
of the farm. Worcester county, Mass., takes $720,000,000 of our material
and turns out $87,000,000 of products every year, paying $20,000,000 in
wages. The most prosperous section of this world is that known as the
Middle States of this republic. With agriculture and manufacturers in
the balance, and their shops and factories set amid rich and ample
acres, the result is such deep and diffuse prosperity as no other
section can show. Suppose those States had a monopoly of cotton and coal
so disposed as to command the world’s markets and the treasury of the
world’s timber, I suppose the mind is staggered in contemplating the
majesty of the wealth and power they would attain. What have they that
the South lacks?—and to her these things were added, and climate, ampler
acres and rich soil. It is a curious fact that three-fourths of the
population and manufacturing wealth of this country is comprised in a
narrow strip between Iowa and Massachusetts, comprising less than
one-sixth of our territory, and that this strip is distant from the
source of raw materials on which its growth is based, of hard climate
and in a large part of sterile soil. Much of this forced and unnatural
development is due to slavery, which for a century fenced enterprise and
capital out of the South. Mr. Thomas, who in the Lehigh Valley owned a
furnace in 1845 that set that pattern for iron-making in America, had at
that time bought mines and forest where Birmingham now stands. Slavery
forced him away. He settled in Pennsylvania. I have wondered what would
have happened if that one man had opened his iron mines in Alabama and
set his furnaces there at that time. I know what is going to happen
since he has been forced to come to Birmingham and put up two furnaces
nearly forty years after his survey.
Another cause that has prospered New England and the Middle States while
the South languished, is the system of tariff taxes levied on the
unmixed agriculture of these States for the protection of industries to
our neighbors to the North, a system on which the Hon. Roger Q.
Mills—that lion of the tribe of Judah—has at last laid his mighty paw
and under the indignant touch of which it trembles to its center. That
system is to be revised and its duties reduced, as we all agree it
should be, though I should say in perfect frankness I do not agree with
Mr. Mills in it. Let us hope this will be done with care and industrious
patience. Whether it stands or falls, the South has entered the
industrial list to partake of his bounty if it stands, and if it falls
to rely on the favor with which nature has endowed her, and from this
immutable advantage to fill her own markets and then have a talk with
the world at large.
With amazing rapidity she has moved away from the one-crop idea that was
once her curse. In 1880 she was esteemed prosperous. Since that time she
has added 393,000,000 bushels to her grain crops, and 182,000,000 head
to her live stock. This has not lost one bale of her cotton crop, which,
on the contrary, has increased nearly 200,000 bales. With equal
swiftness has she moved away from the folly of shipping out her ore at
$2 a ton and buying it back in implements from $20 to $100 per ton; her
cotton at 10 cents a pound and buying it back in cloth at 20 to 80 cents
per pound; her timber at $8 per thousand and buying it back in furniture
at ten to twenty times as much. In the past eight years $250,000,000
have been invested in new shops and factories in her States; 225,000
artisans are now working that eight years ago were idle or worked
elsewhere, and these added $227,000,000 to the value of her raw
material—more than half the value of her cotton. Add to this the value
of her increased grain crops and stock, and in the past eight years she
has grown in her fields or created in her shops manufactures more than
the value of her cotton crop. The incoming tide has begun to rise. Every
train brings manufacturers from the East and West seeking to establish
themselves or their sons near the raw material and in this growing
market. Let the fullness of the tide roll in.
It will not exhaust our materials, nor shall we glut our markets. When
the growing demand of our southern market, feeding on its own growth, is
met, we shall find new markets for the South. Under our new condition
many indirect laws of commerce shall be straightened. We buy from Brazil
$50,000,000 worth of goods, and sell her $8,500,000. England buys only
$29,000,000, and sells her $35,000,000. Of $65,000,000 in cotton goods
bought by Central and South America, over $50,000,000 went to England.
Of $331,000,000 sent abroad by the southern half of our hemisphere,
England secures over half, although we buy from that section nearly
twice as much as England. Our neighbors to the south need nearly every
article we make; we need nearly everything they produce. Less than 2,500
miles of road must be built to bind by rail the two American continents.
When this is done, and even before, we shall find exhaustless markets to
the South. Texas shall command, as she stands in the van of this new
movement, its richest rewards.
The South, under the rapid diversification of crops and diversification
of industries, is thrilling with new life. As this new prosperity comes
to us, it will bring no sweeter thought to me, and to you, my
countrymen, I am sure, than that it adds not only to the comfort and
happiness of our neighbors, but that it makes broader the glory and
deeper the majesty, and more enduring the strength, of the Union which
reigns supreme in our hearts. In this republic of ours is lodged the
hope of free government on earth. Here God has rested the ark of his
covenant with the sons of men. Let us—once estranged and thereby closer
bound,—let us soar above all provincial pride and find our deeper
inspirations in gathering the fullest sheaves into the harvest and
standing the staunchest and most devoted of its sons as it lights the
path and makes clear the way through which all the people of this earth
shall come in God’s appointed time.
A few words for the young men of Texas. I am glad that I can speak to
them at all. Men, especially young men, look back for their inspiration
to what is best in their traditions. Thermopylæ cast Spartan sentiments
in heroic mould and sustained Spartan arms for more than a century.
Thermopylæ had survivors to tell the story of its defeat. The Alamo had
none. Though voiceless it shall speak from its dumb walls. Liberty cried
out to Texas, as God called from the clouds unto Moses. Bowie and
Fanning, though dead still live. Their voices rang above the din of
Goliad and the glory of San Jacinto, and they marched with the Texas
veterans who rejoiced at the birth of Texas independence. It is the
spirit of the Alamo that moved above the Texas soldiers as they charged
like demigods through a thousand battle-fields, and it is the spirit of
the Alamo that whispers from their graves held in every State of the
Union, ennobling their dust, their soil, that was crimsoned with their
blood.
In this spirit of this inspiration and in the thrill of the amazing
growth that surrounds you, my young friends, it will be strange if the
young men of Texas do not carry the lone star into the heart of the
struggle. The South needs her sons to-day more than when she summoned
them to the forum to maintain her political supremacy, more than when
the bugle called them to the field to defend issues put to the
arbitrament of the sword. Her old body is instinct with appeal calling
on us to come and give her fuller independence than she has ever sought
in field or forum. It is ours to show that as she prospered with slaves
she shall prosper still more with freemen; ours to see that from the
lists she entered in poverty she shall emerge in prosperity; ours to
carry the transcending traditions of the old South from which none of us
can in honor or in reverence depart, unstained and unbroken into the
new. Shall we fail? Shall the blood of the old South—the best strain
that ever uplifted human endeavor—that ran like water at duty’s call and
never stained where it touched—shall this blood that pours into our
veins through a century luminous with achievement, for the first time
falter and be driven back from irresolute heat, when the old South, that
left us a better heritage in manliness and courage than in broad and
rich acres, calls us to settle problems? A soldier lay wounded on a
hard-fought field, the roar of the battle had died away, and he rested
in the deadly stillness of its aftermath. Not a sound was heard as he
lay there, sorely smitten and speechless, but the shriek of wounded and
the sigh of the dying soul, as it escaped from the tumult of earth into
the unspeakable peace of the stars. Off over the field flickered the
lanterns of the surgeons with the litter bearers, searching that they
might take away those whose lives could be saved and leave in sorrow
those who were doomed to die with pleading eyes through the darkness.
This poor soldier watched, unable to turn or speak as the lanterns grew
near. At last the light flashed in his face, and the surgeon, with
kindly face, bent over him, hesitated a moment, shook his head, and was
gone, leaving the poor fellow alone with death. He watched in patient
agony as they went on from one part of the field to another. As they
came back the surgeon bent over him again. “I believe if this poor
fellow lives to sundown to-morrow he will get well.” And again leaving
him, not to death but with hope; all night long these words fell into
his heart as the dews fell from the stars upon his lips, “if he but
lives till sundown, he will get well.” He turned his weary head to the
east and watched for the coming sun. At last the stars went out, the
east trembled with radiance, and the sun, slowly lifting above the
horizon, tinged his pallid face with flame. He watched it inch by inch
as it climbed slowly up the heavens. He thought of life, its hopes and
ambitions, its sweetness and its raptures, and he fortified his soul
against despair until the sun had reached high noon. It sloped down its
slow descent, and his life was ebbing away and his heart was faltering,
and he needed stronger stimulants to make him stand the struggle until
the end of the day had come. He thought of his far-off home, the blessed
house resting in tranquil peace with the roses climbing to its door, and
the trees whispering to its windows, and dozing in the sunshine, the
orchard and the little brook running like a silver thread through the
forest.
“If I live till sundown I will see it again. I will walk down the shady
lane: I will open the battered gate, and the mocking-bird shall call to
me from the orchard, and I will drink again at the old mossy spring.”
And he thought of the wife who had come from the neighboring farmhouse
and put her hand shyly in his, and brought sweetness to his life and
light to his home.
“If I live till sundown I shall look once more into her deep and loving
eyes and press her brown head once more to my aching breast.”
And he thought of the old father, patient in prayer, bending lower and
lower every day under his load of sorrow and old age.
“If I but live till sundown I shall see him again and wind my strong arm
about his feeble body, and his hands shall rest upon my head while the
unspeakable healing of his blessing falls into my heart.”
And he thought of the little children that clambered on his knees and
tangled their little hands into his heart-strings, making to him such
music as the world shall not equal or heaven surpass.
“If I live till sundown they shall again find my parched lips with their
warm mouths, and their little fingers shall run once more over my face.”
And he then thought of his old mother, who gathered these children about
her and breathed her old heart afresh in their brightness and attuned
her old lips anew to their prattle, that she might live till her big boy
came home.
“If I live till sundown I will see her again, and I will rest my head at
my old place on her knees, and weep away all memory of this desolate
night.” And the Son of God, who had died for men, bending from the
stars, put the hand that had been nailed to the cross on ebbing life and
held on the staunch until the sun went down and the stars came out, and
shone down in the brave man’s heart and blurred in his glistening eyes,
and the lanterns of the surgeons came and he was taken from death to
life.
The world is a battle-field strewn with the wrecks of government and
institutions, of theories and of faiths that have gone down in the
ravage of years. On this field lies the South, sown with her problems.
Upon the field swings the lanterns of God. Amid the carnage walks the
Great Physician. Over the South he bends. “If ye but live until
to-morrow’s sundown ye shall endure, my countrymen.” Let us for her sake
turn our faces to the east and watch as the soldier watched for the
coming sun. Let us staunch her wounds and hold steadfast. The sun mounts
the skies. As it descends to us, minister to her and stand constant at
her side for the sake of our children, and of generations unborn that
shall suffer if she fails. And when the sun has gone down and the day of
her probation has ended, and the stars have rallied her heart, the
lanterns shall be swung over the field and the Great Physician shall
lead her up, from trouble into content, from suffering into peace, from
death to life. Let every man here pledge himself in this high and ardent
hour, as I pledge myself and the boy that shall follow me; every man
himself and his son, hand to hand and heart to heart, that in death and
earnest loyalty, in patient painstaking and care, he shall watch her
interest, advance her fortune, defend her fame and guard her honor as
long as life shall last. Every man in the sound of my voice, under the
deeper consecration he offers to the Union, will consecrate himself to
the South. Have no ambition but to be first at her feet and last at her
service. No hope but, after a long life of devotion, to sink to sleep in
her bosom, and as a little child sleeps at his mother’s breast and rests
untroubled in the light of her smile.
With such consecrated service, what could we not accomplish; what riches
we should gather for her; what glory and prosperity we should render to
the Union; what blessings we should gather unto the universal harvest of
humanity. As I think of it, a vision of surpassing beauty unfolds to my
eyes. I see a South, the home of fifty millions of people, who rise up
every day to call from blessed cities, vast hives of industry and of
thrift; her country-sides the treasures from which their resources are
drawn; her streams vocal with whirring spindles; her valleys tranquil in
the white and gold of the harvest; her mountains showering down the
music of bells, as her slow-moving flocks and herds go forth from their
folds; her rulers honest and her people loving, and her homes happy and
their hearthstones bright, and their waters still, and their pastures
green, and her conscience clear; her wealth diffused and poor-houses
empty, her churches earnest and all creeds lost in the gospel. Peace and
sobriety walking hand in hand through her borders; honor in her homes;
uprightness in her midst; plenty in her fields; straight and simple
faith in the hearts of her sons and daughters; her two races walking
together in peace and contentment; sunshine everywhere and all the time,
and night falling on her generally as from the wings of the unseen dove.
All this, my country, and more can we do for you. As I look the vision
grows, the splendor deepens, the horizon falls back, the skies open
their everlasting gates, and the glory of the Almighty God streams
through as He looks down on His people who have given themselves unto
Him and leads them from one triumph to another until they have reached a
glory unspeaking, and the whirling stars, as in their courses through
Arcturus they run to the milky way, shall not look down on a better
people or happier land.
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