THE SOUTH AND HER PROBLEMS.
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.