The Southern South

by Albert Bushnell Hart

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the last ten years the South has seen a wonderful advance in railroad transportation. States like Louisiana and Georgia are fairly gridironed with railroads, and new ones building all the time: indeed, in the “Delta” of Mississippi a railroad can live on local business if it has a belt of its own twelve miles wide.