The Southern South

by Albert Bushnell Hart

Wealth the South possesses—large wealth, growing wealth, greater wealth than that section has ever before approached. So agreeable is this state of things that Southern writers are inclined not only to set forth their prosperity but to claim that theirs is the most prosperous part of the whole country and is soon to become the richest. As Edmonds puts it in his “Facts about the South”: “Against the poverty, the inexperience, the discredit and doubt at home and abroad of ourselves and our section of 1880, the South, thrilled with energy and hope, stands to-day recognized by the world as that section which of all others in this country or elsewhere has the greatest potentialities for the creation of wealth and the profitable employment of its people.” The Southern statements of the poverty of the South from 1865 to 1880 are more easily verified. The tracks of armies outside Virginia and parts of Tennessee were narrow; but at the end of the war the South had exhausted all its movable capital; the banks were broken; the state and Confederate bonds worthless; the railroads ruined; the cities disconsolate. And the labor system was, for a time, much disturbed, though never disrupted. As Henry Watterson, of Kentucky, puts it: “The South! The South! It is no problem at all. The whole story of the South may be summed up in a sentence: She was rich, she lost her riches; she was poor and in bondage; she was set free, and she had to go to work; she went to work, and she is richer than ever before. You see it was a ground-hog case. The soil was here, the climate was here, but along with them was a curse, the curse of slavery.”

The immense increase of wealth and productivity since 1880 is equally unquestionable. When it comes to the claim that it is the most prosperous part of the world, it cannot be accepted offhand. The fact that the South is well off does not prove that it is better off than its neighbors; the wealth and prosperity of the South are always limited by the character of its labor. Calculation of profits, adding of bank balances, cutting of coupons, have to some degree drawn men’s minds away from the race question; but on the other hand the demand for labor and the losses of dividends or of opportunities to make money because the labor is inefficient are ever renewed causes of exasperation. At all times the South is subject to reverses like those of other regions. The crisis of 1907 hit that section hard by cutting down the demand for timber, minerals, iron, and other staples, and was one of the factors in a decline in cotton which touched the pocket nerve of the South; and the railroads felt the loss of business. Still, most Southern enterprises weathered the storm, and in 1909 the tide of prosperity is mounting again.

If it be true that the South is the most prosperous part of the world, a disagreeable responsibility falls upon somebody for having less than the best schools, libraries, buildings, roads, and other appliances of civilization; if it be not true, there must be some defect in the social or industrial system which out of such splendid materials produces less than a fair proportion of the world’s wealth. To be sure a section or a state might lag behind in production and yet forge ahead in education, in the harmony of social classes, in respect for law, in good order. Switzerland is not a rich country, but it is an advanced country. The claims of superior productiveness can with difficulty be tested. The relative status of the two sections in intellectual and governmental ways has been examined in earlier chapters and the South cannot claim supremacy there. A similar comparison shall now be made as to the relative production and accumulation of the two sections.

A criterion of wealth much relied upon by Southern writers is the movement of commerce. We are told that two fifths of the inward and outward movement of foreign trade passes through Southern ports. The truth is that in 1907 that figure was $883,000,000 as against $2,432,000,000 in all Northern Atlantic, Lake and Pacific ports. The bulk of this Southern business, however, is in exports—$742,000,000—a third of the total. Not a tenth of all the imports came into Southern ports, and three fourths of that through the three ports of Baltimore, Galveston, and New Orleans, from all which a part goes into non-Southern states. The explanation is that through the Southern ports pour the staples, but that the return cargoes, especially of manufactures, go to Northern ports, even though part of it is later distributed to the South. A second correction is due to the fact that about $536,000,000 of the exports goes through the five ports of Baltimore, Newport News, Norfolk and Portsmouth, New Orleans, and Galveston, all of which are entrepots for immense trade originating beyond the limits of the South. For instance, New Orleans and Galveston together shipped 24 million bushels of the 147 millions of wheat exports—practically not a Southern crop. Even in such an unreckoned increment of income as the federal pension lists, the South is less forward than the North, which drew 113 millions a year against 25 millions in the whole South and 11 millions in the seceded states—most of that to colored soldiers.

The relative wealth of the two sections is best measured not by foreign trade but by internal production and by public income and expenditure, calculated on a per-capita basis. Of course conditions vary greatly from state to state; in Alabama there is steady farm work most of the year, while in North Dakota the winter is a time of comparative leisure; California uses agricultural machinery, South Carolina depends chiefly on hand tools; Wyoming is so young that it has had little time to accumulate capital, Tennessee has large accumulations. It would be unfair to compare Arkansas with Connecticut, or Illinois with Florida, on a strictly per-capita basis. The only way to equalize conditions for a fair comparison is to take groups of states and set them against other groups of equivalent population and of similar interests, so that local errors may neutralize each other.

As a basis for such a comparison of resources, three sets of tables have been made up. The first sets apart the group of eleven seceding states with 17,000,000 people (West Virginia not included) as being typically Southern; and places against them a group of agricultural states extending from Indiana to Oklahoma, also containing 17,000,000 people. The second tables include the whole South—viz., the fifteen former slaveholding states (excluding West Virginia), together with the District of Columbia, including a population of about 28,000,000 people; to which is opposed the Middle West and Pacific states from Indiana to the Coast, together with Vermont and New Hampshire, which are added to make up a full 28,000,000. To such comparisons the objection has been made that it averages the confessedly inferior rural negro population with the picked immigrants from the East and abroad in the Northwest. The objection is a concession of the lower average productive capacity of the South; but in order to compare the white elements of the two sections by themselves, a third set of tables compares the whole South containing 17,900,000 whites and 8,000,000 blacks against a group of Northern agricultural states with a population of 18,000,000 whites and 234,000 blacks.

The materials for such comparisons are various. Every traveler has his impressions of the relative prosperity of South and North based on what he sees of stations, public and private buildings, cities and stocks of goods, and on the appearance of farms and work-people throughout the country. For precise indications, the population of the states is estimated year by year in the Bulletins of the Census Bureau; estimates of accumulated wealth are made every few years by the Department of Commerce; returns of annual crops by the Department of Agriculture; banking statistics by the Treasury Department. The annual Statistical Abstract prints summaries of manufactures and other industry, and on these topics the Census Bureau issues valuable bulletins. For tax valuations there is no general official publication, but the World Almanac collects every year from state auditors a statement of assessments. Most of these sources must be accepted as simply a series of liberal estimates, but the factors of error are likely to be much the same in the Northern and the Southern communities, and at least they furnish the basis for a comparison in round numbers. The tax assessments are significant, because they are revised from year to year, and the methods of assessment are not very different in the various parts of the country and are likely to err by giving too low a value or omitting property, so that comparisons from tax returns are relatively more favorable to the poorer than to the richer communities.

I. The Eleven Seceding States.

Tabulation based upon the principles stated above will be found in the Appendix to this volume; and a study of those tables reveals some interesting comparisons between the eleven communities which formed the Southern Confederacy and nineteen Western communities, the two groups each having in 1900 about nineteen million inhabitants. The assessed taxable valuation of the Southern group in 1904 was 4,200 millions; in the Northern group it was 9,700 millions, or more than double. Four years later the valuations were 5,200 millions as against 13,800 millions. Since tax assessments are subject to many variations, perhaps a fairer measure of sectional wealth is banking transactions. The bank deposits of the National groups of the Southern group were, in 1906, 700 millions, in the Northern group, 2,400 millions. Bank clearings in the same year were respectively 4 billions and 8½ billions.

All the eleven seceding states together in 1906 valued their real estate at 2,900 millions, their personal at 1,800 millions, total 4,700 millions. A corresponding Northern group (in which the richest state is Indiana), counts its real estate worth 7,700 millions, its personalty, 2,700 millions, a total of 10,400 millions. That is, the Northern land and buildings are counted nearly thrice as valuable, and personalty about a half more valuable, though everybody knows that there is a vast deal of untaxed personalty in the North.