The Southern South

by Albert Bushnell Hart

The seacoast, along the Atlantic and Gulf, is again different from the Black Belt. It abounds in islands, some of which, especially the Sea Islands of South Carolina and Georgia, present the most interesting negro conditions to be found in the South. In this strip lie also the Southern ports, of which the principal ones are Norfolk, Wilmington, Charleston, Savannah, Brunswick, Jacksonville, Pensacola, Mobile, New Orleans, and Galveston. With the exception of Atlanta, Montgomery, Birmingham, and Memphis, and the Texan cities, this list includes nearly all the populous cities of the Lower South. The ports are supported not from the productions of their neighborhood, but as out-ports from the interior. Three of them, Savannah, New Orleans, and Galveston, have a large European commerce; the others depend upon the coasting trade, the fruit industry, and the beginnings of the commerce to the Isthmus of Panama, which everybody in the South expects is to become enormous.

In one respect the Southland and the Northland were originally alike, namely, that they were both carpeted with a growth of heavy timber, the pine and its brethren in some localities, hard woods in others. Here a divergence has come about which has many effects on the South; by 1860, outside the mountains, there was little uncleared land in the North, while most of the hill region, and large parts of the Black Belt and coast, in the South were still untouched by the ax. In the last twenty-five years great inroads have been made on the Southern forests, and clearing is going on everywhere on a large scale. Nevertheless, a very considerable proportion of the Southern Whites and many Negroes still live in the woods, and have retained some of the habits of the frontier. Population is commonly sparse; pretentious names of villages on the map prove to mark hamlets of two or three houses; nearly all the country churches are simply set down at crossroads, as are the schoolhouses and mournful little cemeteries. The good effects of frontier life are there, genuine democracy, neighborhood feeling, hospitality, courage, and honesty; but along with them are seen the drawbacks of the frontier: ignorance, uncouthness, boisterousness, lawlessness, a lack of enterprise, and contempt for the experience of older communities.

One of the characteristics not only of the lower classes, but of all sections of the South, is the love of open-air life; the commonest thing on the roads in any part of the South is the man with a sporting gun, and a frequent sight is a pack of dogs escorting men on horseback who are going out to beat up deer. In some parts of the back country and in many parts of the Black Belt the roads are undrivable several months of the year, and people have to find their way on horseback. So common is the habit of horseback riding that a mountain girl to whom a Northern lady lent a book on etiquette returned it with the remark: “Hit seems a right smart sort of a book, but hit is so simple; why, hit tells you how to sit on a horse!” As will be seen in the next chapter, the frontier is ceasing to be, but many of its consequences will long be left impressed upon Southern character. Meanwhile the woods are turning into dollars, and a farming community is emerging not unlike that of the hill regions of western Pennsylvania or southern Ohio.

The physical respects in which the South most differs from the North are its climate and its products. The South enjoys an unusual combination of climatic conditions; it is a subtropical country in which can be raised cotton, rice, sugar, yams, and citrous fruits; it is abundantly watered with copious rainfall and consequent streams; at the same time, it is subject to occasional frosts which, however destructive of the hopes of orange growers, are supposed to be favorable to cotton. Not one of the Southern crops is a monopoly, even in the United States; they are raising cotton and oranges in California, rice in the Philippines, sugar in Porto Rico, and tobacco in Connecticut; but the South is better fitted for these staples than any other section of the Union, and in addition can raise every Northern crop, except maple sugar, including corn, oats, buckwheat, considerable quantities of wheat, barley, rye, and garden fruits. Every year trucking—that is, the raising of vegetables—grows more important in the South; and Texas still remains a great cattle state. There is, however, little dairying anywhere, and it cannot be too clearly kept in mind that the great agricultural staple, the dramatic center of Southern life, is “making cotton.”

Though agriculture is the predominant interest in the South, it is coming forward rapidly in other pursuits, and is putting an end to differences which for near a century have marked off the two sections. Down to the Civil War the South hardly touched its subterranean wealth in coal and iron, and knew nothing of its petroleum or its stores of phosphate rock. Mining has now become a great industry, especially in Alabama, and the states north and northwestward to Virginia. The manufacture of iron has kept pace, and indeed has stimulated the development of the mines; and Birmingham is one of the world’s centers in the iron trade. Cotton mills also have sprung up; and, as will be shown later, think they are disputing the supremacy of New England. Though the Black Belt shares little in these industries, or in the city building which comes along with them, it has two local industries, namely, the ginning of cotton and the manufacture of cotton-seed oil, together with a large fertilizer industry.

The South is not without drawbacks such as all over the world are the penalty for the fruitfulness of semi-tropical regions. While, with the exception of the lower Mississippi, perhaps no day in the summer is as hot as some New York days, the heat in the Lower South is steady and unyielding; and though the Negroes and white laborers keep on with little interruption and sunstrokes are almost unknown, the heat affects the powers, at least of the Whites, to give their best service. Colleges and schools find it harder to keep up systematic study throughout the academic year than in similar Northern institutions.

The South is much more infested by poisonous snakes, ticks, fleas, and other like pests than the North, and though the climate is so favorable for an all-the-year-round outdoor life these creatures put some limitations on free movement. The low country also abounds in swamps, many of them miles in extent, which if drained might make the most fertile soil in the world; but, as they lie, are haunts of mosquitoes, and therefore of malaria. Deaths by malarial fever, which are almost unknown in the North, mount up to some hundreds in Southern cities, and in the lowlands, particularly of the Mississippi and the Sea Islands, every white new-comer must pay the penalty of fever before he can live comfortably. The people accept these drawbacks good-humoredly and often ignore them, but they make life different from that of most parts of the North.

On the other hand, the rivers of the South, flowing from the wide extended mountains with their abundant rainfall, make a series of abundant water powers. In the upper mountains there are a few waterfalls of a height from twenty to two hundred feet, but the great source of power is where the considerable streams reach the “fall line,” below which they run unimpeded to the sea. Places like Spartanburg and Columbia in South Carolina, and Augusta and Columbus in Georgia, have large powers which are making them great manufacturing centers. No part of the United States east of the Rocky Mountains is so rich in undeveloped water powers as is the South.

This prosperity extends also to the smaller cities which are now springing up in profusion throughout the South. Even in the Black Belt there are centers of local trade; and forwarding points like Monroe in Louisiana, Greenville in Mississippi, and Americus in Georgia, are concentrators of accumulating wealth and also of new means of education and refinement. In this respect, as in many others, the South is going through the experience of the Northwestern states forty years ago; and although its urban population is not likely ever to be so large in proportion as in those states, a change is coming over the habits of thought and the means of livelihood of the whole Southern people.

In Southern cities large and small, new and old, the visitor is attracted by the excellent architectural taste of most of the public buildings, of many of the new hotels and modern business blocks, and of the stately colonnaded private houses. Texas boasts a superb capitol at Austin, one of the most notable buildings of the country, which will perhaps be thought abnormal in some parts of the North, since it was built without jobbery and brought with it no train of criminal suits against the state officers who supervised its erection. The less progressive state of Mississippi has a new marble capitol at Jackson, which is as attractive as the beautiful statehouse at Providence. The same sense of proportion and dignity is shown in many smaller places, such as Opelika, Alabama, or Shreveport, Louisiana, which contain beautiful churches and county buildings appropriate and dignified.