The cities in many ways affect the white race, chiefly for the better; they furnish the appliances of intellectual growth, tolerable common schools, public high schools, public libraries, and a body of educated and thinking people. In the cities are found most of the new business and professional class who are doing much to rejuvenate the South. The interior cities much more than in former times are centers for the planting areas in their neighborhood; and through the cities are promoted those relations of place with place, of state with state, of section with section, of nation with nation, which broaden human life. Unfortunately in the cities, although their negro population is less in proportion than in the open country, the race feeling is bitter; and some of the most serious race disturbances during the last twenty years have been in large places; although the presence of a police force ought to keep such trouble in check.
Still the South remains a rural community. Leaving out of account Louisville, Baltimore, and St. Louis, which, although within the boundaries of slave-holding states, were built up chiefly by middle-state or western state trade, the ante-bellum South contained only three notable cities: Richmond, Charleston, and New Orleans. As late as 1880 out of eight million people in the lower South only half a million lived in cities of eight thousand inhabitants and upward. In 1900, though a third of the people of the whole United States lived in cities, the urban population of the states extending from South Carolina to Texas was only about a ninth. Since that time the cities have been going forward more rapidly; but the drift out of the open country is less marked than the similar movement in the Northern states, and the influence of foreign immigration is negligible.
Nevertheless the cities have become a distinct feature of the New South; and their healthy growth is one of the most hopeful tokens of prosperity. The largest is of course New Orleans, which has now passed the three hundred thousand mark and, in the estimation of its people, is on the way to surpass New York City. What else does it mean when the Southern port in one year ships more wheat than the Northern? But New Orleans is only the fourteenth in size of the American cities, and the Lower South has only one other, Atlanta, which goes into the list of the fifty largest cities of the Union.
Though these figures show conclusively that the South is not an urban region, they do not set forth the activity, the civic life, and the prospective growth of the Southern cities. Charleston is still the most attractive place of pilgrimage on the North American continent, beautiful in situation, romantic in association, abounding in people of mind, and much more active in a business way than the world supposes; Savannah is a seaport, with a few incidental manufactures, but one of the busiest places on the Atlantic coast; Mobile has become metropolitan in its handsome buildings, and in a spirit of enterprise which the Yankees have not always been willing to admit to be a Southern trait. Atlanta is the clearing house of many financial enterprises, such as the great life insurance companies and trust companies, and has become a wholesale center. While three other interior cities of this region, Columbia, Montgomery, and Birmingham, are among the active and progressive places of the country. In Texas there is certain to be a large urban population, and Houston, San Antonio, and Dallas have not yet decided among themselves which is to be the Chicago of the South.
CHAPTER III
THE POOR WHITE
The broad and beautiful Southland is peopled by about thirty million human beings (26,000,000 in 1900), who constitute the “South” as a community conscious of a life separate in many respects from that of the North. What is there in these thirty millions which sets them apart? First of all is the sharp division into two races—two thirds of the people Whites and one third Negroes, which in uncounted open and obscure ways makes the South unlike any other country in the world. In the second place account must be taken of the subdivision of the white people into social and economic classes—a division common in all lands, but peculiar in the South because of the relations of the strata to each other.
An analysis of the elements of white population may begin with the less prosperous and progressive portion commonly called the Poor Whites. As used in the South the term means lowlanders; and it is necessary to set off for separate treatment the mountaineers, who are, if not typical Southerners, at least unlike anything in the North. No other inhabitants of the United States are so near the eighteenth century as the people to whom an observer has given the name of “Our contemporary ancestors.” For nowhere else in the United States is there a distinct mountain people. The New England mountaineers live nowhere higher than 1,500 feet above the sea, and have no traits which mark them from their neighbors in the lower lands; in the Rocky Mountains the population is chiefly made up of miners; the Sierra Nevadas are little peopled; in the South alone, where some elevated valleys have been settled for two hundred years, is there an American mountain folk, with a local dialect and social system and character.