Texas experienced the most thorough change in the fifty years after the Civil War. From 307 miles her railways expanded to more than 14,000 miles. Only one of the Confederate States, Arkansas, had a slighter mileage in 1860, but in 1910 no one had half as much as Texas. The totals for the Confederate area rose from 11,000 miles in 1870 to 17,000 in 1880, to 36,000 in 1890, to 45,000 in 1900, and to 63,000 in 1910. After 1880 no Confederate State equaled Texas, whose vast area, suddenly brought within reach of railway service, poured forth cotton until by the end of the century she alone raised one fourth of the American crop. Through the expanding transportation system the area of profitable cotton culture rose more rapidly than the demand for cotton, and in overproduction may be found one of the reasons for the decline in cotton values in the early nineties. In the decline may be found an incentive toward diversified agriculture. When cotton went down, farmers tried other crops. The corn acreage in the ten cotton States passed the cotton acreage before 1899, and with the diversification came no decrease in the total cotton output, but an increase in general agricultural prosperity. In many regions fruit culture and truck-raising forced their way to the front among profitable types of agriculture.
In spite of the changes in industry and transportation the South remained in 1910 a rural community when compared with the rest of the United States. Out of 114 cities of 50,000 population in 1910, only 15 were in the Confederate area. But when compared with its own past the South was developing cities at a rapid rate. Only New Orleans and Richmond, in 1880, had 50,000 inhabitants. Atlanta, Charleston, Memphis, and Nashville were added to this class by 1890. Texas had no city of this size until 1900. But in 1910 she possessed four, Dallas, Forth Worth, Houston, and San Antonio. As the cities increased in number, bound together, and bound to the cities of the rest of the United States by the ties of trade and society, the localisms of the South diminished. The essential fear of negro control remained untouched, but in superficial ways the Southerner came to resemble his fellow citizen of whatever section.
The sectionalism which had made a political unit of the South before the war was weakened. In the tariff debates of 1883 and later a group of Southern protectionists made common cause with Northern Republicans. Sugar, iron, and cotton manufactures converted them from the old regional devotion to free trade. A fear of national power had kept the old South generally opposed to internal improvements at the public cost. The Pacific railroads had been postponed somewhat because of this. But this repugnance had died away, and in the Mississippi River the United States found a field for work that was welcomed in the South.
The Mississippi never fully recovered the dominance that it had possessed before the war, but it remained an important highway for the Western cotton States. The whimsical torrent, washing away its banks, cutting new channels at will, flooding millions of acres every spring, was too great to be controlled by States that had been impoverished by war and reconstruction. In 1879 Congress created a Mississippi River Commission. Unusual floods in 1882 attracted attention to the danger, and thereafter Congress found the money for a levee system that restrained the river between its banks from Cairo to the Gulf.
The mouth of the river, always choked by mud flats, was opened by the United States in 1879. A Western engineer, James B. Eads, devised a scheme by which the current scoured out its own channel and converted itself into an ocean-going highway. He had already proved his power over the Father of Waters by building the railroad bridge that was opened at St. Louis in 1874. In 1892 other engineers completed a bridge at Memphis.
The active development of the New South lessened the difference between it and the rest of the United States, and brought it within the general industrial revolution. By 1884 the trend was not noticeable. By 1890 the white population had divided over a political issue like the North and West. In the years immediately following 1890 Populism was as much a problem in the South as anywhere.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Most of the books relating to the South are partisan. The most useful economic analyses are to be found in the writings of W.L. Fleming, U.B. Phillips, and A.H. Stone. Special points of view are presented in A.B. Hart, The Southern South (1911), E.G. Murphy, Problems of the Present South (1904), E.A. Alderman and A.C. Gordon, Life of J.L.M. Curry (1911), J.L.M. Curry, A Brief Sketch of George Peabody (1898), J.E. Cutler, Lynch Law (1905), B.T. Washington, Up from Slavery (1905), W.E.B. DuBois, Souls of Black Folk (1903), and J.L. Mathews, Remaking the Mississippi (1909). The Annual Cyclopædia is full of useful details. The Annual Reports of the Peabody Fund, the Slater Fund, and the United States Commissioner of Education contain statistics and discussions upon Southern society. The Civil Rights Cases (109 U.S. Reports) give the best treatment of the legal status of the negro, and are supplemented by J.C. Rose, "Negro Suffrage" (in American Political Science Review, vol. I, pp. 17-43,—a partial sketch only), and J.M. Mathews, Legislative and Judicial History of the Fifteenth Amendment (in Johns Hopkins University Studies, vol. XXVII). There were interesting articles on the New Orleans Exposition, by E.V. Smalley, in the Century Magazine for April and May, 1885.