Once I remarked to him: “What Virginia needs is an influx of Northern ideas, Northern energy, Northern capital; what other way of salvation is open to her?”
“None; and she knows it. It is a mistake to suppose that Northern men and Northern capital are not welcome here. They are most heartily welcome; they are invited. Look at this.”
He showed me a beautiful piece of white clay, and a handsome pitcher made from it.
“Within eighty miles of Richmond, by railroad, there are beds of this clay from which might be manufactured pottery and porcelain sufficient to supply the entire South. Yet they have never been worked; and Virginia has imported all her fine crockery-ware. Now Northern energy will come in and coin fortunes out of that clay. Under the old labor system, Virginia never had any enterprise; and now she has no money. The advantages she offers to active business men were never surpassed. Richmond is surrounded with iron mines and coal-fields, wood-lands and farm-lands of excellent quality; and is destined from its very position, under the new order of things, to run up a population of two or three hundred thousand, within not many years.”
I inquired about the state finances.
“The Rebel State debt will, of course, never be paid. The old State debt, amounting to forty millions, will eventually be paid, although the present is a dark day for it. There is no live stock to eat the grass; the mills are destroyed; business is at a stand-still; there is no bank-stock to tax,—nothing to tax, I might almost say, but the bare land. We shall pay no interest on the debt this year; and it will probably be three years before the back interest is paid. We have twenty-two millions invested in railroads, and these will all be put in a living condition in a short time. Then I count upon the development of our natural resources. In mineral wealth and agricultural advantages Virginia is inconceivably rich, as a few years will amply testify.”
As an illustration of native enterprise, he told me that there was but one village containing fifty inhabitants on the canal between Richmond and Lynchburg, a distance of one hundred and fifty miles; and land lying upon it was worth no more to-day than it was before the canal was constructed. “Neither is there a village of any size on the James River, between Richmond and Norfolk. How long would it be before brick villages and manufacturing towns would spring up on such a canal and river in one of the free States? Wasn’t it about time,” he added, “for the old machine to break to pieces?”
At the hotel I used to meet a prosperous looking, liberal faced, wide-awake person, whom I at once set down as a Yankee. On making his acquaintance, I learned that he was at the head of a company of Northern men who had recently purchased extensive coal-fields near the James River, twelve miles above Richmond.
“The mines,” he said, “had been exhausted once, and abandoned, so we bought them cheap. These Virginians would dig a little pit and take out coal until water came in and interfered with their work; then they would go somewhere else and dig another little pit. So they worked over the surface of the fields, but left the great body of the coal undisturbed. They baled with a mule. Now we have come in with a few steam-pumps which will keep the shafts free from water as fast as we sink them; and we are taking out cargoes of as good anthracite as ever you saw. Here is some of it now,” pointing to a line of loaded carts coming up from the wharf, where the coal was landed.
I asked what labor he employed.