APPENDIX
The Old and New South, a Centennial article for the International Review, afterwards corrected and published separately. New York: A. S. Barnes & Co. 1876.
The approach of the Centennial Celebration is not hailed in the south with the demonstrative joy of the north. It would be out of taste to expect that the former should appear to triumph greatly over the life of the nation preserved at the cost of her recent overthrow. Her late antagonist can rejoice in a vast and happy population, great material prosperity, and the fresh fame of a world-renowned success. It is meet, while remembering she has so lately saved the union by her stupendous armipotence, that the north should exult as a people never did before. The south has been made to feel the pangs of a sudden impoverishment and the incalculable discomfort of complete economical unsettlement; and she has not learned the new lessons which she must learn to become self-sustaining and progressive. But her earnest spirits, doing painfully the slow task of repairing lost fortunes; seeking after the system proper to succeed planting; striving to make their homes pleasant again and to give their children a fair hope in the land,—these intent workers, who are most of them scarred confederate veterans, even if they will not say it loudly, have come around to hold in steadfast faith that it is far better the Blue Cross fell, and the American union stands forever unchallengeable hereafter. And they have brought with them the great mass of their people. They cannot joy so happily as the north, but they have a warm welcome for the Great Commemoration. For they see that the evils which followed as the scourge of defeat are soon to pass away, while the fall of slavery and the failure of secession are to prove greater and greater blessings as years roll on.
And so the time has come for a southerner calmly to discuss the past, present, and future of the south. He has no use for the methods of popular and unscientific politics, wherein everything is blamed or applauded as being the result of party measures. The intentions and motives of the actors, on both sides of the late strife, will give but proximate explanations. How the two sections became, to use the fine phrase of Von Holst, economically contrasted; how the southern people and their representative politicians were bred, under their circumstances, into opposition to the union; and how the northern people and their representative politicians were bred, under widely different circumstances, into love of the union; how the long clashing in politics culminated in civil war; how the south was utterly crushed and her whole industrial system destroyed; how she slowly re-erects herself into a new condition better than the old,—the ultimate solution of these questions can only be found by discussing them in the light of those laws of development which give every community a policy suited to what it discerns to be its best interest. These laws are of far more importance than the politician, who is but their creature. Leaving to others to fight over the old struggles of the political arena and bandy hard words with one another, we will try to discuss our subject in the manner we have indicated to be appropriate.
To understand the present and future, we must first understand the past. To understand the New south, we must first understand the Old south, the distinguishing feature of which was negro slavery. Mr. Stephens, then Vice-President of the southern confederacy, in an address to a large assembly in Savannah, in March, 1861, said of the new government: “Its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery—subordination to the superior race—is his natural and normal condition.” There is no doubt slavery was the corner-stone of southern society; and when it was removed, four years later, a thorough disintegration of the whole fabric was the logical result.
When our country was first settled, the southern regions were far more attractive in soil and climate; and their other natural resources—minerals, good harbors, navigable streams, water-power idling everywhere, to mention no more—were equal to those of the other section. The subsequent advancement of the north has been so rapid as to excite the wonder of the world; while it is said by us of the south, jesting upon our worn-out and exhausted land, that we have done worse for the country than the Indians before us, who stayed here many centuries and yet left the soil as good as they found it.
The plantation system was the great barrier to southern progress. From its first historical appearance, among the Carthaginians, from whom the Romans seem to have derived it, this rude and wholesale method of farming has rested on slaveholding. Its workings have been similar everywhere. In Italy, under the Roman republic, absorbing the petty holdings, it drove out the small farmer; it destroyed the former respect for trades and handicrafts, and brought them into disfavor; it prevented the development of the industrial arts; it created a non-reciprocal commerce. Centuries later, it did the same things in our southern States.
A sketch of the leading features and results of the plantation system, as it existed in America, is our proper beginning.
The driver, as the negro foreman was called, was not very common in the south, and was generally under the superintendence of the overseer. Could the planters have made a good overseer of the driver, of course they would have consulted their interest, and reproduced the ancient slave-steward of Rome. Slaveholders keep their slaves under careful surveillance, but they do not usually overlook them in person. It is not often that a master engages in an employment which brings him into daily and intimate contact with the lowest orders, and which he instinctively feels to be degrading. The planter could have neither his first choice, which would have been a slave overseer, nor his second choice, a superintendent from his own rank in society; and so, as the next best thing, he took as overseer a white hireling from the non-slaveholding class. The tillage of the fields was thus intrusted to the overseers, who were, for the most part, men of little education and business skill, and who had no interest in their employment except to draw its wages. Thus the foremost, if not the only, southern industry was managed by incompetent and careless agents.