First. No one crop will make a people prosperous. If cotton held its monopoly under conditions that made other crops impossible—or under allurements that made other crops exceptional—its dominion would be despotism.
Whenever the greed for a money crop unbalances the wisdom of husbandry, the money crop is a curse. When it stimulates the general economy of the farm, it is the profiting of farming. In an unprosperous strip of Carolina, when asked the cause of their poverty, the people say, “Tobacco—for it is our only crop.” In Lancaster, Pa., the richest American county by the census, when asked the cause of their prosperity, they say, “Tobacco—for it is the golden crown of a diversified agriculture.” The soil that produces cotton invites the grains and grasses, the orchard and the vine. Clover, corn, cotton, wheat, and barley thrive in the same inclosure; the peach, the apple, the apricot, and the Siberian crab in the same orchard. Herds and flocks graze ten months every year in the meadows over which winter is but a passing breath, and in which spring and autumn meet in summer’s heart. Sugar-cane and oats, rice and potatoes, are extremes that come together under our skies. To raise cotton and send its princely revenues to the west for supplies, and to the east for usury, would be misfortune if soil and climate forced such a curse. When both invite independence, to remain in slavery is a crime. To mortgage our farms in Boston for money with which to buy meat and bread from western cribs and smokehouses, is folly unspeakable. I rejoice that Texas is less open to this charge than others of the cotton States. With her eighty million bushels of grain, and her sixteen million head of stock, she is rapidly learning that diversified agriculture means prosperity. Indeed, the South is rapidly learning the same lesson; and learned through years of debt and dependence it will never be forgotten. The best thing Georgia has done in twenty years was to raise her oat crop in one season from two million to nine million bushels, without losing a bale of her cotton. It is more for the South that she has increased her crop of corn—that best of grains, of which Samuel J. Tilden said, “It will be the staple food of the future, and men will be stronger and better when that day comes”—by forty-three million bushels this year, than to have won a pivotal battle in the late war. In this one item she keeps at home this year a sum equal to the entire cotton crop of my State that last year went to the west.
This is the road to prosperity. It is the way to manliness and sturdiness of character. When every farmer in the South shall eat bread from his own fields and meat from his own pastures, and disturbed by no creditor, and enslaved by no debt, shall sit amid his teeming gardens, and orchards, and vineyards, and dairies, and barnyards, pitching his crops in his own wisdom, and growing them in independence, making cotton his clean surplus, and selling it in his own time, and in his chosen market, and not at a master’s bidding—getting his pay in cash and not in a receipted mortgage that discharges his debt, but does not restore his freedom—then shall be breaking the fullness of our day. Great is King Cotton! But to lie at his feet while the usurer and grain-raiser bind us in subjection, is to invite the contempt of man and the reproach of God. But to stand up before him and amid the crops and smokehouses wrest from him the magna charta of our independence, and to establish in his name an ample and diversified agriculture, that shall honor him while it enriches us—this is to carry us as far in the way of happiness and independence as the farmer, working in the fullest wisdom, and in the richest field, can carry any people.
But agriculture alone—no matter how rich or varied its resources—cannot establish or maintain a people’s prosperity. There is a lesson in this that Texas may learn with profit. No commonwealth ever came to greatness by producing raw material. Less can this be possible in the future than in the past. The Comstock lode is the richest spot on earth. And yet the miners, gasping for breath fifteen hundred feet below the earth’s surface, get bare existence out of the splendor they dig from the earth. It goes to carry the commerce and uphold the industry of distant lands, of which the men who produce it get but dim report. Hardly more is the South profited when, stripping the harvest of her cotton fields, or striking her teeming hills, or leveling her superb forests, she sends the raw material to augment the wealth and power of distant communities.
Texas produces a million and a half bales of cotton, which yield her $60,000,000. That cotton, woven into common goods, would add $75,000,000 to Texas’s income from this crop, and employ 220,000 operatives, who would spend within her borders more than $30,000,000 in wages. Massachusetts manufactures 575,000 bales of cotton, for which she pays $31,000,000, and sells for $72,000,000, adding a value nearly equal to Texas’s gross revenue from cotton, and yet Texas has a clean advantage for manufacturing this cotton of one per cent a pound over Massachusetts. The little village of Grand Rapids began manufacturing furniture simply because it was set in a timber district. It is now a great city and sells $10,000,000 worth of furniture every year, in making which 125,000 men are employed, and a population of 40,000 people supported. The best pine districts of the world are in eastern Texas. With less competition and wider markets than Grand Rapids has, will she ship her forests at prices that barely support the wood-chopper and sawyer, to be returned in the making of which great cities are built or maintained? When her farmers and herdsmen draw from her cities $126,000,000 as the price of their annual produce, shall this enormous wealth be scattered through distant shops and factories, leaving in the hands of Texas no more than the sustenance, support, and the narrow brokerage between buyer and seller? As one-crop farming cannot support the country, neither can a resource of commercial exchange support a city. Texas wants immigrants—she needs them—for if every human being in Texas were placed at equi-distant points through the State no Texan could hear the sound of a human voice in your broad areas.
So how can you best attract immigration? By furnishing work for the artisan and mechanic if you meet the demand of your population for cheaper and essential manufactured articles. One-half million workers would be needed for this, and with their families would double the population of your State. In these mechanics and their dependents farmers would find a market for not only their staple crops but for the truck that they now despise to raise or sell, but is at least the cream of the farm. Worcester county, Mass., takes $720,000,000 of our material and turns out $87,000,000 of products every year, paying $20,000,000 in wages. The most prosperous section of this world is that known as the Middle States of this republic. With agriculture and manufacturers in the balance, and their shops and factories set amid rich and ample acres, the result is such deep and diffuse prosperity as no other section can show. Suppose those States had a monopoly of cotton and coal so disposed as to command the world’s markets and the treasury of the world’s timber, I suppose the mind is staggered in contemplating the majesty of the wealth and power they would attain. What have they that the South lacks?—and to her these things were added, and climate, ampler acres and rich soil. It is a curious fact that three-fourths of the population and manufacturing wealth of this country is comprised in a narrow strip between Iowa and Massachusetts, comprising less than one-sixth of our territory, and that this strip is distant from the source of raw materials on which its growth is based, of hard climate and in a large part of sterile soil. Much of this forced and unnatural development is due to slavery, which for a century fenced enterprise and capital out of the South. Mr. Thomas, who in the Lehigh Valley owned a furnace in 1845 that set that pattern for iron-making in America, had at that time bought mines and forest where Birmingham now stands. Slavery forced him away. He settled in Pennsylvania. I have wondered what would have happened if that one man had opened his iron mines in Alabama and set his furnaces there at that time. I know what is going to happen since he has been forced to come to Birmingham and put up two furnaces nearly forty years after his survey.
Another cause that has prospered New England and the Middle States while the South languished, is the system of tariff taxes levied on the unmixed agriculture of these States for the protection of industries to our neighbors to the North, a system on which the Hon. Roger Q. Mills—that lion of the tribe of Judah—has at last laid his mighty paw and under the indignant touch of which it trembles to its center. That system is to be revised and its duties reduced, as we all agree it should be, though I should say in perfect frankness I do not agree with Mr. Mills in it. Let us hope this will be done with care and industrious patience. Whether it stands or falls, the South has entered the industrial list to partake of his bounty if it stands, and if it falls to rely on the favor with which nature has endowed her, and from this immutable advantage to fill her own markets and then have a talk with the world at large.
With amazing rapidity she has moved away from the one-crop idea that was once her curse. In 1880 she was esteemed prosperous. Since that time she has added 393,000,000 bushels to her grain crops, and 182,000,000 head to her live stock. This has not lost one bale of her cotton crop, which, on the contrary, has increased nearly 200,000 bales. With equal swiftness has she moved away from the folly of shipping out her ore at $2 a ton and buying it back in implements from $20 to $100 per ton; her cotton at 10 cents a pound and buying it back in cloth at 20 to 80 cents per pound; her timber at $8 per thousand and buying it back in furniture at ten to twenty times as much. In the past eight years $250,000,000 have been invested in new shops and factories in her States; 225,000 artisans are now working that eight years ago were idle or worked elsewhere, and these added $227,000,000 to the value of her raw material—more than half the value of her cotton. Add to this the value of her increased grain crops and stock, and in the past eight years she has grown in her fields or created in her shops manufactures more than the value of her cotton crop. The incoming tide has begun to rise. Every train brings manufacturers from the East and West seeking to establish themselves or their sons near the raw material and in this growing market. Let the fullness of the tide roll in.
It will not exhaust our materials, nor shall we glut our markets. When the growing demand of our southern market, feeding on its own growth, is met, we shall find new markets for the South. Under our new condition many indirect laws of commerce shall be straightened. We buy from Brazil $50,000,000 worth of goods, and sell her $8,500,000. England buys only $29,000,000, and sells her $35,000,000. Of $65,000,000 in cotton goods bought by Central and South America, over $50,000,000 went to England. Of $331,000,000 sent abroad by the southern half of our hemisphere, England secures over half, although we buy from that section nearly twice as much as England. Our neighbors to the south need nearly every article we make; we need nearly everything they produce. Less than 2,500 miles of road must be built to bind by rail the two American continents. When this is done, and even before, we shall find exhaustless markets to the South. Texas shall command, as she stands in the van of this new movement, its richest rewards.
The South, under the rapid diversification of crops and diversification of industries, is thrilling with new life. As this new prosperity comes to us, it will bring no sweeter thought to me, and to you, my countrymen, I am sure, than that it adds not only to the comfort and happiness of our neighbors, but that it makes broader the glory and deeper the majesty, and more enduring the strength, of the Union which reigns supreme in our hearts. In this republic of ours is lodged the hope of free government on earth. Here God has rested the ark of his covenant with the sons of men. Let us—once estranged and thereby closer bound,—let us soar above all provincial pride and find our deeper inspirations in gathering the fullest sheaves into the harvest and standing the staunchest and most devoted of its sons as it lights the path and makes clear the way through which all the people of this earth shall come in God’s appointed time.