[58]. Four months later they were speaking of him as “our great Conservative Minister of State.”
CHAPTER XXXIX.
Mobile Temper and Trade—Inducements of Alabama to Emigrants.
Between Meridian and Mobile, the railroad passes only very small tracts of land that appear at all inviting to Northern eyes. Much of the country is grown up in pine. Possibly lumbermen might find it a good location, but planters are likely to keep away from it.
All in all, however, Alabama offers better inducements to the Northern emigrant than almost any of the other Southern States. The feeling against Northerners is not so bitter as through most of the South. The climate of the northern half of the State is delightful, and throughout the State it is more healthy than at any point in the same latitude to the westward. Northern, and a portion of Central Alabama, are well adapted to the growth of Northern crops, wheat, corn, oats, hay, or flax. Cotton can be grown anywhere in the State; although the only first-class cotton lands lie in the central belt. The mountain regions are admirably adapted for stock-raising. Apples may be well grown in the same localities. In the southern sections, all the semi-tropical fruits flourish in the greatest luxuriance. Worn-out and abandoned lands, within easy distance of Mobile, may be bought for trifling prices,[[59]] on which oranges, figs, bananas, peaches, apricots, plums, pears, strawberries, blackberries, raspberries, and melons can be grown in perfection, and with comparatively little labor. Fruit-growing has hitherto been much neglected in Alabama, but no branch of industry gives permanent offer of better rewards. Off the coast the fisheries are almost as productive as those of Newfoundland, and they abound in rare and valuable fishes not now known to any considerable extent in commerce.
It would be much better for Northern men, who seek to avail themselves of these advantages, to go in small colonies. They should not be too large, lest they grow unwieldy. Half-a-dozen families, purchasing farms of one or two hundred acres apiece, adjacent to each other, may thus make up a little neighborhood of their own, which can sustain its own school, and which will be sure to form the nucleus for further accretions from the North. A farm of a hundred acres can thus be bought, in many localities, for five or six hundred dollars, half or more of it on long credits. No emigrant should be without half as much more, to put at once into improvements for his family.
The Mobile and Ohio Railroad, down which I went from Meridian to Mobile, seemed to be in better condition at that time than any of the other Southern railroads, and the cars ran heavily loaded. Even then they were making the trip between the mouth of the Ohio River and Mobile, in forty-eight hours. The mails here, as elsewhere on the entire trip from Washington, were carried with a degree of carelessness that showed how little the gratuity of keeping up a mail service for them was yet appreciated by the Southerners themselves. Often no one was at the station to receive the mail. Sometimes it was handed to any chance negro boy, with instructions to deliver it to the postmaster. Occasionally it was thrown out on the ground. The route-agents, on the other hand, were not free from fault. Often, especially at night, they went to sleep, carried mails past a dozen stations before they waked again. But they were not always to be blamed. One route-agent told me he had to make the entire trip from Columbus to Mobile, two days and two nights, without sleep! Enough agents had not yet been appointed; and the few on duty were making an effort to do the work of the full force.
The greatest embarrassment, however, was for lack of postmasters. “’Twill be a long time ’fo’ you get any postmaste’ heah, ’less you ’bolish that lyin’ oath,” said a strapping fellow who received the mail at one place. “He was not appointed postmaste’, but he tuck pape’s and lette’s to ’commodate ’em. You mout git wimmen for postmaste’s or niggahs; but you can’t git no white men; cause they all went with their State. An’ mo’—ef you fetch any d——d tories heah, that went agin their State, and so kin take the oath, I tell ye, ’twill soon be too hot to hold ’em. We haint got no use for sich.”