The old South and the new. A series of letters

Front matter

S13 Si

/ A ^ A i-ATO fCl£i,LEY i

QUESTIONS OF THE DAY.

Preface

This volume is the result of an earnest desire on the part of its author to understand the industrial and social condition of the people of the Southern States. The better to gratify this desire, he revisited in 1887 substantially the field he had traversed in 1867. A few days sufficed to convince him that to chronicle his observations with photographic fidelity, and to report them, with his conclusions therefrom, to his countrymen at large, might prove to be a fitting close to the labors of a long life which has been devoted chiefly to the investigation of social and politico-economic questions.

W. D. K.

Letter I

THE SOUTH IN 1867 — NASHVILLE, COWAN, SOUTH PITTSBURG, CHATTANOOGA, BIRMINGHAM, ANNISTON, AND ATLANTA IN 1887.

Washington, D. C, December 15, 1886.

I gladly comply with your request for a communication on the resources, progress, and prospects of the South as seen during my recent visit to Tennessee and Alabama, and while making a trip through Northeastern Georgia and across South Carolina on the Piedmont Air Line road, en route from Atlanta to Washington.

I have points of comparison in vivid recollections of visits to these States in 1867, and to Florida and Georgia in 1875. The progress in wealth, in the means of individual comfort, and in productive power made by those portions of the country with which I can thus institute comparisons has been marvellous. In 1867 the South was a land of desolation, her fields were fenceless and uncultivated, and her people were without reproductive stock, or that with which to impel modern agricultural implements, if these had been bestowed upon them gratuitously. They were, numerically speaking, without seed for food crops, except such as had been bestowed upon them by personal friends, or the government through the Freedmen's Bureau and the agencies of the Agricultural Department.

The war had undoubtedly been the proximate cause of these deplorable conditions ; but it was not their primary cause, as investigation discloses the fact that this was to be found in the economic opinions and industrial system that had dominated the South before the war, and under which she neither had nor could have populous towns or a great city, which her leaders regarded as great sores. Without such aggregations of people, no development of her boundless and infinitely varied mineral resources could be had. These were, in fact, treated as of little value, and as involving in their possible development dangers to the prevailing system of field labor. In the absence of cities and of mining and manufacturing populations, the productions of the South were restricted to a few great staples, s".ch as cotton, rice, sugar, and tobacco ; and in the inevitable absence of fertilizers, which in those days were chiefly derived from the barnyard, and the refuse of towns and cities, these crops were so exhausting as to require the land to be recuperated by being permitted to lie fallow for twenty or more years, so that each planter was required to own vast bodies of land in order to have at all times a plantation susceptible of profitable cultivation. As the labor on these large estates was performed by slaves, there was no employment for the white families, who occupied small patches of poor land, and most of whom derived a precarious living from the game and fish they might take, and from such cotton or tobacco as in the absence of implements and barnyards they could extort from their exhausted acres.

Referring to the poverty of the people and contrasting it with the incalculable value of the mineral wealth with which their State abounded, I appealed to an audience of thousands of people at Montgomery, Alabama, in May, 1867, to relieve themselves from the drudgery of ill-paid manual toil, and the penury it entailed upon them, by exchanging part of their land for capital with which to develop the coal, iron ore, and limestone to be found in or near to that which they might retain. By recurring to my remarks, as reported by a citizen of Alabama in the Montgomery Sentinel, I find that I said :

" It is in the interest of our country that I speak when I ask you how you use the advantages with which nature has so bounteously provided you, and tell you that you have impoverished yourselves by treating them with contempt. We turn our coal and iron to most profitable account. You permit yours to slumber in their native earth. Availing ourselves of their power, one man with us does the work of a hundred with you. One little girl, tending a machine in a factory, will spin or weave more cotton in a day than one of your women will in a year by the ancient method of the wheel and the hand-loom. You have not deemed your mineral wealth worthy of consideration. In your devotion to your peculiar system of labor, you have forgotten that iron and coal are the most potent agents of modern civilization. Mere muscular power has become a thing of secondary consideration. Iron is the muscle of modern civilization, and coal — ignited coal — is the nervous force that animates it." '

In view of the immense development of the coal and iron ore of these States, and the increase in number and extent of industrial centres I saw in Tennessee and Alabama, the States in which I had most frequently spo-

1 Speeches, Letters, etc., by Wm. D. Kelley, p. 162.

ken in 1867, the recollection of the remarks just quoted made me fear that well-instructed men among my auditors must have felt that I was treating them as children, and giving them what might be regarded as a kindergarten lesson in the elements of the civilization of the latter half of the nineteenth century. Certain it is that they have outgrown the need of such elementary suggestions. The changes wrought in the meantime have been marvellous, and may justly be regarded as the work of Titans.

The systems of railroad that now traverse the South are as perfect in the construction of road-bed, track, and bridges, and in passenger cars and the means provided for the transportation of freight, as those of the North. Lateral roads branch from them into such valleys as are known to be specially rich, not in iron alone, but in other minerals, some of which are found in such profusion and juxtaposition as to seem to defy geologic laws as elsewhere illustrated.

I have said that prior to the war the South neither had, nor could have, great cities. It is also true that her statesmen preferred that their workshops should be in foreign lands, and that the ships which exported their raw products and brought them manufactured commodities in exchange should be built and owned by foreigners. In this respect the change is most striking.

Nashville is a beautiful city, nearly every one of whose many hills is crowned by an edifice which, though it may not rival the magnificent State Capitol, does vie with it in challenging the admiring attention of visitors. The city has become a manufacturing and commercial centre. While there I visited a foundry, which though originally large has doubled its extent and capacity within the last two years, and is sending out an immense variety of stoves and hollow-wart, but which uses no iron not made from native ores in Tennessee or Alabama ; also an immense cotton factory, which is one of four within the city limits, all of which are supplied with the most improved machinery. Nashville's manufactures increase in variety as rapidly as they do in volume, and its growth as a distributing point has been sufficient to prove that it is destined to enjoy the advantages of a producing and commercial centre, and to become at no distant day a populous city.

Chattanooga, Tennessee, and Birmingham, Alabama, are marvels each in its own way. Chattanooga may be described not inaptly as lying at the foot of Missionary Ridge and Lookout Mountain, though when the battles were fought which made the names of these mountains famous the smoky little village on the Cumberland River was at its nearest point to either of them more than a mile away. It is a growing place, and grows because its people are all busy. It is, at least, in one respect cosmopolitan. We were told that its adult population is about equally divided between ex-soldiers of the Confederate and of the Union army, and that recruits from either, or masters of industry who have never meddled with arms or politics, are alike welcome to a share in its fortunes. For so young a city its industries are widely diversified. Of course those connected with ore beds, coal mines, and furnaces predominate, but it has others. Its lumber trade, especially in white woods, is claimed to be second only to "that of Chicago. It has a tannery, too, which is said to be the largest in the world, and, without having seen all its rivals, I am prepared, from its dimensions, to believe that it is the largest. The labor it employs is colored, and it was in connection with the homes of these laborers that my attention was first drawn to the striking contrast between the neat, commodious, and well-painted homes of the negro laborers engaged in mining, smelting, and mechanical pursuits, and the cabins in which the poor white growers of cotton live now, as they did before the war.

With a party of friends, in a special car on the belt road, which encircles the city, we visited foundries for miscellaneous wares and cast-iron pipe works, and passed several furnaces. We examined the rolling-mill which was constructed by the government during the war for the re-rolling of old rails, and after the war was greatly enlarged and improved by private owners, among whom were Messrs. Cooper and Hewitt, of New York, and which is now being fitted with all the1 appointments necessary for the production of Bessemer steel and its conversion into rails. But the establishment which interested me as much as any in Chattanooga was a Bessemer steel-nail works, of which Mr. James Duncan, formerly of the Cambria Works, of Johnstown, Pennsylvania, is superintendent, and, I think, proprietor. The establishment is not remarkable for its extent, but is very remarkable for the compactness of its arrangements and the perfection of the nails it produces. The labor is colored, though the fact that an applicant for employment is white is not an impediment to his engagement, if he be a skilful nail-maker. The converter used by Mr. Duncan is the smallest I have seen, as are the ingot moulds into which the metal is cast. The rolling apparatus is, of course, proportioned to the supply this diminutive converter can create. When the nail mill is in operation the bodies of many of the negro workmen, who are youths or very young men, sway to its music, and, at times, the whole gang break out in a negro melody or chorus. Here I found unexpected evidence of the industry and mechanical skill of some of these colored boys, in attestation of which I purchased from one of them a steel paper-cutter made from a railway spike with such imperfect tools as he had himself constructed. The maker disliked to part with this evidence of his skill, because it had not received the finishing touches, and the blade was less smooth and polished than he had intended to make it. I also secured a lady's button-hook, made from a spike with the same artless tools by the same lad. Mr. Duncan assured us that for the privilege of testing their skill and improving it some of the boys would devote more than half of the hour allowed for dinner to this work, and that the only limitation upon the number of articles they might produce was that they should work at them during dinner-time only, and should report the fact whenever they required another spike. The establishment of an industrial-art school in the midst of a population like these Chattanooga nail-makers would soon produce gratifying evidence of the adaptation of negro labor to mechanical pursuits requiring a high degree of skill. Chattanooga, in addition to its productive industries, is also a large distributer of groceries and dry goods, and evidently has a commercial future.

Birmingham lacks the advantages Chattanooga derives from its situation on a river. It is an interior town. When the war closed its site was a tenantless wilderness, but it is now an industrial centre, the energy of whose more than 25,000 inhabitants and the resources, found chiefly within a few miles of the city limits, which they have made tributary to their prosperity, would be a marvel in any country. About six miles out upon the line of one of the railroads, which traverse the property of the Pratt Coal and Iron Company, are ranges of coke ovens, which reminded me of the Connellsville and Westmoreland coke regions of Pennsylvania, and about the same distance on another road parallel to the former, and but two or three miles from it, we saw gangs of men quarrying iron ore by the use of the drill and explosives used by those engaged in quarrying stone. In view of the fact that the narrow strip of land which divides the coal and ore beds is a mass of limestone, it is not surprising that the over-sanguine men of Birmingham really believe that they will be able to make iron so cheaply as to soon close up the works of Pennsylvania and force her ironmasters and their employes to re-establish themselves at Birmingham. The consequence of this faith is a wild speculation in town lots, which is without a parallel in my recollection. Just before the arrival of our party, a corner lot ioo feet square, which appeared to be swampy, because it was rather below grade, and in front of which was a peanut-stand, had been sold for $100,000, or $1,000 per front foot. Of course such speculation will retard the immediate growth of Birmingham, and time, by various processes, will determine the actual value of corner lots in a city whose success is to extinguish the furnace fires of Pittsburg, Braddocke, Johnstown, Bethlehem, and generally throughout Pennsylvania.

I was much impressed by some things I saw at Cowan, especially by the fact that the close proximity of fuel, ore, and limestone at that point enables the proprietors to produce a superior quality of foundry iron, which I saw in use at Nashville, from ores that are so lean that they would not be worked on the costly lands of Pennsylvania and with the more expensive fuel used in that State. This furnace, the erection and working of which have created a prettily situated village, embodies all the latest im-

THE OLD SOUTH AND THE NEW. g

provements, as do the two that are operating at South Pittsburg, and the four charcoal furnaces of the Woodstock and Clifton companies at Anniston, Ironaton, and Jenifer, prosperous villages but a few miles from Anniston. At South Pittsburg work has been commenced on another furnace, and we were told that contracts had been made for the immediate construction of two others ; and while I yet lingered at Anniston, Mr. John S. Perry, proprietor of the great stove works at Albany and Sing Sing, having determined to remove the last-named branch of his works to South Pittsburg, contracted for land on which to erect a foundry and finishing buildings, which will cover ten acres, and proposed to purchase twenty acres on which to erect homes for his workmen. It is believed that South Pittsburg must enjoy a large trade in lumber generally, and compete with Chattanooga in poplar and other white woods ; and there is much talk of the early establishment at this place of pipe works and other industries that will gather about them large numbers of laborers. There is no doubt that South Pittsburg is destined to grow rapidly and become a town of considerable size and importance. Its situation is on a beautiful bank of the Tennessee, and slopes from the river gently to and up the side of the mountain, in whose evening shadow it will grow. I heard much said about Sheffield, and read much of what is to be done there, but as I did not visit the place I cannot speak advisedly of its prospects.

The objective point of my trip was to visit my friend, Mr. Samuel Noble, the founder and chief manager of the settlement of Anniston, in Calhoun County, Ala., and my opportunity to study the progress and present condition of the industries of Anniston, and the resources of the territory, of which it may be said to be the capital, was

IO THE OLD SOUTH AND THE NEW.

complete. We remained there ten days, occupying apartments in the magnificent hotel known as " Anniston Inn," a favorite summer resort for the people of the Gulf States. This picturesque edifice, which is a perfect specimen of the prevalent architecture of the days of Queen Anne, stands at the head of a gentle slope, near the base of which are Anniston's workshops, which include two charcoal furnaces, a foundry, car-wheel and axle factories, a machine shop, shops for the construction of freight cars, a large brick cotton-factory, and several other establishments, including an ice factory capable of producing five tons per day. The water supply is drawn from a bed of pure white sand, eighty feet below the surface, and is crystalline in its purity. The pumping force raises it to a reservoir 236 feet up one of the mountain sides, and the supply is said to be sufficient to meet the wants of a population of many thousands. But to return to the Inn which overlooks these hives of industry. Its apartments on the office floor, including dining-room, parlor, smoking alcove, and reading-room, and the sleeping apartments in the upper stories exceed in finish those of any baronial hall of the olden times. Except some red-wood shingles from California, which were required to produce an effective contrast, the timber in the structure is all native to the surrounding hills. There is not a particle of paint on the interior of the building. The polished woods derived from the immediate neighborhood afford a study to the tourist as he roams through the spacious apartments of this old-fashioned Inn, whose guests enjoy the comfort of every modern improvement. In its broad fireplaces there lie upon massive andirons logs six feet or more in length, and in many of the sleeping apartments logs of about four feet.

THE OLD SOUTH AND THE NEW. II

It is a noteworthy fact that Anniston has a direct trade with China, at least to the extent of part of the productions of its cotton-mill. It was indeed a surprise to find bales of goods marked and branded for direct shipment from this interior town in Alabama, the history of which runs through less than seventeen years, to a commercial correspondent in China. The ores used in the furnaces at Anniston, Ironaton, and Jenifer are procured from mines belonging to the companies, and the wood from which charcoal, the only fuel used in the furnaces and shops, is derived from the mountain spurs which are distant far enough from the Inn, as viewed from its broad verandas, to give the scene the character of an enchanted valley. Not only is the Inn the property of the Woodstock Iron and Steel Company, but until four years ago that company had, under the management of Messrs. Samuel Noble and Alfred L. Tyler, controlled the settlement, as the towns of Pullman, in this country, and Saltaire, in England, are controlled by proprietors ; but during the last four years town lots have been offered for sale, and quite a commercial centre has been established by private enterprise. Fifteen thousand bales of cotton will be handled this year, much of which will be received from poor whites in exchange for their very limited annual supply of store goods. The Woodstock Company owns over 50,000 acres of land on which are immense deposits of brown and red hematite, fossiliferous and specular ore, mountains of limestone, and seemingly inexhaustible supplies of wood and coal. The companies have just completed a railroad more than sixty miles long down the Talladega valley from Anniston to Sylacauga, which is known as the Anniston and Atlantic road, and by which their properties are connected with the system of roads that connect the interior with Southeastern Alabama, Georgia, and Florida. The first passenger train traversed the valley on schedule time while I was at the Inn. The next work in hand is to complete a road of about thirty miles, which will connect Anniston with the Cincinnati Southern road at Gadsden, and give her direct connection with Chicago. The Woodstock Company has also determined to construct two furnaces for the manufacture of coke iron as a preliminary step to the establishment of foundries, and I venture the prediction that though Anniston has never had a " boom," and its planting and development have been managed so quietly that its name is hardly recognized by the popular ear, it will, before two decades shall have passed, be one of the most remarkable centres of iron, steel, and kindred industries to be found in those wonderfully endowed States, Georgia, Alabama, and Tennessee.

Space will not permit me to say anything definite about the marble deposits which extend through Tennessee, Alabama, and Georgia, and embrace almost every variety of marble. I may, however, mention an illustrative fact. In passing by the Woodstock furnaces, the attention of our party was attracted by a pile of broken marble of singular whiteness, pieces of which bore such an appearance of polish, as to create the impression that they were fragments of a manufactured article. This, however, was not the case. They had been brought there to be used as flux. The quarry from which they had been taken was the one selected to furnish the block of marble Alabama was to contribute to the Washington monument. When it had been finished and properly inscribed, the block was forwarded and received by the builders of the monument, and having been scrutinized and submitted to the judg-

'/■///■: OLD sorrn and THE NEW. 13

ment of experts, it was returned with a communication stating that the law required the stone from each State to be a specimen of its own resources, and that this was Italian marble. So firm was this conviction that it required the certificates upon honor of the governor of the State, of senators and members of Congress, and the affidavits of parties connected with the quarry to convince the experts who had the erection of the monument in charge that it was not Italian, but Alabama marble.

With my son, who accompanied me throughout my trip, I lingered at Anniston until Congress had actually assembled. Accompanied by our friend, Noble, we departed with regret, and proceeded by the Georgia Pacific Road to Atlanta, and thence next morning by the Piedmont Air Line, which traverses Northeastern Georgia and the Carolinas, for Washington.

In 1867 I saw the ruins of what had been the little city of Atlanta, which had prided itself upon the amount of cotton its merchants handled annually. It was literally in ruins — I may say in ashes; but as I looked upon it now I saw thaf. I had then looked upon the ashes from which a phoenix was to rise. The census of 1880 found more than 50,000 people in Atlanta, and the number has certainly increased since then. That they are prosperous people is attested by every thing you behold in Atlanta. Into and out of its union depot pass the cars of eight throughline railroads, to which three important ones are now being added. The Kimball House, which is one of the bestappointed hotels in the country, cost considerably more than a million of dollars for its reconstruction after its destruction by fire in 1883. The office from which the Constitution issues its many thousand papers daily is impressive alike by its extent and architectural beauty. The

Markham House and other fine hotels cluster about the depot and the Kimball House. The evening was cold and the streets were sleety, but it was the only chance I would have to see any thing of Atlanta. I therefore walked far enough to see some of the great business houses of the city, and, by the aid of street railroads, saw something of the portion in which the elegant residences of Atlanta's millionaires are found. As we left in the morning we discovered pregnant proof that the growth of Atlanta had exceeded the expectations of its earlier settlers, for factories, warehouses, freight depots, and other massive buildings are rapidly enclosing the beautiful cemetery, which, when laid out, was evidently believed to be too remote from the town for the possible encroachment of its stirring life upon this quiet city of the dead.

In having complied with your request, and thus told the readers of the Manufacturers' Record what I saw in my brief visit to Tennessee, Alabama, and Georgia, I have given them but faint intimations of the resources of the South, of the impulses that now animate her, and of the rapid strides with which the spirit of the nineteenth century is changing not only the aspect of the country but the purposes and aspirations of her people.

Letter II. Florida The Winter Farm And Garden Of The Union

The Inn, Anniston, Ala., May 9, 1887.

I passed the month of March, 1875, in Florida, dividing my time between Jacksonville and Hibernia, whence I made visits to St. Augustine, Palatka and Green Cove, and took the customary trip to Silver Spring by the Oclawaha. I had gone South for rest in a genial climate, both of which I found on the banks of the beautiful St. John's. The repose, however, became too absolute, and engendered ennui, which drove me North while winter yet covered the lap of spring throughout Pennsylvania. The controlling impression I received was that at some period when, by the decay of successive growths of her luxurious vegetation, Florida should have been lifted out of the water, she would probably be a safe and agreeable home for human beings. She was apparently without resources, and was, as she to some extent still is, a terra incognita, Indeed, I find on the face of a very recent map a notice covering parts of Dade and Monroe counties, equal in size to two States of New Jersey, which begins thus: " This unsurveyed and but partly explored region." Let me therefore, in justice to myself, present to my readers some of the circumstances which seemed to justify the unfavorable conclusion to which I had been forced. In this immense State, with the fame of whose fruit and flowers Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe had just filled the land, Col.

Hart's grove, near Palatka, was everywhere cited as proof that oranges could be raised in commercial quantities in Florida, and I heard that Gen. Sanford had planted a grove near a town to which his name has been given, and that others were planting groves in that vicinity. It was also said that the lumber of Florida was valuable and inexhaustible, but I could not see that anybody had been tempted to use it commercially ; and as schedule time by rail for passengers from Savannah to Jacksonville, which is now five hours, was then sixteen, and as there were, including disconnected and unfinished roads, but 484 miles of railroad in the State, I concluded that the lumber of Upper and Middle Florida was not manufactured because it would not pay the cost of transportation. As the people who used milk depended on Northern manufacturers of condensed milk for their supplies, and as the cows I saw were very small, and obtained their food from beneath the surface of the St. John's, at a depth which required them to submerge their horns, and sometimes their shoulders, I concluded that they were not kept for dairy purposes, but belonged to a class of amphibious animals of which I had not read, which the Spaniards had probably introduced as a means of supplying themselves with hides and tallow. This impression was strengthened by the fact that nowhere did I see an effort to produce pasturage, fodder plants, corn, wheat, oats, or any other of the cereals, and by the type of the only flouring mill I saw. It was located at Hibernia, so near to my chamber that I could hear the noise of the machinery when it was in motion, and was used for grinding corn. It was modelled after the mills that were in use before the Christian era, and which had suggested to the apostle his apt illustration of the uncertainty of human life : " Two women shall be grinding ; the one shall be taken and the other left." On examination I found that its motive power consisted of a venerable-looking colored man and a lad ten or twelve years of age, who was probably his great-grandson. Nor was my conclusion, which now seems so ludicrous, inconsistent with replies made to queries by intelligent white Floridians. For instance, when I asked a group of them upon what they lived, one said : " On sweet potatoes and consumptive Yankees " ; and to the question, What have you to sell ? another replied " Our atmosphere."

Soon after my return home I determined to re-examine the conclusion from which I had all along revolted by bringing it to my favorite test, that of experience expressed in statistics, reports of the census, and Poor's Railroad Manual. Careful examination of these volumes confirmed my adverse conclusion, by showing the following comparative results : Florida was granted a territorial government in 1822, and Iowa not until 1838, and both were admitted to the Union as States on the 3d of March, 1845. Florida includes 59,268 square miles, and Iowa but 55,475. The report of the census taken in June, 1840, five years before their admission, shows that Florida's population then numbered 54,477, and that of Iowa but 43,112. Yet the census of 1870, the last taken before my visit, showed that Iowa's 43,112 had expanded into 1,194,020, and that Florida's 54,477 now numbered less than the thousands Iowa had in excess of a million, the totals standing thus: