The New South | Page 2

by that deadly apathy so often remarked by travelers who ventured to visit the land as they would have visited Africa. The white South wished only to be let alone.
During this apathetic period there was some talk of the natural resources of the South; but there was little attempt on the part of Southerners to utilize these resources. There was talk of interesting foreign capital, but little effective work was done to secure such capital. Many men feared the new problems which such development might bring in its train, while others, more numerous, were merely indifferent or lukewarm. Many of those who vaguely wished for a change did not know how to set about realizing their desires. The few men who really worked to stimulate a quicker economic life about 1880 had a thankless and apparently a hopeless task.
Yet one must be careful not to write of the South as if it were a single country, inhabited by a homogeneous people. Historians and publicists have spoken, and continue to speak, of "Southern opinion" and of the "Southern attitude" as if these could be definitely weighed and measured. No one who really knows the whole South could be guilty of such a mistake. The first difficulty is to determine the limits of the South. The census classification of States is open to objection. Delaware, Maryland, and West Virginia are included in the South, and so is Kentucky. Missouri is excluded, but a place is made for the new State of Oklahoma. As to Delaware and Maryland, there may be a difference of opinion, though it is difficult to justify the inclusion of the former. West Virginia is certainly not Southern, socially, politically, or economically. Kentucky is doubtful, and it is difficult to see why Missouri should be excluded from any list which includes Kentucky. Oklahoma is difficult to classify. But, at any rate the South is a large country, with a great variety of soil, climate, and population. As the crow flies, the distance from Richmond to Memphis, in an adjoining State, is greater than from Richmond to Bangor, Maine. From Richmond to Galveston is farther than from Richmond to Omaha or Duluth. Atlanta is usually considered to be far down in the South, and yet the distance from Atlanta to Boston or Minneapolis is less than to El Paso. Again, New Orleans is nearer to Cincinnati than to Raleigh.
There were, moreover, many racial strains in the South. The Scotch-Irish of the Piedmont in the Carolinas had, and have yet, little in common with the French of Louisiana. The lowlander of South Carolina and the hill men of Arkansas differed in more than economic condition. Even in the same State, different sections were not in entire accord. In Virginia and the Carolinas, for example, economic conditions and traditions--and traditions are yet a power in the South--differed greatly in different sections.
As the years passed, apathy began to disappear in some parts of the South. Wiser men recognized that the old had gone never to return. Men began to face the inevitable. Instead of brooding upon their grievances, they adjusted themselves, more or less successfully, to the new economic and social order, and by acting in harmony with it found that progress was not so impossible as they had supposed. White planters found that the net returns from their farms on which they themselves had labored were greater than when a larger force of negroes had been employed; shrewd men began to put their scanty savings together to take advantage of convenient water power. Securing the bare necessities of life was no longer a difficult problem for every one. Men began to find pleasure in activity rather than in mere passivity or obstruction.
Somehow, somewhere, sometime, a new hopefulness was born and this new spirit--evidence of new life--became embodied in "the New South." The expression is said to have been used first by General Adam Badeau when stationed in South Carolina, but the New South of which he spoke was not the New South as it is understood today. Many others have used the term loosely to signify any change in economic or social conditions which they had discovered. The first man to use the expression in a way which sent it vibrating through the whole nation was Henry W. Grady, the gifted editor of the Atlanta Constitution. In a speech made in 1886 by invitation of the New England Society of New York City, he took for his theme "the New South" and delivered an oration which, judged by its effects, had some of the marks of greatness. "The South," he said, "has nothing for which to apologize. She believes that the late struggle between the States was war and not rebellion, revolution and not conspiracy." He went on, however, to express the