The New South | Page 4

against the scalawags and the carpetbaggers and many had suffered thereby. Now they came into their own. In some States the organization of voters was almost military.
During the first years after the downfall of the Reconstruction governments the task of consolidating the white South was measurably achieved. As some one flippantly put the case, there came to be in many sections "two kinds of people--Democrats and negroes." It was the general feeling on the part of the whites that to fail to vote was shameful, to scratch a ticket was a crime, and to attempt to organize the negroes was treason to one's race. The "Confederate brigadier" sounded the rallying cry at every election, and a military record came to be almost a requisite for political preferment. Men's eyes were turned to the past, and on every stump were recounted again and again the horrors of Reconstruction and the valiant deeds of the Confederate soldiers. What a candidate had done in the past in another field seemed more important even than his actual qualifications for the office to which he aspired. A study of the Congressional Record or of lists of state officers proves the truth of this statement. In 1882, fourteen of the twenty-two United States Senators from the seceding States had military records and three had been civil officers of the Confederacy. Several States had solid delegations of ex-Confederate soldiers in both houses. When one reads the proceedings of Congress, he finds the names of Vance and Ransom, Hampton and Butler, Gordon and Wheeler, Harris and Bate, Cockrell and Vest, Walthall and Colquitt, Morgan and Gibson, and dozens of other Confederate officers.
The process of unifying the white South was not universally successful, however. Here and there were Republican islands in a Democratic or Conservative sea. The largest and most important exception was the Appalachian South, divided among eight different States. It is a large region, to this day thinly populated and lacking in means of communication with the outside world. Though it has some bustling cities, thriving towns, and prosperous communities, the Appalachian South today is predominantly rural. In the 216 counties in this region or its foothills, there were in 1910 only 43 towns with more than 2500 inhabitants.
This Appalachian region had been settled by emigrants from the lowlands. Some of them were of the thriftless sort who were forced from the better lands in the East by the inexorable working of economic law. By far the greater part, however, were of the same stock as the restless pioneers who poured over the mountains to flood the Mississippi Valley. Students of the mountain people maintain that so small an accident as the breaking of a linchpin fixed one family forever in a mountain cove, while relatives went on to become the builders of new States in the interior. Cut off from the world in these mountains, there have been preserved to this day many of the idioms, folksongs, superstitions, manners, customs, and habits of mind of Stuart England, as they were brought over by the early colonists. The steep farms afforded a scanty living, and though the cattle found luscious pasturage during the summer, they were half starved during the winter. If by chance the mountaineers had a surplus of any product, there was no one to whom they might sell it. They lived almost without the convenience of coinage as a means of exchange. Naturally in such a society there was no place for slaves, and to this day negroes are not welcome in many mountain counties. But though these mountain people have missed contact with the outside world and have been deprived of the stimulus of new ideas, they seldom give evidence of anything that can fairly be classed as degeneracy. Ignorance, illiteracy, and suspended or arrested development the traveler of today will find among them, and actions which will shock his present-day standards; but these same actions would hardly have shocked his own father's great-grandfather. These isolated mountaineers have been aptly called "our contemporary ancestors."
The same people, it is true, had poured out of their cabins to meet Ferguson at King's Mountain; they had followed Jackson to New Orleans and to Florida and they had felt the influence of the wave of nationalism which swept the country after the War of 1812. But back to their mountains they had gone, and the great current of national progress swept by them. The movement toward sectionalism, which developed after the Missouri Compromise, had left them cold. So the mountaineers held to the Union. They did not volunteer freely for the Confederacy, and they resisted conscription. How many were enlisted in the Union armies it is difficult to discover, certainly over 100,000. It is not surprising, therefore, that these people became Republicans and have so continued in