MR. REELEY'S LETTERS
TEXAS AND THE LOWER MISSISSIPPI:
TO WHIlCH ARE ADDED HIS
paddres o thq Farmer  o~ ~~a~, 
AND HIS
SPEECH ON  HIS RETURN TO NEW YORK,
JUNE 12, 1871.
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NEW YORK: 
TRIBUNE  OFFIOE.
1871.
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MR. GREELEY'S LETTERS
TEXAS AND THiE LOWER MISSISSIPPI:
TO WHICH ARE ADDED HIS
ldrets  io  thq   narmer%  of   exan,
AND HIS
SPEECH ON HIS RETURN TO NEW YORK,
JUXNE 12. 1871.
NEW YORK:
TRIBUNE  OFFICEF.
1871.
e..c.....
FROM
6 
THE LESSON OF OUR CIVIL WAR.
The New Orleans Price Current-a journal of the intensest Southern proclivities-discusses the visit of Mr. Greeley to the South as follows:
"The industrial doctrines professed by Mr. Greeley have subjugated the
South. Not because he professed them-they were planted before his day.
They originated with the great De Witt Clinton, who persisted in the execution of a great work of internal improvement which connected the Atlantic
with the Lakes. That canal conducted population into the Indian wilderness. It was the pioneer of those other ways which have poured all Europe
upon the North-Western territory won by the arms of the Southern colonies,
and which have naturally brought the votes and arms of that population to
the aid of the cities and sections that bestowed these blessings upon them.
Mr. Webster, Mr. Carey, Mr. Seward, and Mr. Greeley have been the advocates of the capital, commercial, and mechanical interests. It followed that
when the question of inherent rights in the States was referred to the arbitrament of the sword; the one section was on hand with soldiers, ships, arms,
food, money, and credit, while the other had courage and a just cause, patriotism and endurance. Now we are far from agreeing with the school in
which Mr. Greeley is an eminent professor, that any industry is entitled to
special protection at the hands of the Government; but we are satisfied that
no people can ever hope to be free that exchange staple productions, worth
gold and silver, for commodities which perish in the use; nor who have to
send abroad for the guns that they fight with, the food that they eat, and
the very clothing that they wear. There can be no doubt but that the command of immigrant numbers, capital, and mechanical skill, with the financial
resources of the Government and country, was due to the school of material
and industrial development at the North. They received powerful aid from
the total want of preparation in these departments at the South. We have
always thought that Ames & Co., the greatest manufacturers of spades,
shovels, and axes in the world, did more to conquer a people who had not a
manufactory of spades, axes, or shovels, than any general of the Federal
army.
"Setting aside, then, the ruinous application which has been made of
industrial progress by the Federalists, we have no cause of complaint against
the disciples of this school. On the contrary, it is the true duty of the South
to cultivate all those industries, the want of which has enslaved her. The
foundation of war and conquest was laid when Washington in vain adjured
the Southern people to connect the waters of the Chesapeake with the
North-Western territory.  Mr. Greeley happens to have been a cotemporary
of the success of the system founded by Clinton, Adams, and Webster. If
there be something in that system to reform or oppose, let us do so; but do
not let us commit the mistake of turning our condemnation upon individuals
who profess the doctrine.
" There is one topic upon which Mr. Greeley is entitled to the unreserved
approval of all who live by land and labor. He has been one of the most
intelligent and consistent advocates of agricultural improvement.  What he
Knows about Farming' has become a jocular phrase; hut, if he knows as
much as he has printed, he possesses no despicable amount of knowledge. It
is a little late in the day to sneer at book-farming, when the best minds of
the world are engaged in analyzing soil and seed to lessen the labors or increase the profits of the farmer. The Agricultural Department of T/te New
York Ti-ibune contains as3 much of scientific and practical knowledge as any
other paper, and, as it has a larger circulation than most, must diffuse much
of that knowledge."
11 R do 
THROUGH THE SOUTH.
CULTIVATION BY STEAM IN LOUISIANA
[EDITORIAL CORRESPONDENCE OF THE TRIBUNE. ]
NEW ORLEANS, May 17.-On our way down through Mississippi,
we made the acquaintance of Mr. H. E. Lawrence, a lifelong and
successful sugar-planter, who, on learning my anxiety to witness
Plowing by Steam (not for show, but as a business), invited us to
visit the plantation of his brother, where that style of breaking up
the earth is in fashion.  Accordingly, a tug-boat was chartered,
and some forty or fifty gentlemen, including the Congressman of the
lower district, Gen. J. H. Sypher, Collector Casey, Judge Dibble,
several Editors, and my traveling companions, Gen. E. A. Merritt,
and Charles Storrs, Esq., devoted yesterday to Sugar-planting by
Steam.
Magnolia plantation lies some fifty miles below this city, having
a front of two miles on the west bank of the river, with the Gulf of
Mexico but five miles distant on either hand. Most of the ten-mile
strip which here constitutes the County (late parish) of Plaquemine
is a reedy marsh, the haunt of alligators, musketoes, &c., which a
tempest in the Gulf may submerge at any time; but a fine forest of
Live Oak on the rear of this plantation indicates that the surface
usually dry is wider at this point than the average. The famous
Levees are slight affairs so near the Gulf, where the rise and fall of
the mighty stream (here a mile and a half wide) rarely exceeds three
feet, and at the utmost is seven. The river-surface is now but two
to three feet below that of the Levees, and has recently been two
feet higher. Water leaking through the Levee is caught in the
substantial ditches that everywhere traverse the plantations, and
runs swiftly away till lost under the rank vegetation of the swamps
or absorbed by some bayou of the adjacent Gulf. This whole region
has of course been formed of the muddy sediment deposited by the
Father of Waters wherever the swiftness of its current is arrested.
Thus by ten thousand annual overflows, mainly in April or May, 
LTER FROM NEW ORLEANS.
Louisiana has been projected far into the Gulf; and the process of
making new land at the expense of salt water is still in progress.
Though the tide rises eighteen inches at New Orleans, and is felt
at Donaldsonville, seventy miles further up, the force of the current
keeps the river here wholly fresh at this season, though it is somewhat brackish at times when less water is passing out. That the
soil is rich, black, and of unfathomable depth, need not be added.
Ditching or deep plowing is constantly unearthing immense cypresses
which have been imbedded here for thousands of years-some of
them still sound and serviceable.
Mr. Effingham Lawrence, the owner of Magnolia plantation, is a
scion of a well-known Long Island family, the son of a good farmer,
and himself invented a plow when but ten years old.  Cultivation
is not only his pursuit but his passion. He came hither while still
young, and has planted since his minority. The machinery in his
Sugar-House, where he refines more sugar than he makes, has eost
$300,000, and little of it has been superseded by later and more
perfect devices. Of his 3,000 acres, he cultivates 1,000, which is
nearly all that stands well out of water. Some of the most efficient
of his former slaves have left him to plant rice on small places below
him, where they make $1,000 to $2,000 each per annum, being
superior workers. Most of his ex-slaves chose to remain with him,
and some of them are here earning $40 per month. His arable acres are
divided into tracts or fields of five to ten acres each by deep ditches
on the north and south, crossed by firm high roads on the east and
west. These acres have been sixty or seventy years cultivated,
mainly in Cane, and have received little or no fertilization, unless
an annual burning the waste stalks or "trash" of the Cane to get
rid of it may be called such. Negroes and mules have till recently
furnished all but the brain-power employed.
Mr. Lawrence was accustomed to use teams of eight mules to each
plow, and was then able to pulverize but eight to ten inches in
depth.  Had he not been an experienced and capable plowman, constantly in the field and often between the plow-handles, he could not
have got below six inches, even by the aid of all the persuasives
known to plantation management.   Of eonrse his soil, annually
drawn upon by such exhausting crops as Cane and Corn, grew gradually less productive; and he was among the earliest to realize the necessity of bringing Steam to the aid of Agriculture. He had means
aid credit; he thoroughly understood his business mnd its needs; he
4 
t
CULTIVATION BY STEAM.
visited Europe and scrutinized the working of various Steam Plows;
and he concluded that Fowler's machinery, whereof two powerful
engines stand at each side of the field and draw the plows back and
forth by winding up and unwinding wire-ropes around their respec tive drums, was the only device adapted to this soft, heavy, easily
compacted soil. He bought successively two sets of these machines,
the second much heavier and more powerful than the first; and he
is now using thirty-horse engines, supplied on his resolute demand,
though none so powerful had ever been constructed Tfor plowing till
he ordered them. When the Fowlers have done their best for him,
he takes the machines into his own shops and directs such modifications as his own experience has suggested. He is confident that we
shall soon require sixty-horse engines, and that by their aid dry
prairie may be plowed two feet deep at the rate of at least fifty
acres per day.
Though the season has been persistently cool and rainy, so that
everything is backward, and the soil was too wet to be plowed to
advantage, yet we found, on our unannounced arrival, both sets of
plowing machinery in full operation, with none but negro field-hands
near them, though an overseer rode from field to field supervising
their efiorts. Boys of 12 to 14 years, who could not hold a breakingup mule-plow, were running engines as learners, at wages of seventyfive cents each per day. The ground was cane-stubble, heavily ridged
or hilled to counteract excess of moisture, with the " trash" of last
year's crop lying between the rows and constantly clogging and choking the plows, often requiring the machinery to be stopped in order
to clear them.   The subsoil-never disturbed till now-is a glutinous clay loam, compacted by sixty years' treading of heavy mule
teams, so wet that it came up unbroken, as if it were glue, and
about as easy to pulverize as so much sole-leather. So obstinate is
it that Mr. Lawrence had reduced each gang of plows to two, lest
his engines should be stalled or his wire-ropes broken. These two
each cut a furrow sixteen inches wide and fully two feet in average depth: had the surface been level, they would have averaged
twenty-six inches. They were drawn across the field (576 feet)
faster than most men would like to walk. Three men were required
to keep them in place, and clear them of the choking " trash," which
Iwould have burned out of their way, though I, had I been planter,
would have preferred to have it buried as they buried it. Against
all these impediments, each set of machinery was plowing from five
I
5 
LETTER FROM NEW ORLEANS.
to six acres per day-plowing them two feet deep, remember, and
thus relieving them of the generally superabundant moisture as shallow plowing, or even ordinary sub-soiling, never did and never can.
Mr. Lawrence, upon land thus plowed, makes an average of 2,000
pounds per acre of sugar where he formerly made but 800 pounds.
And he regards himself as yet on the threshold of Steam Cultivatioin.
And even this was not the best he had to show us. In other
fields, perhaps half a mile distant, other machines were cultivating
Cane by Steam. I believe the like of this has not yet been done
elsewhere on earth. The rows of Cane are fully seven feet apart;
the plants now fully a foot in average height. A locomotive engine
stands at either end of the field, moving forward or backward at a
touch of the hand of the negro boy standing upon it and looking
out for signals. The cultivator is composed of five or six ordinary
horse cultivators, enlarged and fixed in a frame, whereof the half
that has just stirred the earth to a depth of two and a width of five
feet is lifted clear of the ground on reaching the engine which draws
it, while its counterpart is brought down to its work by the plowguider stepping upon it. At a signal, the boy at the other end of
the field or " land" starts his engine, and begins to wind up his wirerope and uncoil or pay out that of the drum beneath the opposite
engine, pulling the cultivators through the earth as they are guided
nearer the row that they were kept further from as they passed in
the opposite direction. Hlaving thus thoroughly pulverized the
space between two rows, by traversing it twice, the engines move forward to the next space and there repeat the operation; and so on till
nightfall. Mr. Lawrence assured me that one such thorough working answers for the season; whereas, while tilled by mule-power,
every cane-field required working six times per season at intervals
of fifteen days. A set of machinery and hands tills about twelve
acres per day. I judge the cost of this day's work, including fuel
and wear of machinery, ranges from $25 to $30. This is far below
the cost of repeated workings by mule-power, while it is much more
efficacious.  The land plowed and tilled by steam is far dryer than
the rest. Mr. Lawrence considers his thousand acres under tillage
worth $100 per acre more than they would be but for Steam  Culture. lie will keep his two sets of Plowing machinery at work not
only throughout each day when the earth is not too sodden, but (by
relays of hands) throughout each night also, when the moon serves
6 
LOUISIANA AND HER LEVEES.
Steam tillage of growing crops, being a nicer, more critical operation, will be confined to daylight. But the Autumn is here the dry
season, therefore most favorable to plowing; and he realizes an
immenese advantage in this: Throughout the cane-cutting months
of October and November, when all the mules on a plantation are
overworked at hauling up cut Cane from the fields to the sugarhouse, so that plowing with animals is impossible, he will have his
plowing machinery constantly at work, doing him most excellent
service in preparing for next year's crop.
I am quite aware that this letter will not convey any clear idea
either of the machinery or the processes employed in Steam Plowing
and Tillage. No sensible man expects to be made acquainted with
these otherwise than by personal and careful observation. If I have
given any tolerable idea of the results achieved, their cost and their
value, I have done all I purposed. I close, then, with an avowal of
my confident belief that Mr. Effingham Lawrence has rendered an
immense service to American Agriculture, especially that of the
Prairie States, by demonstrating the benefits not merely of Steam
Plowing but of subsequent Steam Tillage, and that the day is not
remote wherein the "barrens" of Long Island and New Jersey, the
rich iutervales of the Connecticut and the Susquehanna, will be
profitably plowed and tilled to a depth of twenty-four to thirty
inches by Steam Power, and that far larger and surer crops than those
of the past will therefrom be realized.                      H. G.
THE LOWER MISSISSIPPI, AND THE GULF.
[EDITORIAL CORRESPONDENCE OF THIE TRIBUNE.]
IIOUSTON, Texas, May 20.-I presume there is no richer soil
on earth than that formed by the annual overflow of its banks by
the mighty Mississippi. That inundation has been checked, not
precluded, by the artificial Levees, which, though locally advantageouls, seem to me, on a broader view, mistaken.  The current
of the Father of Waters is, in the main, so resistless when the
river is at a high stage, and is so surcharged with the richest earth,
that it has only to be modified, not arrested, to induce it to commence a deposit of fertilizing sediment. Now, if its banks were so
adjusted that it would at once overflow them along its whole course,
from Cairo to the Balize, it could never rise six I.uches above them,
7 
SOIL AND PRODUCTS OF LOUISIANA.
and its inundations, no longer devastating, would still further enrich
and gradually though slowly elevate the adjacent region. I dis.
trust the permanent efficacy of any artificial Levees. It is not practicable to pile both banks of a great river for a full thousand miles;
yet, without piling, nothing will surely prevent the undermining
of the highest and firmest Levees, so that they will crumble into the
current and be swept away, causing crevasses which human power
is inadequate to close till the river falls. I predict, therefore, that
leveeing will fail to keep the Mississippi within its banks; and,
while I do not suggest any alternative, I submit that it were better
to bear existing evils than to seek their cure through agencies likely
to create evils still greater.
I judge from what I have seen that the surface of most of the
acres of Louisiana accounted land, is lower than that of the adjacent rivers and bayous. Naturally, swamps and marshes abound,
mainly covered by thick forests of Live Oak, Cypress, and some
smaller trees, usually standing in six to twelve inches of water, and
intersected by small bayous, averaging four to six feet in depth of
water, the congenial home of the alligator, as they would be of the
frog and the duck, if the alligator were not fond of a meat diet.
The gray moss which trails from most of the trees in these swampforests is much admired by the inhabitants, and is gathered to fill
mattresses. Very little has yet been done toward draining these
vast morasses, because of their very slight inclination toward the
Gulf, in which direction alone can water be made to flow away
from them.  Ultimately, they will be severally leveed or dyked, and
then pumped dry by steam; but not these many years. Meantime, the relatively dry land which separates them, being two or
three feet higher, has been largely improved and cultivated, though
some of it has been neglected since the War. Cane and Cotton are
grown on a part of the plantations; Corn quite generally; Potatoes
and what we call sweet potatoes, with corn and some cotton, by the
Blacks on their petty holdings. I had been told that the Black
women no longer work in the fields; but they were at work on most
of the patches we passed between New Orleans and Brashear, eighty
miles westward on the Atchafalaya, where we took boat for Galveston. In many places, husband, wife, and one or two children,
were hoeing side by side; and, though this kind of agriculture is
not very efficient, their crops generally looked well. Where theii
patches are easily flowed, part of each was often devoted to Rice
8 
ADDRESS TO THE FARMERS OF TEXAS.
whereof the culture in this State is rapidly extending. I understand that it is considered the surest and most profitable grain-crop
grown in Louisiana, while it requires no costly machinery to fit it
for sale.  The grower takes it in its rough state to the mill, where
he receives 100 pounds of the cleaned or hulled grain for each 160
pounds in the hull, called "paddy." A poor man can do better
at growing Rice than Cotton.
I doubt that one-eighth of the area of Louisiana is to-day under
tillage, while she grows little or no other than wild grasses of
slight value. She has some nlillions of acres of thin, poor, sandy
soil in her northern and eastern sections, usually covered with Pine,
some of it of good size and quality, the rest small and worthless.
Leaving this to grow timber, the residue is exceedingly fertile; yet
less than half of it is arable without the aid of steam. By-and-by,
bayous will be dredged, dykes or levees constructed, large inclosures
pumped dry, then plowed and tilled by gigantic steam-engines; and
then Louisiana will rapidly take rank among the most productive
and populous of the States composing our Union.
H. G.
SUGGESTIONS TO FARMERS.
ADDRESS BY HORACE GREELEY, OF NEW YORK, AT THE STATE AGRICUL
TURAL FAIR.
HOUSTON, Texas, May 23, 1871.-The civilization of our race is
evinced and measured by the growth and progress of its Agriculture.
The thorough savage is never a cultivator. What the earth spon
taneously produces, he appropriates without gratitude and consumes
without forecast. He revels in abundance one week, to be pinched
by hunger the next. Only his want of an ax or his ignorance of
its use precludes his felling, and thus destroying, the tree which,
for generations, has fed his tribe with its nourishing, palatable fruit.
He delights in gorging himself on the flesh of animals, but never
feeds nor shelters them. Thus devouring and devastating, never
tilling nor producing, he requires square miles to subsist scantily,
precariously, his tribe, where his civilized successor will feed and
clothe more persons generously on so many acres. After poets and
dreamers have done their best to glorify him with
"The light that never was on sea or land,"
9
1. ,.:. I. 
ORIGIN AND GROWTH OF AGRICULTURE.
the savage is a miserable creature, enjoying less and suffering more
than the wolf or the leopard, to which a lawless, careless, predatory
freedom is truly natural, and which is at home with the elements,
as he never was nor can be.
The savage builds no monuments-leaves but scanty proofs that
he ever existed save his bones. A hundred of his generations
come and go, leaving the earth and its living vesture essentially as
they found it. But let civilized man replace him for a bare lifetime,
and he leaves foot-prints that centuries will not efface. Our Atlantic seaboard has hardly been known to civilized men for four generations; yet, if these were to be swept away to-morrow, and the
wilderness untrodden by human foot were here to resume its
ancient sway, more memorials of these four generations would
challenge attention and reward inquiry two thousand years hence
than we can now discern of all the races that peopled this Atlantic
slope prior to the voyages and discoveries of Columbus.
The rigors of Winter, and the experienced perils of starvation
during its reign, gradually impel the savage to save and store the
grains and fruits of the seasons of plenty to subsist him through
the dearth which regularly follows: and he slowly learns to pre serve and tame the animals best calculated to serve him by draft
or as food.A The grains which habitually grow and ripen on the
fertile intervales of streams which annually overflow their banks,
ultimately teach him to increase their quantity and render their
reproduction more certain by cultivation. To plant the seed in
the most promising localities and take the chance of its repro ducing its kind ten or twenty-fold, is his first essay; necessity im pels and experience gradually teaches more methodical and efficient
cultivation. EThe loss of cattle by cold, by storm, by hunger, at
length suggests the curing of fodder for winter use, and the pro vision of such shelter as the climate may seem to require. The
supply of food being thus doubled and trebled, population increases
correspondingly; and thus is created a necessity for a still more
thorough and effective tillage of the soil. Thus pressed by want or
a justified apprehension of it, Man slowly learns to deepen his cul ture, to fertilize his fields, to diversify his implements and improve
his methods, until the labor of one produces adequate sustenance
for many, and ever-enlarging conceptions, wants, capabilities,
achievements, enjoyments, expand his intellect, refine his nature,
and exalt his aspirations.  His increased power over Nature is the
10
I 
WATER IN AGRICULTURE.
general measure of his progress from the lowest barbarism up to
that perfect mental and moral stature which is symbolized by
Copernicus, Galileo, Shakespeare, Milton, and Newton.
Modern Agriculture is an art-or rather a circle of arts-based
upon Natural Science, which is a methodical exposition of Divine
Law. The savage is Nature's thrall, whom she scorches, freezes,
starves, drowns, as her caprice may dictate.  He lives in constant
dread of her frosts, her tornadoes, her lightnings. Science teaches
his civilized successor to turn her wildest eccentricities to his own
use and profit. Her floods and gales saw his timber and grind his
grain; in time, they will chop his trees, speed his plow, and till his
crops as well. Science transforms and exalts him from the slave
into the master of the elements. If he does not yet harness the
electric fluid to his plow, his boat, his wagon, and make it the
most docile and useful of his servants, it is because he is still but
little advanced from barbarism.   Essentially, the lightning garnered in a summer cloud should be as much at his command and
as subservient to his needs as the water that refreshes his thirsty
fields and starts his hitherto lifeless wheels.
Nowhere has human stolidity been more forcibly demonstrated
than in the average farmer's bygone dealings with water. This
mobile, subtle fluid, which will voluntarily travel wherever you
will, if you give it an inch of descent per mile, ought to have long
since been absolutely and everywhere at the beck and call of every
cultivator. And yet, I have stood beside a corn-field parched and
withering from drouth, while a mill-stream danced and brawled
right through its center, falling twenty feet in a hundred rods, yet
moistening the roots of no plants but those of the two rows next its
bed on either side, while three days' work of two men would have
dammed and diverted its waters so that four or five acres of the corn
would have been unrolled and set to growing again by their influence. WVhoever travels with open eyes may note a thousand
such opportunities in almost any State-a hundred or more in
nearly every County. 
With Grass, the facility and advantage of Irrigation are still more
obvious. I visited last Summer the region of the White Mountains
-Coos, the northernmost county of New-Hampshire. That district is cold, mountainous, rugged, rocky, with a strong, granitic
soil, which does not lend itself easily to tillage, but which is very
natural to grass. And, so numerous are the horses required for the use
11 
ADDRESS TO TEXAS FARMERS.
of its many Summer visitors, that Hay is always worth  $20 per
ton, and, in Winters following dry Summers and Autumns like the
last, considerably more. It is a country of abundant springs and
rills, and dancing, laughing streams, which fall so rapidly as to
make Irrigation an obvious and profitable resort. I am quite sure
that ten thousand acres of grass land in that county might be amply irrigated, by dams and reservoirs and shallow ditches, at an average cost of $20 per acre, and with an average increase in their annual
product of one ton of good hay per acre, worth at least $10 as it
stands in the field ready for the scythe of the mower.  Here would
be fifty per cent. annual return for the investment; and its value
is likely to increase rather than diminish. And yet, I doubt that
there are one hundred acres of that county irrigated: and what
wonder, since the farmers of the older and richer counties south of
it, whose fields have been cultivated from one to two centuries,
have not yet realized the thriftlessness and waste of letting rills
and brooks dance idly by and through the crops that are perishing
firom thirst? While the rich valleys of the Connecticut and Kennebec, which have for generations been tilled by farmers exceptionably wealthy and intelligent, exhibit not an acre irrigated to every
thousand left to depend for water on the caprice of the often scorching, withering skies, what can we reasonably expect of newer, ruder,
poorer communities?
If Irrigation were a novelty, Conservatism might shake its head
gravely, doubtingly, thereat,without exposing its emptiness of brains.
But in fact the artificial application of water to secure and increase
production is older than the Plow-older than authentic History.
Nature gave the example and the broadest possible hint in the
valley of the lower Nile; Italy borrowed and improved upon the
suggestion in the early morn of Christendom, if not earlier; and
the Spaniards brought the art to this country before the Pilgrims
built their huts around Plymouth Rock. How came it that lessons
,so striking and so palpable can have so long been defied by a people
so alert and eager for profit as ours?
I believe the time is at hand when not only will streams be
generally utilized to moisten adjacent fields, and thus largely increase
their product, but when every thirsty, arid plain will have its bounteous well, with a windmill erected over it to pump its contents automatically, at little cost, into a reservoir where, after being warmed
by the sun, and perhaps fertilized, they will be drawn away in
12 
INTELLECT IN AGRIULTURE.
gentle rills to irrigate acre after acre on every side. I believe that
even Texas could richly afford to dig and equip a thousand such
wells this summer, and many thousands in the course of the next
dozen years. Every plain or intervale that slopes gently, imper
ceptibly, to the stream which divides or bounds it, should have its
well at the highest corner, with a spacious shallow reservoir by its
side, and ditches leading thence to every point whence gravitation
would carry the water gently over and through the soil of nearly
or quite all its area.  Even though that water should shrink until
it utterly failed in seasons of severest drouth, the soil would still
respond to the freshening influence of the moisture with which it
had been charged and saturated during the fervid weeks and months
required to dry up its deeper sources. Meantime, the crop would
be perfected, and the drouth, when it did at last fasten on the irrigated plain, would perforce exhaust itself on the season of Nature's
annual sterility and wintry repose.
In the great Future which Science and I-uman Energy are preparing, Artesian  wells, bored to depths,-a thousand to fifteen
hundred feet, will be sunk on every arid plain, and near the head
of every capacious valley wherein water is deficient, to enable the
strong currents that flow from subjacent mountain or elevated
plateau between diverse strata to rivers and seas to rise by
gravitation to the surface and fruitfully overspread hundreds of
acres, instead of uselessly coursing in darkness beneath. These
wells, being costly, will long be comparatively rare; but the " Staked
Plains" of Texas and  New-Mexico, with  the wide  mis-named
"Desert" at either foot of the Rocky Mountains, will yet be transformed into the verdurous, plenteous feeding-ground of innumerable cattle and sheep by irrigation, whereto Artesian wells will
largely contribute; one of them subserving the end of many ordinary wells, while drawing water from sources beyond the reach of
any or all of them.
Agriculture, as it steadily rises from the low level of barbarism to
the commanding altitude of a true civilization, becomes a more and
more intellectual calling. The rude pioneer,wrestling stubbornly with
the giant forest or the inhospitable marsh, may waste half his time
in play or idleness; but his work, when he does work, is purely muscular, making no draft on mental power or culture.  His fields are
subdued and tilled, his crops produced and secured, almost wholly
by dint of the strength in his good right arm. But, for his civilized,
13 
ADDRESS TO TlE FARMERS OF TEXAS.
enlightened descendant and successor, all this is changed. Water,
wind, steam, supply the needed power; his task is to mold and guide
that power to beneficent ends. In nmy boyhood, the man who cut
an acre of heavy grass did therein a good day's work, which taxed
his physical energies to the utmost and sent him weary and exhausted to bed, to rise stiff and sore for the morrow's duties; now, any
intelligent, resolute girl of fifteen, guiding a span of horses, may cut
five acres of just such grass before noon, cut it better than the best
mower ever did, and alight from her seat on the mowing-machine
untired and eager for a pic-nic or frolic after dinner. Steam saws
wood into fuel for the kitchen fire-place and the parlor stove; cuts
stalks and straw into half-inch pieces and then cooks them into a
pulpy mass; slices roots; churns cream into butter without supervision; and is just harnessing itself to the plow, resolved to pulverize the soil more rapidly, more cheaply, to a greater depth, to a
more equal and perfect commninution, than it has ever been possible
to attain by the force of animal power.  Manifestly, we stand but
on the threshold of the new age whereof Steam is at once the harbinger and the impulse: but enough has been developed to assure
usa..ha. more -and better is at hand.
Nor should we doubt that Steam itself is the forerunner of agencies still more potent and more cheaply efficacious. Mighty as have
been its achievements, they only serve to render more obvious and
lamentable its limitations. Of the power actually generated by the
vaporization of water, I cannot say how great is the share utilized
by an ordinary steam-engine, but I believe the estimates of scientists
all range below twenty per cent. Then the enormous weight of
boiler, fuel, and water, that must be transported with every form of
locomotive, absorbs nearly half the power not squandered by imper
fect devices for directing and applying it. Mighty as Steam assuredly is, it is not only a blind giant, but we are deplorably blind
with regard to its economy and adaptation.
And why should Steam, even in its best estate, be final? Intelligence has already spurned its trammels; Thought has far outstripped it in the invention and operation of the Magnotic Telegraph; why should the wondrous power we have evoked in Electricity be limited to the transmission of ideas? Why may it not
be employed to impel material substances as well? True, we have
not yet learned how to transmit the power unquestionably generated by Electricity; but our average ignorance and incapacity, result
14 
ELECTRICITY-UNDER-DRAINING.
ing in obstruction and defeat, are constantly overstepped and transfigured by the men of genius and of prescience whom God benignantly sends to lead us on from achievement to achievement, from
triumph to triumph. To be conscious of a need or a deficiency, is to
be far on the way whereby we shall at last overcome it.  Steam, as
a productive force, an industrial factor, is barely a century old;
Electricity was harnessed to a wire and made a post-boy hardly
thirty years ago. I do not believe this al], nor even the best, that
this all-pervading, irresistible power is destined to do for us. i
believe that plants will yet be grown by its aid with a celerity never
yet attained; that heat will be profitably produced and diffused by
its agency; and that power will be generated from electric batteries, of old or new device, which will supplement, if not in time
supersede, all other mechanical forces, liberating Man almost wholly
from obstruction and defeat by material obstacles, and rendering
Productive Industry a matter of application and oversight, rarely
or never taxing human sinews to achieve a result which invokes
the employment of material force.
If I do not speak here of what, in my section, as in Europe, is
the basis of all thorough culture-I refer to Under-draining-it is
not because I deem it inapplicable to your State, but simply that
the time when it can be expected to command general attention
here has not yet arrived. You do not need to warm your soil,
lengthen your season of verdure, or hasten the growth and maturing of your crops, as we do; and there are but few square miles of
your State on which a net-work of under-drains three feet in average
depth and but three rods apart, would not cost more than it would
be worth. And yet, I have no doubt that many gardens, nurseries,
&c., in this State ought to be thus drained, and would be to profit,
if only to relieve them of an excessive moisture in Spring and early
Summer, remaining stagnant in and souring the soil. By-and-by,
you will begin to under-drain grain-fields and meadows as we do;
but that topic can wait. The draining of bogs and marshes, by
widening, deepening, and straightening, the channels wherein water
now flows from them-often making new ones in part, if not wholly
-proffers more obvious and instant advantages. The lands waiting
to be thus reclaimed are nearly always exceptionally fertile; they
rarely present other obstacles to cultivation than water; while their
proper drainage must contribute signally to the healthfulness of the
surrounding country. No State which embosoms extensive swamps
f15 
ADDRESS TO THE FARMERS OF TEXAS.
or bogs should hesitate to have them surveyed by competent engineers
and the best means of drying them ascertained and reported.
Knowledge will almost inevitably lead to practical, decisive action
with regard to these nurseries of fever, these magazines of disease
and death.
Bear with a few suggestions upon a standing topic of debate
among Southern cultivators.
I am not young, as you see; yet I cannot remember a time when
the South did not affirm and deplore an excessive addiction of her
people to Cotton. That emninent scholar and statesman, Hugh S.
Legar6, alluded to it as a venerable grievance, thirty-odd years ago.
Before as well as since, every one remonstrated with every one
against the fatuity which impelled Southrons to plant so much
Cotton; exhorted all to retrench and reform; and then slid away to
plant a few more acres than ever before. For generations, it was
reiterated as an axiom that Cotton culture depended on Slavery;
yet Slavery is dead, and we produced nearly One Million tons of
Cotton in 1870-more  than in any former year, with the exceptions of 1859 and 1860. Yet, in this year of grace 1871, we have
the old cry from millions of throats-" Plant less (Cotton! "-and
I presume with the old result. The army-worm, the boll-worm,
may diminish the Cotton-crop; expostulation, I judge, will not.
I know no more striking illustration of what St. Paul terms "the
foolishness of preaching" than this incessant yet fruitless clamor
against growing so much Cotton.
Doubtless, the remonstrants are right, as remonstrants are apt
to be.   But, after two generations of incessant deprecation, the
passion for cotton-planting seems as intense and pervading as ever.
The owner of a thousand arable acres, after hearing all that is to be
said against it, plants almost exclusively Cotton. The poorest negro,
who owns or rents a dozen acres, puts in his field of Cotton, and
takes his chance for bread. lie has endured less preaching on the
subject than his old master; but, had he been lectured from infancy
on the madness of cotton-planting, he would have planted all the
same.
And this for a most obvious reason. Cotton is Money, and
Money is Power.   Cotton is of such moderate bulk in proportion
to its value that it bears transportation far better than Wheat, or
Corn, or Fruit, or Vegetables. It endures tropic suns and arctic
frosts without injury; it neither molds, nor rots, nor rusts, nor
16 
INDUSTRY SHOULD BE DIVERSIFIED.
putrefies. He who has Cotton to sell does not quake at the footsteps of the tax-gatherer, and can generally look the sheriff square
in the face.
Admitting that the South has grown, and still grows, too much
Cotton-(and I judge that three millions of bales grown in 1870
would have netted her as large a sum as the four millions she
actually did grow)-I see no way to counteract this tendency but
by introducing new branches of industry whereof the product will
also command money. In vain do you exhort the average planter
to grow more Corn and make more Pork: he is often in debt, and
chooses to produce what will surely sell for the money he sorely
needs. He is sure Cotton will do this; he is not so sure as to Corn
or Pork. But plant one hundred Cotton and as many Woolen Factories on the soil of your State, making a steady cash market here
for Wool and:Meat, for Grain and Vegetables, as well as Cotton, and
now your Agriculture will naturally and certainly divide its forces
and diversify its products. Farmers will grow diverse crops, if they
know that a sure cash market is at hand.  A denser population, a
greater variety and range of employments, these are pressing wants
of the entire South.   Every wheel set to turning on a Southern
water-fall, every manufactory of Edge-Tools or Farm Implements,
started in any of your cities or villages, is certain profitably to
divert labor from your Cotton-fields, as naked preaching never will.
There is hardly an acre of Southern land which would not be
doubled in value if Southern farms were mainly cultivated with
Southern-made implements, Southern backs clothed in Southernwoven fabrics, and Southern dwellings filled with Southern-made
furniture and wares.   And, now that Slavery has gone out, it
is high time that the useful arts were steadily and rapidly comw
img in.
Am I inculcating what would injure my own section?   Not at
all. The more you do for yourselves, the more you will require
from abroad. The State of Arkansas has more inhabitants than,
the City of Boston; yet the latter, while the focus of an immense
interchange and large consumption of domestic products, buys and
consumes far more of the productions of foreign lands. Our purchases are limited, not by our needs, but bv our means. A thousand
times it has been predicted that we should destroy our Foreign
Commerce by protecting Home Industry, and a thousand times th is,
has been proved a fallacy by increased imports iader high duties
2
17 
ADDRESS TO THE FARMERS OF TEXAS.
If Texas were expending four times as much as she is, per annum,
in the purchase of home-made wares and fabrics, she would buy far
more from abroad than she now does. If she had a dozen ax-factories
in fiull operation, she might import fewer axes than now, but her imports of Steel, Iron, and a hundred other articles, would be swelled
beyond computation.
I hold the Naturalization of new and the extension of existing
Manufactures among the most urgent wants of this State, as of
nearly every young community. Hence, I hold-not that you
ought to pay a high price for a poor article because it is home-made
-not that you should forego the gratification of a legitimate want
because the article it contemplates is not of Texas growth or fabri cation-but that each of you should give an intelligent preference,
other things being equal, to whatever is made on your own soil should buy your harness, or saddle, or pail, or broom, or plow, or
ax, of your neighbor's make, in preference to one brought from
abroad; should take and pay for some  first-rate Texas journal
before looking abroad for a better.  Having thus done your duty
by the community whereof you are a part, if you are able and willing to take'a second journal, I might possibly aid you in finding a
good one.
Is Agriculture a repulsive pursuit? That what has been called
Farming has repelled many of the youth of our day, I perceive;
and I glory in the fact. An American boy, who has received a
fair common-school education and has an active, inquiring mind,
does not willingly consent merely to drive oxen and hold plow forever. He will do these with alacrity, if they come in his way; he
will not accept them as the be-all and the end-all of his career. He
will not s, down in a rude, slovenly, naked home, devoid of flowers, and trees, and books, and periodicals, and intelligent, inspiring,
,refining conversation, and there plod through a life of drudgery as
hopeless and cheerless as any mule's. He has needs, and hopes,
and aspirations, which this life does not and ought not to satisfy.
This might have served his progenitor in the Ninth Century; but
this is the Nineteenth, and the young American knows it.  He
needs to feel the intellectual life of the age flowing freely into and
through him-needs to feel that, though the City and the Railroad
-are out of sight, the latter is daily bringing within his reach all
that is noblest and best in the achievements and attractions of the
former.  He may not listen to Sumner or Thurman in the Senate;
I8 
THE PRESERVATION OF TREES.
to Ward Beet(her or Tyng in the pulpit; but the press multiplies
their best thoughts and most forcible expressions at the rate of ten
to twenty thousand copies per hour; and its issues are within the
reach of every industrious family.  Any American farmer, who
has two hands and knows how to use them, may, at fifty years of
age, have a better library than King Solomon ever dreamed of,
though he declared that "of making of many books there is no
end;" any intelligent farmer's son may have a better knowledge of
Nature and her laws when twenty years old than Aristotle or Pliny
ever attained. The Steam Engine, the Electric Telegraph, and the
Power Press, have brought knowledge nearer to the humblest cabin
than it was, ten centuries since, to the stateliest mansion; let the
cabin be careful not to disparage or repel it. To arrest the rush of
our youth to the cities, we have only to diffuse what is best of the
cities throughout the country; and this the latest triumphs of civilization enable us easily to do. A home irradiated by the best
thoughts of the sages and heroes of all time, even though these be
compressed within a few rusty volumes, cheered by the frequent
arrival of two or three choice periodicals, and surrounded by such
floral evidences of taste and refinement as are within the reach of
the poorest owner of the soil he tills, will not be spurned as a
prison by any youth not thoroughly corrupted and depraved.
But thousands of farmers are more intent on leaving money and
lands to their children than on informing and enriching their
minds. They starve their souls in order to pamper their bodies.
They grudge their sons that which would make them truly wise,
in order to provide them with what can at best but make them rich
in corn and cattle, while poor in manly purpose and generous ideas.
— It may seem presumptuous in me to speak to you of the preservation and diffusion of Trees in a State so new as yours, and of
whose alternations of hill and valley, forest and prairie, you know
so much and I so little. But there are laws everywhere potent,
needs everywhere felt, and errors very generally committed; and
of these last the most pervading is the reckless extermination of
Trees. It is not peculiar to this continent; for France and Spain,
Italy and Portugal, have for the most part been denuded of forests,
and suffer for it not only in the scarcity of Timber and Fuel, but in
the severity and duration of their drouths, the fierceness and
devastations of their gales, the violence and aggravation of their
floods. All of them have timber on their rugged, sterile imoun
19
I 
ADDRESS TO THE FARMERS OF TEXAS.
tains, where it is scarcely accessible, and where it is least available
to their denser and more active communities. But if one-tenth ot
the surface of each arable square mile were now covered with stately and serviceable forest-trees, those countries would be better fitted
to maintain a large population, and their inhabitants would be more
thrifty, efficient, and comfortable, than they are.  My own section
of this continent has destroyed trees too eagerly, recklessly, and
planted them too tardily, too sparingly.  My county, of Westchester (New York), began to be inhabited by our race fully two hundred and fifty years ago; it has been divided into farms from one
to two centuries, and its people are not behind others in sagacity
and intelligence; they have still much land covered with mainly
young timber; yet there are not less than five thousand acres in
that county to-day exposing rocks thinly and partially covered with
soil which ought never to have been stripped bare of trees. Cut
off the timber, if you will, though it is better to thin out than to
sweep away a forest where the land is not needed for tillage, and
have trees of all ages and sizes growing on each acre devoted to
forest. If those five thousand acres were reclad in their primitive
vesture, all the springs and streams of the county would be more
copious, more equable, more constant, than they are, and the soil ot
the subjacent fields and meadows would endure drouth and retain
moisture as they never can while hill-side and rocky ridge are exposed to sweep of wind and glare of sun.
In this new, bounteous, sunny land, where the need of fuel is so
much less than with us, you are exposed to the miscalculation made
by my ancestors two to four generations back,  when, seeing seveneighths of New-England covered by stately, luxuriant trees, they
said, "There will always be timber enough.  Let us cut and slash,
and clear all the land we can; others will save wood enough though
we destroy all we have;" but their children have lived to deplore
their error. Fifty-five years ago, great pines were cut from hills now
included in the city of Burlington, Vermont, sawed into boards,
and these rafted down Lake Champlain and the Sorel to the St. Lawrence, and so shipped to Europe, not paying fifty cents per day for
the labor, calling the worth of the timber nothing. Barely thirty
years later, when Vermont began to construct her railroads, she
had to draw the bridge-timber from Canada, paying for it many times
what her own disparaged pines brought when they were so recklessly
swept tway. The world is full of experiences as instructive as this
20 
MAXIMS FOR FARMERS.
It is not too soon to begin to plant forests in the more naked and
arid portions of Texas; it is high time that you were regarding good
timber as property, and saving it with scrupulous care and foresight.
Extensive sections of your State will need it before they can grow
it, aside from those locealities which need it already; and your
Society can do her no better service than to impress on all owners of the soil, whether in village or rural district, the duty and
profit of an annual and persistent planting of choice and serviceable
Trees.
But-not to trespass too far on your patience-let me close with
a few maxims, applicable to cultivation in every climne and under all
circumstances, whether among populations dense as that of China
or sparse as that of British America.
I. Only GOOD I7arming pays.  He who sows or plants without
reasonable assurance of good crops annually, might better earn
wag,es of some capable neighbor than work for so poor a paymaster
as he is certain to prove himself.
II. The good farnmer is proved such by the steady appreciation
of his crops.  Any one may reap an ample harvest from  a fertile
virgin soil; the good farmer alone grows good crops at first, and
better and better ever afterward.
III. It is far easier to maintain the productive capacity of a
farm than to restore it. To exhaust its fecundity, and then attempt
its restoration by buying costly commercial fertilizers, is wasteful
and irrational.
IV. The good farmer sells mainly such products as are least exhaustive. Necessity may constrain him, for the first year or two, to
sell Grain, or even Hay; but he will soon send off his surplus mainly
in the form of Cotton, or Wool, or Meat, or Butter and Cheese, or
something else that returns to the soil nearly all that is taken from
it. A bank account daily drawn upon, while nothing is deposited
to its credit, must soon respond " No funds:" so with a farm similarly treated.
V. -Rotation is at least negative -ertilization. It may not positively enrich a farm; it will at least retard and postpone its impoverishment.  HIe who grows Wheat after Wheat, Corn after Corn,
for twenty years, will need to emigrate before that term is fulfilled.
The same farm cannot support (nor endure) him longer than that.
All our great Wheat-growing sections of fifty years ago are Wheatgrowing no longer; while England grows larger crops thereof on
21 
ADDRESS TO THE FARMERS OF TEXAS.
the very fields that fed the armies of Saxon Harold and William
the Conqueror. Rotation has preserved these, as the lack of it
ruined those.
VI. T'isdom is never dear, provided the article be genuine. 1
have known tarmers who toiled constantly from daybreak to dark,
yet died poor, because, through ignorance, they wrought of disad vantage. If every farmer would devote two hours of each day to
reading and reflection, there would be fewer failures in farming
than there are.
VII. The best investment a farmer can make for his children is
that which surrounds their youth with the rational delights of a
beauteous, attractive home. The dwelling may be small and rude,
yet a few flowers will embellish, as choice fruit-trees will enrich and
gladden it; while grass and shade are within the reach of the hum blest.  Hardly any labor done on a farm is so profitable as that
which makes the wife and children fond and proud of their home.
VIII. A good, practical _Education, including a good trade, is a
better outtft for a youth than a grand estate with the drawback of an
empty mind.  Many parents have slaved and pinched to leave their
children rich, when half the sum thus lavished would have profited
them far more had it been devoted to the cultivation of their
minds, the enlargement of their capacity to think, observe, and
work. The one structure that no neighborhood can affoibrd to do
without is the school-house.
IX. A small library of well-selected books in his home has saved
many a youth from wandering into the baleful ways of the Pr'odi gal Son.  Where paternal strictness and severity would have bred
nothing but dislike and a fixed resolve to abscond at the first oppor tunity, good books and pleasant surroundings have weaned many a
youth from his first wild impulse to go to sea or cross the continent,
and made him a docile, contented, obedient, happy lingerer by the
parental fire-side. In a family, however rich or poor, no other good
is so cheap or so precious as thoughtful, watchful love.
X. M/ost men are born poor  but no man, who has average capaci ties and tolerable luck, need remain so.  And  the farmer's calling,
though proffering no sudden leaps, no ready short-cuts to opulence,
is the surest of all ways from poverty and want to comfort and
independence.  Other men must climb; the temperate, frugal, dili gent, provident farmer may grow into competence and every exter nal accessory to happiness. Each year of his devotion to his home
22 
TOPOGRAPlHY OF TEXAS.
stead may find it more valuable, more attractive than the last, and
leave it better still.
Farmers of Texas! I bring you mainly old and homely truths.
No single suggestion of this Address can be new to all of you;
most of them, I presume, will be familiar to the majority. There are
discoveries in Natural Science and improvements in Mechanics
which conduce to the efficiency of Agriculture; but the principles
which underlie this first of arts are old as Agriculture itself. Greek
and Roman sages made observations so acute and practical that the
farmers of to-day may ponder them with profit, while modern literature is padded with essays on farming not worth the paper they
have spoiled. And yet, the generation whereof I am part has witnessed great strides in your vocation, while the generation preparing to take our places will doubtless witness still greater. 1 bid
you hold fast to the good, with minds receptive of and eager for the
better, and rejoice in your knowledge that there is no nobler pursuit
and no more inviting soil than those which you proudly call your
own.
TEXAS... THE STATE MATERIALLY CONSIDERED.
[EDITORIAL CORRESPONDENCE OF THlE TRIBUNE.]
HOUSTON, Texas, May 25. —" How do you like Texas?" I have
been many times asked during the week I have been in the Stateasked even before I was at all qualified to give an answer of any
value. Now that I have traveled some hundreds of miles, mainly
in the valleys of the Trinity and the Brassos, I can speak somewhat
more to my own satisfaction. Still, it should be considered that I
have as yet seen only the south-eastern quarter of Texas, and but
a small proportion of that. Of course, I knew long since that Texas
has a warm though variable climate, and a soil generally, though not
uniformly, fertile. Few who read considerably can need to be told
so much. Let me endeavor to indicate the points on which observation has modified my former impressions.
I. Texas seems to be better timbered than any other prairie State
with which I am acquainted. I do not mean that the timber is exceptionally good, for it is not.  Eastern Kansas, with her Hickory
groves and the stately, luxuriant forests that cover the intervales
23 
LETTERS FROM[ TEXAS.
(" bottonis'") of her rivers, is decidedly ahead of her in this respect.
But the prairies of Eastern Texas, though often large, are interrupted, chlequered, diversified, by clumps or groves of timber, as I
never saw any other. Wherever water finds or makes a course, no
matter how shallow or how generally dry, there trees spring up and
struggle resolutely for existence. And, since these prairies and
glades have been fed down by innumerable cattle, the annual prairie-fires, if not prevented, are so enfeebled, by the relative scantiness
of their aliment, that they no longer charge upon and drive back the
timber as they formerly did. It is plain that the forests are steadily extending their boundaries on every side,while every tree cut out
of them is replaced by half a dozen young ones. I judge that the
increase of timber throughout the region I have traversed has been
very great during the last ten years, and that it will continue for
the next twenty, in spite of the rapid increase of population.
As to quality, this timber is not what I could wish it. Oaks, of
almost every known variety, with two or three species of Pine, are
most abundant; while Cottonwood, White Ash, Pecan, Elm, Gum,
&c., garland the rivers and bayous. The Live Oak is quite common,
and is a good timber-tree; the long-leaf Pine is of tolerable quality,
though not equal to our White Pine. But most of the Oak is
"brash," as the woodmen say-that is, it lacks toughness and elasticity. Much of it is low and scrubby, but the young trees, growing
thickly, promise to be tall and comparatively limbless. I hol)e
their timber will prove more elastic than that it replaces. I would
gladly hear that Hickory, Locust, Larch, and other desirable species, are extensively planted ere long. As yet, more sawed Pine is
imported (especially for bridge-building) than I wish was needed.
II. As to the Soil, I have seen few acres that would not yield
good crops to good cultivation; but this is expected of a prairie
country.  Some of the pine-covered lands, especially near the Gulf,
seem but moderately fertile; a part of the upland "Oak openings"
only a little better. On the other hand, the river bottoms, especially those of the Brassos, are very fertile, as annually overflowed intervales are apt to be. Here, however, the inundations are frequent
and of enormous extent, so that I judge the intervales of the Trinity,
Brassos, Colorado, &c., deeper and richer than those of the Connecticut, Hudson, Delaware, Susquehanna, or Potomac, ever were or
could be. I never saw better soil than the Brassos bottoms.
I was more surprised, however, by the remarkable fertility of the
24 
HOW THEY LIVE IN TEXAS.
rolling prairies, especially those of Washington County, on either
side of Brenhamn, its capital.  These have been twenty to thirty
years planted to Corn or Cotton, never manured, and cultivated so
shallowly that every rain sweeps off thousands of tons of their soil
to be borne into the Gulf by the Brassos or squandered upon its
intervales.  Yet these prairies still sustain and mature bounteous
harvests; and no wonder, since their black mold ranges from two
to five feet in depth.  Mellow, dry, breezy, healthful, I do not see
how these lands could be made more inviting. -
The level prairies are of good quality, though not equal in the
average to those just spoken of. They may average a foot of dark
mold, generally overlying clay. They are mainly left in a state of
nature, and devoted to the rearing of cattle, which are sold at three
or four years old for $10 to $20 per head to drovers or packers.
Tens of thousands in good condition have been slaughtered for their
hides and tallow-the flesh, after yielding all its tallow, being fed to
swine. This, I trust, is ended; it certainly will be when the first
railroad shall have connected the valley of the lower Colorado with
that of the Missouri or the Ohio. As yet, the State is full of
cattle, and will be for a few years longer; but they must ultimately
give place to tillage.  Whenever lands devoid of stump or stone,
equal to those of the Connecticut valley, and within four days by
rail of New York, shall be worth $5 per acre, these prairies will be
gradually inclosed, broken up by the Steam Plow, surface-drained
by gigantic machines, and cultivated for Corn, Cotton, Wheat, or
some choice Grass; and then Cattle will gradually disappear, or be
reared in some more civilized fashion.  At present, they simply
hold the ground till Cultivation shall be ready to claim it.
III. Whether it be a recommendation or not, I judge that it has
required less effort to live in Texas than in any other State of the
Union.  The common saying, "It costs no more to rear a cow
here than a hen at the North," is literally true.  The cow was
never fed, never sheltered, no matter how cold or stormy the
weather; and you might have ten thousand head of cattle ranging
the prairies and openings without owning an acre of land on earth.
Many a man has thus grown rich without effort and almost without
thought.
Rich, but to little present purpose. His home was a rude cabin,
with little or no glass in its windows, and nothing but dirt on its
floors. His children grew up unschooled and rude-mnannered. His
25 
LETTERS FROM TEXAS.
wife was slatternly, deprived of society, and rendered unhappy by
memories of better times and more congenial associations.  Man
lives as a herdsman mainly on horseback, in the open air, often
meeting acquaintances or strangers; Woman, being confined to her
small, rough cabin, found therein no solace, no comfort, but in her
children. The partnership was not an equal one; there was no
similarity in its conditions. There are proud and happy wives in
Texas as elsewhere, but the rancher's life has not tended to make
them so. I am glad that I can see to the end of it. And I trust
that the ranchemen's wives are even gladder than I am.
While Slavery lasted in Texas, any decided change was hardly
possible. The tillers of her soil were slaves. WVhite men almost
uniformly refused to "make niggers of themselves" by plowing and
hoeing; but they did not hesitate to mount a horse and gallop after
a herd of Cattle. Boys early learned to lasso a steer or colt; they
liked the herdsman's life, with its excitements and adventures; it was
the next thing to a buffalo-hunt. Land had no value; products,
unless near navigable water, next to none. Many a manl has been
unable to sell his Corn at 25 cents per bushel in one County, when
no better Corn was wanted at six times that price in another; impassable streams and unfathomable roads separating them. So the
owner of five thousand cows was often for weeks without flour
bread, and very rarely had either Cheese, Butter, or Milk; "hog
and hominy" were his staples for diet; Fruit he seldom tasted;
Tobacco and Whisky were his only luxuries.
So much for the Past. I will speak of the Future in my next.
-H. G.
TEXAS... THE FUTURE OF THE STATE.. ITS RAILROADS.
[EDITORIAL CORRESPONDENCE OF THE TRIBUNE.]
COLUMMBUS, Colorado Co., Texas, May 26.-Before I dilate on the
bright future now opening before this State, let me indicate some
of the drawbacks which, have hitherto retarded her material and
still more her intellectual and moral prog,ress.
Bad water is quite often the accompaniment of very good land;
and South-Eastern Texas has little that is good. I have now traveled over nearly every completed mile of her railroads without having
'% 26 
DRAWBACKS ON LIFE IN TEXAS.
been offered one glass of water from spring or well. Rain-water is
very generally drank; nearly every tolerable dwelling being provided with a tank or reservoir for keeping it, oftener underground.
As very many lack even this, the excuse for drinking bad coffee,
or worse whisky, is here stronger than almost anywhere else. That
springs are very rare, while well-water is uniformly undrinkable, is
certain; but why each city and considerable village has not tried to
obtain better, by sinking to a depth of two or three hundred feet
(not expecting the fluid to rise to the surface and flow over, on the
Artesian plan, but drawing it up by wind or other power), I do not
understand. The muddy product of the rivers, creeks, bayous, and
sloughs, which the cattle must imbibe per force, cannot but be prej udicial to their health and thrift; to say nothing of the dry seasons,
when even this detestable stuff can hardly be obtained. The suffering
of animals from thirst, and from the villainous witch-broth wherewith
they must quench it, must work them serious harm. If I were a herdsman here, I would have better water for my stock, or I would
sink at least three hundred feet in quest of it.
-Bad roads and other impediments to inter-communication have
sadly crippled Texas, and still cripple her.   Her crops, as a general rule, have cost the grower more after than before harvest.
Though oxen and horses have long been abundant and cheap, the
wheat-growers up North could reach no market with their product
unless at ruinous cost, while the lower counties were importing
Flour at the rate of three thousand barrels per day. A State whose
chief products are Grass and Cattle, has imported both Hay and
Milk; her herdsmen, as a general rule, never see either. A purely
agricultural State that buys most of her bread, a splendid soil for
Corn on a good part of which Corn is dearer to-day than in NewYork City, a capital State for growing Swine at no cost, yet
which has bought three-fourths of the Hams universally consumed
by her people-such are among the causes which have kept her
people poor in spite of the remarkable fertility of her soil. Her
rivers, creeks, and bayous, rarely bridged, are subject to great and
sudden floods, whereby teamsters are often imprisoned for days
between two creeks which in dry seasons are waterless, and halted
by a river for weeks. But for Railroads, Texas is doomed by nature
to stagnation, impotence, and barbarism.
As yet, she has barely begun to be penetrated by railroads. A
line north by west from Galveston to Houston (.50 miles), and
27
4 
LETTERS FROM TEXAS.
thence by Hempstead, Navasota, Bryan, Hiearne, &c., to Groesbeck,
in Limestone County, soon to be extended to Corsicana, in Navarrc
County (say 250 miles from Galveston), with a branch from Hemp.
stead westward across the Brassos through Washington County to
Giddings, 55 miles, soon to be extended 50 miles further to Austin,
the State Capital, with another from Harrisburg, 6 miles below
Houston, through Fort Bend and Colorado Counties, across both
the Brassos and Colorado to this point (84 miles): such are about
all the pieces of railroad now in operation in the State. The
piece from Shreveport, Louisiana, westward through Harrison and
Smith Counties to Hallsville (56 miles), is rather a suggestion than
a practical road. And these are about all that are in operation today. The work of providing this people with necessary railway
communication is barely well begun.
But that is half the battle. At last, nearly every line seems
to be in the hands of solvent, capable, upright men, who are backed
by ample capital, and is pushed with vigor and clear-sighted resolution. The Texas Central is going right on north by west to meet
one of the Missouri-Kansas roads at the north line of the State,
near Gainesville or Sherman. A new road (" The Great Northern "), well backed by Northern capital, pushes directly north
from Houston, crossing the Southern Pacific near Tyler, strikes the
Red River near Fort Towson, and connects with the Missouri, Kansas and Texas from Kansas near that point. The " Chattanooga
and Mobile" is now pushing due westward through Louisiana, and
expects to reach Houston before this time next year. These, with
the Southern Pacific, now certain to be vigorously prosecuted, will
give Texas not less than 1,000 miles of completed railroad within a
year, and 1,500 within two years.
But the most important and effective single line of railroad in
the State is "The International," which is to connect at Fulton, Arkansas, on her north-eastern border, with one from Cairo, Ill., and
thus with Chicago and New York, running diagonally through
Texas from north-east to south-west, crossing the Southern Pacific
and " The Great Northern" near Tyler, the " Texas Central" at
lHearne, and thence pushing straight for Austin, the capital, and
hence to San Antonio, and so to the Rio Grande not far from
Laredo.   This road, though begun last November at Hlearne,
where it crosses the "Texas Central," and impeded by the necessity
of importing Corn at a cost of $2.10 per bushel and Hay at $85 per
28 
TE:XAS AS A LAND OF PROMISE.
tun for its oxen and mules, has been pushed right vigorously ineither direction, and will have crossed both the Brassos and Col.
orado, and reached Austin on the one hand, the Trinity on the
other, by next May. Two years hence, it will have been completed
from Fulton to San Antonio (400 miles), and will then have
brought the heart of this State within four days' travel of the
Commercial Emporium, where it will be known as one of the most
judicious and successfill railway enterprises ever planned. It will
carry more Beef Cattle than any road on the globe, and it will bring
into Texas more immigrants than railroad ever carried into any
State till now.
I close with a single instance of the spirit in which our Northern
railroad-builders are met by the people of Texas. The Legislature
having, granted a liberal subsidy in State Bonds to the Southern
Pacific Road, Gov. Davis felt constrained to veto the bill.  The
Legislature thereupon repassed it by a vote of seven or eight to one
in either House; and the Democratic vote in the affirmative was,
like the Republican, all but unanimous. And, while no man questions the purity of the Governor's motives, I have heard no dissent
from the satisfaction with which the triumph of the measure is
received.
-I hope to leave Texas on my homeward way very soon, having
been dissuaded by heavy and extensive rains from my purpose of
reaching Austin and perhaps San Antonio on the one hand, or Tyler,
Marshall, and Shreveport, on the other.  The time does not serve
for stage-rides or other travel off the line of operated Railroads.
H. G.
TEXAS AS A LAND OF PROMISE.
[EDITORIAL CORRESPONDENCE OF THE TRIBUNE.]
GALVESTON, Texas, May 27.-Texas is as large as France, with
a more genial climate and far richer soil.  She has to-day less than
One Million inhabitants, while France (as reduced by the late war)
has more than Thirty-six Millions. She has more and better Timber,
and more Cattle and Horses than France; why should not her fortieth part of France's population be rapidly increased to a twentieth,
a tenth, and, before the close of this century, to a fifth or fourth?
2 
LETTERS FROMl TEXAS.
Why should not this State be the home of Ten Millions of the
human family early in the next century?
Before deciding to say a word in favor of Texas as a home for
those as yet strangers to her, I made inquiry and satisfied myself
that her wild lands are not merely cheap to-day, but certain long to
remain so. They are held in tracts of a thousand to many thousands
of acres, by men of limited means, who bought them for a song, or
obtained them without price by Mexican concession, and who have
held them to this day partly because wild lands paid no taxes, and
partly because they could find no purchasers: every one who either
had property or aspired to have being already gorged with wild
land. Now all is changed. Slavery being dead, lands are in request
and have a value, which railroads are rapidly doubling and quadrupling. Taxes are high and rising; Common Schools and State
loans to Railroads are certain to enhance them; so that moneyless
holders of unproductive tracts must sell or be sold out by the sheriff and tax-collector. I am sure that at least One Hundred Millions
of fertile acres are to-day owned by men who must sell them within
the next five years.  And this necessity is sure to keep down prices.
Let me, then, give some idea of their range.
I traversed yesterday the railroad which runs westward from
Harrisburg near Houston, through Harris, Fort Bend, and Colorado
Counties, by Richmond to Columbus, 83 miles. MIost of this route
lies through a rich, level prairie, covered with Horses and Cattle;
but Timber is always in sight on one side or on both, and we pass
through the generally forest-covered intervales of the Brassos and
Colorado, with those of Oyster Creek, San Bernard, and Caney.
This is one of the earliest settled portions of Texas, and its population has largely increased since the war. I was authorized by Mr.
WVm. Brady of Houston to offer a league of it (4,400 acres), including a sufficiency of timber and water, for $1 per acre; but, if that
should not meet the views of pioneers, he would survey it into farms,
and give alternate tracts of 100 acres to industrious, sober, thrifty
pioneers who would settle upon and convert them into productive
homesteads. And I have been assured by others that a colony of
two or three hundred Northern farmers and mechanics could obtain
lands for settlement on like terms in almost any part of the State.
Do not jump at the mistaken conclusion that the landholders of
Texas are exceptionally philanthropic and generous. They make
no pretensions to this character.  They want to make their lands
30 
TNDEVELOPED RESOURCES OF THIIE SOUTH.
valuable and marketable; to which end, they will sometimes give
away a part to enhance the value of the remainder. Only a few
will do this; but almost any one will sell a part very cheap in order to obtain a price for the rest. And they are quite aware that
a Yankee or German colony raises the value of the lands all around
it.
The Railroads are in like circumstances. Some of them have
land-grants; all want the population and production along their lines
rapidly increased. Their interest leads them to invite settlement
and encourage the transfer of lands from non-residents to cultivators.
Hence, while lands near railroad junctions and other locations of
predicted cities are held for higher rates, I judge that half the soil
of Texas is this day in market at prices ranging from 50 cents to
$2 per acre, and that $1 per acre in cash would buy the greater portion
of it. And, while a rapid rise along some of the railroad lines is
inevitable, I judge that 82 per acre will buy good wild land in this
State for at least ten years to come.
The least favorably situated of this vacant land is more eligibly
located to-day than the best was twenty years ago. Railroads are
bringing markets and comforts to every man's door. Milk sells for
$1 per gallon in this city; there is not a quart of it to every thousand cows throughout the State; and you whiten your tea or coffee
with the condensed article from New York or you don't whiten it at
all, even at petty hamlets in the far interior, where a likely cow and
calf will bring not more than $10.
As yet, the Mineral wealth of this State sleeps undisturbed and
useless. She has Iron enough to divide the earth by railroads into
squares ten miles across; but no tun of it was ever smelted.   She
has at least five thousand square miles of Coa] (probably much
more); but no tun of it was ever dug for sale. She has Gypsum
enough to plaster the continent annually for a century; but it lies
inert and valueless-a waste of earth-covered stone. She has more
land good for Wheat than Minnesota, yet imports nearly all her
Flour; she has millions of acres of excellent Timber, yet builds
mainly of pine from Louisiana and Florida; she sends to the Ohio
for her Hams and to New York for her Butter, and would import
Berries and Fruits if her people had not learned, while they were
unattainable, to do without them. If ten thousand Northern farmers would settle just below Houston, and. devote themselves to
supplying that city and this with fresh Milk, Butter, Strawberries,
81 
LETTERS FROM TEXAS.
Raspberries, Peaches, Grapes, &c., they might charge double prices,
and get rich faster than so many cultivators ever did before. They
would have to make their own Ice, but that is not difficult; they
might have to teach the Texas Central how to run a milk-train fifty
miles; but that need not exhaust their energies. Their pastureland, fenced, might cost them $10 per acre just around a depot and
a junction; their cows might be picked at $15 per head; and they
would soon sell Hay enough at 200 per cent. profit to defray the
cost of feeding and shedding their stock. This is but one of a hundred equally promising enterprises now impatiently awaiting the
right men to direct them.  Who will send them along?
H. G.
GLEANINGS FROMI TEXAS.
[EDITORIAL CORRESPONDENCE OF THIIE TRIBUNE.]
NEw ORLLEANS, La., May 29.-Texas is a great State geographically, with immense natural resources and gigantic possibilities;
but she has not yet justified her early promise. Her wealth in
soil and cattle, with the ease wherewith an abundance of food may
be secured froln these with little labor, has blinded her people to
many shortcomings which should not have endured or been endured
so long. Her habitations, as a whole, are far smaller, ruder, and
less comfortable, than they might and should be.  She ought to
pay for ten million panes of glass, and hire ten thousand glaziers to
set them directly. She is in urgent need of twenty thousand more
school-teachers and fifty thousand instructed cooks. It is a grief
to see beef that might be broiled into tender and juicy steaks fried
or stewed into such repulsive, indigestible messes as I have encountered at all but her two best hotels. It is a crying shame for
a region where the Peach, the Grape, the Pear, the Strawberry,
&c., grow so luxuriantly and bear so bounteously, to be living almost
entirely on Meat, Bread, and Coffee, even if these articles were what
they should be, and in Texas are not. In Labrador or Alaska,
such a "hog and homrniny" diet would be faulty; under this fervid
sun, it is atrocious.  No family which has been five years or over
in Texas has any right to live so badly.
I judge that there are, at the outside, fifty acres of cultivated
Berries of all kinds in the State, perhaps as many of Grapes, aid
32 
IMPEDIMENTS TO TRAVEL IN TEXAS.
possibly one Peach-tree to each family, though I consider that a
high estimate. At all events, not one family in every ten has either
fruit-tree, grape-vine, or strawberry-bed, down to this hour; and
fiuit makes no part of the average mneal.  Yet the profusion of
wild grapes (Mustang) in the Brassos bottoms, covering nearly
every tree for miles after miles, argues that choice Grapes would
grow here if any one would only plant them; while I know that
Peaches and Strawberries are hardly anywhere more luxuriant or
prolific. Almost every one owns land; those who do not, easily
might; but the great majority seem content to live as the pioneers
of Texas had to, on coarse, gross food alone, when they might have
Fruits, Milk, &c., by moderate exertion. The girls working in
Lowell factories would strike the first day that they were fed like
the family of a Texas planter who owns five thousand acres of land
and a large stock of cattle.
I speak of these things at the risk of giving offense, because they
ought to be discussed till corrected. The Texas pioneer, living a
hundred miles from anywhere, with a neighbor to each ten miles
square, no roads and no bridges, had to fare as he could. That is
no reason for cherishing his privations after all excuse for them
has passed away. If half the money spent in the State for Liquors
and Tobacco were devoted to making dwellings comfortable and
supplying their tables with fruits, &c., the whole people would be
happier and better.
A few words as to the cities:
I missed Austin, the State capital, by an accident and an all-night
thunderstorm, which stopped me at Giddclings, the present western
terminus of the Texas Central Railroad, leaving 55 miles (rapidly
diminishing) of staging over tracks which might be converted into
roads were not the railroads so soon to supersede their most important use. As they are, 18 hours are usually required to traverse
them; but the stages which I didn't take at Giddings had not reached
Austin two days after they started-the usually dry water-courses
having been converted by the rain into raging torrents which could
not be crossed. Had I duly reached Austin, I hoped thence to make
New-Braunfels, the nucleus of the principal German settlement in
Texas and the seat of considerable manufacturing industry, and
thence (if possible) San Antonio, the Capital and pride of Western
Texas, which boasts a population of 15,000, with a tendency to rapid
increse.  Within two years, it will have been reached by the Inter              3
33 
LET'TERS FROM TEXAS.
national Railroad from Austin and the north-east, and by that from
Columbus, connecting it with Houston, Galveston, New Orleans,
and Mobile; when its population will go up like a balloon to 50,000,
if not higher.  I am assured that they have good (though hard)
spring water near the Capital and all these Western cities, which
made it harder for me to turn back without reaching them.
Galveston seemed to me a little nervous lest the railroads now in
progress should draw offher trade, and leave her hard aground; which
does not to me seem probable. Her relative importance may be
reduced by them, but I judge that her actual trade will be largely
increased. She has by far the best harbor in the State, with a primacy already achieved which will not lightly depart. I profoundly
trust that she may soon and forever lose the profit she now derives
from the importation and distribution of all the Flour and most of
the Hams and other Pork consumed in the lower half of the State,
drawing her own supplies from Northern Texas by rail instead; but
Texas will always grow Cotton for export, and most of it will find
its way to the North and to Europe through Galveston.  Sugar
will be made on the coast and distributed throughout the interior
via Galveston; while Beef, Hides, Tallow, and ultimately Corn,
Hams, Wool, &c., will be exported thence, and many cargoes of
Dry Goods, Hardware, &c., be received and distributed in return.
The vessels that take away the exports of Texas will come freighted
with imports. As her manufactures expand, she will require many
ship-loads per amnium of Coal from the Ohio before she can have
achieved easy access to her own. Galveston must devote part of
her wealth to making advantageous connections with all the great
railroads that cross or reach the State; she must work hard to im prove or at least maintain the capacity and accessibility of her har bor; and she must resolutely fence out the Yellow Fever by internal
purification as well as external vigilance, and her future is secure.
Houston is now intent on so deepening and straightening her
Bayou that any vessel that can pass the bar at Galveston may dis charge at her wharves, 50 miles inland, and so much further on the
way to a large majority of Texan consumers. It is a spirited en terprise, in good hands, well backed, and its early success fully as sured.  It will increase the trade of Houston, but will not a'ggran dize her at Galveston's expense to any such extent as is expected.
Most of the vessels that cross the bar at Sandy Hook might go up
to Newburgb or Poughkeepsie; but they generally conclude to stop
34 
THE FREEDMEN OF THIE SOUTH.
at New-York. A correct history of the origin and daily growth of
our city of Hudson might be read with profit by Houston and with
comfort by Galveston. They are two smart, young, growing com
munities, and not half so much in each other's way as they fancy.
If Galveston stood twenty feet higher above the surface of the Gttlf,
Houston rejoiced in a few hills and ledges, and each of them were
blessed with water to drink other than as it falls from heaven, I
should like them even better than I do. As she is, Houston is one
of the loveliest cities that ever rose from a level plain, and stands
so high above the Bayou that she may cleanse and keep sweet if she
only will.
It remains only to say that, though the early Spring was rather
backward and cold, followed by a dry time that stopped vegetable
growth, the heavy rains of the last ten days have "made the crops,"
as they say-Corn especially, which is planted more extensively than
ever before. The foremost fields are now in tassel; many are six
feet in average hight; and the promise of a large yield is almost a
certainty. Cotton is generally small as yet, but looks well. Other
crops (except Beef) are of little consequence.  The general expectation is that Texas will produce far more  Food in 1871 than in
any former year, with less Cotton only because her planters have
learned in the dear school of experience that those who till the
earth can rarely afford to buy the bulk of their own food.
L G.
THE CONDITION OF THE BLACKS.
[EDITORIAL CORRESPONDENCE OF THE TRIBUNE.]
NEAR VICKSBURG, Miss., June 1.-During the last three weeks,
I have made a point of inquiring of all classes as to the condition,
conduct, and prospects, of the Freedmen throughout the Gulf States.
The substance of the testimony thus elicited I sum up as follows:
The planters who were formerly slaveholders have uniformly assured me that their ex-slaves are working better than they expected,
and better this year than ever before. I cannot recollect a single
dissent from this averment. Most of the old plantation hands either
rent lands, paying so much Cotton per acre, or they work them on
shares-say, half the crop when they find their own team and seed,
and one-third when these are found by the land-owner. And it
35 
I,E'rTE~ FROM MISSISSIPPI.
has been found far more satisfactory to divide the crop at the giD
house or at the depot, letting each market for himself, than to have
the land-owner sell it in bulk and account to the cultivator for
his share of the proceeds.  The negroes, keeping no accounts and
not very careful in their habits, usually found, on settlement, that
they had eaten up their crop while it was growing, and were often
in debt after it had been sold and accounted for. No doubt, they
were sometimes cheated; but, even when they were  not, they supposed they were. Especially when, as in 1866, the crop was a failure, and their share of it did not repay the land-owner his advances,
they could not understand that, while "old master" had all there
was, they had less than nothing.  The system was bad, so its results
were evil.  It is far better where they have no credit, no advances,
and struggle through the year as they can, so that their share of the
crop, large or small, is all their own when it is ready for sale.  On
the crop of 1869, those who worked on this basis generally made
money; on that of 1870, which sold much lower, they made little
or nothing; this year, I am assured, they generally grow Corn as
well as Cotton, hoping to make their own bread and meat, and leave
their Cotton clear.  Some will succeed in this; others will fail; but,
taken in the average, I judge that the  Freedmen of the Cotton
States are this day in as good circumstances as the Hired Workers
i who till the soil of any European country. And I am confident
that the plantation laborers are rarely or never in want of employment or of homes. If there were profligate, idle, pilfering fellows
among them, they have drifted away to the cities, or to some other
country than this. There is no place for such on plantations; and
very few of them could stay there if they would.
The old slaveholders, on whose testimony I have mainly relied
thus far, add that the Black women are not doing so well as the
men, but are widely intent on finery and idleness.  The children
(the planters add) rule their parents, and do little or nothing; so
that, when this generation of field-halnds, trained to steady work as
slaves, shall have died off, matters will have changed for the worse.
In opposition to this, I proffer the testimony of my eyes. To say
that I have seen many more  Black women than White  persons
plowing and hoeing in the Corn, Cotton, and Cane-fields of Louisiana
and Texas, would be saying little; I am sure I saw half as many
Black women as Black men working the crops; and in many cases
father, mother, and one or two children, were at work together. OnL
36 
WHAT THE BLACKS SAY.
the whole, I must adjudge the question "Will free niggers work?"
satisfactorily answered. The Four and a Quarter Million bales of
Cotton grown in the United States in 1870 are not to be gainsayed.
On another point, the testimony of the old masters is less assuring. They tell me that their ex-slaves spend their earnings unwisely, improvidently; often squandering in a month the hard earnings
of a year.  One planter instanced the case of a "boy," who recently
bought at once seventeen "Shoo-Fly" boxes, price $1 each; their
aggregate contents being worth perhaps $5, and consisting of candies
and showy knick-knacks, with a silver half dollar perhaps in every
fifth box. The evidence to this effect is so positive and consistent
that I cannot doubt its general truth. The ex-slave, ignorant and
simple, finding himself for the first or second time possessed of
$100 to $30(), the price of his crop, is too apt to fool it away in
purchases that wisdom would shun and reason must condemn.
The Blacks themselves, through such as I have interrogated, give
far more cheering testimony. They admit that fools as well as
rogues are found among them, as among other races; but they insist that the great majority are saving as well as earning. They
assure me that many are buying lands; others accumulating money
in the Freedmen's Savings Bank with intent to own homes at no
distant day; and that nearly all are doing better from year to year.
They say that most of those who own no lands own mules and
plows, and are steadily learning to spend their money wisely or
save it carefully. I have conversed with no Black who was not
hopeful and confident as to the future of his race.   The "carpetbaggers," so called, of course confirm the testimony of the Blacks.
Some of these are good and true men; others aim to be particularly
rood to themselves.  At the worst, it may be fairly urged in their
b)ehalf that the blind obstinacy and dogged refusal of the planters
to recognize accomplished facts rendered them a necessary evil.
The ancient aristocracy of the South remind me forcibly of the
Federal squirearchy of our country after Jefferson's election as
President. Instead of studying the new situation and seeking to
inaster it, they content themselves with endless and fruitless comI)lainings.  They lament the sway of the "carpet-baggers" over
their late slaves, but take no effective measures to counteract it.
Rogues as some of the "carpet-baggers" are, they are all zealous for
the education of the Blacks; while the submerged aristocracy grudge
every penny assessed on them for building school-houses and pay
37 
LETTER FROM TENNESSEE.
ing teachers, as though it were to be thrown into the sea.  The
noblest, purest, most intelligent women of New England, who have
come down here to teach Black children, are shunned and banned
by the aristocracy as though they were camp-followers of Sherman's
army, and, being thus doomed to associate only with Blacks and
live with them, are actually charged with this as a betrayal of low
tastes, when it was the dictate of stern necessity.  I apprehend
that the land-owners will in time be impelled by their hate of
"carpet-baggers" to change their course, and seek a cordial understanding with the Blacks; but they are not yet in the mood; and
the longer they hold off the more difficult the task will prove.
H. G.
THE CONDITION OF THE WHITES.
[EDITORIAL CORRESPONDENCE OF THE TRIBUNE.]
MEMPHIS, Tenn., June 3.-" Are you not satisfied that the South
has no desire that Slavery be reestablished?" I have often been
asked. I answer, I am entirely confident that no considerable
number of the Southern people either expect or purpose to reenslave
their former chattels. They no more expect that than the faded
dandy of fifty full years expects to awake tomorrow morning radiant
in the pink-and-white bloom of one-and-twenty —no more than the
toper, who has broken his jug and seen the thirsty sand swallow the
last drop of its precious contents, expects to get drunk to-morrow
on that squandered liquor. None know better than the great body
of the Southern Whites that the reenslavement of the Freedmen is a
moral iinmpossibility.
But, if you mean to ask, "Would the ex-slaveholders choose to
have their former slaves restored to them as chattels, if they could? "
I answer that I am very thankful that the temptation is mercifully
withheld.  Wise and thoughtful men there are among them who
sincerely, profoundly rejoice that American Slavery is dead beyond the hope of resurrection; but these are not the majority. I
am confident that two-thirds of the men, with nine-tenths of the
women, who formerly composed the slaveholding caste, would this
day give half their houses and lands to have their slaves back again,
just as they possessed them in 1860. They sigh for the good old
38 
THE WHIrE VIEW OF EMANCIPATION.
times when every "nigger" obeyed orders without dreaming of resistailnce or dclemur, and without expecting any pay. They consider
themselves robbed by Emancipation, and would like their "property"
back again or its value in some equivalent. It goes against the grain
with many of them to bargain with their late chattels for service,
and be sued if they do not fulfill their contracts. Their instincts,
their training, their habits, are shocked by this, just as yours would
be if your horse cited you before a court and compelled you to show
cause for not paying him ten dollars per month for last year's
service.
Then the very general complaint that "we can't control our labor"
has a very real foundation.  Under the old regime, the slaves had
their holidays and their easy times; but, when the Cotton-fields had
been filled with grass during three or four rainy weeks in May,
wherein little could be done, all hands were called out at daylight
so soon as the soil was fit for plowing, and kept hard at work all
the bright hours till the crop was "laid by." Again, when the
picking season commenced, all hands-men, women, and childrenwere called into the fields, and kept at work from daylight till dark,
till the crop was securel. If any lagged or shirked, the whip speedily
brought them to their bearings.  All this is changed by Emancipation.  Men talk of so many hours to the day's work; women  and
children are apt to shun field-work;' so a given "force "-say twenty
families —will not pick so much cotton in the month as they did ten
years ago. And nearly every negro aspires to be the master of his
own time, and either rent land or work it on shares, in preference
to hiring out by the month or season. Perhaps this is best for all
concerned; but it sadly dwarfs the planter's consequence, and in
most cases his profits also.  He does n't like it: can you wonder?
And the change bears much harder on his wife. She had her
labors and her cares under the old system: she was no idler, no
trifler; her duty and her interest combined to render her physician in-ordinary and head-nurse to her Black dependents; and she oftenr
gave anxious days and nights to a struggle with disease at a slave's
bedside. But cooking, washing, and other house-work, she was
never bred to; and the fall of Slavery threw them all upon her at
a moment's notice, requiring her at once to do them and to learn
how. Even when ex-slaves remained with her as hired servants,
they were no longer docile and obedient as of old, when it was an
envied privilege to serve in the big house rather than plow or pickl
3.9 
THE If POOR WHITES 7 OF THE SOUTH.
in the fields, and the whip was always in reserve in case of need.
-Thus Emancipation has borne heavily on the wives of the old arisltocracy, and (not being politicians) they do not even affect to
,"welcome the change.  Many of the wisest and most resolute among
them have learned to do their own work, with their daughters' help;
some have obtained White help, mainly of foreign birth; others are
doing with hired Black servants, but most of these get on badly.
Thus the female aristocracy of the South are still averse to the
great change they have witnessed; and years must pass before they
can be reconciled to it.
I learn with great satisfaction that there is a decided improvement manifest among the "poor Whites." These formed, under
Slavery, the most hopeless class in the South. Courted by the aristocracy for their votes, flattered with their rank as members of the
dominant caste, allowed to build their shanties on the outskirts of
the great plantations, and to breed and train dogs to hunt runaway
slaves in the swamps and denser forests, they grew up unlettered
and irreligious, hunted and fished half their time, grew a patch of
corn on sufferance, had a pig running in the woods, and lived a
thriftless, aimless, worthless life. They were far more fanatical in
their devotion to Slavery than the slaveholders, who seldom defiled
their hands with the mobbing of an Abolitionist, since the "poor
Whites" were too ready to take-the job off their hands. For some
time after the collapse of the Rebellion, these spent most of their
time idling at the cross-roads store or some convenient grog-shop,
cursing the Yankees and wondering "why the d            niggers do n't
go to work;" but of late a change is apparent.  Certainly, there
are idle, trifling "poor Whites" still, as there are equally worthless
Blacks; but they are fewer than they h:.ve been, and growing fewer
day by day. They do not work so resolutely, so persistently, as do
their counterparts at the North; but work is no longer disreputable, and many who did not average a fair day's work per week
under Slavery do three or four days' work per week under Freedom.
The " corn-crackers," "sand-hil]ers," "clay-eaters," &c., of the last
generation, will be unknown as a class after this century.
That those who struggled and fought for Secession generally
believe they were right in so doing, I cannot doubt.  Jefferson
Davis's late speeches fairly express their average convictions and
feelings. But, while they still affirm the right of Secession, I am
satisfied that a majority of them believe its practical assertion was
40 
PROGRESS AT THE SOUTH.
unwise and inexpedient. They hold that they should have made
their late struggle in the Union, not against it-under the flag of
our fathers, not that of the Stars and Bars-in ostensible defense of
the Federal Constitution, not in resistance to its authority.   They
purpose to renew the fight, but not with gun and saber. They
expect to regaii as Democrats through elections the power they lost
as Rebels through war.  They herein evince that wisdom  whicli
profits by the lessons of experience.   Here and there a hot-head
may talk of renewing, at some more auspicious season, the struggle
for an independent Confederacy; but the great majority have had
enough of war.  I conclude that another Southern Secession is all
but impossible.
And, while a bitter spirit is cherished by many, I feel sure that
the number who acquiesce, if they do not absolutely rejoice, in the
restoration of the Union, is daily increasing. Thousands hate the
"carpet-baggers," with their alleged corruptions and spoliations,
who protest that they do not hate the Union.  They persist in a
clamor against what they call "nigger equality" (but which means
Negro Enfranchisement, Negro Education), which precludes their
swaying the Negro Vote as they otherwise might and would; but
they will seek to coerce enough of it into voting the Democratic
ticket to give them a majority of the Southern Electoral Yotes for
next President.  But the Blacks grow year by year more independent in fact as well as feeling; and it will neither be easy nor
safe to repeat the terrorism whereby Georgia and Louisiana were
made to vote for Seymour in 1868. Should the South show an
anti-Republican majority in 1872, it will be a consequence of injudicious appointments and removals, of actual or reputed prodigality
in legislation or in office, or of terrorism and constraint exercise(l
over the voters, and not a decision of the people on the questions
which vitally difference the two parties.
That the South is steadily recovering from the calamities and
losses consequent on our late Civil War, is very obvious. The
process might be more rapid, but could hardly be more substantial.
The cattle and swine which were eaten up during thte Civil War
are being steadily replaced, and are already twice or thrice  as
numerous as they were six years ag,o; lands are going back into
cultivation which have long lain waste and idle; farm buildings
are undergoing renovation; cities and villages are extending their
borders; factories and fiurnaces are widely projected, and some are
41 
42    A  31 R. GREELEYIS WELCOME TO NEW YORK.
in process of construction. It were irrational to expect that all the
bitterness engendered by twenty years of sectional collision, including four of bloody war, should be effaced in a day, and of course
it is not; but the tendency is right, and Time will exert its healing
influence if no untoward event should interpose to prevent it. With
a mingling of firmness in upholding the right, with kindness to those
who were miseducated into wrong, the re-cementing of the Union
will be thorough and enduring.                              H. G.
RECEPTION OF MR. GREELEY, N. Y., JUNE 12TII.
HIorace Greeley was welcomed at the Lincoln Club-Rooms, in
lJnion Square, by a large number of friends who were assembled
under the auspices of the Union Republican General Committee,
and who severally congratulated him upon his safe return from his
journey to the far South-West, and through the Lower Mississippi
Valley.   The  rooms were  profusely decorated with  flags  and
flowers, and tables well provided with refreshments were set.
A large oil-painting of Mr. Greeley occupied a conspicuous place
in the main room, and in the others were various photographs and
lithographs of him.   A  plaster bust of Mr. Greeley, cast some
twenty years ago, also attracted much attention. On the balcony
outside was placed a large bust of Lincoln, wreathed in bunting.
In the street, in front of the Club-Rooms, a platform was erected
for speaking, and around it were assembled, by 8 o'clock, many
thousand people. Calcium lights made the scene almost as bright
as day.
Among those present in the Club Rooms and upon the platform,
were Wm. M. Evarts, Gen. N. P. Banks, D. D. Conover, Marshall
0. Roberts, Dr. Geo  B. Loring, Lloyd Aspinwall, Gen. P. H.
Jones, Gen. Geo. W. Palmer, Gen. John Cochrane, Sinclair Tousey,
Waldo Hutchins, Charles Storrs, A. W. Leggatt, Joseph Howe,
Win. P. Richardson, Rufus F. Andrews, Thomas E. Stewart, Gen.
H. A. Barnum, John V. Gridley, Benj. F. Manierre, Ira O. Miller,
Enoch L. Fancher, L. H. Knapp, Geo. F. Coachmnon, J. S. RItitterband, Judg,e Slosson, Geo. P. Bradford, H.  M. Williams, B.  F.
Mludg,ett, Geo. H. Van Cleft, Col. Willis, Major Haggerty, Morris
Ellinger, C. IH. Cooper, Col. Fairman, and others.  Mr. Greeley ap 
MR. FANICHER S ADDRESS.
peared at a little before 9 o'clock, and was heartily cheered by
those in the crowded rooms.  After receiving a personal greeting
from nearly every one present, he descended to the platform in fiont
of the house. He was received with great applause, and Mr. Enochli
L. Fancher, on behalf of the Union Republican General Committee,
addressed him as follows:
MR. GREELEY: On behalf of the Union Republican General Committee of the City of New York, and also of many others of your
personal and political friends, I have the honor to wQlcome you
home after your journey to a Southern State. We don't come, sir,
with any set form of speech or any mere form of words, but we come
to tender our heartfelt congratulations, and to express our gratification at seeing you again among us. We feel that your visit to a
Southern State will have an influence beyond your own personal
gratification and information; for you, sir, were not only foremost
in the support of the Union, in this State, when rebel arms were
raised against it, but you were also the foremost champion for
peace and pacification in the whole country at large when those
rebel arms were laid aside. And now we are glad to listen to your
words of wisdom and your counsels of peace.  On behalf of the Committee-your personal and political friends-you are tendered this
compliment, which you see, in this shape-a spontaneous gathering
of the people of this city; and we welcome you to our circle-the
society you have so long adorned-and to the fervent friendship of
our hearts.
Mr. Greeley was greeted with renewed applause, and responded as
follows
MR. CHAIRMAN AND GENTLEMEN: It is not your fault, it was not
the fault of the Republican party, that the North and South failed
to understand each other before they had sacrificed half a million
of their best and bravest, burying them in bloody and untimely
graves. There never was a time when the representative men of
the South were not welcome to express their sentiments and
enforce their convictions in any city or in any county of the
Free North-in St. Lawrence, in Chautauqua, in Onondaga, or
in Washington.    There  the eminent  champions of Southern
institutions and Southern principles were always sure to find a
patient and respectful hearing.   And  I firmly believe that, if
our leading Northern men had been equally free to traverse the
South and  there  advocate boldly and fearlessly the doctrines
43 
MR. GREELEY' S RESPONSE.
which the North cherished, our terrible Civil War might have
been averted.   But such was not our privilege.  There was no
time while Slavery was dominant in the South that any represen tative Northern man could have traversed the South, and there
boldly and openly asserted the convictions of the North. Never!
I recollect distinctly that, in that eventful winter of 1860-61, the
correspondents of Tlhe Tribune, whom we were obliged to keep tra versing the South, were uniformly compelled to conceal their
business and to deny their views. Brave and true men they were;
but they would have been torn to pieces as if by wolves if they had
been known as Tribune correspondents.  They dared not address
their letters to /7te ](ribune office; they had to address them to
private individuals in different parts of the City, in order that we
might receive themu. So, during that momentous winter, I was, for
the first time, invited to deliver a lecture in the border city of St.
Louis, where there was already a rising Republican party. When
I had arrived say within 100 miles of St. Louis-when I was at
Springfield, Ill.-I was met by a telegram from leading Republicans
in St. Louis, advising me not to come; my invitation was virtually
withdrawn, and I was compelled to return to the North. I was
not expected to say one word in St. Louis concerning politics. I
was journeying there at the invitation of a literary society to deliver
a literary lecture; yet, since now it is said that at that time The
IS ibqne was aiding and inciting the Southern Secession, it may well
be remembered that its editor was turned back from a border city
of the South, simply because it was proposed to have him deliver
a literary lecture before a literary society. I wish it had been
otherwise, and that we could have saved the half million of true
and brave men whose lives have since been sacrificed, because the
North and South failed to understand each other.
Fellow-citizens, two months ago, I, for the first time, received a formal and commanding invitation to visit the extreme South-Western
State of our common country. I at first declined peremptorily, believing it impossible for me to spare time to make the journey required.
But friends gathered around me; invitation upon invitation poured
in; and finally leading men of our City-capitalists who were wisely
and nobly investing their money in large sums to open up Texas to
the world and bring her into free and untrammeled intercourse with
the North-these, too, insisted that I should go.  They said, "By all
means go down to Texas, for inl so doing you may render the whole
44 
INVITATION TO TEXAS-NlOMINATIONS.
country a great service."  There were so many of these urgent ap.
peals to me to go there, that finally I reconsidered my determination and consented to go.
Now, fellow-citizens, I hear it suggested that I went to Texas
with too much parade and circumstance; that I too often was
found making speeches from the platforms of cars and from the
balconies of hotels, when it would have been mnch more dignified
if I had simply delivered my Address at Houston and returned to
you. Well, gentlemen, I fully concur in the justice of that criticism,
and should have gladly deferred to it.  Though all I did say was
said in the hope of promoting a clearer and better understanding
between the North and the South, I would have preferred to speak
more deliberately and less frequently. But invitations to speak,
poured in upon me by rail and by telegraph, were not less pressing
than numerous. I could not find time even to acknowledge, much
less accept, those invitations: so that a New-Orleans editor was
excusable-though I trust not justified-in suggesting that  my
farming, however indifferent, must be rather better than my breeding. [Laughter.] I answered when I could; I consented when I
could; and for the rest I kept silence.
And here, fellow-citizens, allow me to make some reply to a kindred criticism from like friendly sources. It is urged, in several journals, that my name has too often been before my countrymen
in connection with office; and I fully concur in that suggestion.
If my own choice had been consulted, you know very well that
it would not have been so. But I am, to some extent, a public man; I am identified with party contests and party principles;
and I am  known to have reproved and reproached better men
than myself that they shrink from public life, leaving important
offices to be filled by second-rate men, because first-rate men will
not accept them. I have said this too often and too publicly to be
able now to shrink entirely out of sight and refuse to do the very
thing which I have required of others. So, then, during the last
twenty years, if I recollect rightly, my name has been four times
before you as a candidate; once for the Constitutional Convention,
in which I for some time earned $6 per day and paid $4 for my
board, and twice as a candidate for Congress: first in the lower
district of this City, where I was perfectly certain to be beaten several thousand votes honestly and twice as many dishonestly. Our
friends in 1866 saw fit to use my name for Congress in that dis
45 
MR. GREELEY'S RESPONSE.
trict, where I have worked for the last forty years, where I know a
great many people, and where whatever I may have of property or
business is located.  They put up my name and ran me for Congress, giving me all the Republican votes and some more. So,
again last Fall, our friends in the Sixth District saw fit-when I
was prostrated by sickness and unable to fulfill engagements to
speak made' for me by the State Committee-to unite on me as their
candidate for Congress; and they supported me in the face of
twenty-eight hundred Democratic majority in the previous contest.
I could not speak to them.  I could not even visit them; but I stood
in my lot, and shared the fate of my party and its other candidates.
Well, gentlemen, there was one other time. In the Fall of 1869,
your State Convention met, nominated a most respectable and
acceptable State Ticket, and adjourned.  My name was not even
thought of. But a few days later, consternation was spread by the
news that three leading candidates on that ticket had peremptorily
declined; so your State Committee was hastily assembled, and saw
fit-being obliged to make a second nomination in order not to let
the election go by default and give up the Legislature without a
struggle-to fill one of these places on the ticket with mly name.
I was not consulted. I knew nothing of their purpose. I was
absent from the City, and only returned after all had been done, to
be told, "Don't say a word; you must stand; that is the end of
it;" and I stood.
Now, fellow-citizens, I am not at all grateful to the Republican
party for these several nominations.   I accepted them, as I accept
any public duty that seems to be fairly incumbent upon me;
and I did what I could to secure the success of the ticket on which
my name was printed. I am very grateful to those generous and
gallant Republicans who, in the face of certain defeat, rallied around
me and gave me a hearty support, running my name in each case
a little ahead of the average of iiy ticket.  For that support, I am
grateful; for the several nominations, not at all.
But, gentlemen, the past is past.  "Let  the dead bury their
dead." I am perfectly willing to pass receipts with the Republican
party and say that our accounts are now settled and closed. They
owe me nothing for being a Republican; I could not have helped
being one if I had tried; and, being a Republican, it was  in my
nature to do all I could for the success of that party which embodied and enforced my personal convictions. I was just as grate
46 
SPEECHES AT NEW ORLEANS AND COLUMBUS.
ful to you as you were to me. I was just as much obliged by your
cooperation as you were by mine; and there the matter ends. But
for the future, I can say, gentlemen, fully and heartily, that I need
no office, I desire no office, and, though 1 never shall decline any
nomination that has not been offered me [laughter], I certainly
shall seek no office whatever.  I am with you and of you; willing
to do my part; willing to bear my share of our responsibilities;
but I have work enough, reasonable pay for it, sufficient consideration, with too much notoriety; and the more quiet and peaceful
my remaining days may be, the better I shall be satisfied.
Now, then, I went to Texas to deliver an Agricultural Address at
HIouston, and I delivered it. That was my work, and it was done.
But, on my way down, a Club of Union soldiers now living in New
Orleans pressed me to make a speech to them in their club-room,
and I did so. I attempted in that speech to vindicate the right of
this nation, this republic, to that vast Louisiana territory purchased
by her money, and defended by the blood of her sons; organized into
States by her Congress, and so made an integral portion of this
American Union.  I argued that the southern part of the Mississippl)i Valley could not possibly wish to be separated from the
northern part by two menacing lines of frowning fortresses and
hostile custom-houses.  I urged-as I always have believed-that
never did the people living on the lower Mississippi, in their sober
senses, seek to be divorced and alienated from the people of the
upper Mississippi; and I affirmed the right of the American peopIle to navigate that great river, from. the Rocky Mountains to the
Gulf, unembarrassed and unimpeded by any boom across its channel
or by any gunboats stationed on it to cause vessels to heave-to for
custom-house scrutiny and examination. So I talke(l, because I so
believed.
Then, again, visiting the little city of Columbus, Texas-the
only place I did visit on the western side of the Colorado riverI was, about this time of night, while sitting in my hotel, waited
upon by a German deputation, who asked me to come over to their
club-room and talk to them a little while, they being all loyal Union
men. Well, I went over. They had a hastily assembled crowd,
and I spoke for half an hour, perhaps, in vindication and explanation of the late great struggles for unity in this country and for
unity in Germany; for the defense and protection of these two
great nations in their rights of territory and of nationality.   I
lF 
SPEECHES AT TIE SOUTH.
argued, as well as I could, that, though some men honestly believe
that our struggle and the triumph therein of the National cause will
tend to despotism on this continent, and that some so hold with
regard to the German triumph in their great struggle, I, on the
contrary, believe that the ultimate tendency and result of these
two great consummations will be the promotion and advancement
of liberal ideas and institutions alike in the Old World and the
New.
Well, gentlemen, as I was leaving Texas, a pressing invitation
was given me by the Republicans of Galveston to mnake a speech
to them on the last night I spent in their State; and I acceded to
their request. I tried before them to vindicate the North against
the charges made against her in the South, and to prove that the
North did not mnake war on the South (as too many Southern people still believe she did). I tried to show them that the war was
commenced in the South, by the South —nay, in Texas itself by
capturing, through treachery, the United States Army, and turning its arms and munitions against the flag and against the integrity of our country; and that, all the way through, we stood virtually on the defensive, against what seemed to me a most indefensible
and wanton aggression.   I said what I could to vindicate the
North from the reproach of malignity-of wishing to oppress or
plunder or cripple the South; and tried to make my Southern
countrymen believe that we were all Americans, and all together
interested in and striving for the prosperity and the growth of our
whole widely-extended country. [Applause.] Such was my theme
at Galveston.
Well, gentlemen, I have heard it objected that, in my speech at
New-Orleans, I asserted that, if there had been T-niversal Amnesty
four years ago, there would have been no Ku-Klux in 1871. I do
not think I said exactly that; but I did say that I regarded the
lIDlicy of excluding from office the leading men of the South as a
very great mistake, and a very great injury to the National cause
and to the Republican party.   I said no more than Gen. Sickles had
said in substance four years earlier, when he was Military Governor
of South Carolina, and declared that he was crippled and enfeebled
in his efforts to govern that State well by the fact that her best men,
her most intelligent men,Jher most considerate and conservative men,
were not available to him as magistrates, because of an exclusion
whereof Andrew Johnson was the author.  He said, "I cannot gov.
48 
UNIVERSAL AMNESTY-THE KU-KLUX.
ern South Carolina as well as I could if I were able to choose her
best men to help me, instead of her second-best." I am entirely of
that conviction. I believe it was a mistake, when you allowed a mil  lion Confederates to vote for Members of Congress, to deny them
the right to vote for just such men as they preferred. I believe their
first-rate men would be safer and more useful in Congress than their
second-rate men —better for us and better for their Country.   [Ap* plause.] So I argued, because I so believed; and still I say that, if
the men were allowed to represent the South who express the senti  ment of the South-if the Toombses, Wises, and Wade Hamptons
had been allowed to go to Congress, and had been sent there four
years ago-the Republican party would have been a great deal
stronger and Reconstruction very much further advanced and more
certain than it is to-day. [Cries of "Bravo," and applause.] Why,
gentlemene, whenever one of these extreme men say anything, you
see it caught up and carried all over the Union in the very journals
that insist on keeping those men out of Congress and in positions
where their words carrv with them the least possible weight. If
their words are so beneficial and pregnant to us, why not let them
speak where the whole country will hear them? [Applause.]
But I have been asked, "Are there any Ku-Klux down South?"
Yes, gentlemen, there are.  They didn't come up to me and tell me
they were Ku-Klux very often. They didn't undertake to perform
their delicate operations upon me. I should have had very much
more respect for them if they had. [Great laughter.]
I am moved with profound disgust when I think of these men,
covering themselves with second-hand calico, masking their faces,
arming themselves to the teeth, and riding around to the cabins of
poor, harmless negroes, dragging them from their beds, and whipping
and maiming them until they are compelled to swear they will never
again vote the Republican ticket. I hold that to be a very coward ly procedure as well as a very base one; and I hold it to be the duty
of the Government of the Unionl to oppose with all its power and all
its force every such execrable outrage as this. Do you tell me that
those men are liable to State laws for the assaults and batteries
they have committed?  I don't doubt it; but I say they are also
in substance and purpose traitors to the Government, rebels against
its authority, and the most cowardly, skulking rebels ever known to
this or any other country. [Applause.]
I hold our Government bound, by its duty of protecting our citi
4
49 
50    THE SOUTHERN KU-KLUX-THE TEACHING WOMEN.
zeus in their fundamental rights, to pass and enforce laws for the
extirpation of the execrable Ku-Klux conspiracy; and, if it has
not power to do it, then I say our Government is no Governirment,
but a sham. I, therefore, on every proper occasion, advocated and
justified the Ku-Klux act. I hold it especially desirable for the
South; and, if it does not prove strong enough to effect its purpose,
I hope it will be made stronger and stronger.  [Applause.]
Why, fellow-citizens, these very men that asked me if I saw any,
Ku-Klux have themselves read the returns of the last Presidential
election in Louisiana, when that State, with 30,000 Black majority
on its registers, was made to vote for Seymour and Blair by more
than 30,000 majority; counties which had 3,000 negro voters alone
giving three, two, one, and in several instances no vote at all, for
Grant and Colfax.  Now, friends, you and they know perfectly well
that this result was secured by terror and by violence; by telling
those Black men, "You shall vote for Seymour and Blair, the enemiies of your fundamental rights, or you shall not vote at all, or you
shall be killed." That was the way Louisiana was made Democratic
in 1868; and that is the way that I trust she will never be made
so to vote again. Therefore I uphold and justify the Ku-Klux
law.
Fellow-citizens, the KuL-Klux are no myth, although they shroud
themselves in darkness.  They are no flitting ghosts; they are a
baneful reality. They have paralyzed the Right of Suffrage in many
counties throughout the South, and have carried States that they
ought not to have carried; but they are not the only enemies to
Republican ascendancy in the South.
There is another influence equally pernicious with theirs, and a
great deal more detrimental to the fame and character of the Republican party.  I allude to what are known as the " thieving carpetbaggers." LApplause. ] Fellow-citizens, do not mistake me. A l the
Northern men in the South are not thieves.  The larger part of them
are honest and good men, some of whom stay there at the peril of
their lives, because they believe it their duty. Next to the noble and true women who have gone down South to teach Black
children how to read-nobler there are not on the earth than these,
whomr a stupid, malignant, dilapidated aristocracy often sees fit to
crowd into negro hovels to live, not allowing them to enter any
AVThite society because they are teaching negro children-next to
these, who rank as the noblest women in the South, are the honest 
THE THIEVING CARPET-BAGGERS.
and worthy Northern men, who, in the face of social proscription and
general obloquy and scorn, stand firmly by the Republican cause.
There was a most urgent and special necessity for rigid economy
in the reconstructed States of the South, even aside from their impoverishment by war and the disruption of their industry by peace.
For despotic government has this advantage over free, that its
agencies are apt to be simple and cheap. The old Slave govern.
ments of the South were thoroughly aristocratic, and they were
very rarely corrupt or prodigal. The planters paid most of the
taxes; they decided who should be legislators; and they did not
abide jobbers. Legislative stealing was almost an unknown art
among them. Then they had no public support of the poor; each
subsisted, after  a fashion, his own used-up slaves.   The Poor
Whites lived or died as they might; and, except for the Whites or
two or three great cities, there were no public schools: and this
made government cheap and taxes light.
With Emancipation, came a great change. There was an urgent
demand for free schools, and the school-houses had to be built, to
begin with; for the public support of paupers, White and Black,
and there were no almns-houses; and so with many public institu,ions. Just when the people were poorest, they were required to
bear the heaviest public expense, though only accustomed to the
lightest. Dissatisfaction and complaint were inevitable; but every
effort should have been made, every nerve strained, to mitigate them
by vigorous economy. I regret to say that the reverse was the
course pursued in some States by men who rode into power on the
rtillery wagons of the Union, under the flag of Emancipation.
The public is often heedlessly unjust. Let a Government have
10,000 official subordinates in power, of whom 9,900 are honest and
true men who do their duty faithfully, while barely 100 are robbers
and swindlers, the public will hear a great deal more about the 100
robbers than about the 9,900 true men. The 100 stand out in the
public eye-they are always doing something which exposes them
to the scornful gaze of the multitude-while the honest and true
men pass along silent and unobserved, and nothing is said, very little is thought, of them. All attention is concentrated upon the 100,
whlo are defaulting, and stealing, and forging, and running away.
Well, gentlemen, the thieving carpet-baggers are a mournful fact; they do exist there, and I have seen them.  They are
fellows who crawled down South in the track of our armies, gen
51 
THEY DAMAGE THE REPUBLICAN CAU)E.
erally at a very safe distance in the rear; some of them on sutleis'
wagons; some bearing cotton permits; some of them looking sharply
to see what might turn up; and they remain there. They at once
ingratiated themselves with the Blacks, simple, credulous, ignorant
men, very glad to welcome and to follow any Whites who professed
to be the champions of their rights.  Some of them got elected Senators, others Representatives, some Sheriffs, some Judges, and so on.
And there they stand, right in the public eye, stealing and plundering, many of them with both arms around negroes, and their hands
in their rear pockets, seeing if they cannot pick a paltry dollar out
of them; and the public looks at them, does not regard the honest
Northern men, but calls every "carpet-bagger" a thief, which is not
the truth by a good deal. But these fellows-many of them longfaced, and with eyes rolled up, are greatly concerned for the education of the Blacks, and for the salvation of their souls. [Great
laughter. ] "Let us pray," they say; but they spell pray with an
"e," and, thus spelled, they obey the apostolic injunction to "pray
without ceasing."
Fellow-citizens, the time has been, and still is, when it was
perilous to be known as a Republican or an Abolitionist in the
South; but it never called the blush of shame to any man's cheek to
be so called, until tlfese thieving carpet-baggers went there-never!
[Applause.] They got into the Legislatures; they went to issuing
State-bonds: they pretended to use them in aid of railroads and
other improvements. But the improvements were not made, and
the bonds stuck in the issuers' pockets. That is the pity of it.
"Well," some say, "you have just such thieves at the North."
Yes, we have-too many of them! [Applause.] But the South
was already impoverished-was bankrupt-without money, without
thrift, almost without food; and these fellows went there robbing
and swindling when there was very little to steal, and taking the
last ten-cent shin-plaster off of dead men's eyes. They were recognized by the late aristocracy not merely as thieves but as enemies.
Says Byron's Greek minstrel,
" A tyrant —but our masters then
Were still at least our countrymen."
Thus we regard the men who annually rob us at Alban y, at
Trenton, and at Harrisburg.  They do not carry their plunder out
of the State when they get any. These fellows do! The South
,......... ~
52 
ABOUT LEE AND STONEWALL JACKSON.
was not merely beaten in the late contest; she was profoundly
astonished by the result. Her people have not fairly got over their
amazement at their defeat; and what they see of us are these thieves,
who represent the North to their jaundiced vision, and, representing
it, they disgrace it.  They are the greatest obstacle to the triumph
and permanent ascendancy of Republican principles at the South,
and as such I denounce them.  [Applause.]
"Well, then, do you justify the Ku-Klux?" I am asked.  Justify
them in whlat? If they should choose to catch a hundred or two
of these tliieves, place them tenderly astride of rails, and bear them
quietly and peaceably across the Ohio, I should of course condemn
the act, as I condemn all violence; but the tears live in a very
small onion that would water all my sorrow for them. [Laughter
and applause.]   But they do nothing like that; they don't go for
the thieving carpet-baggers; but they skulk around wretched
cabins, and drag out inoffensive negroes, to lash and torture them,
merely for standing up for their rights as men.  For this, I do execrate the  Ku-Klux.  I say they  are  a disgrace to Southern
Chivalry; and they would be drummed out of the South if there
were any true Chivalry there.
But it has been reported very widely that at Vicksburg, addressing a mainly Southern audience, and trying to awaken in them
something of the sentiment of nationality and patriotism which
burns in a true American bosom, I said that I trusted the time
would come when we of the North would honor Lee and Stonewall
Jackson. I did not say that. What I did say was that I hoped
the time would come when Americans North, as well as Americans
South, would feel a just pride in the soldierly achievements and military character of Lee and Stonewall Jackson, just as I trusted the
late Confederates would learn to feel a patriotic pride in the achievements of Grant and Sherman, and Thomas and Sheridan.  I said
that, or something very like it.  Possibly, you are not willing to go
so far as that. Very well, there is no hurry. Take your time; 1
can wait. Yes, I can wait.
THE NEW DEPARTURE.
But, gentlemen, my voice fails, yet I want to say a few words
about the New Departure.  When men  are in a bad fix, I reckon
they had better depart from it; and I fully justify those Democrats who have determined to depart from the foolish old busi.
~  ~  *             e e~
53 
THE NEW DEPARTURE.
ness of running their heads' against a stone wall.  If I were there,
[ should depart; and I think it well for them to do it; and, since
they do it, I am not inclined to criticise the manner too severely,
nor to judge them too harshly. I have made a rule for some
time never to conjure up a bad motive for a good action. They
are where they ought not to be; they propose to depart; and I
think they should.
Our Ohio friends do not take quite so charitable a view of the
New Departure as I do. They say there was a particularly rough
character once, who was noted for violating the Sabbath, among
other bad deeds. But finally he became converted, "got religion,"
and joined the church. All right. One day, a gentleman came
along and asked a neighbor of his, "Do you see any great change
in Nokes since he joined the church?"  " 0 yes, very great; he used
to go out chopping Sunday mornings with his ax swung over his
shoulder; n6w he carries it under his coat." [Laughter.] Gentlemen,
I am very glad that the Democratic party has taken off its shoulder
the ax which it has wielded so many years in deadly hostility to the
rights of the Colored race. I am glad even if it has put it under its
coat; but I hope it will think better of it and put it back into the
wood-house, and meet the Blacks with open hands, saying, " We are
going to treat each of you just as you shall deserve to be treated,
no matter what is the color of your skin." I do believe they mean
this-the most of them. I believe they mean hereafter to wear
their Democracy somewhat more than skin-deep.  At any rate, I
shall urge and encourage them to do so.
Fellow-citizens: I would not make too much of this New Departuire. I do not understand these gentlemen even to profess any
penitence for their past warfare against the Equal Riights of Men.
I don't understand them even to promise that they will never renew
that warfare. I only understand them as pledged to this extent:
They admit that the three Republican amendments to the Federal
Constitution are now a part of that Constitution, and, while they
shall remain there, they must be obeyed. That I understand to be
the extent of the New Departure; and I deem it worth a great deal.
So long as they admit that these Amendments are in, I shall feel
pretty sure that they are not likely to get them out. I shall rest content that the rights of all men, being citizens of the United States,
are safe under the guaranties of the Federal Constitution.
Twenty-five years ago, I stood at the polls of the XIXth Ward
.....:.:
U4 
DEAD ISSUES SHOULD BE DROPPED.
of this city all one rainy, chill November  day, peddling bal lots for Equal Suffrage.  I got many Whigs to take them, but not
one Democrat.  Again in 1860-not eleven years ago-I again
stood at my poll all day, and handed out the same kind of vote;
and I do not remember that a single Democrat took one. Some
Republicans, even, would not take them; but no Democrat would.
I believe in Human Progress. I believe that men are rather
wiser and better to-day than they were twelve years ago; and here
is proof of it. It is not two years since our Democratic State
Legisla.ture withdrew the consent given by its Republican predecessors to the XVth Amendment, and, by a party vote, so far as New
York could do it, they tried to defeat that amendment.   Now, we
have a New Departure. Was it not high time? I think it was.
Fellow-citizens: I am weary, weary, of this sterile strife concerning the fundamental principles of republican institutions.   I am
fired of trying to teach Democrats the A, B, C's of Democracy. I
rejoice to know that they have taken a New Departure; and I tell
you that, when they have once taken it, it will be a great deal
harder to get back to the old ground than to go on. Some one
says, "Isn't it going to put the Republicans out of power?"   I
cannot tell.  Immediately, I think not.  Mr.  Burke  well says:
" Confidence is a plant of slow growth;" and I think it will take
some time for the people to realize that the Democrats mean to up
hold Equal Rights,-some time for their own folks to realize it-a
great deal longer to make any Black man believe that they mean it.
I don't anticipate any sudden change in the relative strength of
parties, because of the New Departure.  Ultimately, I think, it will
strengthen the Democrats.   "Then," one says, " yoqt will go out of
power." Yes, we shall some time, no doubt. If it were to be my
fate to go out this moment, and every year of my life thereafter to
be in the minority, prostrate and pc werless, I should still thank
God, most humbly and heartily, that Hie allowed me to live in an
age, and to be a part of the generation, that witnessed the downfall
and extinction of American Slavery. [Prolonged applause.]
Fellow-citizens: I trust the day is not distant wherein, putting
behind us the things that concern the Past, we shall defer to that
grand old injunction of the Bible: "Speak to the children of Israel
that they go forward." I am weary of fighting over issues that
ought to be dead-that logically were dead years ago.  When Slavery died, I thought that we ought speedily to have ended all that
~,..             *e.e
55 
THiE NEW DEPARTURE.
grew out of it by Universal Amnesty and Impartial Suffrage. [Applause.] I think so still; and that if the Democratic party shall
concede Impartial Suffrage, the Republican party will concede Universal Amnesty; if not, it will have a very short lease of power.
So, then, friends, I summon you all, Republicans and Democrats,
to prepare for the new issues and new struggles that visibly open
before us.  In the times not far distant, I trust we shall consider
questions mainly of industrial policy-questions of national advancement-questions concerning the best means whereby our different
parties may, through cooperation, or through rivalry, strive to promote the prosperity, the happiness, and the true glory of the American people.  To that contest I invite you.   For that contest I would
prepare you.  And so, trusting that the bloodshed in the past will
be a sufficient atonement for the sins of the past, and that we  are
entering upon a grand New Departure, not for one party only, but
for the whole country a departure from strife to harmony, from
devastation to construction, from famine and desolation to peace
and plenty —I bid you, friends and fellow-citizens, an affectionate
good-night. LProlonged cheers and applause.]
56
aIae