sources. The conquest of the Mississippi and of the railway lines was a final defeat. The structure of the Valley made the union of the States and sections a foregone conclusion.

Only lines of demarkation which had grown up, like those of Europe, from difference of early history-difference of origin, of language and of political institutions-could permit different nationalities to form on the Atlantic slope and in the Valley. The mountains disappear to open the Valley on the north and on the south. New York, Savannah and New Orleans are equally essential to the interior. The great enterprises of modern life, with a really homogeneous people occupying both the interior and the coast, both the North and the South, render political harmony, such as can only be found under one government, absolutely essential to the welfare of the people. A real union once consummated, interest would make it indissoluble. The Valley is ready to pour out a mighty and exhaustless flood of wealth. It is as essential to their welfare that the East and the South should receive it as that the northern and central Valley should send it. Commercial and industrial forces are the strongest now in operation among men; they are irresistible.

These forces required the union of the whole country that they might reach their natural expression and assume their proper magnitude. In the resources of the Valley lay the securities for the stability of the American Union. The common origin of the mass of the people, and the favorable reaction of the Valley on their character and the direction of their development, coincided with other circumstances. The people were one and their interests harmonious, notwithstanding the difference of labor systems. The result-the victory of the economic labor system and the permanence of the Union-was natural and inevitable.

PART THIRD.

THE NEW ERA IN THE VALLEY.

CHAPTER I.

THE SOUTHERN VALLEY AT THE CLOSE OF THE WAR.

The North had made great sacrifices to maintain the integrity of the Union so far as that could be done by force. No men or money had been spared; the ranks of the armies had been kept full as needed; a system of extraordinary taxation had been devised and accepted by the people and a vast debt created. The burden had been great; but, for the time, extraordinary expenditure had stimulated every branch of activity and production; immigration and machinery had taken the place of men withdrawn to the armies, and there was great prosperity, which did not cease for many years after the

war.

The South experienced the opposite fortune. With the close of the war and for some time after, its misfortunes seemed to have reached a climax. During the war all the funds obtainable were gathered by the Confederate Government for military expenditure, and little gold, or that which could be turned into gold, failed to be sent out of the country to secure military supplies. For the most part, the cash capital of the people had been in the banks and the Government acquired all the sound values deposited in them in exchange for its paper money. If that government failed its money issues would be worthless. The people burned their ships behind them and staked all on success.

That success eluded them; the Government dissolved without a successor, and as to cash resources they were ruined. The enthusiasm of the people had endeavored to supplement the efforts of the Confederate Government in the support of the army by voluntary aid, and still further reduced their slender resources. Had the blacks remained in servitude the planters could have recovered prosperity in a short time by resuming forms of industry with which they were familiar. Much of their former property had been invested in slaves. The labor they owned was their current capital; some two thousand five hundred millions of dollars had been so invested; it disappeared with the war. Multitudes of the large planters were left penniless and helpless; tens of thousands of widows and orphans, whose property had consisted chiefly of colored servants, were destitute.

For four years war had desolated their lands and cities and very many of their pleasant homes; it had struck down their vigorous men on the battlefield or returned them wounded and broken to helpless poverty, throwing their families into the deepest distress; there were no pensions to sustain the wounded, to smooth their way to health or the grave, nor to furnish a pittance to the dependent women and children. The conquering government would not, indeed, leave them to starve when their cases were known and within reach; but such dependence was a humiliation they, of all others, found it hardest to bear. The land remained and, where the rush of war had not swept, the buildings still stood; but the lands were of little value in themselves now, the houses were bare and decayed from the waste of war or free contributions of comforts to the soldiers during years of blockade, the absence of the master or loss of income.

The loss of personal property in slaves was at least $2,500, 000,000.. The expense and waste of war, the destruction and deterioration of property must have been twice as much more. Industrial development was arrested in all the South with the

THE LOSSES OF THE SOUTHERN PEOPLE.

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opening of the war except in warlike directions. The ground was cultivated for the necessary supplies of food, and some cotton still raised in the hope of getting it through the blockade to foreign markets; this was, in general, impossible, and the country was shut in from the world. War was the great fact and absorbed most of the energies it did not palsy and the resources it did not dry up. Everything was lost that, with an Anglo-American people, it was possible to lose. Their tenacious bravery, for the most part, kept the desolations of actual conflict to the great strategic lines and the regions immediately adjacent, and the interiors remained, as a rule, undisturbed; yet, all that was left was really but a remnant. The desolation was great. The diversion and loss of industrial and business energies and resources, the disorganization that entered into every field of ordinary activity, were equivalent to the entire loss of capital. The small values that remained were counterbalanced by a loss of business habits, by mental and moral depression, and the want of hopefulness that has been the true spring of American progress.

Besides all these losses, which were greater than could easily be conceived in the North, there were many and serious embarrassments to a return of prosperity. Could this population have been placed in a new country with the untamed vigor, boldness and hope of the early settlers of the Valley the dif ficulties would soon have been mastered. It was not the worst that everything was virtually lost, that the weight of sorrow. ful memory rested upon their energies. There is a vitality and recuperative force inherent in the race that would soon restore mental and physical tone. The greatest embarrassment lay in the new industrial situation. The subject and superior races stood in antagonism. The necessity of obedience had been removed from the first before the mental change that alone could render it logical and healthy had been obtained. It was impossible that the colored people should not be demoralized, industrially, by a liberty so suddenly gained. Servile

habits could not be immediately changed for a wise self-control; they could but be transformed, for a time, into license. Liberty could not mean to them what it meant to the intelligent white; it was, for the mass of them, and for an indefinite time, liberty to be idle, liberty to be absurdly inconsequent and changeable, to be careless of the future and to obey the fancies of the moment.

Thus, there was an inevitable disorganization of any labor system; the blacks remained, but in a condition singularly embarrassing to the resumption of profitable industry. The impossibility of a sudden mental revolution among the whites, all whose habits had been based on absolute control of the laboring class, added to this difficulty. It seemed an absurd situation. Chaos was come again. The mode of reconstruction adopted by the General Government required the new prosperity of the South, however, to be built up in harmony with these conditions. The Southern people had no power of control; they could not restore former relations; the principle of equality as citizens must be regarded.

The abolition of slavery became constitutional by the Thirteenth Amendment, at the close of 1865; the Civil Rights Bill became a law in the following year; the Fourteenth Amendment went into operation in 1868; and in 1870 the Fifteenth Amendment conferred the elective franchise, or right to vote, on the colored people.

The Southern people must begin anew, contrary to their habits, to their judgment, and, as they were situated mentally and industrially, to their interests. They were disfranchised for the time, lest they should exert industrial and political control and interfere with this transformation of the colored race from servitude to citizenship. So great a change, on so large a scale and in so short a time, had never before occurred in human history. It had been believed impossible. A war of races had been predicted. It had not been thought that there lay in humanity the capacity to endure a change so