CHAPTER III. _conditions Precedent to the Erection of the Mills_

CONDITIONS PRECEDENT TO THE ERECTION OF THE MILLS

To understand the establishment of cotton mills in the South, it is necessary to grasp the deeper impulses which actuated every policy certainly from the year 1880 onward, continuing in only modified degree to the present. Every phase of the movement for the building of cotton mills was conditioned by motives at once tender and heroic, universal in their applicability and too intimate in appeal to admit of more than passing argument. In a study of the actual erection of factories, the hundreds of problems that arose and the mass of practical detail attendant upon their solving constitute, it seems to the writer, a hopeless or at best profitless puzzle, unless it is clearly understood that these minutiae point back to something elemental and primal which gave them character. On the other hand, if this fact is recognized, the circumstances which accompanied the setting of mills in operation, such as the securing of capital, the obtaining of adequate labor, the selection of sites for the location of buildings and the like, from the very coldness of the subjects, and their unsentimental aspect as commonly thought of, strike into peculiarly bold relief the purposes that lay behind them. When it came to money-getting, psychical factors must be crystallized into something very forceful and admitting of unquestioned faith. It is the aim of the present paper to be an introduction to the study of the problems involved in the setting up of cotton mills, by giving the antecedent action, as it were, and by showing the motive force as it developed, operated and concentrated.

This responsible cause, catching the phrase from a writer of the day, may be termed "real reconstruction". The impulse for it came over the South in 1880 like a great ground swell, translating itself into a thousand activities and ramifications. "Real reconstruction" was spectacularly the outcome of the defeat of Hancock by Garfield in the presidential election immediately, but its roots run deeper and have their hold in the slow but sure recuperation of the South from the devastation of the Civil War through the troubles of radical rule, assisted by a brief breathing space from the termination of carpet bag government in 1876, when the lesson of fifteen terrible years soaked in thoroughly. It is sufficient here to say that in 1880 the South suffered a change of heart, a revulsion of conscience that was fundamental. The people turned on their heel, and faced about to find a new future of the largest promise.

A newspaper which before had bent every effort towards the election of Hancock, the Democratic candidate for the presidency, as securing for the South political independence and revenge for Northern mistreatment, a week after his defeat printed an editorial headed "Our Refuge and Our Strength", with these words:

"... we have been defeated in the national contest. In the administration of the national government for the next four years we need not concern ourselves, for as far as possible our councils will be ignored. What, then, is our duty? It is to go to work earnestly to build up North Carolina. Nothing is to be gained by regrets and repinings.... It is idle to talk of home independence so long as we go to the North for everything from a tooth pick to a President. We may plead in vain for a higher type of manhood and womanhood among the masses, so long as we allow the children to grow up in ignorance. We may look in vain for the dawn of an era of enterprise, progress and development, so long as thousands and millions of money are deposited in our banks at four per cent. interest when its judicious investment in manufactures would more than quadruple that rate, and give profitable employment to thousands of our now idle women and children.

"Out of our political defeat we must work a glorious material and industrial triumph. We must have less politics and more work, fewer stump speakers and more stump pullers, less tinsel and show and boast, and more hard, earnest work. We must make money--it is a power in this practical business age. Teach the boys and girls to work and teach them to be proud of it....

"Demand all legislative encouragement for manufacturing that may be consistent with free political economy. Work for the material and educational advancement of North Carolina, and in this and not in politics, will be found her refuge and her strength."

The uselessness of attempting a political salvation as contrasted with the logic of giving all energy to the building up of the South materially, clearly shown in the passage quoted, occurs time and time again. President C. C. Baldwin, of the Louisville and Nashville Railroad, born in Maryland but for many years resident in New York, and competent to take a comprehensive view of the South and its problems, said in an interview with the New York Herald in 1881, after the new program had gotten under way: "The commercial men of the states fully appreciate the situation.... They now see clearly how very little politics have done for them, and seriously turn toward the real 'reconstruction' which active trade will inaugurate. All the war issues are dead and buried except to a few politicians who misrepresent their constituents and merely use the language of the past to give them, personally, a passing prominence. True, we hear a great deal more about the men who stand forth prominently as the advocates of these dead issues than we do of the thousands of young and energetic Southern men who are building cotton and woollen mills; who are opening mines and starting iron, copper and zinc furnaces, or who are relaying the roads between the Atlantic and the Ohio and the Gulf. These men don't talk, they don't write books, they don't go to the Legislature or to Congress. They speak, trumpet toned, in results, however. The people of the South have suffered--it is not pertinent whether we regard their sufferings as just or unjust--but they have put aside mourning and are ready for work."

The Sumter, S.C., Southern voiced the same idea: "The Southern people, outside of the professional politicians, care very little about Federal politics. They are endeavoring to develop the resources of the South and regain the broken-down fortunes left by the desolation of civil war.

"So taking the past and the present as indices for the future, it is plain to see that a dissolution of the Solid South will cut at the very roots of all these wrangles between the North and the South in which sectionalism is involved."

"The people of the South are beginning to learn that the true road to power is not through the White House, supported by a swarm of federal officials", said a Tennessee paper in March of 1880. "They are learning that solid wealth is power, and that wealth is attainable only by working up their cotton and wool into fabrics and their ores into metals."

The clear-headedness of the following extract from an editorial which appeared in the Columbia, S.C. Register, at the time the city was putting forth every energy to realize a desire for cotton mills, is unsurpassed:

"But if we lost the victory, in one sense, we have won it in another. We have been taught what the South can do for itself if it wills to do it. If we have lost the victory on the field of fight, we can win it back in the workshop, in the factory, in an improved agriculture and horticulture, in our mines and in our schoolhouses.

"There is where our fight lies now, and the only enemies before us are the prejudices of the past, the instinct of isolation, the brutal indifference and harmful social infidelity which stands up in our day with the old slave arguments at its heart and on its lips, 'I object' and 'You can't do it'."

In the broken and all but disheartened condition of the South after enduring the war, radical rule and defeat of political hopes, this conception of another economic future, once it burst upon the consciousness of the Southern people, amounted to nothing less than a religion. Every one of the old pangs added devotion to the new purpose. The whole pride of the South seemed about to go to disruption, and the imminent danger of this lent a passionate loyalty to the changed program which appealed to everything that was best and noblest in the people.

The new spirit was strongest in North and South Carolina and in that portion of Georgia contiguous to South Carolina. Distance from this region as a center about marks the intensity of feeling and comprehensiveness of grasp with which the impulse was voiced. Florida and Mississippi felt it little, due probably to their position so very far South as to be still submerged in misery; Virginia was only slightly affected and Maryland hardly at all in the same sense as the middle South, because of proximity to the North and difference of character, by reason of the absence of cotton as the staple. North and South Carolina and the region about Augusta, Georgia, gave the plan its first conception and its most whole-hearted support because, it appears, North Carolina is by nature resourceful and hardy above any Southern State, and South Carolina, despite every discouragement, would have the heart to try again because she is thoroughbred in a company of thoroughbreds.

Just as the philosophy varied in intensity territorially, so it varied in degree within the same region. Some wished salvation through material advance for the sake of the State; this was natural, as growing out of a well-known loyalty of the citizens of Southern commonwealths.

Others with larger view proclaimed the new gospel for the whole South as a section, rather adopting an attitude of aloofness toward the North, wishing the Southern people to work out their great problem without assistance from those who would be predisposed to meddlesome criticism. It is true that reorganization for the South was the most national thing Southerners could turn themselves to at that time, and in the judgment of many still is, but speakers and writers often failed of just the most fortunate expression of their purpose in that they did not strike the national note very consciously.

It is something to have gone through what the South went through and come out not dispirited utterly, not defiant against fate or enemies, not forgetful of the past, but, remembering the worst, determined soberly, quietly, thoroughly to do the fundamental thing and do it nationally. It was left for Charleston more than all others--noblesse oblige--to speak this greatest message:

"The Southern people must be national themselves, in their aspirations and conduct, if they would have the government truly national in spirit", and have Garfield "President of the whole country, and not of a section, or party, to have a government of 'the whole country', to be entitled to it, we must think of the whole country as our own, and demand no more than we are ready to give. It must come to this. In the near future the successful leaders, South and North, will be those whose first thought is for the Republic, men who are national in feeling and purpose; men who understand that the political and social strength and safety of each State depend not on isolation and separation, but on combination and union."

By the late fall and winter of 1880 the mind of the South was ripe for progress and accomplishment. Perhaps the first gropings after procedure struck upon the consideration that manufactures would add another profit to the profit of agriculture. The big, general conception was first grasped without refinements or modifications or drawbacks; it was received with almost childlike simplicity and faith. But it came to be ingrained. "The cotton which now comes into Charleston and is sold here pays commissions to the factors and brokers, and when shipped leaves behind it the price of the drayage, compressing and storage. Cotton which comes into Charleston and is manufactured here is doubled in value, and an amount equal, at least, to the value of the raw cotton when it reached the city boundary is distributed among the people of Charleston. This is the simple key to the prosperity which invariably attends the development of manufactures. Manufacturing gives additional value to raw material, and this additional value goes into the communities where the manufacturing is done. At present Charleston does nothing to increase the value of the cotton which comes here for sale. It leaves us as it finds us. The city lives on the pickings and scrapings....

"Cotton mills change all this. A bale of raw cotton worth forty dollars is spun into yarns or cloth worth eighty dollars.... The stockholders and the working people get the whole difference between the cost of the cotton and the value of the yarns or cloth, except what little may be expended for material that cannot be purchased here."

President H. P. Hammett, of the Piedmont Factory, in a remarkable address before the State Agricultural and Mechanical Society and State Grange, of South Carolina, to which reference will several times be made, after describing the earlier absorption of the South in a single pursuit, and the ills that grew from this, said: "A new condition of things and a changed sentiment amongst the people prevail at present; with the changed relations of society and institutions a sentiment favorable to a diversity of pursuits has developed ... a disposition is manifested to develop the many resources heretofore lying dormant or hidden. Capital when needed is furnished, and men of energy, enterprise and ability develop ... the general sentiment of the people is to utilize all the facilities within their reach.... Under such circumstances it is natural that the public mind should be directed to the manufacture of their great staple."

There were a score of reasons making this course seem plausible. They were advanced, scrutinized, at the South sometimes accepted with a grain of salt, at the North not infrequently flatly and stoutly challenged as absurd; they were patiently explained or difiantly, and not always with the closest reasoning, flung in the faces of their objectors--but finally they were proclaimed as gospel, and in this sign the South set out to conquer. Of these beliefs is to be placed first and foremost the conviction that, other things aside, manufacturing was most economical and so logically belonged, at the source of production. Here is the doctrine, given in all simplicity, and not without the force characteristic of newspaper correspondences of that day: "Sir, it matters not what anyone may say to the contrary, common sense tells us that other things--machinery, skilled labor, motive power and facilities of shipment--being equal, a cotton factory in the midst of cotton fields must prove more profitable than the same concern a thousand miles from its base of supply could possibly be." Other factors there were--cheap labor, unused water powers, abundance of wood and coal nearby, local market for the sale of product, longer running time than in the North, a favorable climate, saving in fuel and light, absence of damage to cotton by compress, saving in bagging and ties, assistance to be given to women and children much in need of work--all of them bore their part in focussing the energies of the South upon that program which was to mean so much in so many ways--the "cotton mill campaign."

The current passion for building cotton mills--it was nothing short of this--was stimulated and guided by press and platform in urging, chronicling and praising advances.

The Columbia, Georgia, Enquirer, after recounting the progress of the city in spinning--it had 60,000 spindles--said: "These are the weapons peace gave us, and right trusty ones they are.... The story the spindles tell is one of joy to all, and show (shows) how rapidly we are climbing the hill of prosperity." The affectionate tone of this item from the Rock Hill, S.C. correspondence of The News and Courier is unmistakable: "In conclusion let me say a few words in regard to the 'pet' of the town, the Rock Hill Cotton Factory. This factory is owned and controlled by the citizens of the town, (except $15,000 in stock owned in Charleston). It has a capital of $100,000, has over 6,000 spindles, with 1,500 more to be added in a few days." The Marion, S.C. correspondent of the same paper a year earlier contributed this for his town: "Our wants: A bank, an academy, a cotton factory, a comfortable room for passengers at the depot, an iron foundery, and last, but not least, work upon our streets." So much did cotton mills come to be considered the natural signs of progress that Raleigh made apology for not having a single mill. "There is not a cotton factory in Raleigh, but there are not less than five large planing mills, two foundries, two boiler factories ...", and there follows a list of everything in the corporate limits, including schools and even newspapers.

Under its caption, "The Cotton Mill Campaign", the active News and Courier every few days listed new entries into the field of cotton manufacture. The issue of February 8, 1881, presented a particularly large number of items from different towns. The Newberry Herald exhorted the citizens with reference to Charleston's achievement thus: "Cheer for Charleston--A Movement all Along the Line. Charleston is in a fair way to have two large cotton factories in a short while.... Camden is preparing for a cotton factory. Hodges, Abbeville County, is preparing for a cotton factory. Rock Hill has a cotton factory. Greenville has several cotton factories. Newberry, the best location for a cotton factory in the State, and the place most needing one is not preparing for a cotton factory, and there is no present likelihood that she ever will." The method followed here, of citing the advance of other places in mill building as an incentive, was widely used, and not commonly with the rather complaining tone of the above from Newberry.

That the spirit was in the air is clearly discernible in a Winnsboro contribution: "Why does not Fairfield (the county in which the town of Winnsboro is located) make the experiment? It is said that $15,000 will set in motion over five hundred spindles, and continual additions can be made." While recognizing that water power was difficult of access, steam might be used, for there was plenty of cheap fuel for years to come, and the Charlotte railroad offered easy communication with the world for a mill located along its tracks. The Hampton, S.C. Guardian struck the note: "Factories are springing up all over the State, and our people must not be found lagging in the race of progress."

How the people were reaching out for cotton mills, with their attendant profits and advantages, may be seen in this advertisement appearing in the winter of 1881: "We will give to a Cotton Manufacturing Company, that will organize and locate at Landsford, S.C., with a capital of $300,000 a site, 20 acres of land and 3000 horse water power. Apply for particulars to T. C. Robertson, Allen Jones, Rock Hill, S.C.; Wm. R. Landsford; Edward McCrady, Jr., Charleston."

A little earlier the cotton mill campaign had extended itself to the point of interesting class effort, for the most prominent German citizens of Charleston organized a mill in a short space of time.

The cotton mill campaign had gotten well under way when its further progress was greatly facilitated and its successful outcome made plain by the projection of a plan to display the resources of the Southern States in an exposition at Atlanta. The scheme was first proposed in October of 1860, and the International Cotton Exposition was opened in Atlanta October 5, 1881. The exposition, in organization, history and influence, is inseparably bound up with the name of Edward Atkinson, economist, publicist and manufacturer of Boston. He gave it its inception; in an unselfish and magnanimous spirit he guided its beginnings and brought it, by his advocacy and superintendence, to completion. He was "the father of the Atlanta exposition." In a sincere desire to see the South extricated from the disorganization of the war and the years that followed, he planned this method of showing the people what he considered to be their true interest, namely, concentration upon better methods of cultivating and preparing cotton for market and for manufacture. With a fine comprehension of the most fundamental needs of the section in many directions, he conceived the care of cotton between the field and the factory to be properly the first concern of the Southern States, not temporarily, but for all time. The Atlanta exposition he proposed as the lens through which to focus attention upon this.

But Mr. Atkinson, most singularly for a man of his grasp, penetration and experience, had not reckoned upon the force of the enthusiasm for manufacturing cotton, which, as has been shown, came over the Southern people. That cotton mills were being built he could not but see; that they were making profits he could not deny--but in the economic wholesomeness and permanency of the factories he would not believe. In the International Cotton Exposition he created a Frankenstein to amaze and frighten and torment him. For once the resources, of the South were displayed in visible, tangible form in reasonable compass, and once the people were united upon an effort which should gauge their strength and possibilities, the invitation, or, as some put it, the duty to manufacture the staple in the fields where it grew leaped out as a fact more patent than ever. The people had felt the strength that came from union in a common purpose, and nothing could deter them from following the light that this brought to them. Mr. Atkinson, who had acted in the best of faith and with great ability, was surprised and chagrined; when he found that, while following his lead in showing the necessity of more careful culture and preparation of the crop for manufacture, the South, by the agency of the exposition, was fascinated in going beyond his goal, and building mills to make up the cotton for itself, he protested earnestly, and went to no end of pains to turn the people from their course. But the horse had taken the bit in his mouth, had glimpsed a broader highway open ahead, and the reins that had directed him once were of no avail to arrest his career.

Conscious of his New England milling and insurance interests, it is likely that Edward Atkinson felt the South, which he had tried to help, distrusted him. And though the fact of his connections, coupled with a manner of addressing himself to the Southern people at times unfortunate in its seeming superiority, and tendency to become impatient and didactic, might easily have led the section to regard him with enmity, it is to be remembered to the credit of the Southerners that they showed as great charity for his, as they regarded them, short-comings of judgment, as they held in esteem his friendship and constructive co-operation. The vision which the South had caught rose superior, in almost all cases, to any pleasure to be found in taunting those who differed in view, especially when so much was owing to a man as belonged to Mr. Atkinson. His position is one of the most important in the whole history of cotton manufacturing, not only in the South, but in this country, and it is the most dramatic and pathetic. He stood virtually alone after the exposition had run a few months, protesting impotently against a new state of things, every development of which seemed to cry the lie to his objections. His very antagonism lent impetus to the current setting toward cotton mills for the cotton estates. And, to make the sting even more poignant, instead of looking upon his opposition to Southern cotton manufacturing as representing a class of jealous industrialists at the North--and many things there were to lend color to such a belief--the South was appealing over his head to New England capitalists to come down and help erect factories.

How Southern sentiment had grown beyond Mr. Atkinson's purposes for the exposition is to be seen in the words of A. O. Bacon, speaker of the Georgia House of Representatives, in welcoming a party of South Carolina legislators and their friends to the Exposition three months after its opening: "This exposition--marks an important epoch in the industrial history of the country. It has aroused the South to the value of new enterprises and of new methods of labor; it has awakened the North to a realization of the boundless resources and enormous industrial capacities of the South. It comes at a most propitious moment, for the South, in sympathy with the quickening energies which excite the continent, is even now trembling in the initial throes of the mighty industrial revolution that surely awaits her. A great change is about to come upon us. 'In the fabric of thought and of habit' which we have woven for a century we are no longer to dwell, and a new era of progressive enterprise opens before us."

The place of the Cotton Exposition in furthering the cotton mill campaign, already attained to a healthy start, is seen in this from Clifton, S.C.: "It is to be hoped the Atlanta Exposition will not take all the enthusiasm out of our capitalists and enterprising men, but that it will only tend to a greater and more steady development of our resources. There are new families coming in constantly (to the Clifton Mill) and the cottages as far as completed are occupied, and still they come." And again: "A good work has been done, the benefits of which will be felt in every part of the country. The New South takes a fresh start at the Atlantic Exposition." Here also is evidence of the very fortunate juncture at which the exposition happened to fall. The show did much for the South irrespective of its exhibits; indeed, before a shovelful of earth was turned, a real service was rendered. It proved to the people that they could organize and exert a force in common; the South was less individual from that day. It demonstrated besides that the South had resources and possibilities worth presenting to the world. Once the exposition was opened, three distinct influences were brought to bear in carrying forward the work already begun. The people of the South were shown for the first time as a whole the implements of cotton manufacture, capitalists in general were introduced to the opportunities of cotton milling in the section, and, in visualizing and making more than ever evident the industrial future, less effective reflex from the ultimate proposals of Edward Atkinson and others of his belief was afforded once for all.

The very day of opening, the exposition greeted crowds of visitors with these words from Daniel W. Vorhees, of Indiana; "There is a far higher remuneration than has ever been given by cotton yet in store for the laborer, the manufacturer, the South and the entire country. In the midst of the cotton plantations themselves there is a career for manufacturing development such as the world has not yet seen. With coal, iron and timber in perfection and inexhaustible, and water power everywhere, by what rule of political economy should the Southern people send their cotton, at an expense always deducted from its price, to distant sections and foreign countries to be spun and woven? If the manufacturer in Great Britain, transporting his cotton from India and the United States, can realize substantial profits, why may they not be realized here...? We have seen the manufacturer of New England, at a long distance from a productive base of supplies, turn a sterile country into the seat of culture, refinement and wealth. Why shall not the South put forth its energies and reap the same and a far greater reward? Here the cotton grows up to the doorsteps of your mills, and supply and demand clasp hands together. The average exportation during the last ten years, from these wonderful fields to England and other European ports, has been over 3,000,000 of bales per annum; while to the mills of New England and other Northern states another million have (has) been annually carried away from your midst, and from the best manufacturing region on the globe."

So, even from the opening of the exposition, matters had taken a decided turn toward cotton manufacturing for the South. After the fair had been in progress three weeks, Mr. Atkinson and a committee from the New England Cotton Manufacturers' Association came down for their initial visit. From Mr. Hemphill's letter to The News and Courier it is clear that the New Englanders appreciated most those parts of the exhibit which had to do with "ginning and preparing." Still considering all cotton manufacturing to belong to the North, just as all cotton growing belonged to the South, the verdict of the party on this first inspection was: "Nothing ever happened in the history of the country to prove so adequately the identity of the interests of the cotton grower and cotton manufacturer as this exhibition." Thus were visitors coaxed to examine into the increased efficiency and profit which lay in sending clean Southern cotton to Northern manufacturers.

Soon the situation demanded more drastic handling. Edward Atkinson, in a set speech on the exposition grounds, stated his position clearly: "You have depreciated every crop of cotton you have made at least 12 per cent. by want of care and attention in ginning, baling, pressing and caring for the cotton between the field and the factory. You can save half your labor and add 10 per cent. to the value of your crop if you will use the new tools and machinery here on exhibition and heed the words which I now speak.

"The Southern planter and farmer has no knowledge, as yet, outside of the sea island district, of the merits of a true roller gin. Clark's cleaner has just been introduced and is only known within narrow limits.... Now, I am going to touch a tender subject--cotton manufacturing.... I have never taken the ground that there were any climatic difficulties in many parts of the South. The real difficulty is that the margin of profit is very small on a very large capital, and unless you can work, in the long run, on a very small margin you cannot succeed. These times are no criterion.... May I say that the true preparation for success in cotton manufacturing must be in knowing how to save the fraction of a cent.... You cannot spin cotton when you do not know the difference between a cent and a nickel."

The reception with which Mr. Atkinson's theory met is seen in an editorial comment on his December address: "The future of the South is described with great power in the ... speech of Mr. Edward Atkinson at the Atlanta Exposition.... Mr. Atkinson is misleading only when invincible prejudice keeps him from seeing clearly, and even Northern newspapers admit that he is wrong in his belief that cotton manufacturing, on a large scale, will not pay in the South. The speech otherwise is suggestive and instructive." In a review of an article by Mr. Atkinson on "The Solid South", appearing in the International Review for March, 1881, William E. Boggs, of Atlanta, wrote: "If one so sincere as Mr. Atkinson in the desire that the South shall flourish can so misunderstand the Southern people, what must be the mental condition of those who have prejudice without good-will? Mr. Atkinson is the father of the Atlanta Exposition, and is, in his way, a true friend of the South."

There was one more condition precedent to the erection of cotton mills in the South. The people of the section might come to a determination to set up schools, run telegraph and telephone lines, construct railroads, stop political quibbling and back-biting, and, above all, institute manufactures as the surest release from a condition calling for the strongest action; they might turn themselves wholeheartedly to the building of cotton mills, calling forth every native resource and ingenuity, enterprise and sacrifice, and these would avail much. But the task was so huge in its proportions that sooner or later it must cease to be a sectional matter, and not only was this necessary, but it was proper that it should be the case. The North must be called upon for help. If there are two facts in the building of cotton mills in the South which stand out head and shoulders above all the rest, they are that the Southern people, impelled by inner forces, undertook the work, and that when it became apparent that outside capital and advice were needed and could be had, these were welcomed gratefully.

There were certain forces which made for a national mind in the South--certain external influences aside from the reasonings of the choicer spirits. These bound the North and South together, and helped to make possible the augmenting of Southern energy and resources by Northern capital and experience.

Just as the International Cotton Exposition at Atlanta lent impetus to the sectional furtherance of the cotton mill campaign, so the shooting of President Garfield, his lingering illness through three months, and his death, occurring at approximately the same stage as the exposition, may be thought to have done much in preparing the way for receiving Northern, and, indirectly, European capital into the South.

"This (the South) is a region where manliness is held in superlative honor", said the Charleston paper so often quoted, "and assassination is loathed for its cowardliness even more than it is abhorred as an offence against law and society.... There could be no doubt then that Guiteau's dastardly act would be heartily denounced--and there was reason to look for some special indignation on account of the exalted official position which Gen. Garfield holds. It could not have been foreseen, however, that the outburst of sympathy and condemnation would have been universal in its manifestation, affectionate in tone and National in spirit. South Carolina does more than reprobate assassination. The people of the State, the whole people, resent the deed because the victim is the President of the United States, the Chief Magistrate of our country.... The process of reunion has gone on with a rapidity which few appreciated. All the elements of cordial friendship and of national good-will were there. It needed only the threat of a common misfortune to give shape and voice to the recreate but sturdy love of the Republic."

The following appeared with the announcement of President Garfield's death. "In the history of the United States, President Garfield will be remembered as he whose nomination by the National Republican Convention strangled imperialism in its cradle, and as he whose assassination was quickly followed by an outburst of sorrow and sympathy which manifested to the North the true nature of the South, and do more than the arguments, the prayers and the common intercourse of thrice five years to bring together the peoples whom war had made separate. By the shedding of blood the North and South were sundered; and through the shedding of blood they are united.... In his wounding unto death passed away the alienation, the estrangement which prevented this country from being truly one, although men and millions had made it in appearance indivisible."

Railroads, both because they allowed sentiment to become solidified in the South, and afforded great currents of intercourse with the North, were of first importance. And in the railroads, with the encouragement they gave to manufactures, and the stability they lent to trade in furnishing a strong commercial backbone, appear early hints of the unifying force of Northern capital itself. A railroad, in which Northern men chiefly were interested, which proposed running up the James River Valley to Clifton Forge, was hailed by Richmond as bringing new prosperity. "We welcome the Northern gentlemen who are to co this invaluable work for Virginia, and we trust and believe that they may never have cause to regret the investment of their capital here. Every such investment is a new band around the States of the Union binding them more closely together."