20 Southern Historical Society Papers.
first railroad was built in Carolina, the first steamship that crossed the ocean weighed anchor from a Southern port, and the cotton gin originated in the cotton belt. The Old South was in truth a vast hive of small industries. It was dotted with domestic factories, tanned its own leather, made its shoes in every county and its hats in every section; wove its cloth in domestic looms, wrought its iron in its own shops, milled its corn and wheat, and lived at home in peace, plenty and hospitality.
I will take the ten years between 1850 and 1860 in illustration of the energies of the Old South to show its enterprise, and to remove the errror that it had the cotton monomania, and was not keeping pace with the nascent industrial spirit of the times.
With only one-third the population of the Union during that decade, the South raised one-third the corn of the country, one- fourth the wheat, three-fourths of the tobacco, nearly all the rice and sugar, one-third of the live stock, made large sales of lumber and naval stores, besides producing in unascertained quantities that remarkable variety of cereals, fruits and vegetables for which it was now more than ever famous. Nor was it then a laggard in manu- facturing and other individual enterprise, as will appear by its gain during that one decade of one hundred per cent, in grain mills, ex- ceeding the percentage of the entire country; its increase by two hundred per cent, in machinery and engine construction; its great growth in cotton mills and in hundreds of minor industries which occupied its people. In those ten years it doubled its lumber trade, doubled the output from iron foundaries and nearly quadrupled its railroad mileage. The South increased its railroad miles in that decade above the percentage increase of all other sections of the United States combined. It had in 1860 a mile of rail to every seven hundred of its white population, while the other States all united had .one mile to every one thousand people. An exposition of the industrial status in 1860 would have shown the world that the Dixie of that day was not merely " the land of cotton, cinnamon seed and sandy bottom," but in the range and value of its products from the soil, and in the diversity and elevation of its industries of every kind, it was measuring up to the stature of the most progressive nations.
The recovery of the South from its stunned condition in 1865, after the war which exhausted its resources, challenges the generous admiration of mankind. The returning soldiers of the Confederate army made heroic efforts to recuperate their country, and although
