Popular Science Monthly/Volume 44/January 1894/Invention and Industry at the South
| INVENTION AND INDUSTRY AT THE SOUTH. |
By BARTON H. WISE.
THE antagonism between the plantation interest on the one hand, and commerce and manufacturing on the other, was pointed out at an early period of our history. The institution of negro slave labor repelled white labor and immigration from the South; and while the North received continuous waves of population, and the growth of commerce and manufacturing caused cities to spring up in every direction, the South remained a sparsely settled section, almost purely agricultural. These conditions have been attributed in part to climatic influences, but this theory hardly holds when we reflect that what we call the South is not only part of the Northern continent and in the temperate zone, but that its southernmost point is seventeen hundred miles north of the equator. So much did the increase of population in the South, however, lag behind that of the North, that in 1850 there were in the former only 18·93 inhabitants to the square mile, to 45·8 in the latter. Not only could capital at the South be more profitably invested in lands and negroes than in manufacturing, but in addition efforts at establishing manufacturing plants were unsuccessful, as negro labor was not suited to it.
In considering the subject of inventions at the South, we can not afford to overlook these facts, nor can we overestimate the depressing effect that negro labor was calculated to produce, though indirectly, upon the inventive faculties of the people. In the North every circumstance tended toward the encouragement of manufacturing, and among a people who, as a consequence, were accustomed to the use of machinery of all sorts, the inventive faculties were stimulated to their utmost.
In the South these conditions were exactly reversed, and nothing tended to the growth of manufacturing or of an urban population. If we except Baltimore, Louisville, and St. Louis, neither one of which, is an exclusively Southern city. New Orleans remains even to-day as the only city in the South of over one hundred thousand inhabitants. Neither Richmond, Atlanta, Charleston, Memphis, nor Nashville has a white population of fifty thousand. With these various conditions borne in mind, it is not strange that the talent of the Southern people was exercised in other directions than those of inventions.
The military qualities of Southerners have been demonstrated in every war in which the United States was engaged; and the leadership in the Revolution, the second war with England, the war with Mexico, and on the Confederate side during the civil war, fell to the part of Southern men. Even on the Northern side during the last-named contest numbers of the foremost soldiers and sailors were men of Southern birth, prominent among whom may be mentioned Thomas, Ord, Fremont, Newton, and Farragut. Abraham Lincoln, the head of the civil administration during the same period, was a born Southerner, and Grant was of Southern extraction. In statesmanship the South had held the highest rank always, and under Southern leadership all the additions to the national domain were made. His English ancestry, the republican form of government under which he lived, the call of a new country for political thinkers during its formative period, the passion for governing engendered by the ownership of slaves, and lastly the long antislavery agitation which saturated the atmosphere with politics, all contributed to cause the ambitious Southerner of the past to drift into public life. The descendants of the Jamestown colonists inherited the Anglo-Saxon spirit of adventure which characterized their ancestors, and it is not strange that Virginia led the rest of the States of the Union in the number of her pioneers who settled the West and Southwest. While all this is true, the talents of the South were largely confined to these channels when exerted at all, and the ability of the North, as has been said of it, "sought expression in a wider range of subjects than that of the South." Conditions at the South were not favorable to the growth of literature, art, or invention, and there being no cities of large size, there were hence no common centers of activity, where either literary workers, artists, or scientists could be sure of employment, and be in contact with sympathetic minds following kindred pursuits. Edgar Allan Poe toiled away at Richmond as editor of the Southern Literary Messenger, but was compelled finally to drift northward to maintain a livelihood. William Gilmore Simms, the only man of note in the South, besides Poe, who followed literature as a profession, plodded along in South Carolina among a people who afforded him little encouragement, and his numerous efforts to found a literary magazine in Charleston all met with failure, despite the fact that an unusually cultivated society dwelt in that city. Washington Allston, after finishing his art studies in Europe, located in Boston, which was able to hold out to him greater inducements than the little city of Charleston, the metropolis of his native State. Gottschalk, the composer, whose dreamy, sensuous music suggests his Southern birth, after finishing his musical course in Paris, made his début there, and died finally in Brazil, spending but little time in New Orleans. Audubon, with his dog and gun, and his pencil and drawing pad, searched the woods and bayous of his native Louisiana for his specimens of birds and natural history that were to win for him the name of the greatest naturalist of the New World. But he labored under adverse conditions, and he had to canvass the large cities of Europe for subscribers to enable him to publish his book on the birds of America, the greatest ornithological work ever undertaken. This he brought out at New York in 1830, with plates containing over one thousand birds of life size, and Cuvier pronounced it "the most magnificent monument that Art has yet raised to Nature."
In the Constitutional Convention of 1787, James Madison, of Virginia, and Charles Pinckney, of South Carolina, proposed the clause protecting authors and inventors, which was the foundation of our copyright and patent-right system. The Patent Office was organized and placed on a firm basis largely through the efforts of Jefferson, who is credited with being its founder, and later on it was reorganized and perfected during Jackson's administration. Jefferson was himself an inventor, being the first American to study and improve the plow. The year 1789 is memorable as the date upon which Rumsey, a Maryland machinist, then living in Virginia, launched his boat upon the Potomac, propelled by steam. Fitch performing a similar experiment upon the Delaware about the same time. Later on, in 1793, Rumsey went to England and made a successful trial trial on the Thames. This same year Eli Whitney, a young New-Englander, invented his famous cotton gin, that may be said to have revolutionized the history of the South and the Union. As an illustration of the scarcity of manufacturing and mechanical establishments in the South at that date, it may be mentioned that Whitney had to draw himself the iron wire he needed and make his own iron tools at the plantation of Mrs. Greene, the wife of General Nathanael Greene, on the Savannah River, where he was residing. It is a notable circumstance that the first canal in America of any consequence, the first telegraph line, and the first railway propelled by steam were all constructed in the South, and the first steamship to cross the Atlantic embarked from a Southern port. The first canal of importance was the James River and Kanawha, which began at Richmond, and was designed to connect the Chesapeake Bay with the Ohio River. It was proposed by Washington and begun in 1785, and afterward carried as far westward as Buchanan in Virginia. During the year 1818 leading merchants of Savannah, Ga., had constructed, through the advice of Captain Moses Rogers, of that city, a combination steam and sailing vessel to run between Savannah and Liverpool. The machinery and engine were built in New York by Daniel Dod, a Virginian, who had moved to that city, and on the 20th of May, 1819, this vessel, which was christened the Savannah, steamed out of the Savannah River for Liverpool, making the first transatlantic trip by a steam vessel in twenty-two days. It created a great sensation in England, and "the people crowded the Mersey's banks filled with surprise and admiration when she entered the harbor of Liverpool under bare poles, belching forth smoke and fire, yet uninjured." From Liverpool the Savannah steamed to St. Petersburg, where it aroused the curiosity of the Czar, and attracted great attention. The log book and cylinder of the vessel are at present on exhibition in London. Charleston secured in 1827 the first railway charter granted in the South for the South Carolina Railroad; and when a few years later it was completed to a point on the Savannah River, opposite Augusta, called Hamburg, it was one hundred and thirty-six miles in length, and the longest line of railway at that time in the world. The directors of this road determined as early as November, 1829, to make steam the sole motive power, which had not then been adopted elsewhere in America, and the first locomotive constructed in the United States, which was called the "Best Friend," was planned for this road by E. L. Miller, of Charleston. The South Carolina Railroad was the first steam railway to carry the United States mail, and the system of double-truck running gear, including the application of pedestals to the springs, which was later on copied by all the railroads, was instituted by Horatio Allen, their engineer. Strenuous efforts were made in the South in the way of railway construction, but in a sparsely settled section the rate of increased mileage naturally fell far short of that in the more densely populated North. The inscription on the bust of Robert Y. Hayne, in Charleston, records that "his last public service was his effort to open direct communication with the vast interior of our continent." "Next to the Christian religion," said Hayne, "I know of nothing to be compared with the influence of a free social and commercial intercourse in softening asperities, extending knowledge, and promoting human happiness." He might at this particular period have named one thing more potent even than railways in uniting the different sections of the country—namely, the doing away with the system of African slavery, for which, though the South was not responsible, it having been fastened upon her by the greed of England and New England, yet which blighted her industries and made her isolated in her modes of thought and out of touch with the world at large.
Despite the fact that the people of the' South were but little engaged in scientific or mechanical pursuits, and that their intellectual energies have for the most part been absorbed with other thoughts, yet many notable inventions and contributions to science have been made by Southern men. Cyrus H. McCormick, a native of Rockbridge County, Va., and the inventor of various agricultural implements, among them his famous reaper, received the thanks of the French Academy of Sciences for having done more for the cause of agriculture than any other man living. "Owing to Mr. McCormick's invention," said William H. Seward in 1860, "the line of civilization moves westward thirty miles each year." Richard J. Gatling, of Hertford County, N. C, devised various machines and the "Gatling gun," now an arm of the United States service and adopted by foreign governments as well. Both McCormick and Gatling moved West the former to Chicago and the latter to St. Louis—the country districts of Virginia and North Carolina affording them poor fields for their endeavors. Henry J. Rogers, a Baltimorean, was the practical adviser and assistant of Morse in the construction of the first telegraph line in the United States, which was built in 1844 between Washington and Baltimore. He was the superintendent of it and made many improvements in it, and was the inventor of several telegraphic instruments. Rogers also devised the first system of pyrotechnic signals in the United States and the one by means of flags that was adopted by the navy in 1846. The author of international fog signals was Samuel P. Griffin, of Georgia; and the inventor of the first complete system of ciphers used by the associated press was Dr. Alexander Jones, of North Carolina. The name of Maury stands above that of every other Southerner, if not of every American, in his contributions to science. Maury's writings demonstrated that meteorology could be raised to the certainty of a science, and Humboldt credited him with being its founder. He was also the first to give a complete description of the Gulf Stream and to mark out specific routes to be followed in crossing the ocean, which won for him the name of the "pathfinder of the seas." In addition to these he founded the method of deep-sea sounding, and his letters to Cyrus W. Field, now in the National Observatory at Washington, prove him to have been the first to suggest the idea of connection between the two continents by means of a cable on the bed of the ocean, and the present cable was laid along the lines pointed out by him. The plan of splicing the cable in mid-ocean was devised by Dr. James C. Palmer, of Maryland.
The limits of this article do not admit of giving a list of all the Southern men who have made inventions of note. Some of them are John Lawrence Smith, of South Carolina, the celebrated mineralogist and inventor of the inverted telescope; "Sibley, of Louisiana, and his conical tent; Gibbs, of Virginia, and his sewing machine; Janney, of Virginia, and his car coupler; Gorrie, of Louisiana, and his ice machine; McComb, of Louisiana, and his 'arrow' cotton tie; Gaynor, of Kentucky, and his fire telegraph; Stone, of Missouri, and his grain roller mill; Remberts, of Texas, with his roller cotton compress; Clarke, of Texas, with his envelope machine, and Campbell, with his cotton picker; Bonsack, of Virginia, with his cigarette machine; Coffee, of Virginia, with his tobacco stemmer; Stevens, of Florida, with his fruit wrapper; Law, of Georgia, with his cotton planter; Avery, of Kentucky, with his plow sulky; Watt and Starke, of Virginia, with their plows; McDonald, of our own day, with his fish ladders and hatcheries, filling our streams with fish." Henry Draper, a Virginian by birth, who removed to New York, made what has been called "the most original discovery ever made in physical science by an American." He was an authority upon telescopic work, and his experiments in his specialty of celestial photography led to the discovery of oxygen. in the sun by this means and a new theory of the solar spectrum.
In the practice of medicine the Southern physician was under the disadvantage of having thinly populated country districts as the field of his labors, and he lacked the benefits of association and co-operation with those of his own calling that a city physician enjoys. But his isolated situation, as has been said of him, often stimulated boldness of thought and original investigation. Ephraim McDowell, M. D., a native of Rockbridge County, Va., and who had moved to the little village of Danville, Ky., performed here in 1809 the first operation on record for the extirpation of the ovary—an announcement received with incredulity in Europe, but the truth of which was established, and which won for him the title of the "father of ovariotomy." Crawford W. Long, M. D., a Georgian, performed in Jefferson County, his State, on March 30, 1842, the first surgical operation on record, with the patient in a state of anæsthesia, which was produced by the inhalation of sulphuric ether. Of a like class of men was J. Marion Sims, M. D., of Alabama, the pioneer in gynæcology and abdominal surgery. The eminent surgeon. Dr. Hunter McGuire, whose position as Medical Director of Stonewall Jackson's corps. Army of Northern Virginia, gave him exceptional opportunities of information, said of the surgeon in the Confederate army: "His scanty supply of medicines and hospital stores made him fertile in expedients of every kind. I have seen him search field and forest for plants and flowers whose medicinal virtues he understood and could use. The pliant bark of a tree made for him a good tourniquet; the piece of a green persimmon, a styptic; a knitting needle, with its point sharply bent, a tenaculum, and a penknife in his hand, a scalpel and bistoury. I have seen him break off one prong of a common table fork, bend the point of the other prong, and with it elevate the bone in depressed fracture of the skull and save life. Long before he knew the use of the porcelain-tipped probe for finding bullets I have seen him use a piece of soft pine wood and bring it out of the wound marked by the leaden ball. Years before we were formally told of Nélaton's method of inverting the body in chloroform narcosis, I have seen it practiced by the Confederate surgeon. Many a time I have seen the foot of the operating table raised to let the blood go by gravitation to the patient's head when death from chloroform was imminent, and I will add that in the corps to which I was attached chloroform was given over twenty-eight thousand times, and no death was ever ascribed to its use." The talents which the stern necessities of war called forth in medical science were exhibited in every other department by the Southern people. It has been said that "one of the compensations of war is a swift ensuing excitation of the mental faculties," and in this instance it would seem to have been so. The outbreak of the civil war in 1861 found the seceding States with a population of eight millions, about one half of whom were negro slaves, as against twenty-four millions in the non-seceding States. The disparity in population between the two sections, however, great as it was, was not greater than that of their equipment in the implements of warfare. A widely separated, almost exclusively agricultural people, without manufactories or skilled labor, were to contend with a people accustomed to the handling of machinery of all sorts, operated by the highest class of trained mechanics, and in whom the inventive faculties had been developed to their utmost. One of the greatest curses of negro slavery was not only that it was in itself an inefficient labor for the higher classes of work, but it also served to drive out white labor of the better sort, which invariably shunned the black districts. A striking instance of the scarcity of skilled labor in the South was furnished in the matter of making gunpowder with which to carry on the war. In the spring of 1861 Mr. Davis authorized Colonel George W. Rains to undertake the construction of powder works for the Confederacy. These mills, begun in September of that year at Augusta, Ga., were finished the following April. For the first year of the war the Confederates were almost entirely dependent upon the powder captured from the enemy, and more than once military movements were hampered owing to the scarcity of ammunition. We have it upon the authority of Colonel Rains that "but one man—Wright—could be found in the Southern States who had seen gunpowder made by the incorporating mill, the only kind that can make it of the first quality; he had been a workman at the Waltham Abbey Government Gunpowder Works in England." During the period that the Augusta mills were in process of construction a small powder factory was run at Manchester, Tenn. The output of this was very limited, and it was conducted mostly as a school of instruction, and as soon as the Augusta works were completed the operatives and machinery were transferred there. At the same time, at a refinery in Nashville, workmen were being taught to refine saltpeter and distill charcoal. Notwithstanding these methods of obtaining competent labor, it was with the greatest difficulty that a sufficient supply could be procured, and as a consequence every sort of labor-saving device possible was adopted. Among the improvements introduced by Colonel Rains in this way was a crystallizing machine of his own invention for refining saltpeter, the main constituent of gunpowder, and which has to be brought to a high state of chemical purity. By means of this machine eight or ten thousand pounds of saltpeter, used by the works daily, which had to pass through many stages and undergo much manipulation, which at first required a large force by manual labor, was prepared by two or three workmen. Other improved methods of powder-making were brought into use for the first time, and the Confederate powder works were pronounced among the finest in the world, and the London Times and other foreign papers gave lengthy and commendatory descriptions of them.
The Confederacy was furnished with one thousand three hundred and seventy-five tons of gunpowder from these works. Colonel Rains is authority for the statement that "notwithstanding the admirable serving of the heavy artillery at Fort Sumter during that engagement, it would have fallen and Charleston been captured had any but the strongest gunpowder been used. The armor of the ironclads, though constructed expressly to withstand the heaviest charges and projectiles, gave way before its propelling force." General G. J. Rains, a brother of Colonel Rains of the powder works, was the inventor of the sub-terra shells, that were first used after the battle of Williamsburg, and which proved effectual in retarding the advance of the Federal forces. At the time that McClellan was in command below Richmond, in 1862, and his vessels in James River, General Rains was placed in command of the submarine defenses by the Confederate Government. Here, opposite Drury's Bluff, the first submarine torpedo used in the war was made. This mode of defense had been previously experimented with by the Russians in the Crimea, but it had proved ineffectual against the allied fleets. Under the spur of dire necessity the Confederates turned their attention to it, and it was brought to such a state of efficiency that Charleston, Wilmington, and Savannah maintained a successful defense till near the end of the war, despite the efforts of Dupont and Dahlgren to force an entrance through their harbors. Their destructiveness was demonstrated at many other points, and fifty-eight vessels, including ironclads, were destroyed by this means in Southern waters.
Shortly after the breaking out of the war, the naval department of the Confederacy began experiments of various sorts with floating batteries and naval rams, many of which were conducted under the supervision of Lieutenant Catesby ApR. Jones. The name of Lieutenant Jones, together with that of Lieutenant John M. Brooke, the inventor of the "Brooke gun," and deviser of the plan by which the hull of the frigate Virginia was converted into the ironclad Merrimac, deserve mention along with Maury and Buchanan, as being the men who probably did most toward rendering the naval appliances of the Confederates effective. English and French officers who witnessed the fight in Hampton Roads of March 8, 1862, when the Merrimac sunk what were then considered as among the finest war ships, remarked to a Confederate naval officer. Captain H. B. Littlepage: "We have not a war ship in our navy; a wooden ship is no longer a war ship; that fight will rebuild and remodel the navies of the world." "The British navy," says Captain Littlepage, "which cost hundreds of millions of dollars, was as effectually destroyed on that eventful 8th of March as was the noble old Cumberland, sunk to her topsail yards by the Merrimac's ram, a weapon practically unknown before. The 9th of March but emphasized the value and importance of iron-plated vessels, and illustrated two principles in the construction of war ships which must last for all time—i. e., the deflecting and turreted armors."
The Confederate Ordnance Department had at its head a highly competent officer. Colonel Gorgas, and through a system of rigid civil-service examinations a set of efficient men were obtained. In the early part of the war, before the blockade became stringent, ordnance stores were purchased in Europe, and these, with what were captured from the enemy, were used. Many instances might be cited to show the difficulties that were gone through with to supply the army, such as the making of percussion caps for the last year of the war (the Confederates being armed entirely with muzzle-loaders) out of turpentine and brandy stills gathered in North Carolina, the only copper mines in the South having fallen into the hands of the enemy. Another illustration was the substitution of chlorate of potash. and sulphuret of antimony for mercury to fill the caps, the latter not being obtainable. These and many other similar facts might be quoted to confirm the statement of Colonel William Leroy Broun, the head of the Richmond Arsenal, and at present the superintendent of the Alabama Polytechnic Institute, that "when we consider the absence of manufactories and machinery and of skilled mechanics in the South at the beginning of the war, its [the Ordnance Department] successfully furnishing ordnance supplies for so large an army during the four eventful years is a striking instance of the wonderful energy and resources and abilities of its people to overcome difficulties." We have but to look at the table of manufacturing establishments in the South at present, in comparison with past years, to realize the rapid increase in that line and the growth of skilled labor that must inevitably accompany it. From 1880 till the present there has been a wonderful forward movement. Data have not yet been collected in full by the Census Department for 1890, but the bulletins issued on the principal Southern cities all show a large increase in the number of plants of every sort, and the cities of Memphis, Nashville, New Orleans, Mobile, Charleston, Richmond, Norfolk, Savannah, Augusta, and Baltimore, all of them more than doubled, and some of them more than quadrupled the amount of capital invested in manufacturing enterprises between 1880 and 1890. Railroad mileage in the South increased from 23,811 miles in 1881 to 44,805 in 1891, and the number of cotton mills during the same period from 161 to 356. All of these facts speak for themselves, and need no comment to point out their influence upon the future. Another potent factor, in its influence in stimulating invention in the future, is the great increase in industrial and polytechnic schools in the South, and the attention now paid to the study of natural science, which was formerly neglected for the classics. As has been recently pointed out in an interesting article by Prof. Charles W. Dabney, in the early days of American history the preachers were the learned men and the leaders in educational work. Nearly all the older colleges were the offspring of the churches, and in the South this continued to be the case, not only down to the period of the war, but for a decade afterward. The University of Virginia, one of the few institutions not under church influence, was naturally the first to open advanced scientific departments. It may be mentioned also that this university was the first in the Union where the elective system was introduced, in contradistinction to the curricular method in vogue elsewhere. Harvard and other Northern colleges have in late years modeled their courses much after the Virginia plan. The South has also within its borders probably the first college in the world to confer a degree upon a woman. The higher education of females was undertaken at an early date in Georgia, and the Georgia Female Institute, opened in 1839, is believed to have preceded both Oberlin and Mount Holyoke in granting degrees to women. Of late years there has been a marked improvement in the number and character of educational institutions of all sorts in the South, but the most significant change is in the number of technological schools, scarcely one of which was in existence twenty years ago. Prof. Dabney quotes the reports of the United States Bureau of Education for 1888 and 1889, which show that there were at that time "a total of twenty-eight schools, or departments of schools, giving regular instruction in science and technology, an average of over two for each State." If the list of patents taken out by residents of the different States for the past century shows that the South has been considerably behind in the race, the more recent statistics are suggestive of a different result in the near future. The following figures give the number of patents granted residents of the Southern States for the years named: 1860, 667; 1870, 1,469; 1880, 2,656; 1885, 1,633; 1890, 3,159.
If it be asked what in the future will be the effect of negro labor and the race problem on the South, the answer is that there will be no negro labor and no race problem, for the very good reason that there will be no negro there. This will doubtless strike the average reader as a bold and perhaps absurd prediction, but every circumstance points to its fulfillment. The idea is by no means new, and Jefferson, probably the profoundest political philosopher of his country, a strong opponent of slavery, and it should be added a resident of a slaveholding State, and whose knowledge of the institution was actual, not theoretical, long ago gave this as his opinion. He asserted that nothing was more certainly written in the book of fate than that the negro was to be free, and he added that it was equally certain that when free the two races would not continue to live side by side. This was also the view of Calhoun, who, while unlike Jefferson a proslavery man, held his opinion as regards the impossibility of the two races continuing together after emancipation. The industrial conditions of the South at present point clearly to the realization of these prophecies at a period not far distant. We hear and talk much of the conflict between capital and labor. We forget that the real conflict is not between capital and labor, but between labor and labor. No race has ever stood in the way of the Anglo-Saxon in his onward march, and it is not probable that the negro race, among the lowest in the scale of civilization, is to be the sole exception to that rule. As the poor white of the South, re-enforced by the laborer from the North, enters more and more into the field as a competitor with the negro, the latter will meet with, an antagonist that must sooner or later press him to the wall, and in conformity to his racial instincts the African will move on farther and farther southward.
The number of farms at the South has increased rapidly since the war. This does not mean more land, but the subdivision of the larger estates of the past into smaller holdings, and an increase in the number of white yeoman farmers who do their own labor. Besides these circumstances, the census of 1890, contrary to the general idea, showed that the natural rate of increase of population among the Southern whites over the negro was almost in the ratio of two to one. The effect of this excess of white increase is apparent, and besides it is by no means probable that the white inhabitants of the South are not to be added to by large immigration from the North. The granting of the suffrage to the negro, partly through a misguided and in part a pretended friendship, will aid to further his displacement, for his aspirations as a politician have not been favorable to his success as a laborer and the betterment of his material condition. Neither the sword and bayonet nor plague and pestilence are necessary to a work of uprooting, for by a natural racial and economic law the negro will be driven out and supplanted by the white, and Louis Blanc's theory of extermination be illustrated as never before. There was a certain fitness in the emancipation proclamation being signed, when it came to be, by Abraham Lincoln, a representative of that class of Southern whites upon whom the institution of slavery had borne most hardly, and who were crowded out of the slaveholding districts. Time and the developments of the future will show more and more that in slavery the negro found his preservation, but the laboring white his curse. The historian Green tells us that after the Norman conquest there was among the English people "an immense outburst of material and intellectual activity," and that "the long mental inactivity of feudal Europe broke up like ice before a summer sun." It would be anything but correct to refer to the "mental inactivity" of the ante-bellum South, for in the lines that its talents were exerted it showed an ability fully equal to that of any other section, but the incubus upon its material growth, and the problems which then demanded its intellectual energies, are now in a large measure removed; and we may say of the South, as Green does of the England of King John, that it is "quickened with a new life and throbbing with a new energy." We need not fear the effects of an enervating climate or Southern sun. The upper tier of Southern States and the Southern Appalachian region form probably the best climate on the Atlantic side of the continent, and in the more Southern States, such as Alabama and Louisiana, while the summers are longer, yet the heat of the sun is not as oppressive as in the North, though the air is as balmy as that of Italy. History does not show that a softer air and sky are less favorable to intellectual growth in any line than a more harsh and uncongenial clime. Italy is not only the land of Michael Angelo, of Raphael, and of Titian, but of Volta, Galvani, Torricelli, and Galileo as well, and the atmosphere that excites the imagination is as favorable to inventive genius, as applied to natural science or mechanics, as to painting, sculpture, or music. Of the Southern States we may say that no section of the Union gives promise of greater achievement; indeed, none is so rich in what the future has in store.
