Memorial and biographical history of Dallas County, Texas, Part 27

Author: Lewis publishing company, Chicago, pub. [from old catalog]
Publication date: 1892
Publisher: Chicago, The Lewis publishing company
Number of Pages: 1128

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men of a billion dollars indemnity to Ger- many, that the five million whites of the Sonth rendered to the torch and sword three billions of property, and that thirty million dollars a year, or six hundred million dollars in twenty years, has been given from our poverty in cordial willingness as pensions for Northern soldiers, the wonder is that we are here at all. There is a figure with which history has dealt lightly, but that, standing pathetic and heroie in the genesis of our new growth, has interested me greatly-the sol- dier-farmer of the South in '65. What chance had he for the future as he wandered amid his empty barns, his stock, labor and implements gone-gathered up the fragments of his wreck, and urging kindly his borrowed mule, paying eighty per cent. usury for all that he bought, and buying all on eredit, his crop mortgaged before it was planted, his children in want, his neighborhood in chaos, working under new conditions and retrieving every error by a costly year, plodding all day down the furrow, hopeless and adrift, save when at night he went back to his broken home, where his wife, cheerful even then, renewed his courage while she ministered in loving tenderness to his troubled heart. Who would have thought, as during those lonely and terrible days he walked behind the plow, locking the sunshine in the glory of his harvest, and spreading the showers in the verdure of his field-no friend near save nature that smiled at his earnest touch, and God that sent him the message of good cheer through the passing breeze and the whisper- ing leaves, that he would in twenty years, having carried these burdens uncomplaining, made a crop of eight hundred million dollars, and that from his bounty the South would have rebuilded her cities and recouped her losses. Yet this has been done! While we

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exult in his fortune, let us take account of his standing. (Applause).

Whence this enormous growth? For ten years the world has been at peace. The pio- neer has now replaced the soldier. Commerce has whitened new seas, and the merchants have occupied new areas. Steam has made of the world a chess board, on which men play for markets. Our western wheat-grower is made acquainted in London with the Russian and the East Indian. The Ohio wool-grower watches the Australian shepherd, and the bleat of the now historie sheep of Vermont is answered from the steppes of Asia. The herds that emerge from the dust of your amazing prairies might hear in their panses the hoof-beats of antipodean herds marching to meet them. Under Ilolland's dykes the cheese and butter makers fight American dai- ries. California challenges vine-clad France. The Dark Continent is disclosed through meshes of light. There is competition every- where. The husbandman driven from his market balances prico against starvation and undercuts his rival. This conflict often runs to panic and profit vanishes. The lowa farmer burning his corn for fuel is is not an unusual type.

Amid this universal conflict, where stands the South? While the producer of every- thing we eat or wear in every land is fighting through glutted markets for bare existence, what of the Southern farmer? In his indus- trial, as in his political problom, he is set apart-not in doubt, but in assured independ- ence. Cotton makes him king. Not all the fleeces Jason sought can rival the rich- ness of this plant, as it unfurls its banners. It is gold from the instant it puts forth its tiny shoot. The shower that whispers to it is heard around the world; the trespass of a worm on its green leaf means more to England

than the advance of the Russians on its Asi- atie ontposts; and when its fiber, current in every bank, is marketed, it renders back to the South $350,000,000 every year. Its seed will yield $60,000,000 worth of oil to the press, and $40,000,000 in food for soil or beast, making the stupendous total of $450- 000,000 annual income from this crop. And now, under the Tompkins patent, from its stalk newspaper is to be made at two cents per pound. Edward Atkinson once said: " If New England could grow the cotton plant without the lint, it would make her rich- est crop: if she held monopoly of cotton lint and seed she wonld control the commerce of the world." But is our monopoly, threatened from Egypt, India and Brazil, sure and per- manent? Let the record answer. In 1872, the South made 3,241,000 bales; other coun- tries 3,036,000,-leading her rivals by less than 200,000 bales. This year the South- ern supply was 8,000,000 bales; from other sources 2,100,000,-all expressed in bales of 400 pounds each. In spite of new areas elsewhere, of fuller experience, of better transportation, and unlimited money spent in experiment, the supply of foreign cotton has decreased since 1872 nearly 1,000,000 bales, while that of the Sonth has increased nearly 5,000,000 bales. Further than this. Since 1872, population in Europe has increased thirteen per cent., and cotton consumption in Europe has increased fifty per cent. Still further. Since 1880, cotton consumption in Europe has increased twenty-eight per cent, wool four per cent., and flax has decreased eleven per cent. As for new areas, the utter- most missionary woos the heathen with a cot- ton shirt in one hand, and the Bible in the other, and no savage, I believe, has ever been converted to one, without having first put on the other. To summarize: Our American

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HISTORY OF DALLAS COUNTY.

fiber has increased its product nearly three- fold, while it has seen the product of its rival decrease one-third. It has enlarged its dominion in the old centers of population, snpplanting flax and wool, and it peeps from the satchel of every business and religious evangelist that trots the globe. In three years the American erop has increased 1,400- 000 bales, and yet there is less cotton in the world to-day than at any time for twenty years. (Loud applause.)

The dominion of our king is established. This prineely revenue is assured. not for a year, but for all the time. It is the heritage that God gave us when he arched our skies, established our mountains, girt us about with the ocean, tempered the sunshine and meas- ured the rain,-ours, and our children's for- ever.

Not alone in eotton, but also in iron does the South exeel. The Hon. ex-Judge Norton, who honors this platform with his presence, onee said to me: " An Englishman of the highest character predicted that the Atlantie will be whitened within our lives with sails earrying American iron and coal to England." When he made that prediction the English miners

were exhausting the eoal in long tunnels, above which the ocean thundered. Having ores and coal stored in exhaustless quantity, in such rieliness and adjustment that iron ean be made, and manufacturing done, cheaper than elsewhere on this con- tinent, is to now command and at last control the world's market for iron. The South now sells iron through Pittsburg in New York. She has driven Scotch iron first from the in- terior and finally from American ports. Within our lives she will eross the Atlantic and fulfill the Englishman's prophecy. In 1880 the South made 212,000 tons of iron; in 1887, 845,000 tons. She is now aetnally

building, or has finished this year, furnaces that will produce more than her entire pro- duet last year. Birmingham alone will pro- dnee more iron in 1889 than the entire Southi produced in 1887. Our coal supply is ex- haustless, Texas alone having 6,000 square miles. In marble and granite we have no rivals as to quantity or quality. In lumber our riches are even vaster. More than 50 per eent. of our entire area is in forests, mak- ing the South the best timbered region of the world. We have enough merehantable yellow pine to bring in money $2,500,000,000, a sum the vastness of which can only be under- stood when I say it nearly equals the assessed value of the entire South, including eities, forests, farms, mines and personal property of every deseription whatsoever. Back of this our forests of hard woods and measureless swamps of cypress gum. Think of it. In cotton a monopoly. In iron and coal es- tablishing swift mastery. In granite and marble developing equal advantage and re- sources. In yellow pine and hard woods the world's treasury. Surely the basis of the South's wealth and power is laid by the hand of the Almighty God, and its prosperity has been established by divine law, which works in eternal justice, and not through human statutes which levies taxes from its neighbors for its own protection. Paying tribute for fifty years that under artificial conditions other seetions might reach a prosperity, im- possible under natural laws, it has grown apace. Its growth shall endure, if its people are ruled by two maxims that reach deeper than legislative enactment, and the operation of which cannot be limited by artificial re- straint, and but little hastened by artificial stimulus.

First, no one crop will make a people pros- perous. If cotton held its monopoly under

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HISTORY OF DALLAS COUNTY.

conditions that made other crops impossible or under allurements that made other erops exceptional, its dominion would be despotism. Whenever the greed for a money crop unbal- ances the wisdom of husbandry the money crop is a curse. When it stimulates the gen- eral economy of the farin, it is the profit of farming. In an unprosperons strip of Caro- lina, when asked the cause of their poverty, the people say "Tobacco, for it is our only crop." In Lancaster, l'ennsylvania, the richest American county by the census, when asked the cause of their prosperity, they say "Tobac- co, for it is the golden crown of a diversified agriculture." The soil that produces cotton invite the grains and grasses, the orchard and the vine. Clover, corn, cotton, wheat and barley thrive in the same enclosure. The peach, the apple, the apricot, the Siberian crab in the same orchard. Herds and flocks graze ten months every year in meadows over which winter is but a passing breath, and in which spring and autumn meet in summer's heat. Sugar cane and oats, rice and potatoes, are extremes that come together under our skies. To raise cotton and send its princely revenue to the West for supplies and to the East for nsury, would be a misfortune if soil and climate forced such a curse. When both invite independence, to remain in slavery is a crime. To mortgage our farms in Boston for money with which to buy meat and bread from western cribs and smokehouses is folly unspeakable. I rejoice that Texas is less open to this charge than others of the cotton States. With her 80,000,000 bushels of grain and her 16,000,000 head of stock she is rapidly learning that diversified agricult- ure means prosperity. Indeed, the South is learning the same lesson, and learned through years of debt and dependence it will never be forgotton. The best thing Georgia

has done in twenty years was to raise her oat erop in one season from 2,000,000 to 9,000,- 000 bushels without losing a bale of her cot- ton. It is more for the South that she has increased her crop of corn-that best of grains, of which Samuel J. Tilden said "it will be the staple food of the future, and men will be stronger and better when that day comes" -by 43,000,000 bushels this year than to have won a pivotal battle in the late war. In this one item she keeps at home this year a sum equal to the entire cotton crop of any State, that last year went to the West. This is the road to prosperity. It is the way to manli- ness and sturdiness of character. When every farmer in the South shall eat bread from his own fields and meat from his own pastures-and disturbed by no creditor and enslaved by no debt, shall sit amid his teem- ing gardens and orchards and vineyards, and dairies and barnyards, pitching his crops in his own wisdom and growing them in inde- pendence, making cotton his clean surplus and selling it in his own time and his chosen market and not at a master's bidding, getting his pay in cash and not in a receipted inort- gage that discharges his debt, but does not restore his freedom ---- then shall be breaking the fullness of our day. Great is king cotton! But to lie at his feet while the nser and grain- raiser bind us in subjection, is to invite the contempt of man and the reproach of God. But to stand up before him, and amid our cribs and smokehouses wrest from him the magna charta of our independence and to es- tablish in his name an ample and diversified agriculture that shall honor him while it enriches ns-this is to carry us as far in the way of happiness and independence as the farmer working in the fullest wisdom and in the richest fields can carry any people. (Ap- plause.)

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But agriculture alone, no matter how rich or varied its resources, cannot establish or maintain a people's prosperity. There is a lesson in this that Texas, even with her amazing total of $137,000,000 of farm pro- ducts, may learn with profit. No common- wealthi ever came to greatness by producing raw material. Less can this be possible in the future than in the past. The Comstock lode is the richest spot on earth, and yet the miners, gasping for breath fifteen hundred feet below the earth's surface, get bare oxist- ence out of the splendor they dig from the earth. It goes to carry the commerce and uphold the industry of distant lands, of which the men who produce it get but a dim report. Hardly more is the South profited when, strip- ping the harvest of her cotton fields or strip- ping her teeming hills, or leveling her superb forests, she sends the raw material to aug- ment the wealth and power of distant com- munities. (Applause.) Texas produces a million and a half bales of cotton, which yield her $60,000,000. That cotton woven into common goods would add $75,000,000 to Texas' income from this crop, employ 220,- 000 operatives, who would draw and spend within her borders more than $30,000,000 in wages. Massachusetts manufactures 575,000 bales of cotton, for which she pays 31,000,- 000 and sells for $72,000,000, adding a value nearly equal to Texas' gross revenue from cotton, and yet Texas las a clean advantage for manufacturing this cotton of 1 per cent. a pound over Massachusetts. The little vil- lage of Grand Rapids began manufacturing furniture, simply because it was set in timber districts. It is now a great city, and sells $10,000,000 worth of furniture every year, in making which 12,000 men are employed and a population of 40,000 peo- ple supported. The best pine districts of

the world are in eastern Texas. With less competiton and wider markets than Grand Rapids has, will she ship her forests at prices that barely support the wood-chop- per and sawyer, to be returned, in the making of which great cities are built or maintained ? When her farmers and herdsmen draw from her cities $136,000,000 as the price of their annual produce, shall this enormous wealth be scattered through distant shops and fac- tories, leaving in the hands of Texans no more than the husbandman's support and the narrow brokerage between buyer and seller? As one-crop farming cannot support the country, neither can a single resource of com- mercial exchange support a eity. Texas wants immigrants. She needs them, for if every human being in Texas were placed at equidistant points throughout the State no Texan could hear the sound of a human voice in all your borders. How can you best at- traet immigration ? By furnishing work for the artisan and mechanic. If you meet the demand of your population for cheaper and essential manufactured articles, one half a million workers would be needed for this, and with their families would double the popula- tion of your State. In these mechanics and their dependents, farmers would find a near and growing market for not only their staple crops, but for truck that they now despise to raise or sell, but that is at last the cream of the farm. Worcester county, Massachusetts, takes $52,000,000 of our material, and turns out $87,000,000 of products every year, paying $20,000,000 in wages. The most prosperons section of this world is that known. as the Middle States of this Republic. Their agri- culture and manufactures are in the balance. Their shops and factories are set amid riell and ample acres, and the result is such deep and diffused prosperity as no other section

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can show. Suppose those States had a mo- nopoly of cotton, iron and coal, so disposed as to command the world's markets and the treasury of the world's timber supply, the mind is staggered in contemplating the majesty of the wealth and power they would attain. What have they that the Sonth laeks ? And to her these things are added, and to these things a kinder elimate, ampler aeres and richer soil. It is a enrious fact that three-fourths of the population, mann- facturing and wealth of this country is com- pacted in a narrow strip between Iowa and Massachusetts, comprising less than one- sixth of our territory, and that this strip is distant from the scouree of raw materials on which its growth is mostly based, of hard climate and in large part of sterile soil. Much of this forced and unnatural develop- ment is due to slavery, which for a century fenced enterprise and capital out of the South. Mr. Thomas, who in the Lehigh valley erected furnaces in 1850, set the pattern for iron-making in America, and had before that time bought mines and forests where Birmingham now stands. Slavery forced him away. He settled in Pennsylvania. I have wondered what would have happened if that one man had opened his iron mines in Alabama and set his furnaces there at that time. I know what is going to happen sinee he has been forced to come to Birmingham and put up two furnaces nearly forty years after his first survey. Another cause that has prospered New England and the Middle States while the South langnished, is the system of tariff taxes levied on the unmixed agriculture of these States for the protection of industries of our neighbors to the north -a system on which the Honorable Roger Q. Mills, that lion of the tribe of Judalı, has at last laid his mighty paw, and under the

indignant touch of which it trembles to its center. That system is to be revised and its duties redneed, as we all agree it should be, though I should say in perfect frankness I do not agree with Mr. Mills in detail. Let us hope this will be done with care and in judi- cious patience. But whether it stands or falls, the South has entered the industrial lists to partake of its bounty if it stands, and if it falls to rely on the favor with which nature has endowed her, and from this immutable advantage to fill her own markets first and then have a talk with the world at large. (Applause.)

With amazing rapidity she has moved away from the one-erop idea that was once her curse. In 1880 she was deemed prosperous. Since that time she has added 393,000,000 bushels to her grain erops and 182,000,000 head to her live stock. This has not lost one bale of her cotton crop, whieli, on the con- trary, has increased nearly 2,000,000 bales. With equal swiftness has she moved away from the folly of shipping out her ore at $2 a ton and buying it baek in implements at from $20 to $1,000 a ton; her cotton at 10 cents a pound and buying it back in cloth at 20 to to 80 cents a pound; her timber at $8 per thousand and buying it back in furniture at ten to twenty times as muel. In the past eight years $250,000,000 have been invested in new shops and factories in her States; 225,000 artisans are now working here that eight years ago were idle or at work else- where; and these have added $270,000,000 to the value of her raw material, more than one- half the value of her cotton erop. Add to this the value of her increased grain erops and stock, and in the past eight years she has grown in her fields or created in her shops inereased food and manufactures more than the value of her cotton erop. The kingly

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revenue she then sent away for these articles she now keeps at home. What surpassing glory and prosperity may not be justified from this formula? The incoming tide has just begun to rise.

Every train brings manufacturers from East and West seeking to establish themselves or their sons near the raw material and in this growing market. Let the fullness of this tide roll in. We shall not exhaust our materials nor shall we glut our markets. When the growing demand of our Southern market, feeding on its own growth, is met we shall find new markets for the South. Under our new conditions many indirect ways of commerce shall be straightened. We buy from Brazil $50,000,000 worth of products, and sell her $8,000,000. England buys only $29,000,000 and sells her $35,000,000. Of $65,000,000 in cotton goods bought by Cen- tral and South America over $50,000,000 went to England. Of $331,000,000 sent abroad by the southern half of our hemis- phere England secured over half, although we buy from that section nearly twice as much as England buys. Our neighbors to the south need nearly every article we make. We need nearly everything they produce. Less than 2,500 miles of road must be built to bind by rail the two American continents. When this is done, and even before, we shall find exhaustless markets to the south. Texas, shall command, as she stands in the van of this new movement, its richest rewards. (Applause.) The South, under the rapid diversification of crops and diversification of industries, is thrilling with new life. As this new prosperity comes to us it brings no sweeter thought to me and to you, my coun- trymen, I am sure, than that it adds not only to the comfort and happiness of our neighbors, but that it makes broader the glory, and

deeper the majesty, and more enduring the strength of the Union which reigns supreme in our hearts. In this Republic of ours is lodged the hope of free government on earth. Here God has rested the ark of his covenant with the sons of men. Let ns-once estranged and thereby closer bound-let us soar above all provincial pride and find our deeper in- spiration in gathering the fullest sheaves into the harvest and standing stanchest and most devoted of its sons as it lights the path and makes clear the way through which all the people of this earth shall come in God's ap- pointed time. (Applause.)

I have a few words for the young men of Texas. Iam glad that I can speak to them. All men, and especially young men, look back for their inspiration to what is best in their traditions. Thermopylæ cast Spartan sentiment in heroic mould and sustained Spartan arms for more than a century. Thermopylae had survivors to tell the story of its defeat. The Alamo had none. Though voiceless, it shall speak. From its dumb walls Liberty cried out to Texas, as God called from the clond unto Moses. Bowie and Fannin, though dead, still live! Their voices rang abave the din of Goliad and the glory of San Jacinto, and they marched with the Texas veterans who rejoiced at the birth of Texas independence. It is the spirit of the Alamo that moved above the Texas sol- diers as they charged like demigods through a thousand battlefields; and it is the spirit of the Alamo that whispers from their graves, held in every State of the Union, ennobling with their dust the soil that was crimsoned with their blood. In the spirit of this inspir- ation, and in the thrill of the amazing growth that surrounds yon, my young friends, it will be strange if the young men of Texas do not carry the Lone Star into the heart of the

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struggle in which the South is engaged.

The South needs her sons to-day more than when she summoned them to the forum to maintain her politieal supremacy; more than when the bugle called them to the field to de- fend issues put to the arbitrament of the sword. Her old body is instinct with appeal -calling ou us to come and give her fuller independence than she has ever sought in field or forum. It is ours to show that, as she prospered with slaves, she shall prosper still more with freemen; ours to see that from the lists she entered in poverty, she shall emerge in prosperity: ours to carry the transcending traditions of the old South, from which none of us can in honor or rev- erence depart, unstained and unbroken into the new. Shall we fail? Shall the blood of the old South, the best strain that ever up- lifted linman endeavor, that ran like water at dnty's call and never stained where it tonelied,-shall this blood that pours into our veins through a century luminous with achievement for the first time falter and be driven back from irresolute hearts? Shall we fail when che South, that left us better in manliness and courage than in broad and rich acres, calls us to settle the problems that beset her?

A soldier lay wounded on a hard-fought field. The roar of the battle had died away, and he rested in the deadly stillness of its aftermath. Not a sound was heard as he lay there sorely smitten and speechless but the shriek of the wounded and the sight of the dying soul as it eseaped from the tumult of earth unto the unspeakable bliss of the stars. Off over the field fliekered the lanterns of the surgeons with the litter-bearers, search- ing that they might take away those whose lives could be saved, and leave in sorrow those who were doomed to die. With

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Memorial and biographical history of Dallas County, Texas, Part 27

Author: Lewis publishing company, Chicago, pub. [from old catalog] Publication date: 1892 Publisher: Chicago, The Lewis publishing company Number of Pages: 1128

Author: Lewis publishing company, Chicago, pub. [from old catalog]
Publication date: 1892
Publisher: Chicago, The Lewis publishing company
Number of Pages: 1128