Page:Confederate Military History - 1899 - Volume 12.djvu/337

Rh All capital was being used in booming and building up the Northwest into new States and increasing their material wealth. This was being done to its utmost limit, and there was no money to help the South. The great Western railroads were being built, backed by enormous grants of public lands by Congress, and these roads were planting immigrants (500,000 foreign) and citizens from other States in the West. Immigration had even gone westward from the people of the South who had despaired of better days. There was no immigration southward The increase in population was only the natural one. There were but few banks, and Southern men had few friends among the great financiers anywhere. The South, in its looted and prostrated condition, offered no invitation to capital which promised even prospective returns. Northern capital strictly avoided the South in those gloomy days. To all appearances, the South was paralyzed. Her great wealth, as shown by the census of 1850 and 1860, which had been the accumulation from the earliest days, in slave property and material investments in all possible directions, had been swept away.

The social fabric of the people had been uprooted and turned upside down. The negroes had not only been freed as the result of the South 's failure in the war, but they had been made lawmakers and put to governing States, whose people had been as progressive and aggressive as any element of the Anglo-Saxon race in any part of the world. The Southern people had before them the lamentable failure of their brothers at the North to restrain their bad blood and forego Anglo-Saxon determination, indifferently to friend or foe, to carry out their own purposes by putting negro governments over men of their own race for whom they showed at that time no sympathy or generosity.

But the white people of the South began to realize again that their destinies had fallen into their own hands. They recalled the terrible ordeal through which they