S K Y- L AN D
STORIES OF PICTURESQUE NORTH CAROLINA
The People's Magazine
Volume 2 JUNE, 1915 Number 3
Entered as Second-Class Matter at the postoffice at
Act of March 3, 1879
Winston-Salem, N. C, Under the
MAE LUCILE SMITH Editor and Owner
Published Every Month
Sent by Mail, One Year — One Dollar
Single Copies Fifteen Cents
ADVISORY BOARD
Locke Craig Governor of North Carolina
Josephus Daniels —
—
....Secretary of the Navy
Lee S. Overman United States Senator
F. M. Simmons United States Senator
Joseph Hyde Pratt.. State Geologist.
W. A. Erwin, President Durham Cotton Manufacturing Company Durham, N. C.
Julian S. Carr, Manufacturer and Banker ..Durham, N. C.
J. Harper Erwin, Secretary and Treasurer Pearl Cotton Mills Durham, N. C.
J. C. Pritchard Judge United States Circuit Court of Appeals
S. B. Tanner, President Henrietta and Carolene Mills Charlotte, N. C.
John E. Ennis, M. D St. Petersburg, Fla.
R. M. WiLLCOX.. President Greater Hendersonville Club, Hendersonville, N. C.
R. R. Haynes President The Cliffside Mills, Cliffside, N. C.
W. A. Smith President Laurel Park Electric Railway, Hendersonville, N. C.
L. L. Jenkins President American National Bank, Asheville, N. C.
F. E. Durfee President Citizens Bank, Hendersonville, N. C.
B. Jackson ...President The People's National Bank, Hendersonville, N. C.
The cover pageJand^'entire contents of this Magazine are protected by copyright, and
must not be reprinted without the publisher's permission.
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SKY- LAN D
STORIES OF PICTURESQUE NORTH CAROLINA
The People's Magazine
Volume 2 JUNE, 1915 Number 3
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
Foreword—To Edward Kidder Graham Lawrence S. Holt, Jr. 10
Frontispiece ..^ - Mrs. William N. Reynolds 12
EDITORIAL COMMENT
Level-Headed Legislators -... „ .— 189
The Textile Industry Historically 189
Labor Troubles .— . 190
More Recent Troubles 190
"The World Do Move" ...:.... :_..:_ ^ 191
"The Empire State of the South" 192
The State of Resorts 193
A Business Governor 194
Large Ruby Deposits 194
The Center of the State.. 195
Col. A. B. Andrews 195
To SKY-LAND Readers 196
Ah! Dreaming Violets—Poem . R. E. Walker 196
SPECIAL ARTICLES
Slighting Southern History and Literature C. W. Lively 197
The New North State Archib.\ld Henderson 212
Looking In On Thomas Dixon ..Mrs. O. Barg.a.min Crocker 219
IN NORTH CAROLINA'S CALCIUM LIGHT
Mrs. William N. Reynolds 221
Edward Kidder Graham—R. E. F., '98. :. 224
FICTION
The Diamond Crop and The Wedding Bells Charles Anderson 227
Spring—A Poem J. Robin Aglee 229
Cats and Soforth By Dred Vaux 230
The Soul of Adam—A Play—Act II .....Hillard Booth 236
INDUSTRIAL SECTION
Alamance County in Industrial North Carolina 243
Graham—The Ideal 261
Some Interesting Products of Child Labor 271
Bigger, Better Burlington : 275
RESORT ARTICLES
Carolina Beach—-The Golden Resort 278
MRS. WILLIAM N. REYNOLDS,
Retiring North Carolina State Regent of the Daughters of the American Revolution.
SKY-LAND MAGAZINE 189
EDITORIAL COMMENT
By R. E. W.
Level-headed Legislators.
WHEN the sensationalist and the
p' demagogue hold forth in the
legislative halls of a people, ignorance
and prejudice are the two legislative
disqualifications that yield to them most
readily their desired end and often-times
burden a State with unwise laws.
Certain it is though that, in the case of
the Weaver Bill, the legislators of North
Carolina in the last session of the Gen-eral
Assembly showed themselves to be
actuated by neither ignorance nor pre-judice
and to be remarkably free from
the influence of those who would cripple
the industries of the State. Certain
labor sensationalists may charge ig-norance.
But if ignorance be the case,
in their ignorance the legislators were
wise in refusing to be bunglers and in
refusing to accept as final evidence of
needed legislation the representations
of well meaning sensationalists and those
of the hirelings of an organization whose
patron saint is said to be vitally inter-ested
in some twenty Northern manu-facturing
enterprises.
That the Weaver Bill was given much
publicity was quite natural in view of
the fact that it lent itself easily to sen-sational
comment and afforded the
opportunity for much rhetorical well-doing.
And that it touched and rallied
the hearts of the public is not strange
when one considers that in this day and
time the public is easily moved to tears
by tales of suffering and oppression
provided the alleged unfortunate be not
near enough to receive material aid.
That amidst it all the legislators sat
steady in the boat and calmly considered
the provisions of the bill in the light of
present conditions and future posibili-ties,
we should be thankful.
For the Southern cotton manufacturer
the days of tremendous dividends are no
more. Time was when they were large.
But year by year they have dwindled.
They have been reduced greatly by the
increased cost of the raw material ; they
have been reduced by the increase in
wages paid the operatives; they have
been reduced by increased taxation;
they have been reduced by legislative
curtailment of the hours per week that
he may operate his plant; they have been
reduced by competition—to say noth-ing
of reductions caused in other ways.
That large dividends were declared in
the past and that great fortunes have
been accumulated in the textile industry
is no occasion for revenge. Retalia-tory
legislation is never wise. And
during these days when the sensationa-list
and the demagogue seek public
preferment by declaiming against the
cotton manufacturing industry and other
large enterprises as well, that man who
calmly sits at his desk with facts and
figures before him and lends his in-fluence
towards securing legislation that
will preserve and increase the wealth of
his State, with due consideration for
humanity, is great. He is on the short-est
road to Utopia.
The Textile Industry Historically.
TTISTORICALLY the manufacture
-'--'- of cotton goods in North Caro-lina
is exceedingly interesting. It began
with the late Edwin M. Holt, who built
190 SKY-LAND MAGAZINE
the old Alamance Mill in 1837 and manu-factured
cotton plaids. The industry
received its greatest impetus some years
after the Civil War; and today it has
reached enormous proportions.
During the almost magical develop-ment
of the industry in North Carolina
through the past several decades, textile
manufacturers have until quite recently
paid little or no attention to publicity
regarding the condition of their opera-tives.
Indeed, they have hardly had
the time to do so, so busily have they
been occupied in building up the State's
great manufacturing industry. Neither
did it occur to them that such publicity
would be necessary in a State where
every man was concerned with retriev-ing
his fortunes and with upbuilding
his unfortunate State.
So the textile industry grew to its
present proportions (employing over
sixty-four thousand operatives and vital-ly
affecting over one hundred seventy-seven
thousand, five hundred and sixty-four
persons) without the manufacturers
troubling themselves about letting their
left hand know what their right hand
was doing. And they prospered, as all
men do who apply themselves to a
business with possibilities.
Labor Troubles.
TI) UT the textile sea was not to be for-
-'-^ ever calm. Some years ago, a
fairly long time ago now, there appeared
at several mills throughout the State
labor union representatives. These peo-ple
came, presumably from the North.
They were pleasing of manner and oily
of speech. With their gifts of picturing
to the mill operatives the terrible condi-tions
under which they were working
(but which the|^ operatives were never
quite able to comprehend) and with
their glowing tales of the benefits of
organization, they succeeded in es-tablishing
several unions throughout
the State.
Here and there strikes were ordered
on this alleged grievance or that. Ow-ing
either to the satisfaction of the
operatives with things as they were or
to their lack of the sense of organized
action, this effort to injure the manu-facturing
interest of the State turned out
to be little more than a fiasco. And
from that day to this the operatives have
been loyal to their mills.
These troubles served, however, in
many instances to interrupt the friendly,
cordial relations between employer and
employed and to place a distance be-tween
those who had hitherto had a
community of interests. One of the
State's oldest and most successful man-ufacturers
recently spoke of this phase
of the matter to me in terms which
showed him to be sincerely and deeply
grieved that the relations of former days
should have been strained and that the
employes had come more and more to
be known by the pay roll rather than
by name.
More Recent Troubles
T~^URING recent years the textile
-"—^ manufacturer has encountered the
labor agitator in this State under another
guise. He now appears as the agent of
the National Child Labor Committee,
whose paid agent in this State is one
Swift of Greensboro, and as sentimen-talists
who agitate in various w^ays the
public thought. The avowed business
of these men is to alleviate the condition
of the mill operative. They ignore the
direct method of personal effort among
the employes and their families and seek
to aid them by securing legislation
which would curtail their income, which,
SKY-LAND MAGAZINE 191
those seeking to help them claim, is al-ready
too small.
To accomplish this end, bitter and
persistent warfare is waged against the
manufacturer. He is represented al-ways
in his worst light, if not in a false
light. The poorest and most unfor-tunate
among his operatives are photo-graphed,
the malcontents among them
are interviewed and the photographs and
the interviews are scattered abroad as
representing the conditions that pre-vail.
Some notable examples of child
labor that have been overlooked by Mr.
Swift and his sympathizers will be found
in another part of this magazine. The
story will be interesting.
"The World Do Move"
TT IS doubtful whether so much has
-- been done for any class of people dur-ing
the last thirty years as for the mill
operative. The mill men were among
the first to recognize the principles of
sanitation and to build and equip their
plants along the most modern and
approved lines. To be sure, the old
mills and the old tenements do not meet
the requirements of the modern idea of
things. They were built according to
the knowledge and ideas of their time;
and so were built the stores, the resi-dences
of the cities and the farm houses
of those days.
But just as new residences and farm
houses are being built according to the
latest and most approved designs, so are
the mills of today. For an idea of what
the condition of the cotton mill opera-tive
is coming to be, do not visit a mill
that has been running for thirty years
and that is nearing the end of its life
unless new machinery is installed and
better provisions are made for the opera-tives.
Visit one of the modern plants.
Note the high ceilings, the systems of
ventilation, the water supply, the wel-fare
work that is being done by the com-panies.
A study of the growth of the
textile business in this State will reveal
a remarkable tendency towards improve-ment
in all things that concern the
operative.
Were these manufacturers forced into
these things by law? Hardly. These
things are the results of education.
Through the years that have been pass-ing,
the manufacturer has learned, just
as the farmer, the merchant and other
men, what will build up his business and
what will not. He has learned that it is
economy to conserve the health of his
operatives, to educate them, to develop
their social life, to make their lives not
only tolerable, but happy. The modern
manufacturer wants an educated, pros-perous,
happy, contented people. He
must have such a people to secure the
best results. And more and more he
will come to develop such a people purely
from a business standpoint, if not from
a religious. And there is no amount of
legislation that can contribute one iota
of what the manufacturers themsleves
can and do contribute towards the
development of their people.
This is not the case in some of the older
mills. No one will deny that in some
instances conditions are not what they
should be. But will shorter hours
remedy the situation? In all probabil-ity
they would simply hasten the day of
receivership and leave the operatives in a
state worse than their first. Then too,
the development of the human being is
slow. No one but God can make of him
a new creature in an instant. So the
process must be one of evolution. And
religious sentiment and keen business
perception in the heart and head of the
manufactuerr are doing for the mill
operative a hundredfold more than all:
192 SKY-LAND MAGAZINE
the agitators, who are harrassing the
manufacturers, poisoning the mind of
the public against the State's greatest
manufacturing industry and placing the
mill operative in a false light before the
public.
"The Empire State of the South"
SOUTH of us lies the largest State
east of the Mississippi, Georgia.
In point of the production of cotton,
Georgia stands second and takes first
place in general lines of manufacture.
To this "Empire State of the South"
the nation and the world owes much.
Georgia was the pioneer in the education
of women, the first female college having
been established at Macon. And it was
from the hands of Georgia that the
world received the cotton gin and the
sewing machine, two of mankind's great-est
inventions.
Georgia is rich in natural resources.
It is a State of quarries, mineral deposits,
gardens, orchards, fields of yellow corn
and snowy cotton. Many streams place
at the disposal of industry an almost
inconceivable number of horsepower.
More than twenty million dollars has
already been expended in the develop-ment
of this enormous source of wealth.
Early the people of the State saw the
possibilities in the manufacture of cotton
and led the South in this industry by
establishing a mill as far back as 1827,
the Georgia Factory, at Whitehall.
Nine years afterwards the Princeton
Manufacturing Company came into
existence near Athens. Eight years
from that time a factory was completed
at High Shoals. In 1850 there were
thirty-five cotton mills in Georgia.
The industry along with everything
else was paralyzed by the Civil War.
But some years after its close a new
impetus was given the textile][business
and the manufacture of cotton goods
went forward by leaps and bounds.
Today there are more than one hun-dred
and forty-five cotton mills in the
State, with a combined annual output
valued at forty-five million dollars.
It is significant too that during the
years of this remarkable development
and growth of their industry, the tex-tile
manufacturers of Georgia have here
and there, and in ever increasing num-bers,
been turning their attention toward
the improvement of the condition of
their people. Georgia was among the
first if not the leader in welfare work.
We find that as early as 1845 the Put-nam
Manufacturing Company near
Etatonton had built a church and a
school house and that in the latter both
day and night classes were conducted for
the operatives. In this school the Bible
had a conspicuous place.
There has been among Georgia manu-facturers
a general spreading of the
sense of obligation to their employes;
and today welfare work has a large place
in their activities. It is understood
that the North Highlands School at
Columbus is in session the year round
with day and night classes. It is
equipped with kindergarten for the little
children and with a manual training shop
for the boys. Also, the school is equipp-ed
with shower baths, gynmasium,
swings and joggling boards. - The work
at these schools, that at LaGrange and
that in the textile department of the
Georgia School of Technology offers
unusual advantages to boys of ambition.
Last year Georgia was afflicted with
the demoralizing work of the I. W. W,
They pitched their tents near the fac-tories
of the Fulton Bag and Cotton
Company and day by day poured their
venom into the ears of peaceful, happy
employes. In due course of time came
the usual strike. Marion Jackson and
SKY-LAND MAGAZINE 193
others, being stirred by the sight of the
marching strikers and seeing an oppor-tunity
for some sensational rhetoric and
verbal well-doing, took up their pens
against the company.
Nothing was left undone to turn the
tide of popular opinion against the
Fulton Bag and Cotton Company.
Mass meetings were held at which sen-sational
speakers waged windy, wordy
warfare against the manufacturers in
behalf of the striking operatives. Daily
semi-religious, yellow bulletins appeared
in the papers, set in large, scare type and
signed by the executive committee of the
Men and Religion Forward Movement.
There was never a more determined
effort to discredit a large manufacturing
interest and to increase the distance
between employer and employed. Yet
the cry of these sensationalists was
"Unite."
Recently I was in one of the cotton
mills of this State talking to a foreman.
I pulled some letters out of my pocket
and among them happened to be one
from Mr. Oscar Elsas, president of the
Fulton Bag and Cotton Mills. The
man with whom I was talking smiled
when he saw the envelope. "I worked
for those people," he said. "What do
you think of them," I asked. "Finest
people I ever saw, " he replied. "Never
saw people better to their help.
"
It is also true that, while the tents of
the I. W. W. were pitched over against
the mills of the Fulton Bag and Cotton
Company, just over the way could be
seen the attractive welfare buildings
where the company had been spending
large sums of money in educating their
employes and in bettering their social
life. Hardly is it necessary to say that
individual improvement and advance-ment
lie before the mill operative today
if he will avail himself of his opportuni-ties.
And neither is it necessary to say
that the man who serves him is the man
who points out the way to success
and not the man who fills him with dis-content
and hatred towards his employ-er.
The State of Resorts.
NORTH CAROLINA is pre-eminent-ly
the State of resorts. They are
strung out all along the coast. In
the mountains of the State they are
almost without number. And here and
there in almost every section of the Old
North State they will be found. Only a
few more weeks and these popular places
of rest. and recreation will throw open
their doors to the public. Hundreds
and thousands of people, not only from
this State, but from all parts of the
country, will flock to them to spend their
vacations and their summers.
There is something about the North
Carolina spirit that gets into a person,
once spending a season within her
bounds, and draws him back again.
Where is the man, woman or child who
has spent a summer in the land of the
balsam and the long-leaf pine and who
has no desire to return? They all come
back and bring their friends, who have
become enchanted with their stories
and praises of the "land of liberty and
love.
"
What charm thus works upon the
natives of the State to make them love
it better than any land on earth and that
makes the visitor wish to return, our
poets have never told us. Whatever
it is it dwells in the State from one end to
the other. May it not be the wildness
of the waves of Hatteras, the calm of the
Blue Ridge, the song of the pines, the
shade of the oaks and the elms, the blush
of the apple and the peach, the rolling
of the hills, the stretching of the plains,
the blowing of the grain, the singing of
194 SKY-LAND MAGAZINE
the streams, the beauty of the girls and
women, the chivalry of the men and
hospitality of the whole people blending
into one powerful, pleasing, heart and
soul satisfying influence? Be that as
it may, they will come again this year.
And they will be happy. We welcome
them.
A Business Governor.
NORTH CAROLINA'S biggest busi-ness
is North Carolina. All other
enterprises in the State are comprehend-ed
within the State and the conducting
of its business. Yet there will be found
at the head of no business a man except
one of long, thorough training. Where-in
then lies the business shrewdness of
placing the gubernatorial powers in the
hands of a man whose life has been given
over to splitting legal hairs and winning
popular notice through press and public
speeches? Do these things qualify a
man for the governorship of North Caro-lina?
They may develop a man into a
politician. And the degree of his great-ness
is in direct ratio to his ability to
utter the greatest number of words with-out
saying anything and to do the
greatest number of things without
accomplishing anything. Is this the
most desirable type of man to place at
the head of the affairs of the State?
Would it not be better, wiser to place
in the Governor's Mansion at the next
election a business man rather than a
politician? Would the State not fare
better under the administration of a man
of farsighted business acumen than under
that of a machine-building politician?
And the logical business man for the
place is General Julian S. Carr.
General Carr is one of the builders of
North Carolina. He has always been
deeply interested in the development of
his State along all lines. He is a friend
of education, a friend of the poor, a
friend of the prisoner—for whom he
desires more humane treatment—he is
the friend of every movement for the
betterment and upbuilding of the State
and with it all he is a successful business
man. The whisperings of policy and
expediency, as they might affect his
personal career, would fall upon deaf
ears; and General Carr would give to
North Carolina what she has so long
needed—a business administration.
He has served his State well in war and
in peace. He is an able, honored son
today. And his mother has no other to
whom she may point with greater pride
or upon whom she may lean in greater
security.
Large Ruby Deposits.
HAT is said to be the largest
ruby-garnet, rhodolite deposit in
the world is that found at the Great
Ruby Mines Camp of Col. S. A. Jones
in Jackson county, North Carolina.
Expert engineers have stated in their
reports that these mines have a deposit
that will turn out over forty million tons
of one hundred per cent pure high-class
abrasive material.
Colonel Jones is in possession of con-tracts
upon which he would now be de-livering
one thousand tons per annum of
abrasive material to Germany alone had
it not been for the outbreak of the
present war. For twenty-one years he
has struggled to develop these great
deposits and plans are now on foot for
the installing of improved machinery
that will enable him to compete success-fully
with foreign producers and with
the manufacturers .of carborundum at
Niagara.
Col. Jones and his associate, Mr. I. L.
Council, who control these deposits of
abrasive ores, are organizing a new
SKY-LAND MAGAZINE 195
company to develop the mines on a
large scale and expect before the end of
the year to be employing over five
hundred men. It is their hope that
by the last of August they will be turning
out material at the rate of five thousand
tons per annum. The opening of these
mines will mean great things for North
Carolina and will bring into the western
part of the State a new stream of wealth.
^•
The Center of the State.
IN a very vital sense Chapel Hill is
today the hub of North Carolina.
Time was when the State reolved
around the Capitol City. With the
coming of Edward Kidder Graham into
the life and consciousness of the Old
North State, the center of things has
shifted to the State University.
The influence of that institution today
reaches into and affects every section of
the State in a manner other than through
its alumni. Through its extension work
the people of the State feel the power-ful
pulse beats of the institution's
strong, steady, life-giving heart. The
lamps of knowledge lighted and kept
burning there no longer await the coming
of the students. Out into even the
remotest corners of the State they fling
their enlightening rays, and thousands
are walking in a greater light.
Thanks to President Graham for this.
North Carolina is exceedingly fortunate
in having a University President whose
brain has not been lured from the ways
of men by the ignis fatuus of mysticism
and speculation. Dr. Graham has sur-vived
the temptation of distance and the
siren luring of the Unknowable—things
which beset the mental pathway of
every intellectual pilgrim. He has kept
himself close to life; and all his visions
and dreams have been related to the
life of mankind in a practical way—best
of all, to the lives of the people of his
State. And as the years go by, North
Carolinians will come to appreciate
more and more the greatness of Ed-ward
Kidder Graham.
Col. A. B. Andrews.
QUINCE the printing of our last issue
^^ there has passed from our midst
one of the empire builders of the South.
With the death of Col. A. B. Andrews
North Carolina sustains the loss of
one of her greatest sons. So long had
he been with us and so accustomed had
we become to his great achievements that
we hardly realized their significance.
But verily this man was a Titan.
Born a Tar Heel more than seventy-one
years ago, Colonel Andrews devoted
practically his entire life to his native
State, for which he had a passionate
love. Loyalty to North Carolina and a
passion for upbuilding and furthering
her every interest were great motives in
his long, useful life. And today the
entire State, and the western part of
it in particular, owes to the memory of
Colonel Andrews an ever enduring
gratitude.
Entering the Conferderate army as a
lieutenant. Colonel Andrews rendered
his State and the Confederacy brave,
loyal service and came out of the war
with the rank of captain. After the war
he engaged in railroad work and became
superintendent of the Raleigh and Gas-ton
Railway in 1869. This road be-came
a part of the Seaboard Air Line and
Colonel Andrews afterwards occupied
important positions with a number of
roads in this State and Georgia. He
became third vice-president of the
Richmond and Danville road in 1892;
and when this road became the Southern,
196 SKY-LAND MAGAZINE
he was made first vice-president of that
road, which position he held until his
death. During his term of service as
first vice-president of the Southern, the
privilege of taking the presidency of
the road was his; but he declined,
choosing rather to remain in North Caro-lina,
the State which he had helped to
build.
Colonel Andrews was also president
of a number of smaller roads in the
State, which developed under his direct-ing
genius. His greatest service to the
State, however, was the building of the
Western North Carolina railroad across
the Blue Ridge. Through his untiring
energy, enthusiasm and indomitable
will this great enterprise was pushed to
completion in the face of almost insur-mountable
dif^culties; and Western
North Carolina with its resources and its
beauty was transformed almost as if by
magic. This work will ever stand as a
monument to the great man North
Carolina now mourns and as an example
of what courage and perseverance may
accomplish.
To SKY-LAND Readers.
THE management of SKY-LAND
MAGAZINE regrets exceedingly
that no May issue of the ' publication
appeared. Special effort will be made
to prevent a similar occurrence; and all
subscriptions will be continued one
month longer that subscribers may
receive their full number of magazines.
-SI-VIOLETS
By R. E. Walker
Ah! dreaming little violets,
A cluster of blue eyes.
When I behold your loveliness.
What memories arise!
Again she looks into my soul
With tender, wondering eyes.
That caught their softness from the clouds.
Their blueness from the skies.
Again her languid lashes droop.
Her tinted eyelids close;
And in her cheeks there reappear
The blushes of the rose.
Again the perfume of her breath
Like incense from above!
Again her kiss and her caress
And whispers of her love!
Again her sacred bosom's heaving.
Her head upon my breast
;
Again those silent moments when
Our tired hearts found their rest.
And O! sweet violets, bear to her
My heart's own wildest love
With all its dreams more tender than
The heart-thoughts of the dove!
And in her presence offer there
The Great Perfumer's art,
An incense rising to her from
The censor of my heart.
And O! sweet violets, on the breast
Of her who keeps my heart,
With all thy magic plead for me.
Tell her we must not part.
SKY-LAND MAGAZINE 197
SLIGHTING SOUTHERN HISTORY
AND LITERATURE
BY C. W. LIVELY
THE Literary Digest of May 31, 1913,
summarized certain articles under
the heading "Slighting Southern Litera-ture,
" which had appeared earlier in
May in the New York Times. Mrs. Leigh
of Alabama, in one of the articles had
condemmed the textbooks on history and
literature as being unfair to the South.
She especially condemned the textbook
of Brander Matthews on American
literature and claimed by way of com-parison
a place for several Southern
writers equal to that given the leaders
of the North. An anonymous writer
replied to her in the Times and defended
the textbooks. He made the usual
Northern claims that Southern intellect
was turned away from art, science, and
literature and into law and politics by
slavery, and that Southern authors were,
when compared with those of the North,
I "surprisingly imitative.
"
I shall attempt to show that the Old
South has not been treated with fairness
by the Northern textbooks on history;
that she did her full part in education,
religion, science, and art; and that
slavery did not hinder any kind of
intellectual development at the South;
and that the average Northern text
writer on American literature is exceed-ingly
ignorant, or he is almost insolent
in his unfair treatment of Southern
literature.
The anonymous writer of the Times
clearly shows his ignorance of Southern
Hfe and literature, as well as his egotism,
when he refers to what he calls Mrs.
Leigh's "extravagant assertions" as
being "a lurid reflection of milder
claims to the same effect ... by
other Southerners." I am satisfied
that the leading scholars, authors, and
historians of the South are as capable of
forming correct estimates of her people,
their history and literature, as Barrett
Wendell, Stedman, Matthews, the anony-mous
writer of the Times, or any other
person at the North. But I shall cite
evidence in support of my claims from
Boston, where they tell God how to do
things, and from New York.
The average Northern text writer on
history and literature aims to bring
reproach on the early settlers of James-town
by calling them "adventurers,"
"profligate sons of the nobility," etc.,
while the Puritans and Pilgrims are
worshiped as gods and goddesses. If
the Pilgrims were so great and so much
under the control and guidance of the
Almighty, why did they not come to
America at the time the Virginia "adven-turers"
came? They went to Holland
instead. Some of the Pilgrim faith did
go to Maine about that time, but soon
returned because of the hardships en-dured.
After the Virginia "adventur-ers"
had founded a new nation, erected
twin altars to learning and to God,
made permanent homes, established
representative government, explored and
mapped out New England, after they
had sent back to the mother country
glowing accounts of their happiness and
prosperity, and after Dutch neighbors of
the Pilgrims in Holland had settled in
New York and the French had settled in
Canada, the Pilgrims came to settle
near their Dutch neighbors in New York.
198 SKY-LAND MAGAZINE
Regardless of what history says, I am
of the opinion that it took as brave,
noble, and as virtuous, if not more
determined, men to make the first
permanent settlement at Jamestown as
the Pilgrims and Puritans who later came
to New England. John Smith, Percy,
Strachey, Sandys, Hunt, Bucke, Thorpe,
Whitaker, the "apostle of Virginia,"
and their associates deserve as much
admiration and praise as the leaders of
the Pilgrims and Puritans. Because
many of the early settlers at Jamestown
died of disease contracted in the forests
and swamps and of starvation, the
textbooks charge it to their imcompe-tency;
but the large number of deaths
among the Pilgrims is laid to the in-hospitable
climate and treachery of the
Indians.
These textbooks call the stories of
Smith and Pocahontas, the Mecklen-burg
Declaration, and others at the
South mythical; but the stories of
Plymouth Rock, the Charter Oak,
Revere's Ride, and others of New
England, which are heralded as facts,
are at least as doubtful. They tell of
the Boston Tea Party, but fail to men-tion
the tea that was sent to the Southern
ports. A street brawl, which John
Adams and Josiah Quincy defended and
justified, is given much space in the
textbooks as the Boston Massacre;
but the battles of Alamance, Point
Pleasant, Moore's Creek, and other
important events at the South leading up
to the Revolution are not mentioned.
Warren and Hale, New England patriots
are given their well-earned praise; but
Isaac Hayne and John Laurens, of the
South, are forgotten. The aid given the
partiot cause by Robert Morris is
chronicled, but that given by Nelson
and Page, of Virginia, and Ralph Izard,
of South Carolina, is not. Hayne,
Calhoun, and South Carolina are al-ways
condemned for threatening nulli-fication
in 1832; but these textbooks
find no room to condemn such treason-able
and unconstitutional acts at the
North as the Faneuil Hall noninter-course
resolutions, Essex Juntos, "blue
lights", Hartford conventions, and
personal liberty laws. Without reading
the speech of R. Y. Hayne, the text-books
tell us that he was "demolished"
by Webster in the great debate. How-ever,
John Q. Adams said, "Webster
left his argument hanging on a broken
hinge," and the Phildelphia Express
stated what was probably the majority
opinion of Americans at that time when
it said: "I do not think Mr Hayne,
completely overthrew Mr. Webster, but
I am decidedly of the opinion that Mr.
Webster did not overthorw Mr. Hayne. "
It has been the textbooks which have
overthrown Mr. Hayne. Old John
Brown is still looked upon by many
Northern text writers as a saint and
martyr, while John . Wilkes Booth is
classed with Satan. Both of these men
are and always have been looked upon
by the people of the South as criminals
of the same class. Both were guilty of
murder, and Brown was guilty of treason.
The same kind of motive impelled both
of them to their criminal acts.
The South is condemned for trying to
destroy the Union in 1861. There was
no real union when the South seceded.
The religious and political ties which
bind nations together had already been
broken by the North. The personal
liberty laws of the Northern States had
annulled the Constitution and Acts of
Congress. To the abolitionists the
Constitution was a "covenant with death
and a league with hell," because it rec-ognized
and protected slavery.
Many at the North said the Union
was not worth preserving in connec-tion
with the South and slaverv, and
SKY-LAND MAGAZINE 199
urged the Northern States to secede.
The South stood by the Union, the
Constitution, and the laws of the
country for forty years amid all of this
discord, clamor, and confusion, and
finally sought peace and independence.
Though the provocation was a hundred
times as great, the right was denied in
1861 just as it was denied in 1776.
The textbooks condemn the South
because it is claimed that the people
were "aristocratic." But Capt. John
Smith, Nathaniel Bacon, Oglethorpe,
Patrick Henery, Jefferson, Mason, Gads-den,
Marion, Houston, Andrew Jackson,
Lowndes, Nathanial Macon, and their
followers at the South were certainly
more democratic than William Bradford,
Winthrop, the Mathers, Hamilton, Jay,
Adams, Pickering, Cabott, Ames, Web-ster,
Sumner, and their followers at the
North. Aristocrats as well as monarch-ists,
in a governmental sense, believe
in the centralization of the powers of
government. This centralization was
opposed by the South, while the North
generally and New England especially
have been its main defenders.
The textbooks complain of the lack
of progress in the Old South; but South
Carolina, with a smaller population, had
a greater assessed property valuation in
1860 than Massachusetts. From 1791-
1813 five Eastern States exported $299,-
000,000 worth of products, products
mostly from the Southern States first
transferred and then reshipped; while
five Southern States during the same
time exported $509,000,000 worth of
products. The commerce of the South
was prosperous until the tariff acts of the
first third of the last century worked a
discrimination against the South and in
favor of the East. Was not the cry of
New England for a protective tariff
during this time really an admission
that she could no longer support her-self
without the aid of the richer South?
Did not New England thereby admit
that unless she could get government aid
she could not establish manufactories?
It was government aid and not the New
Englander's superior wealth or ability
that made her manufacturers prosper-ous.
When she first called for help,
did not the South respond nobly and
thereby agree to feed, clothe, and
support New England until she could
get a start? The "beggars," as Ran-dolph
called them, continually insisted
on the increase of the rates until South
Carolina finding herself impoverished
by the tariff, demanded the right to say
how much she could afford to give to
this government charity. The text
writers condemn Calhoun, Hayne, and
South Carolina for that and call New
England great. And, despite the con-tinued
threats of secession and nulli-fication
by New England from the
adoption of the Constitution down to
1861, she has escaped without a stain,
and all of these sins have been charged to
the South.
The textbooks, however, claim that
slavery, agriculture, and aristocracy
hindered the growth in population and
wealth of the Southern States. Slavery,
as well as the free negro, has undoubtedly
turned many of the best immigrants from
the South. But the presence of the
negro, bond and free, in the South was
more the fault of old and New England
than it was of the South. But it would
be just as fair to compare the growth of
Maine with Massachusetts or New
Hampshire with Connecticut or Maine
with Illinois as it would be to compare
Massachusetts with Carolina or Ohio
with Kentucky. Why not compare the
the growth of Canada with the United
States? Was it slavery, aristocracy,
and agriculture which caused the diff-erence
in growth in the North? The
200 SKY-LAND MAGAZINE
South in 1860, with one-fifth of the
population of the country, showed
forty-five per cent of the property valua-tion,
twenty-eight per cent of the bank-ing
capital, and, with one-fourth of the
area, was producing more than one-half
of the agricultural output of the whole
country. She built twice as many miles
of railroad as all the New England and
Middle States combined, and her manu-facturing
interests showed a larger per
cent of growth than the rest of the
country for the same time. The South
was producing her own supplies of corn,
wheat, oats, and live stock; she pro-duced
nearly all of the tobacco, nearly
all of the sugar, all of the cotton, all of
the rice, and most of the fruits that were
then grown in this country. Yet the
textbooks tell us that the Southerners
were developed "only in certain narrow
grooves and that they could think in
no others." They say the farmer at
the South who produced cotton became
a narrow-minded aristocrat, but the
manufacturer of cotton in New England
became a broad-minded democrat; that
farming in the South retarded the pro-gress
of that section, while farming in the
Middle West was a great boon to pro-gress;
that men who worked fifty
servants on their farms at the South were
inferior classes of men, while those who
worked a thousand servants in the mines
and factories of the North became noble
men. There were but few large fac-tories
at the South before the war, but
nearly every home had its wheel and
loom and every community had its
shop where necessary implements were
made. The South, like New England
followed what seemed most profitable.
Let us notice what the Old South did
in the'way of art, science, and invention.
It is doubtful if Eli Whitney should be
given the sole credit for inventing the
cotton gin, as Bull, Lyons, and McCloud,
of Georgia, seem to be equally entitled
to the honor. McCormick, of Virginia,
invented the reaper and mower, though
he is rarely mentioned. M. F. Maury,
of Virginia, "furnished the brains" and
told Field how and where to lay the
Atlantic cable. Humboldt and other
great men of Europe called Maury one
of the world's leading scientists and
benefactors, but the Northern text
writers have not heard of him. James
Rumsey, of Virginia, invented the steam-boat,
and not Fulton, of the North.
ShafTner, of Virginia, Rogers, of Mary-land,
and Vail, of New Jersey, deserve
as much credit for inventing the tele-graph
as Morse, of Massachusetts. The
textbooks always tell of Ericsson and
the Monitor, but fail to tell of John M.
Brooke, of Virginia, who invented the
deep-sea sounding vessel and was the
builder of the Merrimac, the first iron-clad
battleship and which defeated the
Monitor. Jefferson invented the modern
plow. Gatling, of North Carolina,
invented the famous gatling gun.
Goulding, of Georgia, has a better
right to the honor of inventing the sew-ing
machine than Howe, of New Eng-land,
though the textbooks do not
mention him. Crawford Long, of
Georgia, was the first in the world to
use anaesthetics in surgical operations,
though the textbooks continue to give
the honor of it to Morton and Wells,
of Massachusetts. Marion Sims, of
South Carolina, and Ephriam McDowell
and Walter Reed, of Virginia, were
among the greatest physicians and
surgeons of their time. Coleridge called
Washington Allston, poet and painter of
Carolina, "the first genius produced by
the Western world. " Cooper, of South
Carolina, was called the "Father of
Political Economy in America." Ram-sey's
"History of South Carolina in the
Revolution" was the first book copy-
SKY-LAND MAGAZINE 201
righted in the United States. Debow,
of Louisiana, was a famous statistician
and economist. W. C. Wells, of Caro-lina,
preceded Darwin in formulating the
theory of natural selection and was the
first to announce the present accepted
theory of dew. Joseph Winlock, of
Kentucky, was among our greatest
astronomers. Thomas Godfrey, of
North Carolina, was our first dramatist;
while Stephen Elliott, Joel Poinsett,
and H. W. Ravenal were great botanists;
Shaler, of Kentucky, was our greatest
geologist; and J. E. Holbrook, of South
Carolina, was considered by Agassiz
and other scientists of Europe our
greatest biologist. Robert Mills, of
South Carolina, was the architect of the
Bunker Hill and Washington monuments
as well as many of the nation's finest
buildings. Thomas R. Dew, of Vir-ginia,
was an able sociologist. Edwin
Ruffiin, of Virginia, was a pioneer in
scientific agriculture; and Ettienne de
Bore, of Louisana, was the first in
America to manufacture sugar from
cane. America has not produced a
greater family of scientists than the
LeConte family, of Georgia; no natura-list
has equaled Audubon, of Louisiana;
while Paul Du Chaillu, of the same
State, was one of our greatest explorers
and scientists. Basil Gildersleeve and
Milton W. Humphrey, of the South,
have not been surpassed at the North as
Greek and Latin scholars. Thomas
Jefferson, W. A. Caruthers, A. D.
Murphy, Calvin H. Wiley, Crafts, Le-gare.
Meek, Dimitry, and others at the
South were equaled only by Horace
Mann, of Massachusetts, as educational
reformers. Such preachers as Waddell,
Madison, Meade, Dabney, Semple,
Thornwell, Hoge, Palmer, Robert Henry,
the Alexanders of Virginia, Manley,
Pierce, Asbury, F. L. Hawks, Dagg,
Broaddus, Jesse Mercer, Curry, William
Hopper, and many others at the South
were not surpassed by any at the North
in piety, learning, or ability. Sequoyah,
the greatest American Indian, was born
in the South, and Booker T. Washington,
the greatest man of his race, was born in
slavery at the South and educated in
Southern schools.
For the benefit of the Northern text
writers who have' claimed that the South
has not made any contrubutions to the
intellectual output of the country, it
would be well for them to examine the
birthplace and works of R. W. Gibbes,
Brantz and A. M. Mayer, William Max-well,
J. C. Nott, E. S. Holden, W. H.
Holcombe, John Allen Wyeck, Robert
Greenhow, F. P. Porcher, G. H. Miles,
L. P. Canonge, W. A. Graham, William
Mumford, Archibald Alexander, Alex-ander
Means, J. R. and O. M. Mitchell,
Peter Cartwright, Joseph and Joseph R.
Buchanan, Henery Draper, Cyrus
Thomas, J. L. Shecut, A. S. Taylor,
Gideon Lincecum, Buckingham Smith,
PhiHp Slaughter, T. P. Shaffner, J. L.
Smith, J. H. B. Latrobe, J. B. Minor,
Thomas R. Price, G. S. Bedford, S. W.
Price, Mahlon Loomis, G. H. Calvert,
J. G. McCullough, Thomas and Samuel
MuUody, Francis L. Hawks, Lorenzo
Waugh, Joseph Ray, Max Somerville,
C. P. Cranch, M. D. Conway, Devereaux
Jarratt, John H. Wheeler, Joseph Gales,
Charles Eraser, and many others.
The first American steamship to cross
the ocean was projected at and sailed
from Savannah, Ga. ; the first railroads of
the country were built in Maryland and
South Carolina. The South Carolina
railroad was the first in the world built
expressly for locomotives, the first in
America to have locomotives built for
its own use, also the first to order loco-motives
built in the community by its
own mechanics and citizens. During
the first half of the last centurv the South
202 SKY-LAND MAGAZINE
created an agricultural industry which
represented more brain power, more
business ability, and more capital than
were required to develop the industrial
interests of New England. It not only
dominated the finance, politics, and
commerce of this country, but also
greatly influenced those of Europe.
Other names and achievements might
easily be added, but tliose given should
be sufficient to show that the reproach of
intellectual sterility urged against the
Old South does not lie so heavily as is
often thought and taught by the text-books
and other works from the North
on history and literature. The tenth
edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica,
Volume A., page 719,, expresses the
common Northern impression of the
Old South. It says: "the few thinkers
born south of the Mason and Dixon line,
outnumbered by those belonging to the
single State of Massachusetts, have
commonly emigrated to New York and
Boston in search of a university training.
Nor is it too much to say that mainly
by their connection with the North the
Carolinas have been saved from sinking
to the level of Mexico or the Antilles."
Every well-informed American knows
that that statement is false, and he
further knows that the nearest any
Southern State ever came to sinking to
the level of Mexico or the Antilles was
while the "college-bred men," "Chris-tians,"
and politicians from the North
controlled the afl^airs of the South dur-ing
Reconstruction. It is generally ad-mitted
that the South now has its full
portion of intelligence. Does any one
suppose that Sherman's march to the
sea, Sheridan's campaign in the Valley
of Virginia, Butler's conduct in New
Orleans and reconstruction suddenly
brought about an intellectual, education-al,
moral, and literary cataclysm at the
South? We know that the war greatly
retarded all lines of development and
growth. The manufacturing progress
of the Old South was slower than that of
the Eastern States because it w^as a
natural growth and not fostered by
sectional laws. More than that, the
negro kept a splendid immigration to
this country away from the South. He
kept them away then and keeps them
away now, and the negro is unfit for
manufacturing labor.
Now let us see what the textbooks say
of education and relation in the South
before the War between the States.
Abernathy, speaking of colonial times in
his "American Literature," says, "Ed-ucation
and religion were as thoroughly
neglected in Virginia as they were
thoroughly cultivated in Massachusetts"
and Ashley's "American History" says:
"Education was systematically neglect-ed
at the South before the Civil War."
These two will serve as good examples,
and both are recent.
Before Pilgrim or Puritan set foot on
Massachusetts soil, the colonists at
Jamestown, with the aid of English
friends, had established Henrico College
and were building a preparatory school
at Charles City. Both schools were free
to whites and Indians, and both were
destroyed by the Indian massacre of
1622; but this alone shows that the
colonists were interested in education.
As to religion, "their first act on landing
was to arrange a place to worship. They
stretched a sail from the boughs of two
adjacent trees, and here they had ser-vices
morning and evening." Some of
the Southern people later drank, played
cards, and bet on races, just as they did
and do in the other sections; but that
was no more a sign of irreligion than it
was for the Puritans to burn witches at
the stake, cut ofif Quakers' tongues and
ears, and drive out Baptists and others
who thought differently about religion.
SKY-LAND MAGAZINE 203
The Southerners probably thought more
of the mercies of the Father than of the
vengeance of the Judge. It is counted
deep rehgious feeHng and a high grade of
civiHzation in the early New Englanders
when they cut off the head of King
Philip and placed it upon a pole and sold
his wife and son into slavery; but it is a
sure sign of irreligion and a low order of
civilization in the early Southerners to
play cards, bet on races, or take a drink.
Probably they did not drink New Eng-land
rum. If not, of course it was
wrong.
A pamphlet published in London in
1649 and quoted at length by Fiske, of
Massachusetts, in his "Old Virginia and
Her Neighbors" says: " I may not forget
to tell you that we have a free school,
with two hundred acres of land, a fine
house upon it, forty milch kine, and other
accommodations; other petty schools
also we have. " After naming a number
of early free schools of note established
in Virginia, Fiske again says: "Indeed,
there was after 1649 a considerable
amount of compulsory primary educa-tion
in Virginia, much more than has
generally been supposed, since the
records of it have been buried in the
parish vestry books." Philip A. Bruce,
in his "Economic History of Virginia,"
says: "One of the duties to be performed
on the part of the master was to teach
his youthful servants so that they could
read a chapter in the Bible, the Lord's
Prayer, and the Ten Commandments,"
The early Virginians were indeed a
peculiar people if they bound them-selves
to do these things for their
indentured servants and neglected their
own children. Fiske admits that it is
customary for "historical writers to
make too much of the contrast between
the New England schools and those
of the South" and says the "country
schools of New England rarely ever
taught more than to read, write, and
cipher.
"
^
Schools at that time were almost en-tirely
under the control of the Churches.
Each community built its schoolhouse
and hired its teacher much in the same
manner that churches and preachers
are now provided. The system was
crude and the teachers often ignorant
and incompetent. The old field school,
the parish school, or the charity school
was generally present in every neighbor-hood
in the South. Washington, Jack-son,
Grundy, Crockett, Sevier, and other
early frontiersmen had some advantages
even near the borders of civilization.
But, except in a few of the larger towns
of the country in New England, as well
as in the other colonies, free public
schools were looked upon as charitable
institutions, maintained for those who
were too poor to pay tuition, and
wherever possible "rate bills," or coal
taxes, were assessed on all families send-ing
children to these schools. As late
as 1865 rate bills were collected in New
York, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New
Jersey, and other Northern States, and
the practice did not wholly disappear
until 1871.
The textbooks try to leave the im-pression
that great improvements in
the South were brought about by the
abolition of slavery and the influence
of the North during Reconstruction.
But in the ten years from 1850 to 1860
the number of persons at school increased
forty-eight per cent in the South and
fifty per cent in the rest of the country,
and it may be of interest to those who do
not write textbooks to know that in
1860 there were in the free public schools
of the South 781,199 Southern children,
to say nothing of the many children in
home schools, representing one or more
families, enjoying the benefits of one
tutor or governess. This last was a
204 SKY-LAND MAGAZINE
marked feature of education in the South
from earliest times down to the War
between the States. At the same time
the South had one church building to
every three hundred and thirty-three
of her white population, or one to
every five hundred and twenty-eight
of her total population ; while the rest of
the country had one church building to
every six hundred and sixteen of her
total population. These comparisons
ought to silence ignorance and ignora-muses
everywhere on these questions of
education and religion. The statutes
of the different Southern States show
that they had in force long before the
war provisions for free schools. Their
greatest fault was that they were per-missive
rather than compulsory. But
effective compulsory education has
grown up everywhere in this country
since 1860. Of course it was just as
impossible to have good free schools for
all of the people in the rural districts
at the South as it was to have them for
Franklin, Whittier, and Garrison in
Massachusetts, Webster in New Hamp-shire,
old John Brown, in Conneticut,
Brigham Young in Vermont, Garfield in
Ohio, Lincoln in Illinois, or to have better
conditions than faced the "Hoosier
Schoolmaster" in Indiana, or to always
have better teachers than the Ichabod
Cranes of New England and New York.
Just as many men rose to prominence
from the frontier and from among the
poor at the South as in any other section.
Jefferson and Calhoun came from the
democratic West of their day. Patrick
Henry, Henry Clay, Boone, Sevier,
Robertson, the Clarkes, Sam Houston,
Jackson, Farragut, Lincoln, JeiTerson
Davis, Stephens, Benjamin, Forrest,
Stonewall Jackson, and Simms are the
names of a few of the many Southerners
who rose to prominence from among the
poor people. The "aristocracy of the
South" did not hinder their progress or
rise. The charity-educated Alexander
Stephens and the wealthy Toombs were
the best of friends. Lee, the last of the
Cavaliers, called the poor mountain-born
Jackson his "right arm". It was
character and brains that counted in the
South and not wealth or a college degree.
There certainly was not the ignorance in
the Old South, that is generally believed
to have existed. The South held her
own right well against her Northern
antagonists, and ignorance is no longer,
if it ever was, considered an asset in war.
Of the higher institutions of learning,
W^illiam and- Mary College was the best
and richest of all the Colonial schools.
Later it was overshadowed by the
University of Virginia, the first American
university. Such scholarly and able
men as Washington, Henry, Mason,
Pendleton, Wythe, Jefferson, Madison,
Monroe, Marshall, Taney, the Tuckers,
Poe, Legare, Simms, Kennedy, the
Haynes, Gildersleeve, Lanier, Minor,
and many others are sufficient evidence
that it was not "necessary to emigrate
to New York or to Boston in search of a
university training." Phillips Brooks,
the great Boston preacher, was educated
in Virginia. Is that evidence that there
were no schools in New England? The
large number of Southern teachers and
students at Princeton caused it to be
looked upon by many Presbyterians at
the South as a Southern school, while
Southern Federalists often went to
Harvard College, the home of Federa-lism.
The colleges and universities of
this country are certainly better than
they were prior to the war in the sixties,
yet more people go to Europe to school
than ever before. Is that evidence that
we have no place to get a university
training in this country?
Transylvania College, in Kentucky,
was the first school of higher learning
SKY-LAND MAGAZINE 205
west of the mountains; the Wesleyan
Female College, founded by Bishop
Pierce in Georgia, was the first institu-tion
in the world for the higher education
of women giving a degree. Waddell's
Willington Academy, in South Carolina,
was a sort of American Eton or Rugby.
There Calhoun was so well prepared that
he entered the junior class at Yale
College and finished the course with the
highest honors. Hugh S. Legare, W. H.
Crawford, Judge Longstreet, McDuffie,
Petigru, W. J. Grayson, Wardlaw, and
many others were prepared for higher
courses at this famous institution.
While the scattered population at the
South retarded efficient district schools
in many places where needed, it was a
land of famous academies and was the
forerunner of the present theory of
centralization of schools. Virgil A.
Lewis, in his "History of Education in
West Virginia," names more than sixty
academies which had been established
in that part of Virginia before the war.
%_ Prince Murat, of France, said that he
found the "best and most cultured
society in Charleston, S. C, that he had
ever met on either side of the Atlantic.
"
The Toronto Mail and Express, of
Canada, recently said that the South
I "was regaining some of the lost dignity
and fame of the Southern States, where,
sixty years ago, education and culture
were in a state much in advance of any-thing
that any other part of America
had to offer." There is no reason to
believe that these outside views came
f from partial judges.
r If the schools of New England have
always been perfect, why give Horace
Mann a reputation as an educational
reformer? Brander Matthews, of New
York, speaks of the defective educational
advantages of Irving, Cooper, Bryant,
Hawthorne, Emerson, and other leading
literary men and scholars at the North,
and says: "Harvard College was no
more than a high school when Emerson
left it in 1820." Matthew Page An-drews,
in writing of Colonial New Eng-land,
says: "People sat in church
according to their rank and social
position, beginning with the upper
classes in the front pews to the humbler
folk in the rear. The same rule applied
to students at college, and for more than
one hundred years the Harvard cata-logue
listed its students, not in alpha-betical
order, but according to their
recognized social position." W'as this
democracy in New England? It would
be called rank aristocracy at the South
by the textbooks. Josh Billings must
have had the Northern text writers in
mind when he said: "It is better to
know less than to know so much that
ain't so.
"
The Northern textbooks on history
and literature and the Times writer tell
us that the Southern intellect was turned
away from art, science, and literature
and into law and politics as a result of
defending slavery. We know that the
South before 1860 did take the lead in
the political affairs of the country as
well as in the extension of its territory
and in fighting its battles. We admit
that such lawyers as Rutledge, Wythe,
Henry, Marshall, Wirt, Pinkney, Grun-dy,
Legare, Petigru, the Tuckers, Ben-jamin,
Toombs, Cobb, Stephens, and
others at the South were among the very
leaders of the profession in this country.
We are aware of the fact that Lincoln,
Andrew Johnson, Scott, Farragut,
Thomas, Fremont, Captain Winslow,
and others were furnished to the North
by the South in the War between the
States. But there must have been
virtue and intelligence in this Southern
leadership somewhere. The North,
with her greater population, would not
have accepted nor permitted it had it
206 SKY-LAND MAGAZINE
been inferior either mentally or morally
But we deny that slavery hindered art,
science, or literature at the South.
Was not the Northern mind as much
occupied in trying to destroy slavery,
the Constitution, and the Union as the
Southern mind was in defending them?
Did slavery hinder art, science, educa-tion,
or literature in Greece or Rome?
Were not the morals better and the
masters less severe in the Old South than
they were in any of the older countries
during their golden ages? Were not the
morals better and the masters less
severe in the Old South than they now
are in the great industrial centers of
this or any other country? Has there
not been more suffering, sorrow, and
cruelty, more brutality, bloodshed, and
barbarism within the past three years
in the industrial strikes in Michigan,
West Virginia, Colorado, California, and
Lawrence, Mass., than during the entire
existence of slavery at the South?
If it was slavery that hindered literature
in the South, what is it that hinders
literature now in New England?
Where are the Emersons, Hawthornes,
Longfellows, and Lowells of the present
New England? Has the intellect of the
present New Englander become like
that of his native soil, exhausted by
overcultivation ?
The Times writer denies the South the
right to claim John Smith as a Southern
writer, because he was English-born and
because he is no longer read. We
admit this if Ann Bradstreet, Wiggles-worth,
Bradford, Winthrop, Sewell, and
other early New Englanders are eliminat-ed
from the textbooks for the same rea-sons.
If they are not, equal space
ought to be given to Strachey, Sandys,
Alsop, R. Rich, Stith, Blair, Percy, Law-son,
and other early Southerners. The
first piece of literature of merit produced
in America was a partial translation of
Ovid's "Metamorphoses" by George
Sandys at Jamestown, Va. The best
and most original poem produced in the
colonies before the Revolution was
Bacon's "Epitaph by a Virginian."'
The works of James Blair, Beverly, and
Byrd compare favorably with those of
Mather, Prince, and Franklin. These
Southerners are rarely if ever mentioned
in the Northern textbooks. Aber-nathy
gives more space in his "Ameri-can
Literature" to Franklin, though he
admits that he was not a literary man,
than to Washington, Mason Jefferson,.
Madison, Marhsall, Bland, the Lees,
Randolph, Henry, Laurens, Middleton,.
the Draytons, Rutledge, the Pickneys^
Moultrie, Gadsden, Maurice Moore,
Ephriam Brevard, and other contem-porary
Southerners, all combined. In
fact, most of them are not mentioned.
All were great patriots, all wrote in-teresting
things, and several of
them deserve as much space in a work on
American literature as Franklin.
American literature proper begins
with Irving and includes at the North
Cooper, Bryant, Emerson, Whittier,.
Longfellow, Holmes, Lowell, and possi-bly
Whitman as leaders. At the South
equals and as contemporaries were
Kennedy, Simms, Poe, Timrod, Hayne,.
Cooke, Ryan, and Lanier. All of these
Southern writers except Lanier had made
distinct contributions to literature before
the war, as also had Drayton, Ram-sey,
Claiborne, Bishop Meade, Marshall,
Pickett, the Tuckers, Gayarre, Goudling,
F. O. Ticknor, Meek, Leagre, J. J.
Hooper, Weems, Rives, Garland, Audu-bon,
Poinsette, Elliott, Canonge, Mer-cier,
Howison, W. H. Trescott, Maury,
Judge Longstreet, Babgy, Hope, Caru-thers,
Strother, Benton, Wirt, J. R..
Thompson, Burke, and many others.
Most of the Northern group greatly
increased their fame and productions
SKY-LAND MAGAZINE 207
after 1860; while Longfellow, Emerson,
Whittier, Lowell, Holmes, and Whitman
all outlived Lanier, the youngest of the
Southern group, and all these, except
Longfellow and Emerson, outlived
Hayne, Cooke, and Ryan, the last of
the Southern group. Lanier, the young-est
of the Southern group, received his
inspiration, training, and culture under
the Old South and fought to maintain
her institutions.
A careful examination of the literature
of the Old South will show that nowhere
outside of Massachusetts at the North
was there deeper interest or greater
activity in literature than in Virginia
and South Carolina. Louisiana was not
far behind, but a large part of her
literature was in the French language.
There was as much literary activity in
North Carolina as was to be found in
Rhode Island, as much in Georgia as
was to be found in Connecticut, as much
in Alabama as was to be found in Ohio,
and as much in Tennessee or Texas as
was to be found in Illinois or Michigan.
No higher standards of criticism were
offered in the North American Review
or Atlantic Monthly than were to be
found in the Southern Literary Mes-senger
and the Charleston Magazines.
Poe, Simms, Legare, Thompson, G. H.
Miles, Hayne, Lanier, and others at the
South equaled the very leaders at the
North in sound literary criticism. Ham-ilton
W. Mabie, of New York, admits
that "the love of letters for their own
sake was probably stronger in the Old
South than in New England, where
ethical and religious questions made
literature as literature a matter of
secondary importance". But the
Northern textbooks on history and
literature, as well as the publishers
generally, have seemingly conspired
together to suppress the truth about the
South's contributions to art, science, and
literature. They tried to do the same
thing with Poe and filled their halls of
fame with many less worthy from the
North until the outside world rescued
him from the conspiracy. The text-books
always speak of the intemperance
of Poe, but they do not take this into
account when Webster is compared to
Calhoun and Hayne. Regardless of
Webster's intemperance, loose morals,
and inconsistencies, he is given more
space in the textbooks and selections of
orations than all of the Southern orators
and statesmen, from Washington to
Grady, combined.
The very fact that most of the leading
literary men of the South led more
strictly literary lives than their Northern
contemporaries ought to give them a
distinguished if not a unique place in
American literature. Few men up to
that time in this country had tried to
live by pure literature alone; but Poe,
Simms, Hayne, Timrod, Cooke, and
we might almost say, Lanier hardly ever
earned a dollar except by their literary
products and at times under the most
trying circumstances. Irving, Emerson
Longfellow, Bryant, Hawthorne, Lowell,
and other leaders at the North had other
professions, were antislavery agitators,
editors, or held political posts under the
government. There existed at that
time in the North, as well as at the
South, a sentiment against authorship
as a profession, and Irving, Bryant,
Lowell, and others at the North began
their careers as lawyers.
When we remember that America has
no very great literature, that we have
not produced a real national poet unless
it be Poe, that New England has not
produced an author of the first or second
rank of world writers, and that we have
overlooked much that is weak in the
leading writers of the North and have
written and spoken of their works with
208 SKY-LAND MAGAZINE
much charity, we will be much better
able to arrive at a fair estimate of the
South's literature.
The charge that the Southern writers
are, when compared to the writers of the
North, "suprisingly imitative" is an
unjust charge and without foundation.
Tennyson well said: "Your Bryant,
Whittier, and others are pigmies com-pared
with Poe. He is the literary glory
of America." A careful comparative
study will show that there is more
imitation in Longfellow's works than in
the works of Paul Hayne, as much imi-tation
in the works of Bryant and
Holmes as there is in the works of Timrod
and Ryan, and there is as much imitation
in the works of Emerson or Lowell as
there is in Lanier's works. Of the three
real original American poets—Poe,
Whitman, and Lanier—the South has
furnished two. And the influence of
Poe on American as well as European
literature is greater than that of all other
American writers combined. Kennedy,
Simms, and Cooke were no worse, in
their imitation than Irving and Cooper.
These prose writers, North and South,
were influenced by English writers, but
each had his original qualities. Though
Kenedy wrote less, he wrote as well as
Irving; while Simms rarely fell below
Cooper and often surpassed him.
Simms certainly surpassed Cooper in
range, versatility and productiveness,
as he often did in \'ivid description and in
the faithful portrayal of Indian char-acter.
Both wrote too much to write
with great care. Trent, the biographer
of Simms, has been to him what Gris-wold
was to Poe. He condemms the
South, and especially Carolina, for her
neglect of Simms and all along says that
Simms was not worth noticing. He
makes light of the poetry of Simms and
proceeds to give us much worse poetry of
his own. He forgets that Irving, Cooper
Hawthorne, and other Northern writers
complained of the North's neglect of
their efforts. The South, with its small
white population, could hardly be ex-pected
to support an extensive litera-ture.
Besides, the South's wider knowl-edge
of the best of European literature
made her more critical than the North.
The Southern critic never compared our
literary men to the leaders of Europe,
because her literary tastes were better;
while New England compares Whittier
to Burns, Longfellow to Tennyson
Emerson to Plato, and Lowell to Carlyle.
Of course these are childish comparisons.
The time has come when there ought
to be an honest comparative study of
the literature of the Old South, not with
that of England, but with that of the
North. Compare Paul H. Hayne with
Longfellow and Bryant, Timrod with
Bryant and Whittier, and Lanier with
Emerson and Lowell. The poetry of
the South is generally aesthetic or poli-tical
in motive, while that of the North
is more often ethical or religious. Both
love nature, but the South touches its
brighter side ; while the North, influenced
by Puritianism, swelld on its gloomier
aspects. Theology, transcendenatlism,
and slavery in turn dominated the
literature of the North, while the leading
Southern writers stand out in strong
isolated individuality. The Southern
poets did not aspire to the role of social
or religious reformers. Their only ties
were a common love for their country
and a devotion to art. For this reason
we may well call them more cosmopo-politan
than the Northern group.
"Profound meditativeness " often men-tioned
by the text writers in connection
with the leaders at the North, is not a
quality belonging to any of our poets.
None of them have drunk ever "deep,"
Hayne is at times pensive, but so are
both Longfellow and Bryant. He is at
I SKY-LAND MAGAZINE 209
times diffuse, probably his greatest
fault, but both Longfellow and Bryant
are diffuse. Hanye is rarely oratory,
while both Bryant and Longfellow often
preach. Hayne certainly surpasses
either Longfellow or Bryant as a sonnet
writer, and he used the sonnet to splen-did
effect in restraint of his diffuseness.
Hayne has other faults, but, excluding
Poe, they were common to the best of
the times in this country. No other
contemporary American poet, however,
touched nature so often and so well as
Hayne. It was this phase of his work
that caused Onderdonk to call him the
"Woodland Minstrel of America."
Ludwig Lewisohn calls Hayne's "Dap-hels"
the "finest narrative poem ever
written in this country." So does
Jerome Stockard. Hubner, in his "Rep-resentative
Southern Poets," says:
"Tennyson spoke of him as the finest
sonnet writer in America, Grimm of
Germany praised him enthusiastically,
and Victor Hugo placed him in the front
rank of American poets." Painter, in
his "Poets of the South," places Tim-rod,
Hanye, and Lanier with the best in
this country; while Wauchope, in his
"Writers of South Carolina," considers
Hayne and Timrod in the front rank of
American poets. Maurice Thompson,
in speaking of Copse Hill, the home of
Hayne after the war, says: "You cannot
realize that here lives one of the most
famous poets in the world, Paul H.
Hayne, the friend and peer of Longfellow
Holmes, and Whittier. " Whipple, of
Boston, praised the poetry of Hayne
enthusiastically and compared him to
William Morris, of England. In in-dorsing
what Whippel had said, Bryant
wrote: "This is very high praise, but it
is well merited, and Mr Hayne is even
more happy in his lyrical than in his
narrative poems. Grace, tenderness,
and truth are characteristic of them all.
"
Abernathy, of New York, in his
"Southern Poets," says: "No list of
American poets can be complete without
the names of Timrod, Hayne, and Lanier
and no school serves the interest of its
pupils properly that fails to introduce
them to these poets with the other
accepted poets of our land." He also
gives them a place in his recent "Ameri-can
Literature," and, while fair, he is
entirely too brief. Longfellow said:
"The time will surely come when Tim-rod's
poems will have a place in every
home of culture in our country. " Ham-ilton
W. Mabie, in an editorial in the
Outlook for December 2, 1899, approved
what Professor Thornton, of the Uni-versity
of Virginia, had said in claiming
for Poe, Timrod, and Lanier a place in
"American Literature" equal to that
given to Longfellow, Bryant, and Whit-tier.
In Volume LXVIII. of the Out-look
Mr. Mabie again says: "The
provincialism of thought in Timrod
disappears, the thinness of temper-ment
in Emerson, the rigidity of
Bryant, the lack of variety in Whittier,
the didacticism of Lowell—all these
elements of weakness in American poetry
disappear in the large elemental move-ment
of imagination in the 'Marshes of
Glynn' by Lanier." He also calls
Timrod's "Cotton Boll" and Lanier's
"Sunrise" "among the most original
achievements in American poetry."
Many leading critics in this country and
in Europe consider Lanier, after Poe,
America's greatest poet.
The poetry of Ryan has been less
frequently touched by the critics. He
is, like Longfellow, a household poet and
is more generally read than any other
poet from the South except Poe. His
poetry was generally simple, clear,
spontaneous, and full of melody. The
fact that his poems have passed into
210 SKY-LAND MAGAZINE
numerous editions is evidence of their
popularity.
Now let us see how the Northern
textbooks on American literature have
treated these leading Southern writers.
Mrs. Leigh was. certainly justified in
condemning the textbook of Brander
Matthews on American literature as
being unfair to the South. He treats
Lanier and Timrod together and gives
them three lines, but does not even men-tion
Paul Hayne or Ryan. On the
other hand, he gives the author of
"Uncle Tom's Cabin" one whole page.
Mrs Stowe certainly does not deserve
any more space in a textbook on Ameri-can
literature than the author of
"Leopard's Spots." Matthews gives
Halleck, Drake, and Thoreau ten pages
each and Cooper thirteen pages, while
he gives Simms only four lines. He
gives Irving sixteen pages and only three
lines to Kennedy. Matthews is a good
example, and his book is complete
evidence that some of the Northern
schools are yet in a bad way for. lack of
efficient, unselfish, and broad-minded
teachers.
Stedman, from whom most of the
others have copied, Wendell, Richardson,
Pancoast, Patee, Noble, Irish, Painter,
Beers, Hawthorne, Newcomer, Smiley,
Trent and Abernathy are the names of a
few text writers who show this same
spirit. Most of these text writers follow
some old out-of-date anthology, en-cyclopedia,
or textbook written when
sectional hate at the North was too
strong to brook anything like fairness.
I seriously doubt if ten per cent of them
ever read a dozen pages each from the
works of Kennedy, Simms, Hayne,
Timrod, or Cooke, and but few have
studied Lanier. Abernathy, one of the
fairest and one of the most recent, gives
all Southern writers about forty pages in
a textbook of five hundred pages. He
gives Franklin as much space as he gives
Poe. He gives Simms two pages, while
he gives Thoreau five and Cooper eleven.
He gives Webster eleven pages and Clay
and Calhoun together about three lines.
He gives Everett, Choate, Phillips, and
Sumner about one page each and does
not even mention Lowndes, Cheeves,
Randolph, Legare, W. C. Preston, Ben-ton,
R. Y. Hayne, Petigru, McDuffie,
Davis, Toombs, Stephens, Benjamin
Hill, Benjamin, Yancey, Lamar, Curry,
Gordon, or Grady. Though he speaks
of the present writers of the South as
"representing the finest story-telling
of our times," he gives Howells, of New
York, more space than all of them com-bined.
Even if Cooke did say that
Howells and the realists had superseded
him in public favor as a novelist, I still
prefer his "Virginia Comedians" to any-thing
Howells ever wrote. There has
been a reaction against the realists as
well as the idealists.
Stedman gives Timrod and Hayne
about five lines each, while he gives
Whitman fifty pages. Wendell gives
Hayne one page, Homles seventeen, and
Whittier eleven; he gives Simms two
pages and Brocden Brown eleven pages.
Richardson gives Simms four pages and
Cooper forty. "Masterpieces of Ameri-can
Literature," a book used as a text,
has no place for even Poe, but includes
O'Reilly's poem on the "angelic" Puri-tans.
Newcomer, from the West, while
he warns us in his preface against the lo-cal
and personal influences of the Eastern
authors on the Eastern text writers, is
equally unfair to the South. He gives
Bayard Taylor as much space as he gives
Hayne, Timrod, and Lanier combined;
while he gives Brocden Brown six pages.
Thoreau eleven and only ten lines to
Simms. This sectionalism and ignor-ance
does not stop with the textbooks;
it is found in nearlv all the works on his-
SKY-LAND MAGAZINE 211
tory and literature which emanate from
-the North. The New International
Encyclopedia gives as much space to
John Brown, the traitor and murderer,
as it gives to Toombs, Yancey, or Alex-ander
Stephens ; it gives as much space to
John L. Sullivan, the Boston prize fighter
as it gives to Zeb Vance or Henry W.
Grady, and has no place for such authors
as William J. Grayson and James Bar-ron
Hope. This work is a living monu-ment
to the literary tastes and scholar-ship
of its editors. The Columbia En-cyclopedia
gives as much space to old
John Brown as it gives to Jefferson
Davis. These are but a few instances
that might be mentioned and are good
examples of the scholarship, patriotism,
and broad-mindedness of people who
claim to be the only true lovers of the
Union.
It will appear from the few estimates
of the many that might be given that
there is at least a difference of opinion
as to the place the leading Southern
writers ought to have in our literature.
The same difference of opinion exists as
to Whitman, but he is laways treated at
length, even by his enemies. This
slighting Southern literature comes, I
believe, chiefly from pure ignorance. I
will venture to say that at least ninety
per cent of the teachers and students at
the North, all the way from the public
schools to the universities, have never
even heard the names of a majority of
these leading Southern writers. Yet
the Northern text writers, teachers, and
college men, like the old darky's politi-cian,
"give themselves pow'ful reputa-tions"
as scholars.
A textbook which finds a place to dis-cuss
such poets as Freneau, Halleck,
Drake, Story, Woodworth, Willis, Read
Stedman, Aldrich, Gilder, Holland, Hay,
Carleton, and others at the North should
give equal space to Richard Dabney.
William Mumford, Pickney, Shaw, Key,
W. J. Grayson, Wilde, F. O. Ticknor,
Meek, O'Hara, L. P. Canonge, A. Mer-cier,
Hope, J. R. and Maurice Thomp-son,
G. H. Miles, T. A. S. Adams, Ran-dall,
Chivers, Reuqier, Flash, the Tou-quettes,
Irwin Russell, T. H. Hill,
Bonner, and others from the South.
There is no more imitation in the works
of the minor Southern writers than in the
works of the minor writers of the North.
Grayson's "Chicora" and Meek's "Red
Eagle" are the second and third best
poems on the American Indian, though
both are nearly unknown. The works
of St. George Tucker, George H. Tucker,
William Elliott, Wirt, Caruthers, F. R.
Goulding, Weems, Strother (Porte Cra-yon),
and others at the South are as good
and as interesting as the works of Broc-den
Brown, Thoreau, Dana Hale, Boker
Mitchell, and others at the North. I
can name a dozen women writers of the
Old South equal to Mrs. Stowe, but not
one of them is ever mentioned in the
textbooks. The South furnished several
prominent historians of that period and
her humorists certainly surpass those
that any other section produced during
the same time. It is very rare that the
names of any of the Southern historians
or humorists are mentioned in the text-books.
According to population, the Old South
needed only two leading writers to equal
the North. I feel sure they can be
found in Poe, Kennedy, Simms, Hayne,
Timrod, and Lanier.
"In the future some historian shall
come forth, brave and wise.
With the love of the republic and the
truth before his eyes.
He will hold the scales of justice, he will
measure' praise with blame;
And the South shall stand his verdict,
and stand it without shame."
212 SKY-LAND MAGAZINE
THE NEW NORTH STATE
By Archibald Henderson
IN HIS notorious "History of the
Dividing line betwixt Virginia and
North Carolina," which was run in the
year 1728, the witty William Byrd of
Westover hazarded the ironical query:
"Considering how fortune delights in
bringing great things out of small, who
knows but Carolina may, one time or
another, come to be the seat of some
great empire?" As I glance back over
the two tumultuous centuries which have
elapsed since Byrd ventured that ironi-cal
query, and think of the long, long
way we have traveled since that primi-tive,
barren time, I cannot but conclude
that William Byrd, all unwittingly, was
something more than the "idle singer of
an empty day. " That "great empire,
"
of which he so ironically spoke—has in-deed
found its seat in this ancient com-monwealth
of Carolina. It is in the new
time that Carolina has come to be the
seat of a great empire of democracy
—
a democracy of culture and of the human
spirit.
In the strange, sad epic of the silent
south. North Carolina can justly claim
the authority that springs from the
motherhood of American liberty. At
the very moment when Byrd was run-ning
that dividing line betwixt North
Carolina and Virginia, the borderers
were eager to be included within the
bounds of North Carolina, "as there they
paid no tribute to God or Ceasar.
Those epic ships of Raleigh, sailing west-ward
over unknown seas and beaching
at last their keels upon the golden sands
of Roanoke, bore in their bosoms a breed
of men fired with the divine spark which
in that England of the spaicous days of
Elizabeth flamed up in rugged prose and
in soaring, immortal verse. The breed
of men who settled here bore in their
right hand a genius for civilization and
an indomitable pride of race, and in
their left hand an inflexible steadfastness
and a common sense as firm as adamant.
In the struggle for existence which they
were compelled to wage, the taming of
nature, the conquest of a savage foe,
there was bred in them a mighty re-sourcefulness
and the grim hardihood of
self-reliance. Our legacy from a century
of pioneers is a passion for successful
self-expression, for efficiency, and for
creative conquest. How shorn of a
grea tmeasure of distinction and great-ness
would be this American nation, in
its pioneer days and crude beginnings,
if bereft of the pioneering genius of
Daniel Boone, the love of liberty of the
eloquent William Hooper, the prophetic
insight of that herald of culture, William
R. Davie, the legal wisdom of James
Iredell, the granite conservatism of
Nathaniel Macon, the flaming patriotism
of Andrew Jackson, the new Ameri-canism
of Thomas Hart Benton. How
improverished would be the early annals
of our country if there were blotted out
the memory of Moore's Creek bridge, of
Guilford courthouse, of King's mountain,
of the resistance to the stamp act at Wil-mington,
the patriotism of Mecklen-burg,
the statesmanship at Halifax, the
definite salvation of the Trans-Alle-hgany
region by the pioneers of Transyl-vania.
Out of North Carolina, the
fountain source of American liberty,
welled up the streams of creative con-tribution
which have helped to make
SKY-LAND MAGAZINE 213
this nation great—the inflexible spirit
which knows no compromise, the pas-sionate
belief in liberty and democracy,
and the unchanging faith in the worth
and dignity of average humanity.
Midway in her career—a career memor-able
for national statesmanship, con-tinental
thinking, and purity of thought
in public service—a dark disaster fell
upon the south. Following that tragic
national crisis, when the south in the
dimness of anguish beheld the loss of
wealth, the abolition of property, the
violation of the very sanctities of her
civilization, this people sternly set them-selves
to the task of repairing those
fallen fortunes and rebuilding that
civilization upon broader and more
universal outlines. In the era since
the war between the states, the south
has achieved a prosperity distinguished
by its universal diffusion, and devoted
its energies to the education of the
common man to the tasks of leadership
in all the avenues of an advancing civi-lization.
It was in the earlier grim stages of
that era of civilization rebuilding—the
era of the slow emergence of the average
man from the pressure of economic
necessity and the blight of arrested
cultural development—that the south
temporarily relaxed her hold upon the
reins of national government. * * *
Transit of An Era.
The election of Woodrow Wilson and
the quindecennial anniversary of Gettys-burg
marked the transit of an era.
* * * Surely it is a fact of almost
miraculous fitness that, in this dramatic
resumption by the south of the control
of our national destinies. North Carolina
should play a predominant role. It
is with a sense of conscious elation, no
less profound that it is subdued, that
we, the citizens of this ancient common-wealth,
reflect that American history
can furnish no authentic parallel to
the present epochal contribution of
North Carolina to the life of the nation.
In this great era of national responsi-bility
and national peril the country
breathes in safety with Josephus Daniels
maintaining North Carolina's great
traditions in the navy established by
Branch, Badger, Graham and Dobbin;
with Houston setting new standards of
business efficiency and practical states-manship
for national agriculture; with
Simmons tha leader of a senate, Kitchin
the destined floor leader of the house;
and native and adopted sons like Claxton
and Holmes and Osborn effectively
ministering to the educationa,! indus-trial,
and financial needs of a nation.
In this. North Carolina's hour—the
reward of traditional fidelity to principle
in public life, of enlarging social sym-pathy,
and of invincible faith in demo-cracy^—
there seems to operate a noble
piecies of compensatory justice. The
nation once more turns for guidance to
the venerable commonwealth of North
Carolina, and to the south—the ancient
mother of national leadership.
Do you then realize that this, the age
in which we live—today—heralds the
golden age of North Carolina and the
south? As we stand upon the thres-hold
of this new era, there must come to
all^ of us a sense of joyous elation, a
leaping of the blood, that it is given to
us to live at such a t'me and in such
a country. While our sister Republic
of Mexico is racked with the dire dis-sensions
of civil strife, which the un-selfish
devotions of this nation have
watchfully and patiently sought to
ally; while Europe is a cosmic holo-caust
of flame and blcod and steel;
while the commerce of belligerent nations
is suffering from partial paralysis and the
voice of famine utters to our heeding
214 SKY-LAND MAGAZINE
ears its grim and tragic petition—Amer-ica
stands firm for peace, for progress,
for humanity, for civilization. The
whole country responds today to the
impetus of our enlarging commerce and
advancing trade. The south daily,
hourly grows in wealth, in buoyant power
in the will to meet the manifest obliga-tion
of her destiny. Supreme engineer-ing
genius has cleft in twain Culebra
and recalcitrant Panama; and today the
lock gates at Gatun, Pedro Miguel and
Miraflores hospitably fling wide the
giant portals of the isthmus to the
argosies of commerce, to the trade of the
south, the nation, and the world. * *
The south is America's present land
of promise. Here upon our own soil
will be undertaken the next supreme
experiment in the life of the nation.
This will be the scene of the next great
act in the American drama of industrial
expansion. The thought which gives
me comfort, when I reflect upon the
future of the south, is the consciousness
that in this era of expanding wealth and
a pervasive industrialism, the southern
people still tenaciously hold to those
high yet simple realities which, through-out
our history, have won the confi-dence
and the faith of a nation.
In the hearts of all of us, I daresay,
there is a deep, abiding affection and
reverence for the virtues of a people who,
throughout an historic past, have given
to North Carolina the rich, mellow name
of the Old North State. I sense those
ancient virutes as a fragrant breath from
some distant garden of old-fashioned
flowers—a full blooded parochialism
redeemed by the abiding love of Chris-tian
faith, of family, of fireside; an in-flexible
integrity which put love of the
truth and passion for the making of men
above love of place and passion for the
making of money; a rugged provincia-lism
which had its roots firmly fixed
in a love of naturalness and a scorn for
all pretense; a granite conservatism
which cherished tradition and ever look-ed
with stern disfavor upon the new and
the empiric. This is the Old North
State—always fighting for her right
while neglecting her interests; generous-reckless,
romantic improvident, unpre,
tentious chivalrous, and brave. * *
In our hearts is enshrined the figure
of the most venerable, this most Amer-ican
commonwealths—the unpreten-tious,
homespun, yet infinitely lovable
Rip Van Winkle of the States.
The New North State.
Tonight, my friends, I give you the
new North State. From out our past
have come the old Roman virtues; into
our future shall go the new American
virutes of the new age—an enlarged
communal consciousness; a deeper sense
of local pride which expresses itself, not
in voicing a glorification of the past, but
in putting the shoulder hard to the wheel
of civic progress; a strenuous common
effort for the attainment of a new free-dom,
individual, political, and social
—
for women as well as for men: and a
passionate, a relentless egarness for the
building of a new and higher civili-zation.
We are meeting within the
very week—simply eloquent in its title;
Community Service week—a type of
the seven labors of the new Hercules
of an aroused civic consciousness—the
prophetic vision of that splendid type
of the new social publicist, Edward K.
Graham; aided by the practical wisdom
of an agriculturist sociologist, the popu-lar
leader, Clarence Poe; and happily
legislated into permanence through the
fiat of a progressive, forward-looking
governor, Locke Craig. Only a few
weeks ago, patriotic, liberty-loving wo-men
of North Carolina appropriately
met in the precincts of Mecklenburg to
SKY-LAND MAGAZINE 215
write the political charter of a new
declaration of independence. But of
the fullness of our new life here have gone
to other nations the heralds of American
culture. The first southern scholar se-lected
to go as Roosevelt professor, as
academic ambassador of culture, to the
German nation, is the distinguished or-ator
of tomorrow night, a native of
Greensboro, Charles Alphonso Smith;
and when President Wilson needed a man
big enough for the largest diplomatic
post in the country's gift, he called upon
a great publisher and editor of our most
distinctively national magazine, Walter
H. Page, who is now enjoying the con-fidence
and winning the plaudits of all
in his dexterous management of the
innumerable complex issues evoked by
the problems of a titanic European war.
I would not have you think that, in
this chorus of praise, there is no room
in my mind for reservations or for the
acknowledgement of grave deficiencies
in our artistic and literary culture. In-deed,
the latest researches of science
compel the belief that genious is not the
result of the evolution of the masses of
the people, but is a giant variation from
the common level of our species.
I Whether or not we acknowledge that
genius is a spontaneous giant variation,
a sporadic birth of energy not built up
from the simple to the complex, cer-tainly
it must be recognized that art,
as a factor of civilization, is an incom:
parable means of widening intellectual
and spiritual horizons and promoting
the cause of culture. It cannot be
denied that the measure of a people's
advance in the fine arts is the measure
of their distance from the brutes. Art
is not merely an auxiliary to civilization,
^ art is almost synonymous with civiliza-tion
itself. "Life without art," as
Ruskin says, "is mere brutality." And
no matter how remarkable have been
the "spontaneous, giant variations from
the common level of our species," it
behooves us to take account of that pre-cious
"common level" which, in a true
sense, is the measure of civilization in a
democracy.
"To live and to Work."
"What is the problem of culture?"
asks that remarkable artist and astute
philosopher so maligned by the English
people today, Friedrich Nietzsche. His
answer is unimpeachable: "To live and
to work in the noblest strivings of one's
nation and of humanity. Not only,
therefore, to receive and to learn but
to live. To free one's age and people
from wrong tendencies, to have one's
ideal before one's eyes. " Much as I re-gret
to admit it, long and patient obser-vation
compels me to acknowledge that
here in the south of the past, here in
North Carolina, so far as art and litera-ture
are concerned, we have not lived
and worked in the noblest strivings of
one's nation and of humanity. In litera-ture
and art, for more than a century,
we have received; even in a sense
we have learned; but we have not lived.
There may be much truth in the witty
definition that penury is the wages of
the pen. And at the annual banquet in
London of the Royal L^teray fund for
the Relief of Necessitous authors, Wal-ter
Page recently evoked a chorus of
dessent to his statement; "From the
viewpoint of mere barnyard gumption it
is absurd for anybody to start to spend
his life writing. Gambling is more like-ly
to yield a steady income. It is an
absurd career and a foolish foolhardy
business. No man has a right to take
it up who can avoid doing so. " In mak-ing
these observations, which must be
taken with a liberal pinch of salt, Mr.
Page was undoubtedly making a hu-morous
personal confession. I may go
216 SKY-LAND MAGAZINE
even further and hazard the guess that
he was thinking of North Carolina. It
is a remarkable commentary upon our
civilization that, so far as my knowledge
goes, no man or woman in North Caro-lina,
with the omission of journalists,
has ever succeeded in earning, or even
attempted to earn a livelihood solely
through the medium of the pen of the
literary artist. * * *
I never think of the literature of my
native state that I do not recall the
mournful threnody of that famous bard
of our sister Carolina, J. Gordon Coogler
:
Alas for the south! Her books have grown
fewer
;
She never was much given to Hterature.
* * *
Many of you have seen upon Univer-sity
Heights in New York city a noble
structure of gleaming white marble, an
enduring monument to American genius,
the Hall of Fame. Of the 51 tablets
thus far placed upon its walls, only one
bears the name of a native of North
Carolina, the soldier-statesman, Andrew
Jackson; and through the patronage of
Willie and Allen Jones, and the guar-dianship
of Joseph Hewes, North Caro-lina
can lay a secondary claim to but one
other name, among those of foreign birth
the man whom Benjjmin Franklin dub-bed
the "North Carolina midshipman,"
the greatest naval hero in our annals,
John Paul Jones. A soldier-statesman
and a sailor—but no man or woman of
literary genius. In the hall of fame,
the south is represented by soldiers, sail-ors,
statesmen, jurists, scientists, but by
only one distinctively literary genius
—
a man of English parentage who hap-pened
to be born in Boston, Massachus-etts—
Edgar Allan Poe.
For many years I have searched deep-ly
into the causes for the comparative
dearth of literary and artistic produc-tivity
in the south and for that genial
southern indifference to publication—the
rock upon which literary fame is found-ed.
Tonight, I shall dispense with all
explanation, apology or excuse. The
thrill of the new time tempts one less
to pathetic retrospection than to buoy-ant
prophecy. Neverless I must voice
my solemn conclusion that we can-not
build up here a great civilization—
a
civilization as great in art and letters, in
culture and taste as it is great in mate-rial
resources, statesmanlike ideals, and
an aroused social consciousness—un-less
we do live and work in the noblest
strivings of our nation and of humanity.
Investigation has convinced me that
North Carolina is lamentably backward,
woefully deficient, in her activity and
representation in the great national or-ganizations
making for the development
of art, literature, drama and all the
multifarious activities which make for
artistic culture in a democracy. I have
studied the records of these national or-ganizations
for the present year in the
effort to record, faithfully and justly,
the part actually played by North Caro-lina
in the life and work of national
cutlure. I find that North Carolina is
not represented at all in the National
Academy of Arts and Letters, or in the
much larger body of the National In-stitute
of Arts and Letters; nor has she
any official representation, in the form
of elected officers, president or vice pres-idents,
in the American Historical asso-ciation,
the American Academy of Arts
and Sciences, the American Pageant as-sociation,
the Drama League of Ameri-ca,
the American Folk Lore society, the
Poetry Society of America and the
American Academy of Political and So-cial
Science. Little if any attention
need be paid to those of sectional bias
who point out that no scholar or man
of letters, so long as he remains in the
SKY-LAND MAGAZINE 217
south, ever wins large recognition in the
national societies. Such a narrow
charge, even though resting upon indis-putable
facts, might arise from a com-plete
misinterpretation of those facts,
and in any case cannot serve as a valid
excuse for our supineness and indiffer-ence.
In science, pure and applied.
North Carolina is nationally and inter-nationally
recognized. In this great
branch of knowledge and research no
southern state is her equal. But in the
arts—literature, painting, sculpture,
drama���North Carolina is not living and
working today in the noblest strivings
of the nation and humanity.
Immediate Needs.
As I have studied the cultural prob-lems
of our life here and sought to make
of this association a more construc-tive
instrument for ministering to
our cultural wants, I have come to the
conclusion that we have three vital and
immediate needs. The program of the
meetings of the association for this
year have been especially designed to
meet these needs.
No people can form a just estimate
of their history, or feel legitimate pride
in it, until they know what that history
really is. No comprehensive and com-plete
history of North Carolina will ever
be written until the contrubution of the
invididual units, whose integrated life
have constituted that history, are
studied and bodied forth with complete-ness
and detail. The county is the unit
of the state; the history of the county
must furnish the nucleus of the history
of the state. North Carolina has ex-actly
one hundred counties; it is a
regrettable fact that histories, of reason-able
adequacy, have been written of
only a dozen out of these hundred
counties. I earnestly desire to identify
this association with the duty and the
task of stimulating, inspiring and di-recting
the writings of the industrial,
social, economic, institutional histories
of every single county in North Carolina
The accomplishment of this great work
will prepare the way for the writing of
the true and definite history of North
Carolina—the moving story of the life
of a great people.
In like manner, I desire to see our
people acquire a decent and adequate
knowledge of the literary contributions
of North Carolina for the past one
hundred and twenty-five years. Nie-tzsche
defines man as a something to be
surpassed. And surely we can never rise
above ourselves to ourselves until we
really feel and know what North Caro-lina
has contributed in letters to the
thought and the consciousness of the
American people. As the county is the
unit of the state, so the state is the
unit of the nation. * * *
It has been my great ambition to have
this association take account in an
orderly way of the manifold sides of our
native literature—history, poetry, fic-tion,
oratory and folk-lore. * * *
Suggestions For Counties
Lastly, I have one recommendation to
make to this association and to the peo-ple
of North Carolina. It is to no
Brahmin caste of scholars, to no occu-pants
of the ivory tower of literary se-clusion,
that I would make this recom-mendation.
I appeal to the communal
consciousness of a people—a people who,
individually and collectively, need to be
inspired with a deep sense of historic
tradition and the passion of a great
faith in the destiny of our common-wealth.
I desire to see spread before our
people the entire pageant of our his-toric
creativeness—as I have seen great
pageants of the history of Oxford uni-versity
and of the development of that
218 SKY-LAND MAGAZINE
martial power of the British empire,
now so terribly taxed upon the battle-fields
of Europe. Pageantry has been
defined as poetry for the masses. We
deeply need to see created in North
Carolina, through the common efforts
of our leading citizens, a fine art for the
people. The elemental instinct for dem-ocratic
art in our midst needs to be
educated, developed, refined, by means
of popular pageantry, into a mighty
agency for civilization. I recommend
that, during the coming year, historic
episodes of state and national interest
be presented by common effort in com-munities
throughout the state. May I
suggest, among other, s for Wilmington
the revolt against the stamp act; for
Edenton, the ladies tea party; for New
Bern, the settlement of the Palatines;
for Winston-Salem, the founding of the
academy; for Charlotte, the Mecklen-burg
declaration of independence; for
Salisbury, incidents from the careers of
Daniel Boone and the pioneers; for
Greensboro, the battle of Guilford
Courthouse. Next year, during com-munity-
service week, all of these episodes
which have been locally presented
and perhaps others should then be
linked together in a great state his-torical
pageant here in Raleigh, the
capital of the commonwaelth—arranged
in chronological order and designed to
give a poetic and romantic picture of
the historic evolution of the life of a
people. Through this happy wedding of
art and history may be brought home
to our consciousness a pro oundly mov-ing
realization of a glorious past and a
quickening of all our desires and hopes
and labors for an even more glorious
future.
—Presidential address before the State Lit-erary
and Historical Association of North
Carolina.
SKY-LAND MAGAZINE 219
LOOKING IN ON THOMAS DIXON
By O. Bargamin Crocker
A T HIS home on Riverside Drive,
^ ^ in the library at the top of the
house, which by the way, is shut off
with a trap door over the stairs, sits
Thomas Dixon, working, while the out-side
world with its glorious sunshine and
budding flowers of Spring call to him in
vain.
He is up to his ears in manuscript.
With a master hand he is weaving ro-mances
that thrill in their daring and
quicken the pulse of the reader by tender,
tense love scenes.
He is doing three novels.
"My! You are certainly busy! Of
course you are doing them one at a
time?"
"Rest assured I am!" was his prompt
rejoinder. "But I have them all out-lined.
"
"And you have no secretary? I
thought all big writers had secretaries.
"
He threw back his head and laughed
. in that whole-souled way of his.
I "I never indulge in such luxuries!"
he declared. "In fact I'm a bear when
at work. I can't endure any human
being near me. If I had a secretary I
should commit murder sooner or later."
"I was quite surprised to see your
latest novel running serially in the
Green Book. I never heard of you
writing for a magazine before. In fact,
if you remember, you told me about a
year ago that you had no time for
magazine stories. You were busy get-ting
out novels.
"
"That's true. The Foolish Virgin
is a novel. Not a short story. But
I broke into the magazine game to
avoid sacrificing a book during the
depressing time of this war.
"
" I like the story very much. How
long will it run? It seems to be quite
different from any you've ever written
before. New York sort of gets into the
blood; doesn't it?"
"Yes, of course. It's the only really
great city we have where the individual
can live life in freedom. My new novels
are all remote from the South. The
Foolish Virgin will run until next
September.
"
"Well, I must admit," I said in con-clusion
"I'm somewhat surprised about
the 'secretary' ; I was so sure all writers
had them. I'd thought to some day
become one myself, to some famous
writer, hoping that with the inspiration
of such surroundings to at least realize
my own ambitions to become a novelist."
"Believe me," Dixon emphatically
confided, "the road to a writer's corner
does not lie through the library of any
established author. Avoid them as a
pestilence. The Kingdom is within
you?"
* H= =!:
The Foolish Virgin, meritoriously il-lustrated
by Walter Title, and now
running serially in the Green Book, is
a novel of love at first sight which an-swers
the question: "Does a Girl
Ever Know When the Right Man Comes
Along?"
THOMAS DIXON
Author of "The Leopard's Spots," "The Clansman," "The FooHsh Virgin," Etc.
SKY-LAND MAGAZINE 221
MRS. WILLIAM N. REYNOLDS
/^NE of North Carolina's best known
^^ and most influential women is the
retiring State Regent of the Daughters of
the American Revolution, Mrs. William
N. Reynolds of Winston-Salem. Atypical
Southern woman of the new type, she
is possessed of a strong personal magne-tism
and accomplishments that readily
place her among the leaders of any
group of women in which she may hap-pen
to be.
Mrs. Reynolds has rare gifts as an
organizer and posesses splendid execu-tive
ability. These things, together
with her graciousness and charm of
manner, have placed her among the
leaders of the numerous organizations
through which she has worked for her
State. She is a woman of broad sym-pathies
and a vision of great things. She
is versatile, tactful, unobtrusive and
cheerful, helping and brightening the
lives of all she touches.
These qualities have made her life
one of service. For ten years she has
been vice-president of the Salem College
Alumnae Association and in this capacity
has rendered great service to her alma
mater. Since its organization, Mrs.
Reynolds has been a mem.ber of the
board of directors of the Stonewall
Jackson Training School, to the work of
which institution she has given much
earnest thought. Mrs. Reynolds is a
club woman of unwaning enthusiasm and
through the organizations of which she
is a member contributes largely to the
social and literary life of her city. A
devoted, and conscientious church mem-ber,
she rounds out her life to a rich full-ness
with religious activities.
It is as a member and officer of the
Daughters of the American Revolution
that Mrs. Reynolds has rendered the
State her greatest service. A charter
member of the Winston-Salem Chapter
of the D. A. R., she has remained an
enthusiastic worker of the organization,
contributing much to the life and work
of the Chapter. A^ Regent of the
Chapter she displayed such remarkable
powers of organization and executive
ability that she was called to the ofhce
of State Vice-Regent, which office she
held for three terms. Mrs Reynolds
was then elected State Regent, which
honorable position she filled most accept-ably
for four years. At the last State
meeting of the D. A. R. held in Durham,
so great was Mrs. Reynolds' popularity
with the members of the organization
that she was unanimously endorsed for
Vice-President General for North Caro-lina,
of the National D. A. R. This
honor Mrs. Reynolds declined, much to
the regret of her numerous friends. Her
term as State Regent expired last April
During the Regency of Mrs. Reynolds,
sixteen Chapters were organized and the
membership of the organization in
North Carolina was increased to almost
one thousand, an unparalleled period of
growth. And throughout the entire
four years remarkable activity has been
shown in the three great objects of the
organization—the perpetuation of the
memory of the spirit of the men and
women who achieved American Inde-pendence,
the acquisition and protec-tion
of historical spots, and the erection
of monuments.
Two tablets,marking historical events,
have been placed in Winston-Salem
—
one on the court house for Col. Benjamin
Forsyth, for whom the county is named;
the other on the door of a room in the
old tavern in Salem at which George
Washington spent the night.
222 SKY-LAND MAGAZINE
The grave of the Indian Chief Junalu-ski,
whose bravery helped Gen. Jackson
to turn the tide of battle at Horse Shoe
Bend, has been marked.
There has been placed in the campus
at Chapel Hill a stone seat under the
General Davie poplar, the poplar under
which Davie, the "Father of the Uni-versity",
and his party rested while
locating the site for the University.
A sun-dial has been placed in Char-lotte
on the site of the old Liberty Hall.
But the greatest achievement of the
D. A. R's has been the marking of the
Daniel Boone Trail from his home on the
Yadkin River to the Tennesee line, a
distance of 150 miles. This may well
be termed the greatest historical enter-prise
ever started in North Carolina.
Tablets have been placed on boulders,
with this inscription:
"Daniel Boone's Trail,
From North Carolina to Kentucky,
1769
Erected by the North Carolina
Daughters of the American Revolu-tion."
The places marked are his home near
Yadkin River, Shallowford, Huntsville,
Yadkinville, Wilkesboro, Holman's Ford
Elkville, Three Fork Church, Boone,
Hodges Gap, Grave yard Gap, and
Zionville. These trails show the part
played by North Carolina in opening up
the great North West.
Mrs. Reynolds as Regent, with Mrs.
Lindsay Patterson as Chairman of the
Boone Trail, was indefatigable in meet-ing
promptly all engagements for these
unveilings.
In order to encourage historical re-search,
in reference to the Revolution,
prizes have been offered at the State
Normal and in many of the public
schools for the best essay on a Revolu-tionary
subject. In Winston-Salem, a
silver loving cup was given for the best
eassy on General Joseph Winston, writ-ten
by a pupil of the High School.
At Washington, D. C, North Caro-lina's
column, as one of the original
13 Colonies, stands in the center of the
elegant D. A. R. building.
During the Regency of Mrs. Reynold's,,
the flag of North Carolina was presented
to the D. A. R. building in Washington.
A valuable addition to the history of
our State, is the accurately gotten up
history of Western North Caro-lina.
At present, the Daughters
are engaged in two most interesting
undertakings: The restoration of the
old Wiley Jones house, in Halifax, N. C,
where John Paul added the name of
Jones to his own name, in recognition
of the kindness received from this
family; as "John Paul Jones" he has
gone down in history.
The National D. A. R. are considering
establishing an industrial school for
the descendants of Revolutionary patri-ots.
This historical place, with 100
acres of land will be donated to • the
National D. A. R. by the North Caro-lina
D. A. R. if their offer is accepted to
place this school in North Carolina.
Also plans are on foot for the restora-tion
of old Fort Dobbs at Statesville.
Although no longer interested in the
work of the D. A. R.'s as State Regent,
Mrs. Renyolds' interest in the work of
the organization has not in the least
diminished. The same enthusiasm that
prompted her to keep all engagements
concerning her duties as State Regent
and to labor untiringly for the accom-plishing
of the work undertaken will
continue to exert a great influence in
the organization. Her service to North
Carolina has been great and she is
just now entering upon the full tide of
her popularity and usefuUness.
EDWARD KIDDER GRAHAM
President of the University of North CaroHna
224 SKY-LAND MAGAZINE
EDWARD KIDDER GRAHAM
By R. E. P., '98
COINCIDENT with the inaugura-tion
of Edward Kidder Graham as
president of the University of North
Carolina, the head of the State's edu-cational
system becomes, as it were,
actually full fledged. However well
intrenched the University may have
been throughout its more than one
hundred years of power and usefulness
to North Carolina, it is nevertheless to
be proudly admitted that its scope,
equipment, and ideals now assume pro-portions
which its most adrent alumnus,
even a few years ago, would never have
dreamed possible at this time.
Under the leadership of President
Graham, even before his formal induc-tion
into office, and while he was as
acting president of the institution, there
was crystalizing in University alTairs
a broader, better aim and a surer elTort
to put Chapel Hill in the very forefront
of the Nation's educational centers.
Not that the University has ever been
a laggard in the march, but within the
last three years there has been verily
a quickening of every fibre in the Uni-versity's
body both corporate and spiri-tual.
Service to the State, far beyond the
inculcation of mere book learning, is the
gage Oi educational battle which Presi-dent
Graham and his conferes have taken
up. The Battle lines are far flung in-deed.
It might be said that, instead of
a sentinel surveying the. State from a
lonely mountain top, the University
has become rather as the Good Samari-tan,
going about through the highways
and into even the bypaths to lift the
weak and to minister with all her might
unto even the least opportunities of
her sons and daughters.
In the days to come history will
write large this work, this realization of
broadened ideals for service which Gra-ham
and his unselfish associates are
doing for North Carolina. But even
now, while the work is just crystalizing,
the great heart of the people of North
Carolina has been touched by the nobil-ity
of the conception; and the Uni-versity's
name is on every man's lips.
No longer are the activities of the
University circumscribed, as it were, by
the campus at Chapel Hill. Her long
arm has shaken free from the dull robe
of mere scholasticism and is stretched
forth to the fartherest corner of the
State, bared to the kindly sun or the
fierce tempests—stretched forth for a
hardier, more uplifting work-a-day ser-vice
among the sons and daughters of
men.
President Graham's inauguration
drew together easily one of the most
distinguished bodies of men which has
been gathered in this country. North,
South, East and West proudly took
place in that great company; and it was
as if a coronation ceremony was being
peformed in a staunch educational re-public,
where none was too humble to
do his homage. A conspicuous feature
was the large and representative atten-dance
of alumni, nurtured in the bosom
of Chapel Hill, and who had come back
to pay tribute to the new University.
Not a new University in the sense of
changed ideals, but new in the accom-plishment
of ideals long struggling for
expression in University life.
SKY-LAND MAGAZINE 225
And a young man has done this thing.
There has been no accident about it
whatever. Graham, the man, is the
perfectly logical development of Graham
the boy. Born and bred of staunch
forbears, he has somehow always stress-ed
the things worth while; and he has
not fought for mere power or pelf.
Young Graham entered Chapel Hill
with the class of 1898, equipped solely
with his public school education, am-bition
and the God-give qualities which
have made him what he is. As a student
he at once exhibited a thoroughness in
every task. Yet there was nothing
pedantic about him. He never strove
for brilliancy. Playing for effect was
utterly foreign to him. Breadth of
mind, almost uncanny clearness of vis-sion
and a passion for fair play to every
man characterized him sharply. Real
humor, fate blessed him with. He won
a place in the critical young democracy
of undergraduate life without any ap-parent
efifort. His strength with his
fellows appeared to be a sort of cumula-tive
strength. First, his immediate
friends discovered that he had a way of
being "right" on questions ever so
often. Next, his class began to remark
upon this quality. Soon, members of
the faculty (and be it remarked right
here that Graham never "played to the
faculty") would refer matters to him
frequently. In the Dialectic Society,
where the students from the West de-bated
in a more or less parliamentray
way, Graham did not by any means
assume to take the floor on every sub-ject
that came up. But now and then
one would hear on the campus a chuckle
over some shaft of truth frequently
barbed with wit that young Graham had
unloosed among the embryonic parlia-mentarians.
He played baseball and
tennis and loafted around the post
office and drug store about on an average
with his associates. Always he took a
real interest in every legitimate acti-vity
around Chapel Hill.
"A strong man—a coming big law-yer,"
was the verdict about Graham
in his junior year. Then in a debate,
in which Graham and his colleague
representing Carolina obtained an unan-imous
decision over the University of
Georgia, the future young president of
the University of North Carolina siezed,
clinched, tripple-riveted and for all time
achieved first place in the heart of the
University. And it wasn't his regularly
prepared debate which did this thing.
It was his rejoinder, his extemporaneous
reply to his Georgia opponent. It was
electrical, surcharged with sense, over-poweringly
reasonable and Satanically
crushing. One or two of the strongest
members of the faculty then and there,
it is reported, marked Graham for a
longer stay at the University than even
he himself had dreamed of.
Probably the bar of North Carolina
and the Supreme Court were literally
robbed of a bright ornament just at
this time. Graham at first thought he
was going to study law, but they showed
him the error of his way. Of course
they did not tell him that he was to be
some day president of the University
of North Carolina, for they couldn't
promise that. But they must have
hoped it. If Graham himself had any
idea along that line, he probably com-municated
it to no one. But after he
graduated, taught school and attended
Columbia University, where he ob-tained
his doctor's degree, he returned
to Chapel Hill as an instructor in the
department of English. Within a few
years he became dean. By unanimous
demand, he was looked to as the man
who best understood what the faculty
was trying to do for the student and
simultaneously what the student was
226 SKY LAND MAGAZINE
trying to do for himself. When the frequently heard question. Well, no
cares of administration and long service olifer yet has swerved Graham from his
had grown so heavy upon President Fran- allegiance to Chapel Hill; and there
cis P. Venable that he wished to lay aside have been many calls from other great
the administrative office, only one name institutions which might have tempted
was suggested as his successor. This, the strongest. Those who know him
of course, was Graham. And so this best believe that Carolina will keep
young man, now only in this thirty- this distinguished son of hers for her
eighth year, has buckled on the harness, own work as long as he himself believes
"Can Carolina Keep him?" is the she needs him.
THE WOMAN I LOVE
M. B. Andrews
There are women and women, but this is the one I love:
Without conscious effort, she stands composed and erect: her form was fashion-ed
from flawless material by the master hand of God.
Her large, frank eyes, like the ether above, are perfectly clear; not a blemish in
them is portrayed.
Her tongue cannot utter an unkind word, nor can her lips give expression to
deceit.
She has never committed an act, pondered a thought, or cherished a wish that,
for one moment, she has attempted or even disired maliciously to withold from me.
She sees and knows the world as it is : the sinful, the wounded, the disappointed,
the broken-hearted—her own sisters and brothers,—all make their appeal, and to
each she graciously responds.
As fragrance is to the rose, so music is to her soul : yet she can listen to the wild-est
outbursts of passion or to the tenderest strains of pathos without a quiver of a
muscle in her obdy or a sign of inward emotion.
God is just as real to her as the thunder in the could or as the tender little
violet by the door, and she hears his voice even more often than mine.
Though keenly conscious of the awful pain involved, she never fails to blush
and to smile when she thinks of becoming a warm-hearted mother.
She admires the man in all, but only to me has she promised and given her life;
the mellow colors of the rainbow can hardly be more harmoniously blended than are
her soul and mine.
There are women and women, but this is the one I love.
SKY-LAND MAGAZINE 227
THE DIAMOND CROP AND THE
WEDDING BELLS
By Chas. Anderson
TN a rail pen built on a little sand
-*- island in Sandy Run branch, a
dozen or more lean shoats were squeal-ing
and fighting over some ears of corn
which a buxom, rosy-cheeked country
girl was tossing to them from a splint
basket. Leaning on the top rail of the
pen she was so absorbed in feeding the
pigs that she did not hear from the
opposite side of the pen the approach of
a tall, pleasant looking man, who held
a slop bucket in his hand.
"Mornin', Susan; fine mornin',"
he called cheerily.
Susan Allen looked up with a start
and a frown formed on her comely face.
"What you doin' here. Hank Smith?
You know this is our mornin' to feed
them pesky ol' hogs," she hurled at the
boy.
Hank's even white teeth showed in
a pleasant smile.
" I'clare fo goodness, Susan, that's
so. An' here I comes a-trapsin' down this
hill a quarter mile with these slops.
I'm sho' gettin' fergetful these days,"
he replied.
"Well, you'd better be a-trapsin' back
up to that shanty with your slops;
if my daddy ketches you a messin'
roun' this pen today he'll fill yo' hide
with buckshot," the spirited Susan
retorted.
"Hoi' on, Susan, 'taint no use a-gettin'
mad. You know I ain't hed nothin'
to do 'ith the rumpuses of them two ol'
growlin' ba'rs," Hank continued, good
humoredly.
"Well, I have, ef you hain't. Hank
Smith; an' don't you call my dad no
ol' ba'r neither," retorted the girl.
"I ax yer pardon, Susan; but it do
'peer to me like a plagued shame the
way our paps is a-carryin' on. Here it
is, winter, spring, and summer, 'ith
your folks and my folks ez thick ez
cold 'lasses. An' jest as soon as fall
comes along a stink raises. Daggon!
I tol 'pap they aughter be some fence
law to keep hogs frum runnin' every-where.
So you see, Susan, I ain't
to fault," Hank conciliated.
"Jest the same you're a big oV
coward not to stick by your dad; an'
anyhow whyn't ol' Bill Smith change
his mark fru