Gift of

I

THE LITTLE MILL

WHEN I was a boy, I read in my grandfather's library what, I dare say, is the most curious book ever published in our country. It was a big volume, bound in sheep, and it was called Cotton is King and Pro-Slavery Arguments. It was the slave-owners' campaign book in the long ante-bellum controversy. Its fundamental proposition was that the South had a monopoly of cotton culture, and, therefore, a sure foundation of perpetual wealth. The argument was that cottonculture was possible only by the labor of slaves, and, therefore, slavery had an economic justification.

Never was so sound a premise made the basis of such unsound reasoning. Cotton is a sure foundation of perpetual and even yet undreamed-of wealth; but the development of that wealth is still delayed and hindered because its culture was begun under slavery and is not yet wholly freed from the methods of slavery. How great wealth may be won from the cotton fields, the cotton mills, the cotton trade, no economist has arisen with imagination to predict. What the proper culture of it and the proper manufacture of it will mean to the South, the Southern people themselves least of all yet understand. For no staple plant grows that is as profitable as this will become, and there is no other manufacture of which we have so clear a monopoly. Nor is there VOL. 98-NO. 1

any other manufactured product for which the demand is so sure to increase. Our foreign trade will build itself on cotton and cotton products to an extent that few men can yet imagine. Did you know, for instance, that, although we grow three fourths of the world's cotton supply, we still import more manufactured products of cotton than we export? Now, the great changes that have come and are coming in the South, — in industry, in thrift, in all kinds of development, - and, following these, the great changes in thought and feeling, are brought chiefly by the freeing of Cotton from the methods of slavery. We have talked of the freeing of the slaves, and of the freeing of the masters; we have talked and written much of the political problems of the South, of education, and of all the excellent helps and agencies for bringing these backward English-sprung men from their arrested development, and of lifting up the negro to efficiency. They are all good and worthy, if rightly done. But beneath all these agencies, and, in a sense, controlling them, is Cotton.

world-wide in their extent; it means a world-knowledge of markets and of manners; it means the reverse of all that is provincial; and it means wealth, and the gifts of light and thought that wealth, with world-knowledge, brings.

Cotton, then, is king. The old proslavery proposition is true. It is the big truth of the future for the South. For the story of the South, past and future, is the story of the freeing of Cotton.

Since my own life, and its somewhat exciting small struggle for light and freedom and a proper perspective, have happened to fall in the cotton belt, and illustrate, by small deeds and adventures, this great story of the freedom of a people, partly achieved and now rapidly coming, I have determined to write the story of it. It is a life story of a period when Cotton was beginning to become free. I have changed names and places in the story, and disguised some incidents, not essential facts, only because it is unfair to give publicity to some old deeds and opinions of former enemies that we are all willing to forget. The record of the past is valuable, not for its enmities, but in spite of them; and the twin brother of growth is cheerfulness, and amiability is its cousin.

My father lived in a country house near the railroad. A long avenue of elms led almost to the track. Because he owned a little cotton mill (it was one of the oldest in the South, a little ramshackle house of spindles on the river-bank), the railroad company had built a side track and a hut that was used as a station; and the train stopped there when there was some one to get off or to get on. But travel was infrequent, and the stopping of the train was

an event.

One day, when the cotton fields were white, and the elm leaves were falling, the charming autumn in that climate of brilliant sunsets and deep blue skies,— the train blew its whistle a much longer time than usual. Joe and I ran down to the station to see who was coming. I

was seven years old, and Joe, my slave, philosopher, and friend, was ten.

There was constant talk about the war. Many men in the neighborhood had gone away somewhere; but Joe and I had a theory that the war was all a story. They had fooled us about old Granny Thomas's bringing the baby (old Granny Thomas was the stork of those days), and they had fooled us about Santa Claus. The war might be another myth, So we thought, and wondered.

But we found out the truth that day; and for this reason that day stands out among my earliest recollections. For, when the train stopped, they put off a big box, and gently laid it in the shade of the fence. The only man at the station was the man who had come to change the mail bags, and he told us that this was Billy Morris's coffin, and that Billy had been killed in the war. He asked us to stay there till he could go home and send word to Mr. Morris, who lived two miles away. The man came back presently, and leaned against the fence till old Mr. Morris arrived an hour later.

The lint of cotton was on his wagon, for he was hauling his crop to the gin when the sad news reached him; and he came in his shirt-sleeves, his wife on the wagon seat with him. Late that afternoon all the neighborhood gathered at the church; a funeral was preached, there was a long prayer for our success against "the invaders," and Billy Morris was buried. Old Mrs. Gregory wept more loudly than anybody else; and she kept saying, while the service was going on, "It'll be my John next." In a little while John Gregory's coffin was put off, as Billy Morris's had been; and Joe and I regarded old Mrs. Gregory as a woman gifted with prophecy. And other coffins were put off from time to time. About the war there was no longer any doubt in our minds. And later its unspeakable horrors came nearer home to

us.

But my father did not go into the war. He was a "Union man," as they called

those who did not believe in secession. I remember having heard him afterwards call it a "foolish enterprise." But he could not escape the service of the Confederate government, if he had wished; and, although he opposed the war, I do not think that he wished to be regarded by his neighbors as an active "traitor." The government needed the whole product of the cotton mill, and of a thousand more which did not exist. My father was, therefore, "detailed" to run the mill at its utmost capacity, and to give its product to the government. He was paid for it, of course, in Confederate money; and, when the war ended, I think there must have been several hundred thousand dollars of these bills in the house. My mother made screens of one-hundreddollar bills for the fireplaces in summer. I once asked her, years afterwards, why my father did not buy something that was imperishable with all this money, when it had a certain value, land, for instance.

"Your father knew that the Confederacy would fail, and he did not consider it honorable to make such a use of socalled money that, in his judgment, was already valueless.'

The little mill turned constantly; for the river never ran dry; and the thread that it spun went to the making of clothes for soldiers and bandages for the wounded, mitigated human suffering somewhat, it is now pleasant to think.

poor,

The war came nearer to us. At last one night a Confederate cavalry officer slept in our house, — for a few hours, at least; all the next day Confederate cavalrymen rode by, taking our horses from the stable and emptying the meathouse, hungry devils that they must have been. That night the blue-coats came. All during the afternoon they had a skirmish line along the road. Weeks afterwards a blue coat or a gray one might be seen protruding from the sand by the roadside. Soldiers had been lightly buried just as they had fallen, and the wind or dogs or cats had exposed their coats.

But the death of men seemed like the death of cattle, even to a child. My uncles had been killed, three of them; and perhaps half the men between twenty and fifty who had lived in the neighborhood were missing when the war ended. Old Jake Raynor was left, for he had deserted. They had caught him more than once up his chimney, and had taken him back "to the front;" but his cowardly body escaped at last. Old Jake was afterwards held up to scorn because he had been a deserter.

It took him many years to live down the disgrace. I recall the big revival at the Methodist church, when several notoriously hardened sinners came to repentance, old Jake among them. He used the church to climb back into respectability.

For, if war and death had worn and torn the common sensibilities of childhood, -emotionally I must have been old at twelve, the religious excitement that followed soon afterwards was quite as abnormal. When the revival had gone on for a week or more, men and women fell into trances. Some of them told stories of dying and going to hell. Some went to heaven. It was old Mrs. Gregory who declared that she had seen John in paradise. He told her that they had plenty of good rations in the army of the Lord, and the sashes in the windows were made of real gold. (Old Man Gregory had been a carpenter.)

Joe and I were older now, but we seemed still to have kept incredulous minds. The war proved itself a fact, but we doubted the story of the gold window-sash. It exercised me much; for we were all wrought

up

about religion. I discussed with my mother the advisability of my going to "the mourners' bench." She seemed more confused about this than about any other subject that I ever discussed with her. My younger brother was very ill while one of these revivals was in progress; and, in an agony of prayer, I proposed this bargain with the Almighty: if he would restore Gus to health, I'd go to the mourners' bench. The revival ended

before Gus recovered; and it rested very heavily on my conscience for a long time that I ought to do something to carry out my part of the bargain. But this intense religious feeling, which most of the community shared, had little to do with conduct. It was an emotional rebound from war.

It was fifteen miles from my father's home to the capital of the state; and that was the "city" to which we went at intervals. Sometimes we went on the train; but the train went only in the afternoon, and it came back very late at night, two o'clock in the morning. We oftener drove, therefore, bad as the roads were.

These were the turbulent years that followed war. The camp-followers of two armies, and many other adventurers, had swelled the population of the town, — the lowest class of both races. Assassination on the highway was not uncommon.

One night in the autumn after the moon had gone down,-it was one o'clock, — there was a rapping at the front door. My father got up, and, walking into the hall, asked who was there. The answer was not clear; but presently, after a smothered conversation between men on the outside, one said that he was an officer of the law who had come from the city in search of a criminal; that he had ridden far, and was tired, and could not go back to the city that night, would he be permitted to stay till morning?

While this explanation was going on, my mother had given the shotgun to my father, who stood in his nightclothes in the hall. The only weapon in the house was this shotgun, with which my cousin had been shooting quail. My father refused to open the door. It was a thin double door, and it could be easily broken down. There was a transom of glass above it and on either side.

"Break it down, then," said one voice on the outside; and a heavy foot kicked one of the light panels, and it flew open. The man who kicked it stood behind the other panel, that was plain. My father shot through the closed panel. This

surprised the intruders. They, in turn, shot into the hall. A great scar which a bullet made in the wood of the staircase remained for years.

But they ran off a little distance, and shot back at the house several times. Meanwhile the door was open, and my father stood in the hall, with one charge yet in the double-barrelled shotgun. At last he crept toward the door. There was a closet in the front of the hall where there was more ammunition. To prevent being seen he closed the door that had been kicked open. Instantly there was a volley fired from the yard. My father fired the other barrel of his gun through the glass at the side of the door, and the men on the outside, evidently concluding that there was a strong battery inside, ran off and fired no more.

But just as my father fired his last charge a ball from the outside struck his gun, and, glancing, entered his head. He died instantly. By the time my mother reached him, he was already unable to speak. It was a case of murder for robbery. There were many such. My father had been to the city that day, and had received in a public place a sum of money from a man who had bought a tract of land, a roll of small bills that made less than a hundred dollars; and the robbery must have been planned by some one who saw such a display of money. For him to die so inopportunely, - my mother with three children, - after he had outlived the dangers of war and of a settled difference of opinion with his neighbors in an exciting time, this was hard fortune for us, indeed. But most families that I knew had lost their men; and such a loss was so common that my mother and her children shared only the common fate. We had become accustomed to death. Thus, at this early age, I was already old in emotional experi

ences.

But the river ran perpetually, and falling water gave power to the little mill; and every year the cotton would be used till the end of civilization. Here were per

petual forces, elemental and economic. And my mother, grown older, with a sad, sweet, determined way, took the management of the little mill herself.

IĮ.

"THE HEAD OF THE FAMILY

may

The schools that I attended God forgive the young women who one after another taught the children of the sparsely settled neighborhood—were farces and frauds. There was no public school. The heads of the best-to-do families in the neighborhood engaged a young lady to teach in a little hut that they had built for a schoolhouse. The proper thing for my mother to do was, no doubt, to engage a governess; but governesses were associated, in her mind at least, with the education of girls, not of boys; and only the youngest of her children was a girl. My mother taught her herself; and the neighborhood school was regarded as the place for me and for my younger bro

ther.

We walked two miles, arrived at nine o'clock, sat and droned out things that we did not understand till twelve; we then ate the dinner that we had brought, and played the stupidest games on earth till one; then we droned away three more hours, and walked home again.

"Sacred geography" held an important place in our studies. Nobody in the school, not even the teacher, knew anything about it. But we had an atlas of the Holy Land, and we learned the names of the places and of the rivers by heart, and tried to find them on the finely printed map. Bounding Judea and explaining the course of the River Jordan were great feats. Of course, we spelled and wrote and read (from old "readers" that had been compiled in wartime with the notion that the United States was a foreign country). I do not know what else we did in those stupid years, in which there was no childhood. "Sacred geography" holds the place of prominence in my memory.

But at home I read, perhaps, as many books as most country boys of that period. My mother read Scott to us. There was a big "compendium" of English Literature in the "library." The library contained more books than I had ever seen in any other house, but there could have been only about a hundred volumes, and many of them were on religious subjects; and I read that compendium over and over again. Even these normal pleasures were marred by a necessity that I supposed to be on me to read Baxter's Saints' Rest, Wesley's Sermons, and at some time or other, later, N. P. Willis's poems, in a red gilt, fancy "gift" volume.

But the school, with a succession of silly and raw young women as teachers, made little impression on me. The two great influences on my life at that time were the two households that I used to visit. My grandfather's was one. His plantation was near the city. The other was the family of my remoter kinspeople, the Densons, who lived in the city.

Early in the nineteenth century my grandfather had inherited a farm, where he built his home, and he added to his holdings till it became, in the ample phrase of the day, a plantation. It was like hundreds of others in the cotton states, larger than most, smaller than many. The cotton bloomed and ripened every year, even under wasteful slave labor; and by its profits he lived the life of a modest gentleman and reared his family. Three of his sons and two of his sons-in-law perished in the war. When peace was declared my father only was left of his sons; and when he was murdered I was next my grandfather himself in the succession to the headship of the family. This had much to do with the old man's fondness for me; and he and the "Old Place," as we called his home, played, perhaps, a dominant part in my life.

Good Dr. Denson was the most eminent physician in the city; and his household was the most cultivated one that I knew in my youth, a gentler one I have