Atlanta And Its Builders, Vol. 2 - A Comprehensive History Of The Gate City Of The South. Thomas H. Martin
and Omaha being larger, while among the southern cities Louisville was only $2.34, New Orleans $1.65, Richmond $3.06. Memphis $2.25, and Nashville $2.83.
"In the southern cities Atlanta ranks third in the postal receipts, Louisville being first and New Orleans second. Atlanta's receipts were one-fourth of the entire postal receipts of the state of George and 36.2 per cent, of the fifty-five presidential offices. They are more than the combined receipts of Savannah, Augusta, Macon, Columbus and Rome, and nearly equal to the combined of Nashville and Chattanooga.
"The statement of money order business shows in a very striking way the trade of the city, as four dollars are received here for every dollar sent away.
"In the fiscal year of 1880, when the present post-office was first occupied the postal receipts were only $59,409.07. In 1880, when the post-office floor was slightly enlarged, they were $159,262.61 and this year they will be over $350,000. This shows the enormous increase since 1880 of 489 per cent."
The great Atlanta of the new century was not unforeseen. But little over fifteen years ago Hon. A. K. McClure, the able and far-seeing Philadelphia editor, paid an extended visit to Atlanta while making an extensive tour of the South. Of his impressions he wrote:
"Georgia is the Empire State of the South. Nature made her so by a wealth of soil and mines that is unequalled in any of the coast or Gulf states south of Virginia, excepting Alabama, and her people have been proverbial for more than ordinary Southern progress.
"Atlanta has every appearance of being the legitimate offspring of Chicago. There is nothing of the Old South about it, and all the traditions of the old-time South, which are made poetical to dignify effete pride, logical poverty and laziness, have no place in the men of the present in the young and thriving Gate City. There must be old regulation Southerners in this region, but they have either died untimely in despair, or they have drifted into the current and moved on with the world around them. The young men are not the dawdling, pale-faced, soft-handed, effeminates which were so often visible in the nurslings of the slave. They have keen, expressive eyes; their faces are bronzed; their hands are often the tell-tales of labor; their step is elastic and their habits energetic. They bear unmistakable signs of culture; but it is the culture that came with self-reliance, and it is valued because it cost them sacrifice, invention, and effort. They have learned that 'hardness ever of hardiness is mother,' and if the young men of Georgia who have grown up since the war, do not assert themselves and make a most wholesome shaking up of the old fossil ideas and dreams of the South, every present indication must prove delusive. With a city like Atlanta, that has not a vestige of old Southern ways about it, in the very heart of the State and temple of her laws, it is simply impossible that such keen and powerful pulsations can fail to quicken the whole people. You hear no curses of the blacks from idlers in Atlanta. They understand that the negro is away behind them, that his future is a doubtful one, and they vote him, and vote with him; open schools of all grades for him, on equal footing with the whites.
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"They know that the negro will never rule the State or anything else; that he won't rule himself, and while really cherishing more sincere and practical kindness for him than most of those who bubble over with sympathy for him at long range in the North, they have no political or business warfare with him, and he votes as freely in Georgia as he does in Pennsylvania.
"There are more potent civilizers in Georgia than I have met with in any other portion of the South, and they are not few in number. The more intelligent young men of from twenty to thirty years, who are now beginning to assert themselves, are, as a rule, the foremost missionaries in the new civilization of the South. They don't want offices, for they have learned a better way of making a living, and they are manly in their independence. Instead of discussing the old plantation times 'before the wah,' they talk about railroads, factories, the tariff, the schools, the increase of crops, and the growth of wealth and trade.
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"And wherever the factory is reared there is a new civilization planted in the desolation of slavery. The shade, the vine, the flower, the tidy fence, and the tasteful home about the cotton mill, tell the story of the future South, and the uniform prosperity of the mills of this State must speedily multiply their numbers.
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"The young men, the factory, the school, the hardiness and comfort of industry — these are the new civilizers which are to revolutionize the old slave states.
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"In Atlanta one-sixth of the whole voters are white Republicans, but most of them vote steadily for the Democratic State and local rulers. The schools of the State are open to both races on equal terms, and the State aid to the colored college has been placed on exact equality with the State University for whites by constitutional provisions. High schools, equally for both races, may be maintained by special county taxation, if ordered by a vote of the people, and two high grade schools specially for the colored race are in progress in Atlanta, exclusive of the colored college. The general system of education — equally for both races — has not been grudgingly adopted by the white government of Georgia. On the contrary, it is heartily sustained by the great mass of the whites, and, as a rule, they generously aid rather than hinder the advancement of the blacks.
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"Every acre of ground in and for miles around the city has felt the shock of the most valiant armies in the world, and has been the death couch of the blue and the gray. When Sherman entered it with his shattered but victorious army he was in the heart of the enemy's country, and the destruction of the city was deemed a military necessity. Hood had destroyed all the buildings containing any stores before he retreated, and Sherman accepted the harsh necessity of destroying the place to leave the enemy without a base to reorganize and pursue him on his perilous march to the sea. He notified the citizens to elect which government they would choose for their protection; sent those who gave oath of allegiance to the North, gave all others safe conduct beyond his lines, with such property as they could take with them, and then made Atlanta one scene of desolation. Here and there an ante-bellum Southern home stands in contrast with the modern buildings which surround them, but they were as brands snatched from the burning. Atlanta was destroyed, but it remained the gateway of the trade that survived the waste of war; it is on the through line from the North to the Gulf; the best vigor of the South with the best vigor of the North seem to have met here on the same mission, and the new Atlanta is the Queen of Beauty among Southern cities, and is rich in all that constitutes enduring wealth.
"The influence of Atlanta upon Georgia, and upon the whole South is incalculable. Already it has revolutionized Georgia. It has not been done by Atlanta verdicts at the polls so much as by the advanced leadership that pours out its live currents of healthy progress in every direction.
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"Here the most advanced leaders of the whole South have their homes, and they are felt in every precinct of Georgia, and the tide of progress cannot be swelling up in the center of the South without overflowing and finding its outlet into all the surrounding States.
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"With Georgia, the mightiest and most prosperous of all the Southern States, thus asserting herself in favor of what is to be the new civilization of the South, I look for her to be more potential in the restoration of the South to enduring prosperity than any other factor in solving the great problem known as the Southern question.
"Atlanta is fairly typical of Georgia in the solidity of her prosperity. It is not the apparent prosperity that is visible 'where wealth accumulates and men decay." It is the general diffusion of wealth and the diffused creation of individual wealth for its own producer that makes Georgia exceptionally prosperous today, and the same causes are producing like results largely in South Carolina and in North Carolina.
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"It is not the wealth and luxury of the old-time plantation, but it is the better and more enduring wealth and comfort that comes from well directed industry and the harmony of all classes. I believe that in another decade Georgia will have doubled her cotton production, that her own bread will be grown on