pital was a mainstay of its agriculture.
Transportation, manufacture, and city development found stimulation from
the same source. In 1884 the National Planters' Association promoted a
celebration of the hundredth anniversary of the export of the first
American cotton. In a great exposition at New Orleans they showed how
far the New South had gone in its development.

In the twenty years after 1880 the South became a modern industrial
community. Its coal mines increased their annual output from 6,000,000
tons to 50,000,000; its output of pig iron grew from 397,000 tons to
2,500,000; its manufactures rose in annual value from $338,000,000 to
$1,173,000,000, with a pay roll swelling from $76,000,000 to
$350,000,000. The spindles in its cotton mills were increased from
610,000 to 4,298,000. With the industrial changes there came a shifting
of Southern population. The census maps show a tendency in the black
population to concentrate in the Black Belt, and in the white population
to increase near the deposits of coal and iron. Factory towns appeared
in the Piedmont, where cheap power could be obtained, and drew their
operatives from the rural population of the neighborhood. Unembarrassed
by the child-labor and factory laws of the North, the new Southern mills
exploited the women and children, and were consuming one seventh of the
cotton crop by 1900. In Alabama, Birmingham became a second Pittsburg.

The Southern railway system was completely rebuilt after the Civil War.
In 1860 it included about one third of the thirty thousand miles of
track in the United States, but war and neglect reduced it to ruin.
Partly under federal auspices it was restored in the later sixties.
After 1878 it suddenly expanded as did all the American railway systems.

Texas experienced the most thorough change in the fifty years after the
Civil War. From 307 miles her railways expanded to more than 14,000
miles. Only one of the Confederate States, Arkansas, had a slighter
mileage in 1860, but in 1910 no one had half as much as Texas. The
totals for the Confederate area rose from 11,000 miles in 1870 to 17,000
in 1880, to 36,000 in 1890, to 45,000 in 1900, and to 63,000 in 1910.
After 1880 no Confederate State equaled Texas, whose vast area, suddenly
brought within reach of railway service, poured forth cotton until by
the end of the century she alone raised one fourth of the American crop.
Through the expanding transportation system the area of pr