South. Nearly every department of industry
in this kind was now pushed there at many points. Nashville became a
great manufacturing and commercial city. It boasted one of the largest
foundries in the country, and several flourishing cotton factories.
Chattanooga, Birmingham, and Anniston were all thrifty with iron and
steel industries, which rivalled the most prosperous ones at the North;
nor were there wanting those who predicted that the region of those
cities, viz., Southern Tennessee with Northern Georgia and Alabama, was
speedily to become the centre of iron and steel production for the
world.

The lumber trade of Chattanooga, particularly in the white woods, was
said to be second only to Chicago's. The city also had a tannery
believed to be the largest in the world, and more than one fully
appointed Bessemer steel manufactory. These steel works and the tannery
employed colored operatives almost alone, many of these exceedingly
skilful. Birmingham was entirely a creation of the days since the war,
yet it had in 1890 more than 26,000 inhabitants against 3,000 in 1880,
and enjoyed marvellous prosperity, hindered only by speculation in land.
Much of the marble in the mountains of Tennessee, Alabama, and Georgia
was finer than any elsewhere to be found in this country. The block of
it which was forwarded from Alabama for the Washington monument, experts
condemned for the purpose as certainly Italian, nor was it permitted a
place in that structure till the Governor of the State and the Members
of Congress therefrom had certified upon honor, and the quarry-masters
made affidavit, that it came out of the Alabama hills. Atlanta had risen
from the ashes in which the war left it, to be a city of over 65,000
people, with every manifestation of great industrial life and progress.

Between 1870 and 1880, although the population of Mobile decreased, that
of Charleston rose about 1-1/5 per cent., that of Savannah about 5-1/4
per cent., that of New Orleans about thirteen per cent., that of
Richmond about twenty-six per cent. Between 1880 and 1890 Mobile
advanced about 6-1/2 per cent., Charleston almost 10 per cent., Savannah
over 40 per cent., New Orleans over 12 per cent., and Richmond exactly
28 per cent.

It would be misleading to suppose the progress in welfare indicated by
these and the foregoing statements to be true of every district at the
South. The merely agricultural regions were still far behind. Methods of
tilling