The South at Work: Observations from 1904

What the Levees Are Worth to Mississippi

What the Levees Are Worth to Mississippi A Work in Which the Nation Has Been Niggardly The Imperative Need of a System as Complete as in Holland—The Delta Is, However, Not Going to Wait for Levees, for the High Price of Cotton Is Causing the Development of Many New Tracts—A New Reason for the Slow Growth of the South Found in the War and Aftermath [Special Correspondence of the Transcript] • Vicksburg, Miss., April 7. The best place to see the lower Mississippi River is from the old fort below this city.Nowhere else from New Orleans to Memphis is there such a vantage ground as the high bluffs of Vicksburg.Nowhere else does the river itself wear a more impressive look of power.Though still considerably below the danger line, it is high enough already to make these people turn first to the reports of rising tributaries and excessive rainfall in the States to the northward when they take up a newspaper. Reddish-yellow, swift, and silent, the powerful current bears along big logs and even trees with their branches.There is no elevation on the other side and one sees at a glance how surely a vast area would be flooded by a rise of but a yard or two. A big island opposite cuts the stream Published in the Boston Evening Transcript, April 27, 1904. 80 What the Levees Are Worth to Mississippi in two for a good many miles, while just above the city is the juncture with the Yazoo. The effect is curious. It is as if one saw four rivers instead of one. It is easy to understand why the taking of Vicksburg was a turning point of the Civil War. Most of Grant’s soldiers came, like their leader, from the northern end of the great valley.No wonder they fought so stubbornly to keep it all under the same flag, and to keep the river itself open to their commerce. I heard the other day of a conversation between a Mississippian and a man from Illinois which may stand for the two relations between the two halves of the valley. When the Mississippian proclaimed that his people’s share of it was infinitely the better country, the man from Illinois accused him of impiety .“The Mississippi made your country,”he pointed out,“and the good Lord himself made ours.” “True,” said the man from the Delta, “but you’ve got to remember that for centuries the Mississippi has been picking up the best soils in your country and bringing them down here to us.” Blight of War and Reconstruction If, however the Illinois man had insisted on a comparison of prices to prove that the land of the upper valley is the better, the other might have had some difficulty finding an answer which he would be willing to give. Perhaps he might have mentioned the war and reconstruction as accounting in part for the difference, and there would certainly be much justice in that contention. It is a striking fact that the farm values of Mississippi had not in 1899 reached the total of 1859, and this notwithstanding a gain of twenty-two per cent in the last decade alone.1 On this point, I was impressed with a remark which a gentleman of wide information made to me the other day in New Orleans. He was commenting on the present disparity between the wealth of Northern and of Southern States and took issue with the writer’s view, expressed in an earlier letter of this series, that the present advantage of the North is due chiefly to its better industrial system. His idea was, that too little allowance had been made for the South’s exhausted and clean-swept condition after the war. Comparing that whole section to a man starting out in business without any capital, he remarked that such a man’s hardest struggle will be to earn the first thousand dollars. So far as capital was concerned, this part of the country has simply to begin at the beginning. If a serious error is to be found in the comparisons which from time to time I have been making between the ways of different sections in business , it may be because I have made too little allowance for the handicap under which the South began its new industrial life. Take the census figures What...