CHAPTER XXIII.

From Meridian to Eutaw.-Mr. Stanton's failure to pay the Interest due on the A. and C. Bonds.-The Alabama "Prairie" Land.-Bridge over the Tombigbee.-Tuscaloosa.-Decline of Learning in the University.— River System of Alabama.-The Warrior and Cahawba Coal and Iron Fields. The Chinese on the Railway Works.

[EUTAW, ALA.-Jan. 14-15.]

EUTAW is a considerable way into the interior of Alabama, approaching, as I have done, from the south-west border at Meridian, on the line of what is called the "Alabama and Chattanooga,' or North-East and South-West Alabama Railroad. It is some thirty miles or more from Tuscaloosa, the former capital of the State, where the mineral and agricultural resources of Alabama have a common point of meeting, and where "laws and learning," following "wealth and commerce," at one time had their seat. The earthwork of the road has been completed fifteen or eighteen miles beyond this point towards Tuscaloosa; but the trains work only to Eutaw from the south-west end of the line, and to Elyton from Chattanooga in the north-east. This well-designed line is thus, at present date, an unfinished road. But by cars which push ahead from Elyton on one side and Eutaw on the other with railway material, and stages to Tuscaloosa that run twice or thrice a week, one can attain some knowledge of the deeply interesting country betwixt these points. There was much talk along the line as I passed as to the consequences of the failure of Mr. Stanton, the maker of the road, to pay the January interest due on his State-endorsed bonds, and what the new Governor and Legislature of the State would do in a matter which for the first time threatened to tarnish the spotless credit of Alabama.1

1 The Legislature held an adjourned session at Montgomery in the end of January, and instituted a full inquiry into the Alabama and Chattanooga Railway bonds, the result of which was that there had been an over-issue of bonds to Stanton and Company, and that, in particular, the previous Governor and Legislature, when State endorsation had already exhausted or surpassed its legal limits, had issued two millions of direct State bonds to the company to enable them to complete the undertaking. These disclosures

The day is warm, almost hot towards noon, and the motion of the train from Meridian is an agreeable fan as it passes through a good agricultural country of mounds and hollows and natural drainage, where, along the watercourses, the Alabama canebrake, famed in negro song, springs in some luxuriance, and is crunched at all seasons of the year with greedy zest by mules and other "bestial" of the farms. The railway passengers are not numerous, and some have to pay five or six dollars for stage conveyance from Eutaw to Tuscaloosa. At Livingston, a considerable town half-way between Meridian and Eutaw, we get on the edge of the Alabama "prairie" land; and at Eutaw-a respectable little place, spreading over a rising ground nicely embowered under rows of trees, giving shade to many private residences and streets of stores, and what seem hotels or boarding-houses, where outside not a few blood horses are "hitched up"-the "prairie" land is all around. The Alabama prairies extend across nearly the whole breadth of the State from east to west, and are of varying widths north and south of 60 to 100 miles, forming, with the bottoms along the rivers, the richest agricultural region of Alabama. They are of the same character and structure as the prairie-land of Mississippi, of which they seem a lateral extension, but spread out in much larger compass. The soil is deep and fertile, and rests on beds of rotten limestone, which afford it elements of perpetual renewal. The railway cuttings reveal the limestone, white as chalk, up to near the surface. The rock throws off a white powder under the slightest pressure of one's finger. The Tombigbee, one of the many navigable rivers of Alabama, is here crossed by a high wooden triangle bridge, and, as the train suddenly sweeps along it, the scene draws forth exclamations in which delight is mingled with surprise. The limestone cliffs on one bank rise 60 to excited a great deal of public indignation, and for a few days the financial integrity of Alabama seemed to be passing through a severe ordeal. The resolution come to by the House of Representatives, after various animated debates, was that the Governor be authorized to make provision, either by temporary loan or unappropriated money in the treasury, for the payment of the interest due on all bonds loaned or endorsed to the A. and C. Railroad Company, proved to be in the hands of bona fide purchasers on the 1st of January last, and to proceed to recover in form of law from the defaulting company; and the interest accordingly, by arrangement of the Governor, was paid in New York during the first week in April. Mr. Stanton has since been completing the road. The abuse of State credit, and the imposition on the financial world practised in this instance-an abuse and imposition rendered all the more flagrant by a letter that has appeared from the pen of ex-Governor Smith, arguing strongly that the bonds signed and sealed by himself are illegal, and blaming the Legislature and the Governor for paying the interest on them have received an effectual check, and the railway liabilities of Alabama will be kept in future to the limit strictly prescribed to them by law. The total obligation of the State, when the various railway projects to which State endorsation is pledged are completed, will amount, I believe, toabout 20,000,000 dollars.

80 feet above the bed of the river, and are carved by the action of the waters with almost sculptural art. Columns resting on chiselled pedestals, with ornamental capitals, and long lines of moulded cornicing over massive walls planed and coursed into regular blocks, are seen along the cliffy bank, as if fairy hands had, with wondrous cunning, erected temples of whitest marble in honour of all the goddesses of the river. The railway, after crossing the bridge, passes, on the other and lower bank, along a trestle 3,800 feet in length, and gets down again among the farms and plantations. Bales of cotton are lying on the bluff along the river-side, waiting for the steamboats; but the river, after the long dry fall, and a winter in which there has been a spell of frost, but hitherto little rain, is unusually low. The surface of the deep soil is not a dead level, but slightly swelling, and is free of swamp or other obstruction to uniform cultivation. Yet the watercourses are sluggish ditches, and at the farmhouses there are large bucket wells, dug down a great depth through the soft limestone to the springs. Slavery was dense in this prairie region in the time before the war, and now there is a great scarcity of free negro labour. A spirit of roving, and the demand for labour on the railways, have carried away the blacks in thousands. The planters have been able to grow but small patches of corn and cotton on their teeming lands. Hundreds of acres on every plantation of rich arable soil are lying idle, and enjoying a long fallow, which will probably make them richer and fatter still, against the time when they may again be brought into use. Yet this prairie land cannot rest, but must always be doing something. When the hand of man ceases to till and dress it, the strong and untamed soil begins to work and wanton in its own way, and is now sending up over large tracts a wild herbage, and, where ditches and watercourses have not been kept clear as formerly, displays a tendency to develop little germs of swamp. of swamp. So that over wide areas of open land, which one can readily picture a garden full of wealth and people, an aspect of wildness and solitariness reigns.

Tuscaloosa, with its pretty Indian name, so much finer and sweeter than the "Jonesboro's" and "Smithvilles" of a more prosaic race, is as beautiful and spirited a country-town as one could hope to see anywhere. There is a style about it that is marvellous, when one considers how long it has been not only decapitalized, but shut out from railway communication, another word for "the world." Tuscaloosa is the seat of the University of Alabama, where upwards of a hundred students, the flower of the State, were wont to spend or misspend, as the case might be, their golden hours. But the professors, at the close of the war, were put under the ban of political proscription like all other highnesses in the South, and new men of inferior attainments

were set down in their chairs. The consequence is that Alabama has still a University, with buildings and libraries, and professors, and expenditure, but no students; and one wanders about this beautiful arboury, asking, "Where is the fruit?" The wise men of the North and East attribute this lack of fruit to the deep and inveterate disloyalty of the South, forgetting that while one man may lead a horse to water a hundred cannot compel him to drink," and that three-fourths of the disloyalty in the South is the result of a too prolonged course of political injustice. This is a well-worn truism of the Old World, which the American people will probably find out much sooner than it was found out elsewhere. At Tuscaloosa, the Black Warrior River passes from a fall, over its long upper course, of five feet in the mile, to a descent of five inches in the mile through prairie land, and into confluence with other great rivers which search out an everdeepening and concentrated course towards the Gulf. The river system of Alabama forms a subject of study and interest in itself. The Tennessee, diverted at Gunter's Landing, in the northeast of the State, from its southward course by the "millstone grit" and carboniferous strata which the force of the subsiding waters would appear to have been unable to scoop out as at Chattanooga and down the great valley betwixt the Lookout and the Raccoon range of hills, flows westward over the softer sandstone and cretaceous rocks along the northern border of the State, till it pours its great volume of waters with the Ohio into the Mississippi. The low range of hills skirting on the south this westward valley of the Tennessee forms a new watershed, from which all the rivers of Alabama flow southward to the Gulf of Mexico, and converge till they find a common outlet into that Mediterranean of the New World. Within a few miles of the Tennessee the Warrior begins to gather from numerous forks its portly stream, till at Tuscaloosa, hundreds of miles from the Gulf, it becomes a deep and navigable river. Farther west along the Mississippi line the Tombigbee emerges into importance, and is navigable by heavy-laden river-boats a long way above the railway bridge betwixt Livingston and Eutaw. On the northeastern border of the State the Coosa comes down from its headwaters in the hills of Upper Georgia, and is freely navigable from Rome in the latter State to Greenport, fifty miles south from the Tennessee at Gunter's Landing, where, amidst the hard material of the mineral region of Alabama, that turned the greater river westward, it takes a southward course over 150 miles of rapids and other forms of navigable obstruction to its confluence with the Tallapoosa, near Wetumpka, a town some twenty miles or more above Montgomery, the Alabama capital, where it becomes freely navigable again, flowing through rich agricultural lands amidst deep banks of sandy clay, which, in its winding course,

it has moulded at various levels into lines of almost architectural exactness. The Cahawba River, in the middle territory betwixt the Warrior and the Coosa, drains a distinct mineral basin of its own. But all these rivers flow, south-eastward on the one hand and south-westward on the other, through mineral lands, prairie lands, and alluvial bottoms, to form what is called par excellence the Alabama River, a great navigable channel passing through the southern division of the State, and with new tributaries swelling successively into Mobile River and Mobile Bay, till they become one with the Gulf itself, sweeping round the Mexican and Texan shore and the Western Indies, and so mingling

"With a' the pride that loads the tide,

And crosses o'er the sultry line."

The river system of Alabama is thus singularly connected and harmonized in all its wide-spread parts; and, with the exception of the thirty miles betwixt the Tennessee at Gunter's Landing and the Coosa at Gadsden, forms in reality a complete inland water communication extending far beyond the territory of Alabama, and converging over vast regions towards a common oceanic outlet. Two-thirds of the State of Alabama are traversed by navigable rivers, that are not only parts of a whole within the State itself, but by natural and easily opened connections might be made to extend their power of transport far northward east and west. A small fraction of the money spent to good effect for navigation purposes alone on twenty miles of the Clyde in Scotland, and a still smaller fraction of the efforts in Pennsylvania to bring coal and iron together, would have sufficed to open up all the copious resources, mineral and agricultural, of this richly endowed State, without the modern invention of railroads. But the railway age is now upon the world here as elsewhere, and great lines, two or three hundred miles in length, are being made through the basins of the Coosa, the Cahawba, and the Warrior, with supreme contempt of water communication; so that any one may place himself in the cars at Euston Square in London, and be duly delivered, if he has nothing else to do by the way, at the foot of any of the numerous coal and iron mountains of Alabama in three weeks, a few hours less or more. Tuscaloosa is in the Warrior coal-field, and has been mining coal in its own fashion for half a century. The railway is now coming to it, not under the most auspicious financial circumstances, but it is there within a few miles, and will probably modify in a few years, as in other sections of the mineral region of Alabama where the iron horse is pacing, the whole aspect of affairs. The Warrior coal-field, extending from this neighbourhood to the northeastern corner of Alabama, between Lookout Mountain and the

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