Tennessee River, covers an area of 3,000 square miles. Over this wide district coal seams one to three feet thick abound. There are twenty-five localities in the basin of the Warrior where the coal crops out, and has been more or less imperfectly mined and made merchantable. They are scooping it out from the hill-sides, where it is deposited in horizontal beds of unknown breadth, gathering it on the edges of the roads, and diving for it, by a curious process, in the beds of the Warrior and its forks; and the accumulating material brought into Tuscaloosa in waggons is put on barges and floated down the river, and sold in Demopolis, Selma, Montgomery, and even as far as Mobile, at a price which puts the Pittsburg black diamond out of joint. It is for the most part a soft bituminous coal, but burns brightly, and can hardly be excelled for the generation of heat and steam. The production of coal in Alabama, by the primitive processes pursued without either skill or capital, amounts to about 30,000 tons per annum. The Cahawba coal-field, a little farther south, and in the centre of the State, is still richer in mineral deposits than the Warrior, though of much smaller compass, having an area only of 700 square miles. Seams of coal have been found there in five or six localities three to eight feet thick, and there also beds of red hæmatite iron ore have been disclosed in surprising richness. From Bibb county, a few miles south from Tuscaloosa, to Will's Valley in De Kalb county in the north-east corner of the State, the red fossiliferous iron is found deposited in nodules in the valleys, and seams of hæmatite look out from the sides, and appear to permeate the interior area, of the hilly ranges. The seams of hæmatite are at some points seven to fifteen feet in thickness. Over at Elyton, beyond the present gap in the railway, the Red Mountain, a long range of hill rising betwixt the basins of the Warrior and the Cahawba, and extending north-eastward till it seems to pass into parallel line with the Lookout range culminating in the great peak at Chattanooga, is charged with thick beds of coal and iron, and has long attracted eager attention as the backbone, so to speak, of the mineral wealth of Alabama, loosely scattered over 4,000 square miles of territory. Many furnaces had been erected along this coal and iron district before the war, and various ironworks, such as the Briardale and the Shelby, had attained considerable eminence when the great armed struggle broke out and threw every work of industry and useful enterprise into difficulty and confusion. Two or three new companies, with capitals of a million dollars each, had just been formed, had bought up mineral lands, and commenced operations, when the war came and reduced them to a state of collapse. The Confederate Government stepped forward, and in some cases, where there were working powers and appliances, bought up the property,

or gave financial assistance. The ore at Briarfield, in Bibb county, was converted by a hot-blast furnace into pig, transported to Selma, and there cast into heavy rifled guns. But when the war languished on the Southern side, raiding wings of the Federal host forced their way even here into the mineral heart of Alabama, where, though slave labour had never penetrated, free white labour was beginning to raise its head, and blew up the iron furnaces and devastated the ironworks. Northern capitalists have since the war been attempting to repair this ruin with varying success and failure, but the furnaces for the most part remain extinguished, and ruin still spreads its sable wing over great and promising works, the resumption of which, with the railway facilities now extended to them, can only be a question of time.

Who should be here even now, in untrodden valleys where the negro has scarce shown his face, and where the white man, conscious all the while of the riches within easy grasp, trembles in his gait, and the steam-engine seems in fiery fury to have rushed ahead of all other elements of civilization, but our old and classic "citizens of the world," the Chinese. A band of Chinese labourers, 600 to 700 strong, drawn from California and the Pacific Railway, have been employed on this Alabama and Chattanooga road from an early period of its construction. They are lodged in tents at present over on the Elyton side, and are doing the earthwork pari passu with the negro, who is not so particular in the matter of tents, and is much more easily moved from one site to another. Anything in the shape of a sleeping-place satisfies the negro, and, if put to it, he will take the shadow of a bush or tree for a few nights, and build up his square box of frames without windows by degrees. The Chinée, who struts even here with a celestial sort of air, must have his tent all nicely fixed up and provided for him. The Chinese navvies are paid 15 dollars gold a month with rations, and the negroes 175 dollars a day without rations. The terms, as thus arranged, are considered pretty equal; but as the rations of the Chinaman are not extremely expensive, save in the article of tea burdened with duty, the equality of Chinese and Negro wages can only be accounted for by the practical superiority of Negro to Chinese labour. The Chinese came in on this line of railway at Meridian, the southern end, and did not comport themselves to the approval of the superintendent. Their rations were in money-cost 75 cents a day. Their work done in grading," or earthwork, cost the company 97 cents a yard, when the same labour could have been contracted for at 35 cents a yard. The superintendent at Meridian would not bear it, and the whole band of Chinese were transferred to the Chattanooga end of the works. The testimony borne there by the chief

authorities was that the Chinese had not done so well as was expected, that they were not so capable of labour as the Negro, but that their hands were hardening, and they were now on the whole giving satisfaction. As regards the alleged saving and economical habits of the Chinese, it seems certain that on monthly pay-days at Meridian they spent their fifteen dollars in whisky, chickens, and whatever they could buy in the stores, as freely as any other spendthrifts. The Chinese are inveterate gamblers, and Sundays are spent about the railway cuttings in elaborate efforts of the Celestials to overreach the Infernals at cards or dominoes; but the Negro, also an adept in play, is not supposed to lose much in these encounters.

CHAPTER XXIV.

The Vicksburg and Montgomery Railway.-Demopolis.-Despair of the Planters for Labour.-Negro Women.-Selma its Cotton Mart. Reform of the Municipality.-Claims of the Town to be a Railway Centre. -Free School System in Alabama.- The Negroes and the School or Poll Tax.-Distribution of the School Money.-National Banking.-Patent "Cotton Transplanter."

[SELMA, ALA.-Jan. 15-16.]

RETURNING down the Alabama and Chattanooga road from Eutaw to the little station called York, one gets upon the railway from Vicksburg vid Meridian to Montgomery, part of a great line to be carried to Brunswick in Georgia, the Atlantic seaport nearest the Mississippi. Every strategic point in railway communication is searched out in all this Southern country with a keenness seldom equalled. The old lines may be tolerably serviceable, and may not have traffic more than to make them moderately prosperous; but these considerations do not damp the ardour with which new lines are devised, if two or three hundred miles of distance are to be saved to the Atlantic seaboard, and new and fertile tracts to be opened up by the way. The point of departure may be Vicksburg, a small place rising into commercial importance on the Mississippi, and the point of arrival Brunswick, trying to become a seaport, one hundred and thirty miles south of Savannah, because it has three feet or four feet deeper water than any port, save perhaps Norfolk, on the Atlantic coast; but all this poverty of present resource is scarcely deemed a rational impediment, and though the difficulty of raising the necessary loans is great, and the difficulty of obtaining a respectable subscription of capital is greater, yet the idea of an "airline" as direct as birds can fly seizes on the general mind, and, gathering up all the interests at either end, and piecing itself on to existing roads with the rarest ingenuity, gets itself lobbyrolled through the Legislature into a legal shape, and forthwith becomes more or less an accomplished fact. In a few years hence every salient point on the Mississippi will be connected by direct"air-lines with the Atlantic seaboard, and the great draught by steam and capital to New York of late years, which

would speedily become suffocating to the American continent, will be gradually modified and counteracted by railway enterprise, and by the desire of British and Continental manufacturers, in the natural course of commerce, to get into the most immediate relation with the producers of their raw material. On any narrower hypothesis the present railway making in the South would seem quite unjustifiable. But the interior and local interest of the new railway projects at the same time is very manifest. The great difficulty of the United States is country roads, and the want of stone and rock. The constant tendency to drop into ruts and puddles both wide and deep wherever wheeled vehicles can pretend to go, is observable from the suburbs of Philadelphia to this point. It is only by the iron track, liberally distributed, that the produce of the Southern States can hope to get to market; and over-numerous as the great lines of communication, made and projected, seem to be, they all pass through wide interior regions of country, thinly peopled indeed, but settled and in working order, and capable of much development.

The railroad from York to Selma passes through Sumpter, Marengo, Perry, and Dallas counties, fertile tracts, yielding heavy crops of cotton on a soil that is inexhaustible. At Demopolis, a pretty town founded by French refugees, and where the railway again crosses the Tombigbee after its confluence with the Warrior, the steep limestone cliff's seem even whiter and finer than near Eutaw. The chalky substance when touched whitens one's fingers, and a penknife cuts it as easily as if it were a piece of cheese. This natural "fertilizer" underlies the whole middle or "prairie" territory of Alabama from east to west, and enriches, mellows, and invigorates the deep upper soil of its own accord. But a great desolation has passed over much of these lands, which the vitality of free labour can but slowly efface; and external marks of wealth, and even comfort, have in many places for the present all but disappeared. Many of the planters have deserted farming in despair, and taken up their abode in the small towns, where they live on the profits of some house property, or of some chopping business of insurance or merchandise. Tough and weather-worn men, who adhere to their posts in the field, come riding through the depôts inquiring eagerly for hands to come and pick their stands of cotton, or drive their teams with the bales already made. A crowd of negroes-mostly girls and young women, not unconscious of certain charms, set off with various brass ornaments and glass beads are always seen about the railway stations, looking up and down, wondering, and toying out their long holiday. Other negro women, modestly and tidily dressed, come in with little baskets of eggs, and chaffer greedily for the 30 cents per dozen.