INDUSTRIAL REORGANIZATION IN ALABAMA 495
from the ridges and hollows and caves of the silent hills. 43 The negro artisan is giving way to the white; even in the towns of the Black Belt the occupations once securely held by the negro are passing into the hands of the whites.
In the white counties during Reconstruction the relations between the races became more strained than in the Black Belt. One of the manifestations of the Ku Klux movement in the white counties was the driving away of negro tenants from the more fertile districts by the poorer classes of whites who wanted these lands. P'or years immigration was discouraged by the northern press. Aliens were afraid to come to the " benighted and savage South." 44 But in the eighties the railroad companies began to induce Germans to settle on their lands in the poorest of the white counties. Later there was a slow movement from the Northwest. As a rule, where the northerner and the German settle the wilder- ness blossoms and the negro leaves.
After plowing their hilltops until the soil was exhausted, the whites, even before the war, decided that only by clearing the swamps in the poorer districts could they get land worth culti- vating. This required much labor and money. After the war, with the increase of transportation facilities, fertilizers came into use, the swamps were deserted, and the farmers went back to the uplands. 45
DECADENCE OF THE BLACK BELT
The patriarchal system failed in the Black Belt, the bureau system of contracts and prescribed wages failed, the planters' own
- Address of President C. C. Thach, December 29, 1903.
- Northern Alabama Illustrated, p. 378.
46 By the use of commercial fertilizers, vast regions once considered barren have been brought into profitable cultivation, and really afford a more reliable and constant crop than the rich alluvial lands of the old slave plantations. In nearly every agricultural county in the South there is to be observed, on the one hand, this section of fertile soils, once the heart of the old civilization, now largely aban- doned by the whites, held in tenantry by a dense negro population, full of dilapi- dation and ruin ; while, on the other hand, there is the region of light, thin soils occupied by the small white freeholder, filled with schools, churches, and good roads, and all the elements of a happy, enlightened country life. (Address of Presi- dent C. C. Thach, December 29, 1903.)
