Another vital outcome of this revolution was the transference of a large part of planting enterprise to business.  Mr. Bruce, a Southern historian of fine scholarship, has summed up this process in a single telling paragraph:  “The higher planting class that under the old system gave so much distinction to rural life has, so far as it has survived at all, been concentrated in the cities.  The families that in the time of slavery would have been found only in the country are now found, with a few exceptions, in the towns.  The transplantation has been practically universal.  The talent, the energy, the ambition that formerly sought expression in the management of great estates and the control of hosts of slaves, now seek a field of action in trade, in manufacturing enterprises, or in the general enterprises of development.  This was for the ruling class of the South the natural outcome of the great economic revolution that followed the war.”

As in all other parts of the world, the mechanical revolution was attended by the growth of a population of industrial workers dependent not upon the soil but upon wages for their livelihood.  When Jefferson Davis was inaugurated President of the Southern Confederacy, there were approximately only one hundred thousand persons employed in Southern manufactures as against more than a million in Northern mills.  Fifty years later, Georgia and Alabama alone had more than one hundred and fifty thousand wage-earners.  Necessarily this meant also a material increase in urban population, although the wide dispersion of cotton spinning among small centers prevented the congestion that had accompanied the rise of the textile industry in New England.  In 1910, New Orleans, Atlanta, Memphis, Nashville, and Houston stood in the same relation to the New South that Cincinnati, Chicago, Cleveland, and Detroit had stood to the New West fifty years before.  The problems of labor and capital and municipal administration, which the earlier writers boasted would never perplex the planting South, had come in full force.

[Illustration:  Copyright by Underwood and Underwood, N.Y.

A GLIMPSE OF MEMPHIS, TENNESSEE]

=The Revolution in the Status of the Slaves.=—­No part of Southern society was so profoundly affected by the Civil War and economic reconstruction as the former slaves.  On the day of emancipation, they stood free, but empty-handed, the owners of no tools or property, the masters of no trade and wholly inexperienced in the arts of self-help that characterized the whites in general.  They had never been accustomed to looking out for themselves.  The plantation bell had called them to labor and released them.  Doles of food and clothing had been regularly made in given quantities.  They did not understand wages, ownership, renting, contracts, mortgages, leases, bills, or accounts.