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two or three miles beyond the Savannah River extensive mills have also been erected, and eight million yards of cotton are annually made there. The manufacturing village is as tidy and thrifty as any in the North, and there is none in the South which excels it in general aspect of comfort, unless it be that of the Eagle and Phoenix Company at Columbus, Georgia. Six miles from Augusta is an extensive kaolin manufactory.

Early on a bright summer morning, while the inhabitants were still asleep, I entered Augusta, and walked through the broad, beautifully shaded avenues of the lovely Southern city. The birds gossiped languidly in the dense foliage through which the sun was just peering; here and there the sand of the streets was mottled with delicate light and shade; the omnipresent negro was fawning and yawning on doorsteps, luxuriously abandoning himself to his favorite attitude of slouch. I wandered to the banks of the Savannah, which sweeps past the city in a broad and sluggish current, between high banks bordered, at intervals, with enormous mulberry trees. Clambering down among the giant boles of these sylvan monarchs, and stumbling from time to time over a somnolent negro fisherman, I could see the broad and fertile Carolinian fields opposite, and could scent the perfume which the slight breeze sent from the dense masses of trees in the town above me.

I found that it had awakened to a life and energy worthy of the brightest of Northern cities of its size. The superb Greene street, with its grand double-rows of shade trees, whose broad boughs almost interlocked above, was filled with active pedestrians; the noise of wagons and drays was beginning; the cheery markets were thronged with gossiping negro women; and around the Cotton Exchange groups were already gathered busily discussing the previous day's receipts. Augusta's excellent railroad facilities, and her advantageous situation have made her an extensive cotton market. The Georgia railroad is largely tributary to the town, although Savannah is of late years receiving much of the cotton which properly belongs to Augusta. The new railway stretching from Port Royal, in South Carolina, to Augusta furnishes a convenient outlet, and the South Carolina and Central roads give communication with Charleston and Savannah. The Cotton Exchange was founded in 1872. For the cotton years of 1872-3, Augusta received 180,789 bales. The cotton factories in the city consume two hundred bales daily, and the Langley and the Hickman factories in South Carolina, and the Richmond mills in Georgia are also supplied from this point. Cotton culture throughout all this section has greatly increased since the war. I was told that one man in Jackson county now grows a larger number of bales than the whole county pro

Returning, an hour later, into the city, duced previous to 1860. The use of fer

tilizers, once so utterly disregarded, is now producing the most remarkable results. But the planters in all the surrounding country give but little attention to a rotation or diversity of crops, and so any year's failure of the cotton brings them to financial distress, as they depend entirely upon the outer world for their supplies. In some of the northern sections of the State planters show a greater inclination to grow their own supplies. Conversation with representative men from various sections of the State, who naturally flock into Augusta to inspect the market, showed, however, that there was a steady and genuine improvement in agriculture through all that section, and, indeed throughout Georgia. Lands which heretofore have been considered of superior quality for cotton growing have, under the new régime, with careful fertilizing and culture, produced twice as much as during the epoch of slavery. The negro on these cotton lands usually works well, according to universal testimony, "and when he does not," said a planter to me, "it is because he is poorly paid. Small farms seem to be increasing in Middle Georgia, and much of the cotton brought into Augusta is raised exclusively by white labor. The small farmers, who were before the war unable to produce a crop in competition with those richer ones who possessed larger numbers of slaves, now find no difficulty in getting their crop to market, and in securing good prices for it.

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Augusta, like Savannah, is a town built in the midst of a beautiful wood. The public buildings are embowered in foliage; the pretty City Hall, the Medical College, the Masonic and Odd Fellows' Halls peer out from knots of trees. Street, the main thoroughfare, is well lined with commodious stores and residences, and the streets leading from it are well kept and shaded. In front of the City Hall stands a simple but massive monument, erected to the memory of the Georgian signers of the Declaration of

American Independence. Tall men, as well as tall and graceful trees, abound in the streets, for the Georgian is dowered with a generous height. The policemen are clad in an amicable mingling of gray and blue. On the road to Summerville, the pretty suburb on one of

the sand hills three miles away, one sees the powder mill, once disused, which supplied the Confederates with ammunition for many a day; and in a lovely location, at the hill's top, is the extensive United States arsenal, around which are grouped many workshops, built and occupied by the Confederates during the war.

Nothing can exceed in quiet and reverent beauty the floral decoration of the principal cemetery of Augusta. Loving hands have lingered long over the Confederate soldiers' graves, and the white headstones, neatly surrounded with boxwood hedges, nearly all bear inscriptions like the following, which show that the young were the first to go, and first to fall, even as in the North:

"JOE E. R

Co. E., 4 Tenn. Cav.,
Died Feb. 17, 1863,
Aged 19."

Here and there tall posts have decorative mottoes worked in evergreen upon them, such as

"The Sacred Trust of Heroes."

"Our Boys in Grey."

Augusta escaped the scorching of invasion, but did not escape the ghost of bereavement, who has claimed such a large space among the pleasant shadows for his

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A SOLDIER'S GRAVE AT AUGUSTA, GA.

own particular ground. The old town had a stormy revolutionary history. Named after one of the royal princesses of England by Oglethorpe, it was an Indian outpost after 1735, and in constant danger from the savages, until taken and retaken by Briton and American during the re

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volution. The churches and the institutions of learning in Augusta are numerous, and the huge fair ground of the Cotton States' Mechanical and Agricultural Association occupies many pleasant acres just outside the eastern limits of the city.

From the ashes of the great penitential conflagration in which the exigencies of war enveloped Atlanta, from the ruins of the thousand dwellings, factories, workshops, and railroad establishments totally destroyed in the blaze of 1864, has sprung up a new, vigorous, awkwardly alert city, very similar in character to the mammoth groupings of brick and stone in the North-west. There is but little that is distinctively Southern in Atlanta: it is the antithesis of Savannah; there is nothing that reminds one of the North in the deliciously embowered chief city of Georgia, surrounded with its romantic mosshung oaks, its rice lowlands, and its luxuriant gardens, where the magnolia, the bay, and the palmetto vie with one another in the exquisite inexplicable charm of their voluptuous beauty. Atlanta has an unfinished air; its business and residence streets are scattered along a range of pretty hills; but it is eminently modern and unromantic. The Western and Atlantic Railway unites it with Chattanooga, running through a country which was scourged in bitterest fashion by the war; the Georgia railroad connects it with Augusta; the Macon and Western with handsome and thriving Macon; the Atlanta and West Point road to the town of West Point, Alabama, gives a continuous line to Montgomery; and the new Piedmont Air Line, which has opened up the whole of Northern Georgia, gives it new and speedy communication with the North via Charlotte, in North Carolina. Great numbers of Northern people have flocked to Atlanta to live since the time when General Pope's will was law, and when the Bullock administration was just arising out of the chaos of the constitutional convention. The removal of the State capital from Milledgeville to Atlanta also gave the renaissant city a good start, and the wonderful manner in which it drew trade and capital to it from all sides made it the envy of its sister Georgian cities.

A brief review of the progress of politics in the State since Atlanta became its capital will aid in arriving at an understanding of the present social and political condition of the commonwealth.

When the reconstruction policy of the general government began, a large number of the citizens of Georgia declared for it, and among them was Mr. Bullock, subsequently governor of the State. In the political campaign which ensued, the opposite faction, which totally repudiated the recon

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A COUNTRY CART.

struction acts, condescended to much proscription and denunciation, and numbers of Union men were driven from the State. It was out of this campaign that the KuKlux conspiracy, as manifested in Georgia, is supposed to have grown. Prominent Republicans received lugubrious letters containing pictures of coffins, and acts of violence were not wanting, native Georgians, who were leading Republican officials, were hunted down, and assassinated; Republican meetings were dispersed, not without slaughter; and it was manifest from the outset that there was to be a decided upsetting of the attempt to enforce the policy inaugurated by the war. But the Republican party was organized, and its legislature, in which there were many negroes, went into session

The first trouble that occurred was due to a discussion of the question whether or not men who had held office previous to the war, and then had taken part in the rebellion, were eligible for the legislature. The debate upon this matter was heated and angry, and the final decision was in favor of extreme liberality towards all who had fought on the Confederate side. Many

of these were admitted to the State councils, and after a time, getting control of the middle men, they had the legislature in their hands. Their first act was to oust all the colored members,-some thirty-six, --and to proceed on the basis that a white man's government was the only one for Georgia. The expulsion of the negroes was corrected by act of Congress; and in 1869 the colored element was re-admitted to the legislature. After this, Bullock, who was the first governor chosen under the operation of the reconstruction laws, had full sway for about two years. Some good laws were passed during that time, but the railroad legislation was the occasion of veritable disaster to the progress of reconstruction in Georgia. Bullock was in due time compelled to depart from the State, to save himself from imprisonment; and the Democratic party, completely triumphant, now and then announces its convictions through the medium of Robert Toombs, who has been its leader, and, in some measure, its exponent for many years. It is not long since this gentleman, in a speech made at Atlanta in favor of a convention to revise the constitution of the State, made use of the following language: "Why, look at that miserable thing you call a constitution! It commits you to all the lies of the revolution against you. It says your allegiance is first due to the Federal Government before it is due to your own State! Do you believe that? When you can wrench that from the constitution, do it!" Under the administration of Governor Bullock, a system of internal improvement was inaugurated, theoretically granting State aid to naissant railroads in the proportion in which the companies building those roads. aided themselves. But bonds were overissued, and were negotiated by prominent. bankers in New York city. The Brunswick and Albany Railroad was the principal project. About $6,000,000 worth of bonds were actually issued during the two years, all of which went to the Brunswick and Albany Railroad, with the exception of $600,000 granted to the Cartersville and Van West road. The party now in power has repudiated all the railroad bonds issued under Bullock's régime. The New York bankers have not suffered very much by this, but the repudiation will give the credit of the State a severe blow.

The Governor, during these two years in which the reconstruction policy of Congress was upheld, seems to have had an

agitated and miserable existence. He spent a great deal of time and money in Washington before he succeeded in procuring the legislation which restored the negroes to their places in the legislature in 1869. It is alleged that when he took the reins of government in Georgia he was worth no money, but that, a little time after he had assumed the office, he paid his debts, and became reasonably prosperous. But he was surrounded by an atmosphere of corruption, and it is difficult to say that he was individually dishonest. In his defense, which gives a very clear idea of the immense obstacles which wily and subtle men placed in his path, it is evident that he required the shrewdness of an archangel to march without stumbling. It was for the interest of the Democratic party in the State to make reconstruction unsuccessful, and towards that end they unceasingly toiled.

The material on which one was compelled to work, to maintain the power of the reconstruction government in those days, was unreliable. One never knew when he was to be betrayed by the weakkneed or ignorant legislators who were his own friends. Prominent State officials were applied to to contribute money for "election purposes "-i. e., for the purchase of

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The career of H. I. Kimball in Atlanta, and in various enterprises in the commonwealth, has not a little to do with the present condition of politics in Georgia. In 1865, Mr. Kimball made his appearance in the State, and began by perfecting arrangements for placing sleeping cars on all the roads in the South. Atlanta was even then peering from beneath the ashes under which she had been buried, and was vaguely whispering prophecies of her future commercial greatness. The capital was likely to be removed from Milledgeville to that city as soon as a regular State government should be resumed, and Kimball, doubtless, saw that as readily as did any of the Atlantians. The Kimball-Ramsey-Pullman-Sleeping-Car Company was the name of the organization with which he started; and he intended, it is said, to get rich out of it by means of $300,000 franchise stock, which he was to have. This venture was not successful, and many people who furnished the money to buy the necessary cars were sufferers. His next venture was the "Atlanta Opera House." The original company which had contemplated erecting a mammoth block for an opera house, and for stores and public offices, had failed; the unfinished building was considered worth $115,000, but Mr. Kimball obtained possession of it for $33,000. This purchase

A COTTON PRESS IN THE COUNTRY.

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islature was in session in Atlanta, in the City Hall. The city rented Kimball's new building, as soon as it was completed, for a State House. Kimball had fitted it up with $55,000, which, it is said, was advanced by Governor Bullock from the State funds. The legislature entered the new capital, and no sooner had they assembled than Mr. Kimball besought them to buy it. They at first refused, but subsequently purchased it for $300,000. As soon as this was decided on, the $55,000 loaned by the Governor to Kimball was returned, thus securing Governor Bullock against a charge of impeachment.

Having prospered so well in the Opera House project, the ingenious Kimball conceived the scheme of the Kimball House, which is at present the largest hotel in Atlanta, and one of the largest in the Southern States. A bill was passed by the legislature allowing an advance to the Brunswick and Albany railroad-that is to say, two acts allowed Kimball, who was the contractor to build the road, to draw respectively $12,000 and $15,000 per mile, before building each section of twenty miles. By this issue he obtained the funds with which to build the Kimball House. He constructed the first twenty miles of the Brunswick and Albany railroad in good faith, then gradually encroach

ed, until there was no longer any semblance of adherence to the letter of the act, which naturally required him to build the road as fast as the money was advanced. Meantime the Democrats were vigorously attacking Gov. Bullock, charging him with every kind of theft, and he was in a precarious situation, when he suddenly found that he had not a majority in the legislature that he could count on. Then ensued a severe struggle on his part against the ousting which was threatened. Kimball continued to unfold superb schemes, and turn them to his private account. In the fall of 1871, Gov. Bul

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