Mr. Greeley's Letters from Texas and the Lower Mississippi (1871)

AUTHOR: Greeley, Horace

The text gathers several reports on Greeley's travels to, and in, the the South, touching on questions of agriculture, land use, progress, and race relations. For Greeley, agriculture is a marker of both civilizational and racial advancement because agricultural labor amounts to a form of reciprocity with nature, in exchange for consuming it. In Greeley's racialized understanding, this is a feat of which Native Americans are constitutionally incapable:

The civilization of our race is evinced and measured by the growth and progress of its Agriculture. The thorough savage is never a cultivator. What the earth spontaneously produces, he appropriates without gratitude and consumes without forecast. He revels in abundance one week, to be pinched by hunger the next. Only his want of an ax or his ignorance of its use precludes his felling, and thus destroying, the tree which, for generations, has fed his tribe with its nourishing, palatable fruit. He delights in gorging himself on the flesh of animals, but never feeds nor shelters them. Thus devouring and devastating, never tilling nor producing, he requires square miles to subsist scantily, precariously, his tribe, where his civilized successor will feed and clothe more persons generously on so many acres (9).

Thus Greeley welcomes the use of steam machines for cultivation. Among other advantages he explicitly notes that the steam plow, for example, can be easily operated by cheap African American field-hands: “Boys of 12 to 14 years, who could not hold a breaking up mule-plow, were running engines as learners, at wages of seventy five cents each per day” (5). In fact, Greeley is convinced that scientific and engineering progress will replace steam with the power of electricity (14). Greeley claims that “increased power over Nature is the general measure of […] progress” (10-11). He is not opposed to using animals as food or relying on their labor, so long as this use happens within the kind of agricultural progress outlined above (10). He is, however, concerned with animal welfare and the “serious harm” that animals suffer from lack of clean water (27).

He laments the dismal quality of food, particularly meat, in Texas and thinks that meat should not be prioritized over fruits in the first place:

It is a grief to see beef that might be broiled into tender and juicy steaks fried or stewed into such repulsive, indigestible messes as I have encountered at all but her two best hotels. It is a crying shame for a region where the Peach, the Grape, the Pear, the Strawberry, &c., grow so luxuriantly and bear so bounteously, to be living almost entirely on Meat, Bread, and Coffee, even if these articles were what they should be, and in Texas are not (32).

“If half the money spent in the State for Liquors and Tobacco,” he admonishes, “were devoted to making dwellings comfortable and supplying their tables with fruits, &c., the whole people would be happier and better” (33). He emphasizes general frugality and industriousness: “Other men must climb; the temperate, frugal, diligent, provident farmer may grow into competence and every external accessory to happiness” (22). This includes former slaves, whom Greeley, contrary to the reports of former slaveholders, explicitly notes as being industrious (36-37), whereas he is clear “that two-thirds of the men with nine tenths of the women, who formerly composed the slaveholding caste, would this day give half their houses and lands to have their slaves back again” (38). Consequently, he vehemently insists that the Government should “pass and enforce laws for the extirpation of the execrable Ku-Klux conspiracy” (50).

 

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