Speaking of gullies, let old General Bob Anderson, great-great-grandfather, tell a tale from his grave in South Carolina. Somewhat lonely lie the bones of this fellow they called "Old Thunder Gusty," who rose from sergeant to general, who fought the Cherokees, served in the House of Burgesses and then the Legislature, and who farmed the land.

The weary old soldier was buried in a field one day, and for all anybody knows, what there is of him has washed down to the sea. The slashing and the tearing of the land thereabouts is terrific. The elements of nature have fought around his grave, and everywhere the hand of man has added to the destruction of the land.

From the time he stole his bride and ran away from the land of the Lewises in Virginia, it was fight, fight, fight, whether it was the Indians, the British, or the raw elements of nature. He had no time to play the demagogue, for life was too hard and fast.

But, buried as a gentleman and prosperous merchant should be, are the bones of Sam Maverick, [footnote: Great-grandfather.] a few short miles away. A fine marble shaft glitters in the sun. His bones lie still and peaceful, though some say not, just before he died in 1852 he wrote to his son Samuel in the far-off and mighty Texas, warning him that no war between the states should be tolerated, saying that if such a war came, "ships would rot at anchor, and grass grow in the streets of Charleston." But he must surely have died in peace, for his death came long before the ships rotted and the grass grew in the streets of Charleston.

On the hill across from the private cemetery of the Mavericks near Pendleton, South Carolina, is their great mansion. It is in rack and ruin. The old driveway leading up to the house from the road, which once had fine trees on both sides, is a great, bare, hideous gully. And no one can travel there, for in rain time raging torrents of blood-red clay pour down it. Over the once fertile lands of the Mavericks are gullies and more gullies, and the land is washed slick and shiny. It is practically all worthless and abandoned.

I have heard much of my ancestors and have kept my head in a history book since I learned to read. But nowhere have I ever read a history as eloquent as the Anderson County gullies. Now the soil is a front fact of our lives—so when I started to write this book I knew that I wanted to write something about the conservation of it. I knew the preservation of our land was essential to any story of civilization.

So, traveling everywhere in our country, reading and studying, I obtained the data for a story of soil conservation. I read all their books, and finally I sat down and wrote my soil chapters.

But they were terrible. They sounded like a series of lectures to school children. I dropped the idea. Then the bones of Robert Anderson, his life, and what has happened over in South Carolina intrigued me. There was my story, the waste of our lands—and in his story I found everything that I had written in my other chapters.

In Anderson County, which is named after old General Bob, is now located one of America's great soil conservation projects.

There also, picking up the strings of a dead civilization, is an increasing industrial slavery in the textile mills, built on a dying agriculture. Attempting to save what is left of this dying agriculture is a project of the Resettlement Administration. There also is Clemson College, established by the son-in-law of John C. Calhoun, the nullifier.

Over these lands I have ridden back and forth and have seen the history of America in old tombstones and wasted hillsides. There I have gone with sentimental thoughts and some historical knowledge of the district. It is a perfect example of the dying South, although it is one of the very best counties in the whole region.

One shivery, drizzly day I drove down the road from the little town of Pendleton, to the Maverick house. The visit to the town had been a little shocking, for in all my grandfather's books and memoirs the story is told of the two fine hotels, the schools, and the beautiful homes in the town. I had forgotten this was a hundred years ago. There was no hotel or restaurant, and no sign of wealth there now. Passing out of the town, I drove along a country road and to the Maverick house.

I could not see it plainly, but it looked fine and austere in the sky. I thought of others—Monticello, the Hermitage, Mount Vernon. I drove up to the natural road leading to the house; but it was a great malicious gully, and impassible. I found sideroads leading to the back of the house.

Slithering up a back road, I reached the house. The picture I had was not this. Gone were the vineyards, the well cultivated fields, the barns, the slave quarters, the gardens.

I knocked at the door. A great good-natured American opened the door and let me in. He had a large family, and they all sat about one big room, with a fire burning.

He showed me the house. The oak and magnolia parquet flooring is gone, but the heavy pine sub-floors are there. I was astonished. What happened? I said. Burned for firewood, he answered. The marble on the mantels, imported from Italy. Stolen. All bare and torn.

Then I saw that all of my ideas of old houses were wrong. I had based my opinions on Mount Vernon and others, and I now realized that they had been "maintained," generally by patriotic societies and agencies of the Government. They are the ones visited by Americans. But there are thousands and thousands that Americans never see, the symbols of a broken country, and a land where conditions have gone from bad to worse. Here I saw, and it knifed into my heart, the True South.

Finally, in the top room I saw a loom, spinning wheel, and the old equipment which once made the people self-sufficient. Like a tourist lost with the hillbillies, I rushed questions at him of old customs.

By asking questions about the spinning wheel, I learned other things. "My wife use that damned spinning wheel? Hell, no! She don't know nothing about it. It was great-grandma or maybe grandma, who last used it regular. We just keep it around."

Indeed, manufacturing came in just before the Civil War. Cotton was sold, but clothing was bought mainly from England and Germany. So, my host blithely informed me, they had forgotten all that foolishness about weaving and spinning and such like. But he did not realize that he and his people had learned nothing else, had lost whatever primitive virtues they had, and were now incapacitated and dependent.

I found that he was a caretaker. Some landlord owned the property. This man had inherited a little farm. He lost it, as did many others. He became a tenant, a share-cropper. He and his family had gone from bad to worse. Here he was living broke and poverty-stricken on the old ancestral estate of the Mavericks.

I talked to him about the soil. "The land is all wore out," he said. "You farm and grow crops and the yield is nothing to what it used to be. But even if you grow something, you can't sell it. There is no market."

He was enthusiastic about the work of the Soil Conservation Service. "But I don't see how I can get started farming; it looks mighty like I can't do it all by myself, and the land is all washing away." He seemed to have no idea as to what he could do to get out of the hole. Which means that agriculture everywhere needs planning and leadership, and needs them badly.

The caretaker of Maverick house was a fair example of the soil itself. For he and his family represented about the limit of poverty. In the beginning, people like him had from ten to forty acres, but were self-sufficing, and got along. They had corn, wheat, and oats. They had hogs and cattle and horses. In addition, there was cotton for the cash crop, although it was of more or less secondary importance until after the Civil War. Now such people have nothing; have lost their independence and know nothing.

Since I was there, I am told, the land with the great house has been sold for less than $2,000. I have no figures; but surely the land and the house were originally worth from ten to fifty times as much. The exact amount does not matter, because of one thing we are certain; it is worth nothing in comparison to what it was. What I saw, and what has happened there, can be duplicated anywhere in the Piedmont county along the Eastern seaboard.

It is a brave story of early colonial pioneers. Here, before the Revolution, came the early English traders. They killed off the fur-bearing animals, and then they took to trading in cattle.




They started little "cowpens" in upper South Carolina where the cattle were rounded up and then shipped to England and other European countries. That is how the Battle of "Cowpens" got its name, and how good old General Bob Anderson, then a captain, by commanding with dash and courage a company against the British, added to his fame.

The change from the fur-traders to the cattle traders had been complete in the economy of the region. Around the cowpens were soon built permanent habitations.

Agriculture—and with it, soil erosion, waste of natural resources, had begun.

This was the land mainly of the Cherokees, but of other tribes as well. It was one great primeval forest. In these uplands were giant oaks, pines and chestnuts. The white man started his relentless march long before the Revolution. Without title or color of title from either the Indians or the King of England, he hacked his way into these lands of the Cherokees. There were some dense forests, but most of the country was open. Between the trees the ground was covered with wild cane and pea vines.

The litter of the forest lay over the land, and the top soil was deep and loamy. There is nowhere any record of the red clay subsoil showing in those days, except along the most traveled trails of the Indians which had been used for centuries. This land was like millions and millions of acres all over America.

Around the cowpens grew little villages. Near these little villages, the people cultivated corn and small grains. More and more settlers came. They took the best level bottom lands first. This was natural, because they were near water, and had the best yield of corn. Later, people were forced to locate their farms on the hillsides. Erosion on these farms began cutting the good soil loose, as well as unproductive silts and grimy gravel. All of this washed down, spilling on the lands below.

But the trouble was, and one can see all this easily now, as plowing increased the washing increased, filling up the bottoms, exhausting the lands above, covering the lands below, and choking the streams. The result was a general destruction.

As evidence of this, in the lands of the Mavericks and the Andersons, the Calhouns, Pickenses and Pickneys, everywhere one sees washing soil, red and gory. Long ago, through the fine forests and down in the bottoms ran clear streams, full of fish. Today the streams resemble sickly dishwater, and most of the fish are dead.

In the middle of this district was the city of Pendleton. Shortly after the Revolution it grew to be a small edition of Charleston. The rich coast planters and shippers of cotton maintained summer homes there, and some of them remained to live permanently. Among those was Sam Maverick. Bob Anderson had moved there with his new bride several years before the Revolution. The region became the center of culture and aristocracy for the up country.

A farmer's society was organized in 1815. Its members knew nothing of the chemistry of the soil, but they knew the land was going to pieces. In order to stop the soil depletion, they urged the raising of livestock, to put the land back into grass and trees so it would not all be destroyed by plowing. Also, they advocated that plowing be done around the hill to prevent erosion—on contours—instead of up and down, a practice which let the soil wash away.

As far back as 1818 the following warning was issued throughout the district:

"This system, if it may be so called, of perpetual exhaustion, has impoverished our lands to an alarming degree, and if pursued for half a century more, would make this interesting portion of the state a perfect desert—exhibiting a naked barren surface, spotted here and there by a few patches of broom-straw, or starved shrubbery, and ruined from future recovery by deep-washed gullies, the permanent and accusing witnesses of our apathy and indolence."

And I saw the havok prophesied in 1818 with my own eyes. I saw the "naked barren surface," cut, as the writer suggested by "deep-washed gullies." Here and there were men doping the land with expensive fertilizer. Here many thousands of acres have been taken back by the Resettlement, of whose boss I shall tell a tale, and whose work I shall describe a little later.

Eli Whitney had invented the cotton gin in 1793. With it slavery began to be profitable again. With it came destruction of the land, and the conditions in 1818 just described were a result of it. Slave labor ruined the land, and destroyed fair competition and the small farmer. Farms thus tended to become larger, and the records show that even in the thirties and forties, Sam Maverick owned in that country alone some sixteen thousand acres. The condition of the small white owner, although he still owned from twenty to forty acres, was growing rapidly worse.

So Sam Maverick and the big plantation owners prospered, but the little farmers did not. The big plantation owners continued to use slaves, and the small farmers continued to lose their farms—the sheriffs were selling them right and left. After Sam Maverick departed this life, his estate passed to a daughter. His children moved away, and for a while the land and the home were managed from a distance. Subdivided shortly after the Civil War, the property was sold in pieces. Farming operations had stopped, and the land was growing back into woods. But after the war the land was worked to the limit for cotton.

This process went on until the World War, after which came a new army of boll weevils, the inflation period, the depression, and the economic collapse of the nation.

And now around three-fourths of the surrounding population are share-croppers and tenants. Land ownership and personal land conservation of interested owners is in a bad way, for no share-cropper can do anything but work his land to death for what he can get out of it.

The condition of a majority of these share-croppers, the descendants of the white pioneers who, with evangelical fire, wrested the land from the Cherokees a century and a half ago, is as bad as the condition of the black slaves of seventy-five years ago. I am told by professors of agriculture in the State that many of the share-croppers have less than the slave-owners gave their slaves.

Here around Anderson are twenty-one cotton mills and plants. White labor is, of course, dirt cheap. Negro labor is cheaper, but, as in the rest of the South, it is not used in the mills. There are not so many Negroes, but their condition is as bad as anywhere else.

Some of the cotton mills are around Honea Path. Here, to this beautiful little place, historic and romantic, have come many of these starving people from their little farms on the wasted hillsides. Here their ancestors did battle with the Red Men, and the ground was soaked with the blood of the savages. From all these districts, the Indians were exterminated. And in their little churches the settlers prayed, singing and asking fervently, "Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?" and answering in chorus, "Yes, I am washed, I am washed in the blood of the Lamb."

One Sunday in 1934 the people, singing and praying fervently as their ancestors did, asked and answered the question. But this day the question had additional meaning, for they were uneasy, and a strike was in effect for just a little more money.

Out of the church came the people. A few days later the guns of "The Law" barked; six white textile workers dropped. They had hoped to organize. So they were killed. Someone said they were Reds, God damn'em, and it served them right.

The blood of the Cherokees has washed away. But the blood of the six who were killed will not wash. As the sticky red clay curdles down the eroded gullies of South Carolina, some say it is human blood, blood of white men who were killed by their own white bosses. And still thereabouts, the people pray to a gentle Savior, and they answer that they have been washed in the blood of the Lamb.

Such, then, is Anderson County in the Year of Our Lord, 1937. The people are at the end of their land rope, and know it. They are at the beginning of another industrial era for all men, with their new factories, just as they were in 1793 with Eli Whitney and his cotton gin.

In this old slave country, in which lived John C. Calhoun, who denounced the "Free Soilers" and abolitionists of a century ago, are the new "Free Soldiers" in the sense that they want the land to be saved, and saved for them. Others, also, who have been forced into the little towns let burn in their hearts the Killing of the Six at Honea Path, and say such things must never happen again.

This, indeed, is the land in which Bob Anderson and the white farmers fought that they might have political liberty, written in noble phrases by Jefferson into the Declaration of Independence. The story is a stirring part in the world's history of liberty, and few American's know of one of the tragic omissions concerning it, which, together with the blunder of a judge, led to an awful human catastrophe.