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War of 1812, during which our Atlantic coast was over run and Washington, our nation?s capital, was captured and burned by the British.
The Indian had been used as a ?cats paw? by the British, French, and Spanish, but now he stood alone without help from the European powers. Thus facing destruction and subdued, he was resigned to removal to the West.
PIONEERS OF LAWRENCE COUNTY, MISSISSIPPI
Among the heroic pioneers who contributed so largely to early Mississippi were the ancestors of my wife, Revolutionary soldiers and their sons and daughters. They were men who had but recently emerged triumphant from the War of 1812, the second great war in a lifetime against the might of the British Crown; and their glory is around their descendants like an aura.
They were born variously in Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia, many the seventh generation in this country, old names bearing testimony to good blood, the purest type of American.
They had migrated to Lawrence County in southeast Mississippi before 1820, when everything north of that county was still Indian land.
This virgin wilderness, teeming with game and fish, was watered by the Pearl River, which sweeps to the Gulf through deep woods, and long leaf pines?and everywhere there was the beauty and sweetness of the magnolia bloom and the song of the mocking bird.
And here the ancestors of my wife lived in deep content through transition from primeval forests and unbroken wilderness to ordered farms until desolated by the Civil War.
CIVIL WAR
My wife?s grandfather, Benjamin Stringer, enlisted as a boy of 15 in the Confederate Army at the outbreak of the Civil War. He fought for two years in the campaigns of Mississippi, Kentucky, and Tennessee until his capture by the Yankees at Chickamauga. He remained a Yankee prisoner-of-war for the remaining two years of the war.
Crushed by defeat and two years in a Yankee prison camp, he returned to Lawrence County to find his comrades slain, his farm devastated, his barn empty, his money worthless. A condition of near paralysis existed.
There was little bitterness as he patiently assumed these burdens ? the bitterness came in the Reconstruction Period, when the South, divided into five Federal miltary districts, was ringed by Federal troops and at the mercy of ex-slaves, carpetbaggers, and scalawags.
This so-called ?Tragic Era? in the ensuing decade created far more bitterness between the North and South than the war itself.
STAY SOUTH, YOUNG MAN
The starting point for the new South was the recognition that economic betterment and material progress were the keys to the problems of the agrarian region, which for so long was in bondage to a one-crop economy. Salvation lies in a diversified agriculture balanced with payrolls of industry.
It is in our generation, with the development of low-cost electricity and good roads, that this concept has been realized in a healthy, balanced combination of farm production and industrial payrolls.
The South?s progress ? more rapid than in other sections over the past fifty years ? is due to such favorable conditions as availability of raw materials, low cost and ample electric power, economical fuels, intelligent and cooperative labor, lower living costs, favorable tax rates, friendly laws, and excellent public relations.
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