t to be controlled by States that had been impoverished by
war and reconstruction. In 1879 Congress created a Mississippi River
Commission. Unusual floods in 1882 attracted attention to the danger,
and thereafter Congress found the money for a levee system that
restrained the river between its banks from Cairo to the Gulf.

The mouth of the river, always choked by mud flats, was opened by the
United States in 1879. A Western engineer, James B. Eads, devised a
scheme by which the current scoured out its own channel and converted
itself into an ocean-going highway. He had already proved his power over
the Father of Waters by building the railroad bridge that was opened at
St. Louis in 1874. In 1892 other engineers completed a bridge at
Memphis.

The active development of the New South lessened the difference between
it and the rest of the United States, and brought it within the general
industrial revolution. By 1884 the trend was not noticeable. By 1890
the white population had divided over a political issue like the North
and West. In the years immediately following 1890 Populism was as much a
problem in the South as anywhere.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Most of the books relating to the South are partisan. The most useful
economic analyses are to be found in the writings of W.L. Fleming, U.B.
Phillips, and A.H. Stone. Special points of view are presented in A.B.
Hart, _The Southern South_ (1911), E.G. Murphy, _Problems of the Present
South_ (1904), E.A. Alderman and A.C. Gordon, _Life of J.L.M. Curry_
(1911), J.L.M. Curry, _A Brief Sketch of George Peabody_ (1898), J.E.
Cutler, _Lynch Law_ (1905), B.T. Washington, _Up from Slavery_ (1905),
W.E.B. DuBois, _Souls of Black Folk_ (1903), and J.L. Mathews, _Remaking
the Mississippi_ (1909). The _Annual Cyclopaedia_ is full of useful
details. The Annual Reports of the Peabody Fund, the Slater Fund, and
the United States Commissioner of Education contain statistics and
discussions upon Southern society. The Civil Rights Cases (109 U.S.
Reports) give the best treatment of the legal status of the negro, and
are supplemented by J.C. Rose, "Negro Suffrage" (in _American Political
Science Review_, vol. I, pp. 17-43,--a partial sketch only), and J.M.
Mathews, _Legislative and Judicial History of the Fifteenth Amendment_
(in Johns Hopkins University Studies, vol. XXVII). There were
interesting articles on the New Orleans Exposition, by E.V. Smalley, in
the _Century Magazine_ for Ap