The Birmingham age-herald., 1908-05-18
GOVERNOR PECK VIEWS
 PROHIBITION IN ALABAMA
BY GEORGE w. PECK.

(Former Governor of Wisconsin, who is travelling in the south studying the prohi- bition question for The Age-Herald and the Milwaukee Sentinel)
 Mobile, May 16-How easy it was to get into Mobile this time, and how hard it was to get in in 1864. Then southern gentle men were most inhospitable and showed their teeth, and would shoot at the drop of the hat Fort Spanish and Fort Blake ly, off across the water from where l sit in a beautiful peaceful hotel. held out against us Yankees until Farragut came up the bay and began to throw whole blacksmith's shops at the fort, and the boys in blue stood around the edges on land and sent the lead pills into the boys in gray, and beautiful Mobile sat back ten miles up the river and laughed at the te- merity of the blue people in ever hoping to get near enough to shake hands.
 And then, one day. Farraguts fleet be- gan to send shots so hot you could not handle them without asbestos gloves, and then blue boys moved up and over the entrenchments and squirreled through the fallen trees with the points of the branches sharpened So it was like running against butcher knives, and after the woods and trenches were so full of dead men that you could not step without lodging a dead face and limp form, some in blue and some in gray, the Confeder- ate flags on the forts came down reluc- tantly, the stars and stripes went Up on a gallop, blue and gray shook hands if they were alive and said it was pretty hot work, all joined in to bury the dead Of both sides, and Mobile across the water had a fit when she saw the flags change in a minute by the watch, the gray sol- diers became prisoners, with plenty to eat the blue boys waiting on table in the 1I1o cold +1 nd come on, Johnny, have some more coffee and fried ham," and Johnny said All right sah we'uns hold a heap of yo food, and it will ruin you all to board us for very long"
 And the happy soldiers of the two sides of the Civil War became friends on the battlefield of Fort Spanish and Fort Blakely, the gray boys were paroled and sent home, the blues scattered all over Alabama with A. J. Smiths command and Mobile expected to be eaten up alive, but the blue fellows only rode into town and got a few drinks of milk and some corn pone saluted the good old men and women who were there, and rode away without even idcNing up the dust. and to this day the people of Mobile will tell you that a Yankee soldier is a gentle man and a scholar, sah," and I, little shrimp of a 22-year-old boy, on mule, was one of the gentlemen and scholars, sah,' and l have never been near the place since, and that was A years ago, and I came back here an old gentleman, fat as a pig. and looked around for the olu Battle House where an old man gave me a bucket of milk. Well, if I had as many dollars as I have ridden miles through old Alabama, in the war days, I could buy a house and lot.
 On the way down here from Montgom- cry I passed the scene where l stole hundred-dollar horse, and turned loose on the plantation a two-hundred dollar mule, but I never got off the car to collect the hundred dollars difference from the planter because I knew he had a gun; so I looked out of the car window and tried to look innocent and pious, and as little like horse thief as possible, though it did seem to me as though the passen- gers suspected that I needed watching.
 I am astonished to see that Alabama has not, within the last 40 years, devel- oped more in population and material re- sources. Land on each side of the rail- road for hundreds of miles is unoccupied, and the same woods of small jack pine with an occasional tree big enough for a saw log, is seen everywhere, with few good houses away from the large towns, and apparently no considerable number of new settlers on the rich soil that is going to waste.
 I have asked several leading citizens why they did not try to induce people from the north, east and west and from Europe to settle in the state and make it blossom, and I am told they do hope to get people into the state, but that too many citizens believe that Alabama is good enough for Alabamians and they don't care very much whether people come or not, and if families do come into the state to live, they are not looked upon with much favor if they do their own work
 The idea bred into the native is that negroes and mules are made to work, and that a white man and a good horse are too good to work, that it makes them tired. A good horse should not haul blow, but be ridden or driven by white man. So the white farmer who comes to the state and gets up at daylight and digs is often looked upon setting bad example. If his children work in the gar den or milk the cows. they are not con sidered so very desirable as neighbors, and the old planter with 1000 acres Of ground and plenty of negroes to do the work, would revolt to see his son get well acquainted with the daughter of a man who tills the soil.
 T know that in 1864 nearly every soldier
  bama, looked upon the state as a sort or heaven that he wanted to live in after the war was over, and many plans were made to settle here and there, buy small farm and have all kinds of fruit, flowers and crops of all kinds, where a man could live like a king and enjoy every month of the year.
 But do not find them here. Every acre of Alabama is good for something, and the woods should be full of grazing cat tie and there should be butter and cheese factories at every crossroad, but from Birmingham to Mobile l saw less cattie than I would see on the farms between Milwaukee and Madison 84 miles. and the cattle I did see were scrawny, as though they never expected to amount to much. I asked a man who wore a Confederate button in his buttonhole how many dair1es and cheese factories there were in the state He said that he knew one fankee in his county who had a mess of these yellow New Jersey cows. and he made some butter out of a machine like cash register in a saloon, but he guessed a plain old brindle COW and some crock churns was good enough for him.
 I asked him if he ever talked With the Yankee about the butter business, ana he said NO, sah l looked over ms fence once, and he had on overalis, ana was milking his own cows, with one or these jncubators that has a rubber tube running from the bottom Of the COW 10