Staunton Spectator

There is no part of the continent of America which possesses superior (if equal) advantages to the Valley of Virginia. It lies in the middle region, and its climate is proverbially salubrious. Its inhabitants are rigorous and live to great age. A large number of our people outlive, by one or two decades, the allotted span of human life, and it is not unfrequently the case that they attain patriarchal age of 100 years. The achievements of the "Stonewall Brigade," in the late war, composed almost exclusively of Valley people, sufficiently attest to their capacity of endurance.

The soil of the Valley is remarkable for its fertility. It produces in abundance, not only wheat, rye, oats, corn and barley, but it is particularly adapted to grass and fruits of all kinds. The inexhaustible ledges of limestone furnish the means, not only of maintaining, but of increasing, almost indefinitely, its productiveness. The Piedmont country is a very fine district, but in some respects it is inferior to the Valley. Every traveller in crossing the Blue Ridge must be struck with the marked change in the appearance of the country, and most especially of those fields which are not in crop. The broomsedge, sassafras and briers which spring up with such rapidity east of the mountain, are comparatively unknown in the Valley. West of the Blue Ridge, the farms have a neat, clean look, the fields are covered with clover, timothy, or indigenous grasses, and the fence rows, in the main, are free from shrubs and briers. Herein consists one of our great advantages. If you turn out and exhausted field east of the ridge, it will soon wash into gullies, or clothe itself with broom sedge, briers, or sassafras, or small pines. West of the mountain, an abandoned field will protect itself from the sun the first season by a mantle of weeds, which soon give place to a spontaneous growth of blue grass.

We remember that, some year ago, two or three intelligent citizens of the Valley, tempted by the lower prices of lands east of the mountain, had a thought of selling their Valley lands, and removing to the Piedmont region. Before making a final decision, however, they determined to visit that section, and to make a careful examination of the relative advantages and disadvantages of the two portions of the State. They accordingly spent some weeks east of the mountain, making minute explorations, and returned satisfied to remain in the Valley. According to their report, the increased labor necessary to keep the Piedmont lands in order, in consequence of the tendency to put forth sassafras, sedge, briers, and other noxious products, more than compensated for the difference in the price of lands.

The facility with which lime can be procured in the Valley to be used as a fertilizer is an almost incalculable advantage. Under the new system of labor, and the new order of agriculture economy rendered necessary by it, we expect to see lime generally employed as the most important and valuable of all fertilizers.

As soon as the country becomes settled in its political condition, (which in our judgment the results of the fall elections in the Northern States will rapidly accelerate), there will be a great rush of immigration to the Valley. The inhabitants of the bleak hills of New England will crowd into this fertile and salubrious region to escape the searching east-winds which decimate their country by consumption and kindred diseases; and thousands of the best citizens of the Southern States, disgusted with the thriftless and lawless population turned loose upon them, will gladly seek a refuge in the Valley where very little of that kind of population is to be found.

New England manufacturers also -- now that the bug-bear of slavery is removed -- will find it to their interest to leave the inhospitable climate of the North, and establish mills along our water-courses, which furnish a motive power much cheaper than steam.

We believe that the results of the great conflict between the two sections will be to build up the middle States at the expense of the extreme North and South. Heretofore, slavery has operated like a wall to exclude Northern enterprise and capital from the Southern States, and its outflow has been westward. That wall has now been broken down, and the wealth and skill of Northern manufacturers will find it more to their advantage to establish factories nearer to the raw material and nearer to consumers. The cotton and wool spinners and weavers of Massachusetts, and the stock and wood growers of Vermont and New Hampshire will find it to their interest to come to Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Kentucky, to carry on their respective occupations, where ice does not obstruct their machinery; where provisions are cheaper; where the lands are better; where consumption is almost as stranger; and where not one half of the fuel is necessary for the comfort of man, and one-third of the provender for the sustenance of stock during the winter. The wool-growers of Vermont have to feed their sheep six months in the year, while in Virginia there are but a few weeks during the winter that they cannot manage to shift for themselves.

Other, but not less efficient causes, will induce Southern men to come to the middle States. For some years society must be in a transition state in large slaveholding districts. The suddenly emancipated slaves, without education, mechanical skills, or capital, and with a natural indisposition to work, will not be in a condition to sustain their families. Theft, robbery and all sorts of disorder will prevail until the social fermentation is over, and the scum sloughed off. While this process is going on, the Southern States will not be desirable as places of residence, or for rearing families.

Northern and Southern men will soon begin to understand these things, and then the tide of immigration will begin to flow into Virginia and the other Middle States. Lands and mills in the North will decline in value in the presence of active competition springing up in the middle district, and the Southern States will be to the middle what the East and West Indies have been to England -- places to make money in, but not to spend it or to live in.

And, if the State of West Virginia, that offspring of civil war and lawless usurpation, is suffered to stand, after the restoration of peace and constitutional rule, (which we hope will not be the case,) we shall probably have a large immigration from that quarter of its best citizens who will be unwilling to bear the yoke of oppression and degradation to which they are now subjected.

We shall thus have triple flow of population and wealth into our Valley, and we can accommodate them all. While we should regret to see an influx of narrow-minded, canting, hypocritical radicals into our country, we are prepared to welcome well-behaved, honest and upright men from every quarter.

The consequences of this immigration will be the enhancement of our lands, the subdivision of our farms, improvement in our system of tillage, diversification of our pursuits, utilization of our water power, development of our mineral resources, erection of factories of all kinds, and general spread of prosperity and industry.

Our people have been somewhat depressed by the want of capital and the suspension of their political rights; but, in the main, they have borne up nobly against the pressure of adverse circumstances. They have displayed wonderful will, energy, and recuperative power. They have obliterated, already, may of the traces of the ravages of war, and, in another year, a stranger, looking at the surface of the country, would never dream that we had, during four dreary years, been trampled down by contending armies, drained of our wealth by heavy exactions, and wasted by fire and sword.

We think we can now safely say to our people, "Be of good cheer." A better day is about to dawn upon us. The Philadelphia Convention is but the outward sign of an improved condition of the public sentiment of the country. It is a visible manifestation of the purpose of the people to restore the Union, and to re-establish the Constitution. This purpose has existed for some time, but in a vague and undefined form. The Philadelphia Convention has given it shape and direction, and the popular judgment will, at an early day, accord to it the sanction of law.

We will soon be restored to our rights, and prosperity will speedily follow.

Let our people, then, be patient. Let them hold on, for a time at least, to their lands, so that they may reap the benefits of the appreciation. Let those who wish to purchase, buy now, while they can. Lands must rise. No man runs any risk by buying land at fair prices now. On the contrary every thing tends to give assurance of a rapid advance in value.

We take it, then, that there is a bright future in store for our beautiful Valley.

The people of the South are reduced to the alternative of choosing between the policy of President Johnson as embodied in the Philadelphia platform, and that of Thaddeus Stevens as exhibited by the last Congress. For, in the language of Baltimore Gazette, it is manifest that the South has, at present, nothing to expect but the inauguration of the Congressional or the Presidential policy. The one, in defiance of the Constitution and the rights of the people, looks to the disfranchisement of thousands of the whites and the enfranchisement of the blacks in the South, and to the establishment of the blacks in the South, and to the establishment of such Government Bureaux in that section as will enable Northern radicals to rule and represent it. The other contemplates the restoration of the Constitution, the instant recognition of the clear rights of the Southern people, and opens a way that leads clearly and quickly towards order, law and civil liberty. Now, we have changed none of our convictions concerning the cause or the conduct of the war, nor have we altered any of the deliberate opinions we have formed in reference to many individuals, of whom not a few were in the Philadelphia Convention. Nor is it necessary that we, or any other Southern man, should make any retraction or apology before he can consistently and honestly labor for the success of the work which that Convention has inaugurated. We live in a new time and are confronted with new issues, and nothing short of madness could now prevent the South and the Democratic party from doing their uttermost to secure a speedy and overwhelming triumph for the candidates who stand on the Philadelphia platform.