The cause of the Southern tone which American literature took on during the eighties lies in the single fact that the South had the literary material. The California gold, rich as it was when first discovered by the East, was quickly exhausted. There were no deep mines; it was surface gold, pockets and startling nuggets. Suddenly it was discovered that the South was a field infinitely richer, and the tide turned. Nowhere else were to be found such a variety of picturesque types of humanity: negroes, crackers, creoles, mountaineers, moonshiners, and all those incongruous elements that had resulted from the great social upheaval of 1861-1865. Behind it in an increasingly romantic perspective lay the old régime destroyed by the war; nearer was the war itself, most heroic of struggles; and still nearer was the tragedy of reconstruction with its carpet-bagger, its freed slaves, and its Klu-Klux terror. Never before in America, even in California, had there been such richness of literary material. That a group of Southern-born writers should have arisen to deal with it was inevitable. Who else _could_ have dealt with it, especially in the new era that demanded reality and absolute genuineness? No Northerner could have revealed, for instance, the heart of the old plantation negro. Miss Woolson's stories of the South, brilliant as they are, are in a different world from those of Joel Chandler Harris. The writers themselves made no claim that they were producing a Southern literature. They had, all of them, been touched by the new after-the-war spirit, and their outlook was nation wide. Cable in an address at Oxford, Mississippi, in June, 1882, pleaded for home subjects as a basis for literature, but for home subjects treated in a spirit of the broadest nationality: "Only let them be written," he urged, "to and for the whole nation and you shall put your own State not the less but the more in your debt."[133] He declared himself to be not at all in favor of the popular new phrase "the new South"; he would change it, he said, to "the _no_ South." Lanier, as we have seen, was American in the broadest sense, and Joel Chandler Harris could say: "What does it matter whether I am a Northerner or Southerner if I am true to truth and true to that larger truth, my own true self? My idea is that truth is more important than sectionalism and that literature that can be labeled Northern, Southern, Western, Eastern, is not worth labeling."[134] It was the voice of the new spirit of the new age. I