Unit 5: Lesson 16

New South Beginnings

• The New South started appearing as federal troops exited the South in 1877 and continued into the 20th century.

Compromise of 1877

• The Compromise of 1877 was an agreement between Democrats and Republicans affecting the Southern states.
• Republican leaders pledged to withdraw Union troops from the South if Southern Democrats allowed Rutherford B. Hayes to become president after the disputed 1876 election.
• According to the agreement, a southerner would be admitted to the cabinet, money would be available for internal improvements, and elections would be left up to the southern states.
• The Compromise of 1877 enabled Democrats to take over Southern state governments, ending Reconstruction.

The Redeemers

• By the 1880s, Democrats dominated every Southern state, calling it Redemption.
• The new Democratic officeholders were known as Redeemers because they redeemed the South from federal intervention.
• Most New South leaders came from the middle class as lawyers, businessmen, and industrialists.
• Many had served the Confederacy, leveraging their military service and loyalty to the Lost Cause.
• Redeemers wanted to increase financial prospects for southern businessmen and industrialists, as well as keep a docile black labor force for agriculture.
• They worked to keep taxes low, encouraging the construction of various industries such as railroads, textile mills, and mining companies.
• Legislators provided land grants and tax reductions to companies locating in the South or Southern capitalists starting industries.
• They focused less on improving farmers' economic conditions but assisted large landowners with laws to keep sharecroppers working on the land.

Redeemers and State Governments

• Redeemers rewrote state constitutions, lowered land taxes, and cut expenses, underfunding public education and institutions for the blind, deaf, and mentally challenged.
• They gained power by criticizing the "excesses" of Republican-dominated Reconstruction governments, conducting racist campaigns, promoting white supremacy, and establishing the Democratic party as a closed corporation.
• After 1882, they controlled black voters through measures like the eight-box ballot law, a literacy test for illiterate white voters and black voters denied education.
• In some states, Redeemers gave the power of appointing local officials to state legislatures, undermining democracy and solidifying the "Solid South," where the Democratic Party dominated.
• Their control wasn't challenged until the 1890s with the rise of the Populist movement.

Georgia as an Example

• In 1872, a political group called the Bourbon Triumvirate emerged.
• Alfred H. Colquitt was governor from 1876 to 1882, followed by John B. Gordon from 1886 to 1890, and Joseph Brown was a U.S. senator from 1880 to 1890.
• These men dominated Georgia politics, pursuing low taxes and attracting industries like railroads and coal mining.
• Despite minimal state services, the state legislature spent $1 million building a state capitol.
• They endorsed convict labor that began in Georgia in 1868, where prisoners were hired out to industrialists for construction and mining.
• There were almost no safeguards for convicts; the legislature passed a law allowing only one person per worksite to administer whippings in an attempt to reform the worst of the abuses.
• States across the South adopted the convict lease system, claiming it provided prisoner control, reduced state costs, and provided income, but its abuses were notorious and would be addressed by future reformers.

The New South

• Henry W. Grady, editor of the Atlanta Constitution, was the "Spokesman of the New South."
• Grady endorsed the Bourbon Triumvirates Brown and Gordon in his influential editorials, imagining a South in harmony with the North's industrial aspirations.
• In an 1886 speech, Grady apologized for the South's role in the Civil War and slavery, then spoke of the virtues of a "New South."
• Grady and other promoters of the New South endorsed developing industry, diversifying crops, and moving toward a more harmonious system of race relations in which blacks stayed "in their place" and deferred to white leadership.
• These goals were to be connected to the romantic virtues of civility and heroism, and the notion that slavery had been a benign institution.

The Lost Cause

• Old South memories played out through the Civil War and the Lost Cause.
• Whites invented a collective memory of the past based on the myth of harmonious race relations.
• The Lost Cause has been called a civil religion where people could worship fallen heroes and revere lost saints of the battlefield.
• In Richmond, measures were placed to establish and maintain the reputations of Robert E. Lee as a great general and Jefferson Davis as a worthy president of the Confederacy through immense statues planted on Monument Row.

Women and the Lost Cause

• White southern women made a contribution to the creation of the Lost Cause collective memory.
• After the war, they formed Ladies' Memorial Associations to raise money for finding the remains of southern soldiers, re-interring them, and decorating their graves
• By the 1890s, many of these women had formed the United Daughters of the Confederacy, where they focused on raising statues to the common soldier, preserving historic landmarks, and funding grand projects such as the Confederate Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery.
• Just as women found their way to celebrate the Lost Cause, veterans founded the United Confederate Veterans Association and the Sons of Confederate Veterans, which provided reunions, parades, and barbecues in memory of their sacrifices.

The New South and Education

• Henry Grady saw the South's future in technological institutions.
• He lobbied for the creation of the Georgia School of Technology (Georgia Institute of Technology), which opened in 1888 and initially trained young men for industrial and vocational work.
• Other southern states followed this example.
• Grady ensured Atlanta became a symbol for technological advancement in the region by bringing three cotton expositions to the city in 1881, 1887, and 1895, creating jobs and dollars to the state.

Southern Industries and Urbanization

• Northerners invested in the region’s nascent industries, and southern born industrialists capitalized on the region’s growing acceptance of industrial expansion and trade.
• This resulted both in a rise in extractive industries and manufacturing and the growth of towns and cities.
• Between 1865 and 1890, railroad track construction increased 400 percent, while in many small towns (3,000 to 10,000 in population), residents built grand train stations as evidence of their entree into the modern world.
• Mining companies with extraction machinery looted the hills of coal, leaving behind an environmental mess.
• Northern Alabama industrialists found sources of iron ore in their state and, with cheap white and black labor, boosted Birmingham to the South’s number one iron and steel production center.
• North Carolina industrialists invested in furniture and cigarette manufacturing, dotting the Piedmont with industrial towns.
• Louisiana entrepreneurs’ industrialized sugar refining, bringing more trade to its principal city, New Orleans, although the most impressive story of industrialization in the New South is told through the rise of the cotton mills.

Textile Mills

• Despite its industrial gains, overall the South remained essentially an economic colony of the North, supplying the raw materials for northern industries.
• Industries did diversify in the South but remained little more than branch plants, factories, or chain stores for businesses headquartered in the North.
• The South initially wanted northern capital and investments to “kick-start” the economy but never escaped this paradigm.
• Southerners became agents and executives for northern corporations rather than owners or principals of their own businesses.
• In the antebellum period the center for textile manufacturing had been New England, but by 1910, New South industrialists successfully captured the textile mill industry.
• The rate of textile mill growth in the South jumped from 161 in 1880 to 239 by 1890 to 400 in 1900.
• North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama—took advantage of Appalachian river water sources to power the plants, but those same rivers, some rushing off the mountains into the Piedmont, later provided hydro-electricity.
• The first factory to operate with electricity in the United States opened in the South.
• Mill owners viewed workers as the major recipients of their generosity, offering them steady wages and housing, but in reality, the wages were so low that women and children were forced into working long hours at even lower wages than men

Why Work at a Mill?

• The increase in sharecropping, tenantry, and the crop lien system across the South caught freed people and poor white farmers in a nearly inescapable system of debt peonage, pushing rural folk off the farms.
• Consumer wants and needs pushed families to seek cash and that meant commercial items for sale from the North and the Sears Catalogue with its appeal to “store bought” merchandise.
• Poverty and the increasing lure of commercial goods drove yeoman farm families to consider the change to mill work.
• Merchants and lenders, who had earned profits through the crop lien system, bankrolled the cotton mills and then invited those once self-sustaining farmers to work in them for consistent, although low wages.
• Shrewd owners offered housing to workers based on how many “hands” a family could provide the mill it was necessary to have at least one worker per room in order to live in a four-room mill house.
• Trading the perils of the crop lien system, mill hands lamented the way the owners kept them in debt, as well as how they could only redeem their "pay" at the owner’s store.

Mill Village Life

• Mill village life supported workers emotionally and sometimes materially in the years before World War I.
• "Unique workers’ culture,” mill hands created their own sense of family out of the mill community, sometimes with real kin, other times with neighbors and friends.
• Community gatherings fostered trust and good will: weddings and holiday celebrations brought mill workers together on their one day off a week
• Through herbal medicine and midwifery, some women found that they could achieve a form of respect often denied them at the workplace. Delivering babies and providing healing through folk remedies were important life sustaining tasks that mill villagers needed.
• Village men achieved prominence through their music—banjo, fiddle, and guitar playing. They would make music on weekends, providing entertainment and recreation in the days before radio.

Daily Life

• Mill hands’ lives were controlled by the factory near their homes.
• Supervisors made sure carders, spinners, weavers, and doffers were working; breaks were few.
• Discipline included cursing, yelling, and jerking children around.
• The only jobs available to black men were in the basement. All else was sex and race segregated.
• Men were always supervisors over women. Women earned one half to two-thirds of what men earned; children earned even less.
• The fact that no man could earn a wage high enough to support his family undermined male authority and sometimes domestic abuse was present.

Other Southern Industries

• After the Civil War, tobacco factories sprang up in North Carolina, where tobacco aligned with cotton as a cash crop.
• In the 1880s, tobacco magnate James B. Duke bought a cigarette-making machine invented by James Bonsack and aggressively advertised and marketed packaged cigarettes.
• Duke organized the American Tobacco Company in 1890, and Durham grew from a town of 300 in 1865 to 5,000 by 1884.
• African American women, who were denied jobs in textile mills until the 1960s, found work in tobacco factories in North Carolina, preparing leaves by hand—stemming or stripping them of their midrib—for chewing tobacco and cigarettes.
• The tobacco factories also hired white men, but they monopolized the skilled jobs, tending to the machines and processing the tobacco.
• There were understandings that black men would have little to do with white women; they could not fraternize with white women in public places.

Interracial Cooperation in Industry

• Lumber men, dockworkers, farmers, and coal miners after 1880 were in direct competition with each other and this sometimes led to conflict and violence.
• Episodes of interracial cooperation can be seen in the Alabama coalfields where black and white men worked together and joined the same union. Similar episodes of interracial cooperation among dockworkers in New Orleans and Galveston have also existed.
• The Knights of Labor and the United Mine Workers (UMW), labor unions that had carried both black and white miners, refused to follow the traditional color line.
• When strikes took place for better wages, mine owners brought in black strike breakers, but the biracial unions stayed true to their commitment to all the workers.
• There were no white women in the mines, and the miners’ external lives were entirely separate.
• The absence of white women from the mines allowed black and white miners to have a cooperative relationship just when the rest of the South was moving toward segregation.

The Rise of Agrarian Reform in the South

• From the 1860s until the 1880s, the number of southern farms doubled, while the number of landowners did not increase (farms became smaller).
• Cotton production tripled between 1860 and 1890, with prices plummeting as southern cotton competed on a world market.
• Prices dropped from 11 cents a pound in 1879 to 5.8 cents a pound in 1894. More than half of the people farming cotton in South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi in 1900 were tenants.

Sharecropping

• Sharecropping and tenantry also left many farmers in debt year after year as they succumbed to the crop lien system and became entangled in debt peonage.
• Especially African American sharecroppers found themselves bound to the land through debt and a series of state laws that made it impossible legally to leave if they had not paid off their loans. A person could be convicted of vagrancy by simply appearing not to work or by displeasing a landowner.
• The courts often assigned so-called vagrants to their landlords to work off the fine. It was little more than forced labor, reminiscent of slavery.
• Merchants who supplied seed, fertilizer, tools, and household items passed interest rates on to customers.
• By 1880 southerners had to import grain and livestock from other regions having lost its self-sufficiency in food production.

Agrarian Revolt

• During the late 1880s, several political struggles challenged Redeemer hegemony in southern states.
• One of those organization was the National Grange of the Patrons of Husbandry, or the Grange, founded in 1867.
• Beginning in the 1860s, farmers turned to fraternal organizations but without lasting success.
• Harsh economic conditions, a surplus of cotton on the world market, and a sense that state legislatures and governors only worried about their own ability to stay in power, led to the growth of the Farmers Alliances.

Farmers Alliance

• In 1877 the southern Alliance movement began as a farmers club in Lampasas, Texas.
• In 1886 it came under the leadership of Texan Charles W. Macune and assumed the formal name National Farmers' Alliance and Industrial Union but was actually known as the Southern Farmers Alliance.
• Because the Southern Farmers’ Alliance was for whites only, that same year African American farmers formed the Colored Farmers National Alliance and Cooperative Union in Houston County, Texas.
• By 1890 these two organizations had over 2,500,000 members of which 1,000,000 belonged to the Colored Farmers Union.
• Farmers complained that they were the victims of inequitable taxes, high interest and railroad rates, high tariffs on the goods they bought, and an unsympathetic government.
• They formalized their complaints in the Ocala [Florida] Platform of the National Farmers Alliance, resolved in 1890, calling primarily for an increase in money circulation, free coinage of silver, government ownership of railroads and the telegraph, a graduated income tax, and the direct election of United State senators.
• Members also called for the use of fiat money, or greenbacks, issued directly by the government in order to increase the per capita money supply.

Populism

• In 1892, these farmer alliances blossomed into a political party, consisting of members, disgruntled Democrats, a few Republicans, and an assortment of former Greenbackers, Knights of Labor, and Grangers.
• The goals articulated by the Southern Alliance drove the Populist Party Platform, formulated at the Omaha Peoples party convention on July 4, 1892.
• The platform called for the free and unlimited coinage of silver and the subtreasury plan.
• In the 1892 elections, Populists nationally won 10 percent of the vote, and elected five senators, three governors, and 1,500 state legislators.

Populism and Gender and Race

• The Farmers Alliances and the Populist party worked toward the same ends of achieving a measure of economic progress and winning elections, but they also stretched the boundaries of gender and race restrictions.
• As Katie Moore wrote in the Progressive Farmer, Alliances helped women sense the possibilities of political activism upon receiving the right to vote
• They voted on potential members and held elected Alliance offices, they wrote speeches and newspaper editorials, and they supported prohibition.
• The result of their demands for state supported institutions led to the opening of industrial colleges for women in Mississippi (1985), South Carolina (1891), and Texas (1903).
• Racial boundaries eased somewhat with the People’s movement, especially after 1894, when Populists in Alabama, North Carolina, Texas, and Georgia made sizable gains.
• There was an aim to break the hold of the Democratic party that would require the vote of black and white farmers.
• In the election of 1896, reformers in North Carolina fused Republicans and Populists and gained 129 out of 169 seats in the legislature, leaving the Democrats with only 45 seats.
• Southern Populists were vanquished; Democrats began a campaign to disenfranchise black voters and some poor whites in every southern state.

Race Relations in the South

• After the Populist movement, white southerners restricted black civil rights.
• Black office holding gradually declined, along with black voting, despite the Fifteenth Amendment. Democrats sought ways to disenfranchise black voters

Disenfranchisement

• State governments required the payment of a poll tax in order to eliminate black voters.
• The First Mississippi Plan created in 1875 used violence to keep Republican voters from the polls.
• The Second Mississippi Plan required potential voters to have lived in the state for six years and either pass a literacy test or demonstrate understanding of any portion of the state constitution that was read to them.
• In 1898 the U.S. Supreme Court upheld literacy tests and understanding clauses in Williams v. Mississippi.

Segregation

• Southern legislatures were able to enact segregation laws without black voter opposition because blacks had been excluded from state politics.
• In 1883 the U. S. Supreme Court denied the viability of the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which outlawed racial discrimination in public facilities.
• In 1896, eight of the nine justices in Plessy v. Ferguson argued that racially segregated facilities were not discriminatory as long as they remained separate but equal.

White Supremacy and Race Relations

• Race essentialism gave white supremacists an intellectual premise on which to base their arguments for discrimination.
• White supremacists believed that genetics controlled the destiny of human beings and that whites embodied the highest form of intellectual capacity.
• It wasn’t until 1942 that anthropologists Franz Boas of Columbia University, his colleague, Ruth Benedict, and Ashley Montagu, debunked the racist ideas that had gained currency during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Purity of White Women

• Along with racial prejudice came a fear that African American men wanted to engage in sexual relations with white women
• The threat toward white safety and purity of white women led newspaper editorialists and politicians to race hatred.
• Race riots in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1898 and in Atlanta in 1906 were traced to inflammatory newspaper articles reminding readers of the power of black sexuality.

Lynching

• The greatest number of lynchings occurred between 1882 and 1930.
• The worst years for lynching fell between 1889 and 1898 when 1,613 people were lynched.
• By the 1890s lynchings had become spectacles. Although they typically started with a rumor that a black man raped a white woman, historians claim that the lynchings happened more because of economic competition between whites and blacks.

White Men and White Women

• Lynching acted to define white male superiority and protect white women.
• Lynching empowered white men by showcasing white women as victims needing male protection, especially as women entered the workforce in the new industries, businesses, and urban spaces. This countered the increasing independence and public roles of women.

Black Women

• They feared threats of violence from black women who were wives, mothers, sisters, and daughters.
• They were not immune to violence, especially since one misgiving could often lead to violence.
• Social enforcement against miscegenation only applied to black male/white female relationships.

Ida B. Wells

• She was an African American reformer; after whites lynched three of her friends, she implied that some white women had love relationships with black men and that lynching resulted from economic competition.
• Ida B. Wells-Barnett was a fearless anti-lynching crusader, suffragist, women's rights advocate, journalist, and speaker.

W.E.B. DuBois

• He wrote The Souls of Black Folk, in which he wanted blacks to seek equal education and equal rights rather than submit to discrimination.
• Du Bois directly rebuked the ideas of Booker T. Washington, who directed African Americans toward vocational training, advising them that the road to peaceable race relations was in accommodation to white demands.
• Du Bois argued for the right to vote, civil equality, and education, and founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909.
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