The New South and the Redeemers

• The New South began in 1877 after federal troops left the South and continued into the 20th century.

Compromise of 1877

• An agreement between Democrats and Republicans regarding the future of the southern states.
• Republican leaders promised to remove Union troops from the South if Southern Democrats accepted Republican Rutherford B. Hayes as president after the disputed 1876 election.
• The agreement included admitting a Southerner to the cabinet, funding internal improvements, and allowing Southern states to control elections.
• It resulted in the takeover of Southern state governments by Democrats, ending the federally inspired Reconstruction.

The Redeemers

• By the 1880s, a Democratic majority controlled every Southern state in what Southerners called Redemption.
• The new Democratic officeholders were called Redeemers who aimed to redeem the South from federal intervention.
• They primarily came from the middle class, and many were Confederate veterans who capitalized on their service.
• They focused on increasing economic opportunities for Southern businessmen and industrialists, and maintaining a black labor force for agriculture.
• They encouraged building railroads, textile mills, tobacco factories, steel plants, and lumber and coal industries.
• They offered land grants and tax reductions to companies locating in the South or Southern capitalists starting industries.
• They did not focus on improving the economic condition of farmers, although they did help large landowners keep sharecroppers working on the land.

Redeemers and State Governments

• They re-crafted state constitutions, lowered land taxes, and cut expenses.
• They underfunded public education and institutions for the blind, deaf, and mentally challenged.
• They gained power by criticizing Republican-dominated Reconstruction governments, promoting white supremacy, and establishing the Democratic party as a closed corporation.
• The eight box ballot law was instituted after 1882 to control black voters, requiring voters to place ballots in correct boxes for each office, serving as a literacy test.
• In some states, Redeemers gave local official appointment power to state legislatures, which worked against democracy and forged the Solid South.
• Their control over state politics was challenged by the Populist movement in the 1890s.

Georgia as an Example

• The Bourbon Triumvirate emerged in 1872, consisting of Alfred H. Colquitt, John B. Gordon, and Joseph Brown.
• These men controlled Georgia politics, following the Redeemer agenda of low taxes, attracting industry, and minimal state services.
• The state legislature spent $1 million on a state capitol while insisting on limited state services.
• They endorsed the convict labor system, which began in Georgia in 1868, where prisoners were hired out to industrialists.
• There were almost no safeguards for the convicts.
• States across the South adopted the convict lease system, arguing that it provided prisoner control, reduced the cost of avoiding building penitentiaries, and provided income.
• The abuses of the system became notorious and were addressed by future reformers, many of whom were women.

The New South

• Henry W. Grady, editor of the Atlanta Constitution, was known as the Spokesman of the New South.
• He endorsed the Bourbon Triumvirate and envisioned a South aligned with the North’s industrial aspirations.
• He apologized for the South's role in the Civil War and defending slavery.
• Grady and other promoters endorsed developing industry, diversifying crops, and moving towards harmonious race relations.
• They aimed to connect these goals to the Old South’s virtues of civility and heroism, including the idea that slavery was benign.

The Lost Cause

• Whites created a collective memory of the past based on the myth of harmonious race relations.
• The Lost Cause has been called a civil religion where believers worship fallen heroes and revere the lost saints of the battlefield.
• In Richmond, measures were taken to establish Robert E. Lee as a great general and Jefferson Davis as a worthy president through statues on Monument Row.

Women and the Lost Cause

• Southern women contributed to the creation of the Lost Cause collective memory.
• They formed Ladies’ Memorial Associations to raise money to find and re-inter Southern soldiers.
• By the 1890s, many of these women formed the United Daughters of the Confederacy.
• They focused on raising statues to soldiers, preserving historic landmarks, and funding projects like the Confederate Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery.
• Veterans founded the United Confederate Veterans Association and the Sons of Confederate Veterans, which provided reunions and parades in memory of their sacrifices.

The New South and Education

• Henry Grady saw the future of the South in technological institutions.
• He lobbied for the creation of the Georgia School of Technology, which opened in 1888 and trained young men for industrial work.
• Other Southern states followed.
• Grady helped bring to the city three cotton expositions in 1881, 1887, and 1895, which brought jobs and dollars to the state.

Southern Industries and Urbanization

• Northerners invested in the region’s industries, and Southern industrialists capitalized on industrial expansion and acceptance.
• Railroads crossed the Southern states, connecting isolated towns and cities with each other and outside the South.
• Railroad track construction increased 400 percent between 1865 and 1890.
• Mining towns dotted the Appalachian region, where mining companies extracted coal, leaving behind an environmental mess.
• Northern Alabama industrialists 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 New Orleans.
• The most impressive story of industrialization in the New South is told through the rise of the cotton mills.

Textile Mills

• The South wanted Northern capital and investments but became an economic colony of the North.
• Southerners became agents and executives for Northern corporations.
• Industries did diversify in the South but remained branch plants, factories, or chain stores for businesses headquartered in the North.
• Southern capitalists began cotton mills in the region.
• 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.
• The first factory to operate with electricity in the United States opened in the South.
• Wages were so low that women and children were forced into working long hours at even lower wages than men.
• Mill workers started the day at 6:00 a.m. and worked until 6 p.m., with small breaks between, six days a week, with an average pay of 12 cents a day in the 1880s.
• Investors in these mills often earned profits of 22 percent, and some got away with 75 percent profits.
• The majority of Southern workers found themselves caught in web of labor exploitation.

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.
• Consumer wants and needs pushed families to seek cash and that meant turning to off-the-farm work.
• Poverty and the increasing lure of commercial goods drove yeoman farm families to consider the change to mill work.
• The first to leave marginal farms and come to work in the mills were widows, itinerant farm laborers, and young single women.
• Mill owners offered housing based on how many “hands” a family could provide the mill.
• Mill workers lived and grudgingly accepted the mill owned house, store, school, and church.

Mill Village Life

• Mill hands created their own sense of family out of the mill community.
• Rural families in the South replicated the kinship patterns in the mill villages that had long sustained them.
• Community gatherings fostered common trust and good will.
• Women often jumped in to help when a worker became ill.
• Village men achieved prominence through their music.
• These were the ties that bound one to the other and created a form of solidarity.

Daily Life

• Supervisors roamed the mills making sure that all workers were fully engaged in their tasks.
• Jobs were sex and race segregated; the only jobs available to black men were in the basement where they opened bales of cotton.
• Men were always supervisors over women.
• The tendencies to strike for better wages and improved working conditions did not materialize until after World War I.
• Such ideology coupled with the mill system perpetuated poverty.

Other Southern Industries

• After the Civil War, tobacco factories sprang up in North Carolina.
• 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.
• Tobacco factories also hired white men, but they monopolized the skilled jobs.
• White women held the “clean” jobs, running machines that packed, sealed, and labeled cigarettes, while black men handled the tobacco leaves.
• It was understood that black men would have little to do with white women due to harsh racial taboos.

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.
• Interracial cooperation can be seen in the Alabama coalfields where black and white men worked together and joined the same union.
• Episodes of interracial cooperation among dockworkers in New Orleans and Galveston also existed.
• Black and white men cooperated due to their shared class identity and solidarity against management.
• 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.
• The absence of white women from the mines allowed black and white miners to have a cooperative relationship 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 in the South with more families trying to live off the land.
• Cotton production tripled between 1860 and 1890, with prices plummeting.
• Cotton prices dropped from 11 cents a pound in 1879 to 5.8 cents a pound in 1894.
• Many farmers lost their land due to foreclosure.
• 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.
• A person could be convicted of vagrancy by simply appearing not to work or by displeasing a landowner.
• Merchants who supplied goods passed high interest rates (sometimes 50% or higher) on to customers.

Agrarian Revolt

• During the late 1880s, as farmers experienced their hardest years financially, several political struggles unfolded that challenged Redeemer hegemony in southern states.
• Beginning in the 1860s, farmers turned to fraternal organizations, one of which was the National Grange of the Patrons of Husbandry, or the Grange.
• Organizations such as the National Farmers Alliance, the Colored National Farmers Alliance, and then the Southern Farmers Alliance leapt from regional to national status. Farmers Alliance
• In 1877, the Southern Alliance movement began as a farmers club in Lampasas, Texas, later named the National Farmers' Alliance and Industrial Union and known as the Southern Farmers Alliance.
• The Colored Farmers National Alliance and Cooperative Union was formed for African American farmers.
• By 1890, the two organizations had over 2,500,000 members.
• Farmers complained that they were the victims of high interest and railroad rates and an unsympathetic government.
• They formalized their complaints in the Ocala Platform of the National Farmers Alliance, resolving to demand an increase in money circulation, removal of heavy tariffs, the free and unlimited coinage of silver, government ownership of railroads and the telegraph, a graduated income tax, and the direct election of United States senators.

Populism

• Formed in 1892 by Alliance 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.
• The Populist party's goal of seeking greater government involvement in the lives of its citizens through progressive legislation was its major contribution to reform in the nation and in the South.
• In the 1892 elections, Populists nationally made modest gains: they won 10 percent of the vote, and elected five senators, three governors, and 1,500 state legislators.
• Populism and Gender and Race
• Women formed an important part of the movement by bringing a social element to the meetings.
• The Alliances allowed women a place in which to share their grievances equally with men.
• One of their long sought goals was better education for farm families, including their daughters.
• Racial boundaries eased, especially after 1894 when Populists in Alabama, North Carolina, Texas, and Georgia made sizable gains.
• John B. Rayner, a black Populist in Texas, spoke to white audiences to allay their fears about working across race lines toward common goals.
• Attempts to fuse with southern Republicans were made, however, demagogues spewing racism convinced white voters to stay with tradition and vote for Democratic state legislators and governors.
• Southern Populists were vanquished.
• To prevent black and white voters cooperating again, Democrats began a concerted campaign to disenfranchise black voters and some poor whites in every southern state.

Race Relations in the South

• There was a move toward restricting black civil rights since the end of Reconstruction.
• Black office holding declined.
• Black voters continued to cast ballots despite fraud and intimidation.
• In states like Tennessee and Arkansas, the Republican party remained viable with biracial political groups continuing to challenge the Democrats.

Disenfranchisement

• Southern legislators found ways to eliminate black voters.
• State governments required the payment of a poll tax.
• Legislators amended the Mississippi state constitution in 1890 to include a comprehensive plan to tax and test to read and understand the constitution.
• The Second Mississippi Plan required voters to have lived in the state for six years and pass a literacy test or demonstrate understanding of the state constitution.
• The understanding clause was often used to keep African Americans from voting because it enabled fraud on the part of white registrars.
• The U.S. Supreme Court upheld literacy tests and understanding clauses in Williams v. Mississippi in 1898.
• Once blacks had been successfully disfranchised from state politics, it was possible for these same southern legislatures to enact sweeping segregation laws without black voter opposition.

Segregation

• Schools, churches, and hospitals had remained segregated since Reconstruction, but as late as the 1880s some railroads, theaters, restaurants, and hotels admitted African Americans and whites equally.
• After 1890 states made all public establishments segregated.
• In 1883 the U. S. Supreme Court denied the viability of the Civil Rights Act of 1875.
• 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

• Origins of white supremacy existed long before 1900 and can be seen in European history when they encountered Africans and Asians in the fifteenth century.
• By the end of the nineteenth century scientists, many of them part of the new discipline called social science, developed race theories based on external appearances.
• Race essentialism gave white supremacists an argument for discrimination.
• Booker T. Washington was freed from slavery as a child and was appointed to lead a new teachers college for blacks in Alabama that became known as Tuskegee University.
• Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict debunked racist ideas during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Purity of White Women

• Came a fear that African American men wanted to engage in sexual relations with white women.
• Race riots in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1898 and in Atlanta in 1906 were directly traced to newspaper articles reminding readers of the black sexuality.
• Black men volunteering for military service in the Spanish American War (1898) frightened or angered white supremacists.

Lynching

• Lynching was the ultimate form of violence used by white supremacists.
• The greatest number of lynchings occurred between 1882 and 1930.
• Statistics gathered by the NAACP states that at least 4,761 persons died at the hands of lynch mobs.
• The worst years for lynching fell between 1889 and 1898.
• Mississippi led the states with a total of 545 lynchings, followed by Georgia with 508, and Texas with 494.
• If it takes lynching to protect women’s dearest possession, then I say lynch a thousand a week if it becomes necessary.
• The most poisonous rumor to bring on a lynching was that a black man had raped a white woman or child.
• Historians have concluded that a majority of lynchings occurred for petty offenses and that lynching was connected to the weak constraints against white mob violence as well racist ideology.
• One of the most important reasons why lynching increased in the 1890s was the economy.
• There was a correlation between the price of cotton and lynchings.

###White Men and White Women

• White women, the alleged potential victims of sexual abuse at the hands of black men, found themselves needing white male protection at a time when the South was beginning to modernize.
• The fear of the black rapist could work to put white women in a position of vulnerability and control.

###Black Women

• Threats of violence affected black women, for they feared for their husbands, fathers, brothers, and sons.
• Miscegenation, whether forced or voluntary, still existed, although intermarriage was against the law in every southern state.

Ida B. Wells

• After whites lynched three of her friends out of economic jealousy, she daringly wrote that lynching was not caused by black rapists but was the result of economic competition; as a result white aggressors destroyed the newspaper office, smashed her printing presses, and threatened her life.
• She became especially active in investigating and exposing the fraudulent reasons for lynching.
• In Chicago, Wells-Barnett helped develop numerous African American women’s reform organizations and was anti-lynching.

W.E.B. DuBois

• He pressed blacks to seek equal education and equal rights rather than submit to discrimination.
• Argued that the “talented tenth” should use its gifts to fight discrimination as he was doing.
• He directly rebuked the ideas of Booker T. Washington, who directed African Americans toward vocational training and careers in manual crafts or farming, advising them that the road to peaceable race relations was in accommodation to white demands.
• He adamantly opposed African Americans seeking social equality with whites.
• Du Bois argued for the right to vote, civil equality, and the education of young people according to their abilities.
• Du Bois continued to challenge race discrimination and civil inequality through his writings.
• He founded the NAACP in 1909, proposed challenging discrimination in the courts, and believed in the power of the U.S. Constitution and the legal process.
• NAACP advocated for voting rights restoration, an end to segregation, and equality in education and economic opportunity.

Learn about the New South era that began in 1877, the Compromise of 1877, and the Redeemers. It covers the agreement between Democrats and Republicans, the end of Reconstruction, and the rise of Democratic control in the South.