1.6 The New South, 1870–1900

In the early 1880s boosters of the New South told everyone who would listen about the profound changes transforming the region. Led by Henry Grady, editor of the Atlanta Constitution, propagandists promised to remake the southern economy in the image of the North, claiming that a society of machines and factories was needed to replace the old agrarian order. Henry Watterson, a Louisville editor and orator, urged that “the ambition of the South is to out-Yankee the Yankee.”

The clearest evidence of change was the rise of cities. People from every level of rural society left the countryside for towns. “The towns are being recruited by those too poor to be able to live in the country, as well as by those too rich to be willing to live there,” observed a reporter. Atlanta, which had only fourteen thousand residents at the close of the Civil War, had a population close to forty thousand in 1880 and ninety thousand two decades later. Birmingham, Alabama, saw its population grow from three thousand in 1880 to thirty-eight thousand in 1900.

The spirit of the New South penetrated the halls of statehouses and governors’ mansions. Many state legislatures tried luring northern bankers and capitalists with attractive investment opportunities. With the aid of new investment, southern industries such as textiles, iron, and lumber experienced a boom. The South’s textile mills boasted the latest and most sophisticated machinery. By 1890 textile spindles, which doubled the output per worker, appeared in 90 percent of southern mills, compared with only 70 percent of New England mills. Jefferson County, the home of Birmingham, had only twenty-two factories in 1870; thirty years later it had five hundred. By 1910 the South was producing almost half of all lumber milled in the United States.

To make their new factories accessible to northern markets, many states built new railroad tracks. Between 1880 and 1890 track mileage more than doubled, going from 16,605 to 39,108 miles. Railroads expanded the development of the South’s landlocked mineral resources, particularly the iron mines of Tennessee, Virginia, and Alabama. By 1898 Birmingham was the largest shipping point for pig iron in the country and the third largest in the world.

Although new industries and signs of progress abounded, the South continued to lag far behind the prosperous North. In 1860 the South housed 17 percent of the country’s manufacturing; by 1904 it had only 15 percent. Despite the growth of cities, most people in the South continued to live in rural areas. The 1890 census showed that only 3.9 percent of North Carolinians and 5.9 percent of Alabamans were considered urban.

The economy of the postwar South remained tied to agriculture. The spread of the crop-lien system as the South’s main form of agricultural credit forced more and more farmers, both white and black, into growing cash crops—crops that could earn the most money on the open market. Cotton, which yielded more value per acre than any other crop, was the crop of choice. By 1880 nearly three-quarters of the African American farmers and about one-third of the white farmers in the cotton states were sharecroppers or tenants. The number of cotton mills in the South rose from 161 in 1880 to 400 in 1900. In 1880 there were 45 mills in the United States producing 7 million gallons of cottonseed oil annually for export; by 1900 there were 357, all but four in the South.

The South’s dependence on a single crop had many unforeseen consequences. For one thing, it made the South less self-sufficient, since many farmers replaced food crops with cotton. By 1880 the South was not growing enough food to feed its people. King Cotton also inhibited economic growth across the region. As more and more farmers turned to cotton growing as the fastest way to obtain credit, expanding production depressed prices. Competition from new cotton centers in the world market, notably Egypt and India, furthered the downward spiral, which dragged the rest of the southern economy down with it. By the 1890s per capita wealth in the South equaled only one-third that of the East, Midwest, or Far West. Declining cotton prices produced a grim desperation in the South and only increased suspicion and hostility toward the North. In 1879 the New York Tribune showed little sympathy: “Fifteen years have gone over the South and she still sits crushed, wretched, busy displaying and bemoaning her wounds.”         

Competing currents also pulled southern culture in different directions. On the one hand, a wave of nostalgia swept across the region as whites honored Civil War soldiers. The movement began as a defense of the “Lost Cause” in the 1860s; it then evolved into a nostalgic celebration of old soldiers. Caught up in the “cult of the Confederacy,” many white southerners joined the United Confederate Veterans and the United Daughters of the Confederacy, which raised funds for the erection of new monuments. Nine thousand whites of all ages dragged a new statue of Robert E. Lee to its site in Richmond in 1890. Over a hundred thousand people attended the unveiling three weeks later.

At the same time that many white southerners were celebrating the past, southern fiction writers were questioning the relevance of the values and customs that had shaped their society. These writers attempted to explain their region to northern readers while challenging prevailing notions of race and gender. In Uncle Remus: His Songs and Sayings (1880), Joel Chandler Harris allowed a former black slave to tell stories in which the weak could outwit the strong. The success of Harris’s book convinced Mark Twain, America’s most visible and successful man of letters, to take another look at the South. In 1881 Twain took a boat trip down the Mississippi to reacquaint himself with a region he had previously explored in Tom Sawyer (1876). He was shocked by what he witnessed. The New South, Twain declared, was “a solemn, depressing, pathetic spectacle.” His impressions created the backdrop for his greatest work, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, published in 1884.

Women writers played prominent roles in shaping the literature of the New South. Ruth McEnery Stuart’s short stories about white women in fictional Simpkinsville portrayed females as active agents and men as ineffectual and absent. Kate Chopin juxtaposed the conventions of Protestant America with what she saw as more honest and healthier European standards of sexual behavior. Her book The Awakening, published in 1899, created such an outcry that it was pulled from library and bookstore shelves. The leading woman writer of the New South was Ellen Glasgow. Her most famous novel, The Deliverance, became the second-best-selling book in America in 1904. It told the story of young people of the South achieving success, but only after overcoming the suffocating burden of southern customs.

Music emerged as the most powerful force for cultural innovation in the New South. Music appealed to people of every description. Musical instruments were among the first mass-produced commodities southerners bought. Cheap banjos were mass-produced in the 1880s, and guitars in the 1890s. Students of both races were eager to learn formal music. Instructors taught classical music and voice throughout the towns and cities of the South. Bouncy popular music filled parlors, stages, tents, and streets. Every town of any size had an “opera house” that hosted traveling performers. In 1891 a band tournament in Troy, Alabama, drew four thousand visitors and ten brass bands from nearby towns.

In every other aspect of southern society racial distinctions were hardening, but culturally the line between white and black music was blurring. In cities throughout the South, the polyrhythms and improvisation of African music blended with traditional European styles. Much of the experimentation took place in New Orleans, home to one of the largest concentrations of musicians in the South. The city attracted black and white musicians who trained together, played in the same bands and nightclubs, exchanged ideas, and borrowed styles.

The Redeemers who gained power in the South ousted, state by state, the carpetbag rule of the Reconstruction era. Some Redeemers gained power by compromising with their opponents; others conquered by brute force. They were a mixed group that included the scions of the old planter class as well as new business leaders. They were united by what they opposed: biracial coalitions and the use of state power as an agent of change.

Free of interference from the North, Redeemer governments in the South waged an aggressive assault on African Americans. Democrats regained control of state governments and imposed sweeping changes, slashing social programs, lowering taxes, and placing a premium on restoring social stability. Education programs were especially hard hit. In 1872 only a third of Tennessee’s counties levied school taxes; only about 28 percent of the state’s children attended school. “Schools are not a necessity,” declared the governor of Virginia.

All former Confederate states changed their constitutions to create methods by which they could exclude the black vote. The Mississippi constitution of 1890 set the pattern. It required a poll tax of $2 from prospective voters at registration. To vote, men had to present their receipts at the polls. Other states included literacy tests that required prospective voters to be “able to read the Constitution, or to understand the Constitution when read.” Since white Democratic registrars interpreted the ability to read or understand, officials could use these ordinances to discriminate in favor of poor illiterate whites and against black citizens, literate or not. Louisiana adopted the “grandfather clause,” which limited the franchise to anyone who had a grandfather on the electoral roll in 1867, before the Fifteenth Amendment that gave freedmen the right to vote had been enacted.

The results of these various efforts to eliminate the black vote were dramatic. Louisiana, for example, had 130,334 registered black voters in 1896. Eight years later there were only 1,342. In the South as a whole, black voter participation fell by 62 percent in the 1890s. In 1900 Ben (“Pitchfork”) Tillman of South Carolina boasted on the floor of the Senate, “We have done our best. We have scratched our heads to find out how we could eliminate the last one of them. We stuffed ballot boxes. We shot them. We are not ashamed of it.”

Along with disfranchising blacks, southern lawmakers gave informal segregation in public facilities the force of law. Until the 1880s the South had established a system of segregation by custom. Schools, hospitals, parks, courthouses, hotels, and restaurants were separated by race. Social custom reinforced the distance between the races. Whites never addressed black men they did not know as “mister,” but rather as “boy,” “Jack,” or “George.” Black women were never called “Mrs.,” but rather “aunt” or by their first name. According to custom, the two races did not shake hands, walk together, or fraternize in public. Black men removed their hats in public places reserved for whites, whereas whites did not remove their hats even in black homes.

While some blacks resisted the exclusion from white-owned hotels and restaurants, they could usually find accommodations in black-run businesses. Travel was a different story, for members of both races had to use the same railroads. When middle-class blacks carrying first-class tickets refused to be consigned to second-class seating, southern whites developed “separate but equal” railcars. These new restrictions—called “Jim Crow laws” after a minstrel song of 1830 that presented blacks as childlike and inferior—made it legally as well as socially impossible for blacks and whites to mingle. The laws were soon extended to libraries, hotels, restaurants, hospitals, parks, and playgrounds. Blacks and whites used separate bathrooms and separate toilets, and were even buried in separate cemeteries.

The Supreme Court, which had already made discrimination by individuals and businesses legal, now allowed state governments to make segregation part of the fabric of American life. In Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), the Court upheld, by a seven to one majority, a Louisiana law that required railroads to provide “equal but separate accommodations for the white and colored races.” The Court ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment applied only to political rights and did not extend to “social equality.” Justice Henry B. Brown of Michigan, speaking for the majority, ruled with racist candor, “If one race be inferior to the other socially, the Constitution of the United States cannot put them upon the same plane.” A year later the judges endorsed segregated public schools as a means to prevent “commingling of the two races upon terms unsatisfactory to either.” The justices also upheld the poll taxes and literacy tests used by state officials to disfranchise blacks.

Growing Democratic power emboldened whites to resort to violence without fear of reprisal. Between 1889 and 1898 blacks suffered 187 lynchings a year in the United States, four-fifths of them in the South (see Figure 1.9). Southern newspapers reported the hangings in graphic detail to stimulate and attract white readers and to intimidate blacks. In many cases, victims’ eyes were gouged out and their fingers, toes, and genitals were cut off before they were doused with flammable liquids and burned alive. Despite the horrific nature of these executions, spectators traveled long distances to watch. Democratic restoration also led to the expansion of the convict lease system. In 1876 three Georgia companies contracted to lease the state’s convicts for twenty years in return for annual payments of $25,000. The convicts were assigned to labor camps in which brutal and degrading conditions prevailed, and overseers forced them to toil from sunrise to sunset, disciplined by the rod and the whip.

Blacks were not passive victims of white terror. When the Klan attempted to disrupt their lives, blacks often fought back, forming their own paramilitary groups for protection. In Carthage, Mississippi, in 1868 a group of fifteen white vigilantes were turned away because “the colored men were in too great a force to be attacked safely.” While freed people offered organized resistance in areas where their numbers were concentrated, they had a more difficult time in isolated rural regions. Most of the time, however, black protests were limited to appeals to the professed paternalism of whites.

The most prominent voice belonged to Booker T. Washington. Born in 1856 to a slave woman and her white master, whose identity he never knew, Washington later attended the Hampton Institute in Virginia, a black school established and run by northern whites. In 1881 Washington helped organize the Tuskegee Institute, a state vocational school for blacks. He gained national prominence in 1895 when white organizers invited him to speak at Atlanta’s Cotton States and International Exposition—the first time in southern history that a black man had been asked to address whites at such an important event. In a speech that became known as the “Atlanta Compromise,” Washington told his segregated audience that blacks should put aside their ambitions for political power and social equality and instead focus on developing useful vocational skills. “It is at the bottom of life we must begin, and not at the top,” he said. Political and social equality would proceed naturally once blacks had proven their economic value. To both races, he advised cooperation and mutual respect. Washington’s message of accommodation was almost universally popular with whites. Blacks were more ambivalent. Southern blacks who favored gradual non-confrontational change embraced his philosophy, but some northern black leaders complained that Washington had compromised too much.

For the freed people whose aspirations had been raised by Republican rule, “redemption” was demoralizing. No one could deny the enormous changes that had transformed American society over the previous two decades: slavery had been abolished and the federal government assumed the power to protect individual rights. African Americans created political and social institutions that had not existed before Reconstruction. But as the African American leader W. E. B. Du Bois observed, “The slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery.” Reconstruction had failed to provide blacks with either economic independence or political rights. For many African Americans, the long road to freedom had just begun.