New Frontiers:
South and West
Chapter 5
The “New South”
 Henry Grady, editor of the Atlanta
Constitution.
 In the 1880s, Grady argued for a
“New South” based on industry,
cities, and commerce. In short, to
follow the North’s example and
industrialize.
 But well into the century, Grady’s
New South remained the poorest
section of the country.
The Southern Burden:
Agriculture in the New South
 The economy of the postwar South
remained agriculture, tied to crops
such as tobacco, rice, sugar, and
especially cotton.
 “King Cotton” dominated the
economy
The number of acres planted in
cotton more than doubled between
1870 and 1900.
Yet from 1880 to 1900 world demand
The Southern Burden:
Land ownership
 Sharecropping
Made barely enough to live on.
 Tenant farming (crop-lien system)
Borrowed against their harvests from
merchant.
 Sharecropping, crop liens, and
monopolies on ginning and marketing
added up to inequality and crushing
poverty for the South’s small farmers,
black or white.
Perpetual debt (credit price up to 60%)
The Southern Burden:
Tenancy and Sharecropping
The Southern Burden:
Southern Industry
 Boom in Textiles, Steel, Timber
 Tobacco and cigarettes
1876 – James Bonsack invented a
machine to roll cigarettes.
Suited new urban market in North – “clean,
quick, and potent.”
Between 1860 and 1900 Americans spent
more money on tobacco than on clothes
and shoes.
By the 1890s American Tobacco Company
led the industry.
The Southern Burden:
Summary
 The Sources of Southern Poverty
Late start in industrializing
Uneducated labor force
Isolated southern labor market –
did not attract outside investment
Blacks and the New South
 Bourbon Redeemers – the (white)
leaders of the Democratic party (In
post-Civil War politics, habits of
deference and elitism still prevailed).
 Disfranchisement of blacks in the
South
Designed to allow southern whites to
divide politically without giving blacks the
balance of power (Rise of populism in the
1890s challenged Democratic party).
Mississippi Plan (1890)
 Residency requirement (hurt tenant
farmers who moved around).
 Disqualified if convicted of crimes (often
petty).
 Disqualified those who had not paid their
poll taxes.
 Literacy requirement (“understanding”
clause for whites who could not read the
Constitution).
 Variations – 1898 Louisiana and
Segregation (Racial)
 From 1875 to 1883 any racial segregation
violated a federal Civil Rights Act.
 In 1883 the Supreme Court said that the
14th Amendment applied only to state
sponsored discrimination.
 States could not require separate public
facilities until 1896 when the Supreme
Court upheld the policy of segregation in
Plessy v. Ferguson, which upheld a
Louisiana law requiring segregated
railroad facilities.
Separate but Equal
 Racial separation did not constitute
discrimination, the Court argued, so long
as accommodations for both races were
equal.
 In reality, of course, such separate
facilities were seldom equal.
 Soon Jim Crow statutes separated the
races in almost all public places.
 The lynching of blacks in the South
increased at about the same time that the
Jim Crow laws spread through the South
1890-1899: 187 per year (82% in South) (32%
Separate but Equal
Black
Response
 Booker T. Washington (accommodation)
Argued that blacks should not antagonize whites
by demanding social and political equality; instead
they should concentrate on establishing an
economic base for advancement.
Became known as the Atlanta Compromise
(speech in Atlanta in 1895)
 W.E.B. DuBois (protest)
Criticized Washington and advocated a program
of “ceaseless agitation”
Urged blacks to challenge segregation and
discrimination through social protest and political
action.
The “Frontier”
 Historian Frederick
Jackson Turner
(1890s)
 The West was
defined as a
westward-moving
line
 “The meeting point
of savagery and
civilization.”
 For Turner, the frontier represented the
march of progress into isolated areas of
“free land” and was significant as a social
safety valve, as the cradle of democracy,
as a fountain of American self-reliance
and sense of community.
 Modern historians have generally rejected
Turner’s “frontier thesis.” The West was
not one frontier but many with many
regions and many groups of settlers and
inhabitants.
 We will look at 4: Indians, miners,
The Indian Wars (1864-1890)
 Report on the
Condition of the
Indian
Tribes(1867)
Congress
decided that the
best way to end
Indian wars was
to force the
Indians to live on
out-of-the-way
reservations.
The Great Sioux War
 Custer’s Last Stand - and the
Indians’
Battle of Little Big Horn (1876) (Montana)
Custer and 210 soldiers were annihilated by
2,500 Sioux and Cheyenne
The Indian Wars (1864-1890)
 Indian wars virtually ended in 1886
with the capture of Geronimo
(Apache chief).
 Chief Sitting Bull (Sioux)
Battle of Wounded Knee, South Dakota
(1890)
 Collapse of Indian resistance and the
destruction of the buffalo herds.
Killing with Kindness
 The Dawes Severalty Act (1887)
Was designed to “Americanize” the
Indians (individuals rather than tribes)
Gave individual Indians up to 160 acres of
land which, for the Indians’ protection, the
government held in trust for 25 years
Caused the Indians to lose over half of
their land by 1934
 Citizenship
1901 – Five Civilized Tribes of Oklahoma
1924 – All American Indians
Miners (Gold, Silver, & Copper):
Boom and Bust in the West
 The western boom began in 1849 with the
California Gold Rush and the rise of San
Francisco.
 Typical pattern
The disorderly rush of prospectors was quickly
followed by the arrival of the camp of followers:
saloonkeepers, prostitutes, card sharps, hustlers,
and desperadoes, out to mine the miners. All too
often, busts followed booms, transforming boom
towns into ghost towns.
Once the quick profits were gone, a period of
consolidation brought more order to towns.
Boom and Bust in the West
 The growing
demand for
orderly
government in
the West led to
the hasty creation
of new territories
and eventually
the admission of
states.
The Transcontinental
Railroad
 Before the railroad, travel across the West
was slow and dusty.
 Central Pacific Railroad built the western
link from Sacramento eastward and relied
on 10,000 Chinese workers.
 Union Pacific Corporation built from
Omaha westward using mainly Irish
immigrants.
 Met at Promontory Point, Utah on May 10,
1869.
 The railroads controlled transportation
Cattle Kingdom (Cowboys)
 Railroads opened the Great Plains to
cattle drives that in the 1870s brought
great herds to “cow towns” where they
could be shipped to market.
Chicago became the meat-packing center linked
by railroad to the West.
In 1869, a Chicago meat packer shipped the first
refrigerated beef in an air-cooled car to Boston. 8
years later the system was perfected by Swift.
 The growth of the cattle industry placed a
premium upon land. Conflicting claims
over land and water rights ignited violent
disputes between ranchers and farmers.
Farmers
 Homestead Act of 1862 -- land could be
purchased for $1.25 an acre or claimed
free if you worked it for five years.
 Though land was relatively cheap, horses,
livestock, wagons, wells, fencing, seed,
and fertilizer was not.
By the 1890s, an agrarian revolt was sweeping
the South and West.
In both sections disillusionment and despair
turned to bitterness as more small farmers, black
and white, found themselves enslaved to debt and
driven toward bankruptcy, tenancy, and wage
labor.
Significant Events
 1849-1859 Gold and sliver strikes open western
mining frontier
 1862 Homestead Act
 1864 Chivington massacre
 1869 Completion of first transcontinental railroad
 1874 Barbed wire patented
 1876 Battle of Little Big Horn
 1879 Height of Exodus migration to Kansas
 1887 Dawes Severalty Act
 1890 Wounded Knee
 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson upholds separate but
equal doctrine
Chapter 18