A New South and a New West
Colonial Economics & Race in PostBellum America, 1865-1914
The New South
• Focus on Industrial Production along side of
agriculture
• Major industries were textiles (by 1920
more cloth produced in south than new
England), Tobacco (9/10s of U. S. Cigarette
Production by 1904), Coal (4.6 million tons
in 1860—49.3 million by 1900), Iron/Steel,
and Lumber.
Notice anything about these
industries?
• Extractive
• Most value added outside of region
• Part of Colonial Economics—Pittsburgh
Plus
• Both south and west were incorporated in to
U. S. Capitalist nexus but on terms that
harmed the environment and altered
lifeways.
Henry Grady—Apostle of the
New South
The Old South rested everything on slavery and agriculture,
unconscious that these could neither give nor maintain healthy
growth. The New South presents a perfect democracy, the
oligarchs leading in the popular movements social system
compact and closely knitted, less splendid on the surface but
stronger at the core - a hundred farms for every plantation, fifty
homes for every palace, and a diversified industry that meets
the complex needs of this complex age. --Henry Grady, 1886
Reality of New South
• Racism compelled segregation
• Farm Tenancy rates averaged 60% in lower
south
• Crop Lien system was especially noxious,
but seemingly the only available response to
the lack of cash or credit.
Bourbon Redeemers
• Conservative folk who wielded power
locally and had ties to northern capital
• Retrenchment—(public school per pupil
expenditures fell from $10.27 in 1870 to
$7.63 in 1890)
• Convict Leasing system is poster child for
retrenchment policy (David Oshinsky,
Worse than Slavery).
Disfranchisement & Segregation
• Didn’t happen all at once but key decade
proved to be 1890s.
• New Constitutions and Vote Dilutionary
Devices reduced black voting (and poor
white too) to less than 4% of eligible total.
• Railroad Cars were the real contested
terrain; --led to Plessey doctrine of Separate
but equal.
Rise of Lynching
• No Federal Law Enforcement
• 1890 to 1899—187.5 lynchings per year—
82% in the South (blacks were 67.8% of the
victims.
• 1900 to 1909—92.5 lynchings per year—
92% in the South (blacks were 88.6% of the
victims)
“Benefits” of Segregation
• Separate African American Schools and
Churches
• African American Leadership class
• Doctrine of “uplift”
Major African American Leaders—Ida B.
Wells, Booker T. Washington, W. E. B.
Dubois
Ida B. Wells (1862-1931)
• Journalist and Educator in Memphis
• Had to expatriate to New York
• Led nationwide Anti-Lynching Crusade
Booker T. Washington (18561915)
• Atlanta Compromise—work first, rights
later
• Tuskegee Institute
• Actively challenged Alabama’s 1901
Constitution which disfranchised blacks.
W. E. B. DuBois (1868-1963)
•
•
•
•
David Levering Lewis is his best biographer
Agitation for Political Rights
Helped form NAACP
Eventually became a socialist and emigrated
to Ghana
Dominant White View in North
and South
• “It is necessary that this principle (segregation) be
applied in every relation of southern life. God all
mighty drew the color line and it cannot be
obliterated. The Negro must stay on his side of
the line and the white man must stay on his side,
and the sooner both races recognize this fact and
accept it, the better it will be for both.”
Richmond Times, Jan. 12, 1900
Post-Civil War West
• Incorporation and colonial economics
characterized the structural changes for the
west.
• Native People were placed on reservations,
most by 1876
• West became locus for enclaves of nonEnglish European immigrants, as well as
Exodusters from Kentucky and Tennessee
Las Gorras Blancas
• Throughout west, indigenous people resisted
Gringoization
• Major loss was of ejidos and other communal
rights, some that were supposed to be guaranteed
by Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.
• In San Miguel County, New Mexico, las gorras
blancas , led by Juan Jose Herrera, cut fences,
burned railroad ties, created other impediments to
market, capitalist, gringo nexus.
From Sand Creek to Wounded
Knee
• Sand Creek Massacre led to Plains Wars that ended in 1867
• Washita Massacre in 1868 renewed wars
• Completion of Railroads gave U. S. Army (including the
Buffalo Soldiers) advantage over indians
• Battle of Little Big Horn (June 1876) was last hurrah for
Native Peoples
• Geronimo and Chiricuhua were on reservations by 1886
• Wovoka and Ghost Dance spread among reservations
• Army over-reaction led to Wounded Knee Massacre of
December 1890
Geronimo (1829-1909)
Do-Gooders Do In the Indians
• Churches selected Indian Agents—in name of
morality—who tried to make Methodist sodbusters out of Indians. This is how Nathan Cooke
Meeker got to Colorado
• Goverment abuses of Indians were chronicled by
Helen Hunt Jackson (A Century of Dishonor)
• Dawes Severalty Act (1887)—160 acres to Indian
families—contrary to tribal, collective ethic, and
most of the available land was not conducive to
productive agriculture.
Cattle Culture
• Cattle raised on public domain for free were
driven to points adjacent to railroads—first
sold to railroad crews and later shipped for
slaughter in Chicago
• Barbed Wire led to range wars and range
law and fence law disputes
Other Features of the West
• Westering Women and rural isolation
• Railroads did as much as Homestead Act of 1862
promoted western settlement (474 million acres of
public domain placed in private hands by both.)
• Other important governmental policies and the
west: Morrill Land Grant College Act—ag.
Experiment stations; Transcontinental Railroad
Legislation—1862.
Frederick Jackson Turner and “The
Significance of the Frontier in American
History” (1893)
• Rightly focused on importance of west, but
got everything else wrong
• Affected consciousness of U. S. Elites: If
the west was source of the rugged, frontier
individualism and the west was gone, what
would happen to American values.
• Popularity of sports and dime novels—Ned
Buntline, for example
Frederick Jackson Turner (18611932)