A New South and a New West

Colonial Economics & Race in Post-Bellum 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 (1856-1915)

• 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 non-English 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 sod-busters 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 (1861-1932)