The New South
- After the Compromise, Republicans had hoped their party would gain a foothold in the South
- they don’t
- Demos will control the South for years to come
- But some of the things that the architects of the Compromise of ’77 had hoped would come about do
- The “Redememers”
- after 1877, the South “Redemed”
- troops removed
- “home rule” begins
- but in reality political power in the region was soon more restricted than at any time since the Civil War
- fell under the control of a powerful, conservative small group of men who ruled – oligarchy
- know as the “Redeemers” (as they liked to call themselves)
- or the “Bourbons (called by their critics)
- resembled the ruling class aristocratic antebellum planter class
- but some represented by merchants, industrialists, railroad developers
- corrupt
- they did:
- lower taxes
- reduce spending
- and cut state services
- such as doing away with public schools
- “not necessary”
- began to pay off war debts
- in Va. a “Readjuster” movement started
- wanted the state to readjust its payments of debt to make more public monies available
- won control of the state leg, governor, and a Senate seat
- by the mid-1880’s the movement was all but gone
- Industrialization and the “New South”
- South had lost the war, many believed, because it hadn’t industrialized
- now it was important to “out-Yankee the Yankees” and build a New South
- qualities they had denounced before the war – virtues of thrift, industry and progress – they now advocated
- although southern literature wrote about the age of the pre-war South with romantic nostalgia – Uncle Remus
- textile manufacturing increased 9-fold
- tobacco and James Duke – monopoly with his American Tobacco Co.
- Birmingham, Al – the Pittsburg of the South
- Railroad development
- in reality, the South did not catch up to the north
- they had only won back what they had had before the war
- average income was only 40% of the north’s
- before the war it was 60%
- most of the capital for development had come from the North
- developing a “colonial economy”????
- much of the factory labor was made up of women
- entire families
- moving in from their failed farms
- wages lower than northern equivalent
- mill town were nothing more than company towns
- textiles industries offered no opportunities to blacks
- tobacco, iron and lumbering did
- Convict-lease system
- states leased gangs of convicted criminals to private interests as a cheap labor supply
- harsh conditions
- competed with free-labor
- Tenants and Sharecroppers
- although there was industrialization, the region still remained primarily agrarian
- impoverished state of agriculture
- imposition of systems of tenantry and debt peonage
- the reliance on a few cash crops rather than on a diversified agricultural system
- increasing absentee ownership of valuable farmlands
- much of which was purchased by merchants and industrialists who paid little attention to how it was used
- during Reconstruction tenant farming was at 33%, but by 1900 it had soared to 70%
- due to the crop-lien
- farmers had lost their land to merchants
- farmers who rent could never save enough
- those farmers who owned their own tools paid their rent in cash
- those who did not, such as many blacks, where supplied the materials by the landlords and in return the farmers would promise the landlord a large share of the annual crop – “sharecropper”
- before, this land was marginal, backwoods, piney and these farmers once grew subsistence types of crops
- now they had to try growing cash crop like cotton so as to make some money
- “fence laws”
- African-Americans and the New South
