The "New South"

Industrial growth in the south

In the aftermath of the Civil War, the southern economy was devastated with agricultural and industrial output below 1861 levels; the outlawing of slavery through ratification of the 13th Amendment portended potential restructuring of longstanding labor and societal arrangements. Ultimately, though, it took 20 years for southern industrial production, centered in cities like Atlanta, Birmingham and Mobile, to recover and then exceed prewar levels. In December 1886, Henry Grady, editor of the Atlanta Constitution, proclaimed that a “new south” had arisen from the ashes of the *antebellum *and Confederate past; Grady rejected the idea that former Confederates needed to apologize or make amends for the Civil War and he rejected ideas about racial equality in the south.

Henry Grady, speech to the New England Society of New York, December 22, 1886

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.

Still an agricultural region

While there was important industrial growth in the post-Reconstruction south, often financed by northern investors, the southern economy still largely relied upon cash crop agriculture, particularly cotton and tobacco. James Duke amassed a fortune through the standardization of cigarettes and related tobacco products in the late 19th century; Duke engaged in the anticompetitive practice of horizontal integration by buying out his competitors, providing him with an effective monopoly in the American tobacco market.

Jim Crow

Grady’s positive portrayals of the south glossed over the continuation of sharecropping and threats and acts of violence, including lynching, in the post-Reconstruction south. Southern governments quickly reversed the limited economic, legal, and political gains made by African Americans during Reconstruction, ushering in the Jim Crow era of segregation that was formally endorsed by the US Supreme Court in its landmark Plessy v. Ferguson decision in 1896. Criticized in the lone dissenting opinion as a decision that would eventually be associated with Scott v. Sanford as one of the worst decisions in American jurisprudence, the *Plessy *decision authorized legal segregation of public facilities as long as those facilities were “separate but equal,” a legal fiction that would not be fully overturned in much of the south until approximately 1970.

Southern legislatures enacted a variety of measures intended to effectively prevent African Americans from voting, including literacy tests, poll taxes, and grandfather clauses, all of which were outlawed through the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Segregation extended also to public schools and colleges and universities, public transit, courthouses, swimming pools and beaches, and to private establishments including restaurants, movie theaters, and hotels. A number of southern towns and counties became known as sundown towns, meaning that African Americans were not permitted to be within the town or county limits once the sun had set in the evening; sadly, sundown towns would become common in other parts of the country, including California, Illinois and Kansas in the first half of the 20th century.

Henry Blake, African American sharecropper, interview in the 1930s

After freedom, we worked on shares a while. Then we rented. When we worked on shares, we couldn’t make nothing, just overalls and something to eat. Half went to the other man and you would destroy your half if you weren’t careful. A man that didn’t know how to count would always lose. He might lose anyhow. They didn’t give no itemized statement. No, you just had to take their word. They never give you no details. They just say you owe so much. No matter how good account you kept, you had to go by their account and now, Brother, I’m tellin‘ you the truth about this. It’s been that way for a long time. You had to take the white man’s work on note, and everything.

While the south experienced important industrial growth in the later years of the 19th century, it remained a mostly agricultural region.

After the abolition of slavery at the end of the Civil War, white southerners, frequently with tacit northern approval, enacted a series of segregationist economic, legal and political barriers intended to prevent African Americans from exercising their rights.