THE NEW SOUTH
The Old South, in which two parties had always struggled on fairly equal
terms, was destroyed during the period of the Civil War, while
reconstruction failed completely to revive it. The New South, in
politics, had but one party of consequence. With few exceptions white
men of respectability voted with the Democrats because of the influence
of the race question which negro suffrage had raised. From the
reestablishment of Southern home rule until the advent in politics of
the Farmers' Alliance no issue appeared in the Southern States that even
threatened to split the dominant vote. But under the economic pressure
of the late eighties the old white leaders parted company and even
contended with each other for the negro vote to aid their plans.
The political influence of the Alliance cannot be measured at the polls
in the South as easily as in the West. In most States, in 1888 and 1890,
Alliance tickets were promoted, often in fusion with the Republican
party. The greater influence, however, was within Democratic lines, at
the primaries or conventions of that party. Here, among the candidates
who presented themselves for nomination, the professional politician
found himself an object of suspicion. The lawyer lost some of his
political availability. Men who could claim to be close to the soil had
an advantage.
The value placed upon the dissatisfied farmer vote is shown in the
autobiographical sketches which Senators and Representatives wrote for
the _Congressional Directory_ of the Fifty-second Congress. Some who had
never before held office stated the fact with apparent pride. One, who
appeared from the Texas district which John H. Reagan had represented
through eight Congresses, announced that he "became a member of the
Order of Patrons of Husbandry, and took an active interest in advocating
the cause of progress among his fellow laborers; is now Overseer of the
Texas State Grange and President of the Texas Farmer Cooperative
Publishing Association." From Georgia came several Representatives of
this type. One "has devoted his time exclusively [since 1886] to
agricultural interests, and is a member of the Farmers' Alliance."
Another was elected "as an Alliance man and Democrat." A third "was
Vice-President of the Georgia State Agricultural Society for eleven
years, and President of the same for four years; he is now President of
the Georgia State Alliance." A fourth, Thomas E. Watson, lawyer, editor,
historian, and leader of the new movement, "has been, and still is,
largely interested in farming." A South Carolina Representative covered
himself with the generous assertion that he was "member of all the
organizations in his State designed to benefit agriculture."
The agricultural bases of the Southern political disturbance lay in the
changes in tenure and finance that had recently appeared. The South was
not without a pioneer immigration resembling that of the West. Many of
the carpet-baggers had undertaken to develop farms there. There was much
opportunity for rural speculation that increased in attractiveness as
the area of free Western lands diminished. So far as this went, it
produced a debtor class and prepared the way for inflation.
But the development of new areas in the South was less significant than
the method of its industry. The disintegration of plantations continued
steadily through the seventies and eighties. The figures of the census,
showing tenure for the first time in 1880, and color in 1890,
exaggerated this, since many of the small holdings there enumerated were
to all intents farmed by hired labor and were only matters of
bookkeeping. Yet there was a marked diminution in the size of the
estates. A class of negro owners was slowly developing to account for a
part of the diminution. Frugality and industry appeared in enough of the
freedmen to bring into negro ownership in 1900, within the slave area,
149,000 farms, averaging 55 acres. There were at this time 2,700,000
farms in the South, and 5,700,000 in the whole United States. Negro
renters and negro croppers, many of whom labored under the direct
supervision of the white landlords, increased the number of individual
farmers, and like the rest lived upon the proceeds of the cotton crop
that was not yet grown.
Much of the capital that was used in Southern agriculture came from the
North through the manufacturers and wholesalers who supplied the retail
merchants of the South. These merchants advanced credit to their
customers, measuring it by the estimated value of the next crop. Once
the bargain had been struck, the farmer bought all his supplies from his
banker-merchant, paying such prices as the latter saw fit to charge.
There could be little competition among merchants under this system,
since the burden of his debt kept the planter from seeking the cheapest
market. The double weight of extortionate prices and heavy interest
impressed a large section of the South with the scarcity of cash and the
evils of existing finance.
In agricultural method as well as in finance the South was oppressed by
its system. The merchant wanted cotton, for cotton was marketable, and
could not be consumed by a tricky debtor. Single cropping was thus
unduly encouraged; diversified agriculture and rotation of crops made
little progress. The use of commercial fertilizers was greatly
stimulated, but agriculture as a whole could not advance.
Tied fast to a system nearly as inflexible as that of the ante-bellum
plantation, the South suffered disproportionately in years when cotton
was low. Depression in the later eighties and the early nineties
intensified the suffering of the debtor class and produced an inflation
movement that allied the South and West in the demand for cheaper money
and more of it. The Farmers' Alliance, with its demands for railroad
control, trust regulation, banking reform, and free silver, was the
logical vehicle for the expression of Southern discontent.
The white population of the South, undivided since the Civil War, was
confronted in 1890 by an issue that bore no relation to race and that
divided society into debtor and creditor classes. For twenty years, by
common agreement in which the North had tacitly concurred, the negro had
been suppressed outside the law. Occasional negroes had got into office
and even to Congress in reconstruction days. One, who described himself
as "a bright mulatto," sat in the Fifty-first and Fifty-second
Congresses, but in most regions of the South the negro had not been
allowed to vote or had been "counted out" at the polls, while only in
sporadic cases, mostly in the mountain sections, was the Republican
party able to get enough votes to elect its candidates.
The Farmers' Alliance split the white vote and gave to the negro an
unusual power. From being suppressed by all to being courted by many
involved a change that raised his hopes only to destroy them. The South
no sooner saw the possibility that the negro vote might hold a balance
of power between two equal white factions than it took steps to remove
itself from temptation and to disfranchise the undesired class.
The purpose of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments had been to raise
the freedmen to civil equality and protect them there. Pursuant to the
Fourteenth Amendment, Congress passed, in 1875, a Civil Rights Bill,
which forbade discrimination against any citizen in "the full and equal
enjoyment of the accommodations, advantages, facilities, and privileges
of inns, public conveyances on land or water, theaters, and other places
of public amusement." It was restrained from imposing coeducation of
the races only by Northern philanthropists who were interested in
Southern education. Its compulsion was disregarded at the South, where
social equality between the races could not be attained. Innkeepers and
railroads continued to separate their customers, and in time a few of
them were haled into court to answer for violating the law. Their
defense was that the Fourteenth Amendment forbade discrimination by the
States, but did not touch the private act of any citizen; that it
protected the rights of citizens, but that these rights, complete before
the law, did not extend to social relations,--that attendance at a
theater is not a civil right at all, and may properly be regulated by
the police power without conflict with the Constitution. In the Civil
Rights Cases, decided in 1883, the Supreme Court released the
defendants, ruling that the Fourteenth Amendment was too narrow in its
intention to justify Congress in the passage of a code of social
relations at the South. This part of reconstruction thus broke down,
leaving the negro population at the discretion of its white neighbors.
The Fifteenth Amendment, too, had been limited in its protecting force
before 1890. It forbade a denial of the right to vote by any State. The
Supreme Court easily determined that no violation could occur when a
hostile mob excluded negroes from the polls. It had been settled before
1890 that the negro was defenseless against personal discrimination. It
remained to be seen whether he could be disfranchised by law and yet
have no redress. Not till the South found some of its people appealing
for the negro vote in the crisis of the Farmers' Alliance did it take
the last steps in the undoing of reconstruction.
The Fifteenth Amendment was not explicit. Instead of asserting the right
of the negro to vote, it said, by negation, that the right should not be
denied on account of "race, color, or previous condition of servitude."
The three qualities of race, color, and servitude separated the races,
but the South learned that they were separated by other qualities that
were not proscribed by the amendment as a basis for the franchise. The
negro was generally poor, and any qualification based on property would
exclude him. He was shiftless, and often vagrant, and hence could be
touched by poll-tax and residence requirements. He was illiterate, and
was unable to meet an educational test. Tired of using force or fraud,
the South began in 1890 a system of legal evasion of the Fifteenth
Amendment.
The State of Mississippi, in a new constitution framed in 1890, defined
the franchise in terms that bore heavily upon the negro. In the debates
of its convention members talked frankly and freely of their intention
to disqualify the race; the clause bore no mention of discrimination. It
permitted persons to vote who, being male citizens over twenty-one, and
having reasonable residence qualifications, had paid a poll or other tax
for two years preceding the election, and could read, or understand and
interpret when read to them, any section of the constitution of the
State. Under this clause, between the cumulative tax and the large
discretionary powers vested in the officers of enrollment, the negro
electorate was reduced until it was negligible in Mississippi; and it
was a subject of admiration for other Southern States, which proceeded
to imitate it.
All of the cotton States but Florida and Texas, and most of the old
slave States, revised their electoral clauses in the next twenty years.
Arkansas, in 1893, based the franchise on a one-year poll-tax. South
Carolina, in 1895, used residence, enrollment, and poll-tax, while the
convention called to disfranchise the negro passed resolutions of
sympathy for Cuban independence. Delaware, in 1897, established an
educational test. Louisiana, in 1898, established education and a
poll-tax; North Carolina, in 1900, did the same. Alabama, in 1901, made
use of residence, registry, and poll-tax. Virginia based the suffrage on
property, literacy, or poll-tax in 1902. Georgia did the same in 1908,
and the new State of Oklahoma followed the Southern custom in 1910.
It was relatively easy to exclude most of the negroes by means of
qualifications such as these, but every convention was embarrassed by
the fact that each qualification excluded, as well, some of the white
voters. In nearly every case revisions were accompanied by a
determination to save the whites, and for this purpose a temporary basis
of enrollment was created in addition to the permanent. Louisiana
devised the favorite method in 1898. Her constitution provided that, for
a given period, persons who could not qualify under the general clause
might be placed upon the roll of voters if they had voted in the State
before 1867 or were descended from such voters. The "grandfather
clause," as this was immediately called, saved the poor whites, and was
imitated by North Carolina, Alabama, Virginia, and Georgia. The governor
of Louisiana, in 1898, sang the praises of the new invention: "The white
supremacy for which we have so long struggled at the cost of so much
precious blood and treasure is now crystallized into the constitution as
a fundamental part and parcel of that organic instrument, and that, too,
by no subterfuge or evasions. With this great principle thus firmly
embedded in the constitution and honestly enforced, there need be no
longer any fear as to the honesty and purity of our future elections."
The Supreme Court, in Williams _vs._ Mississippi (1898), and Giles _vs._
Teasley (1903), declined to go behind the innocent phraseology of the
clauses, and refused to overthrow them.
Before the courts had shown their unwillingness to interfere, Congress
had done the same. Two methods of redress were discussed during the
years of Republican ascendancy, 1889-91. One of these contemplated a
reduction of the Southern representation in the House, under that part
of the Fourteenth Amendment that requires such reduction in proportion
to the number of citizens who are disfranchised. Although urged angrily
more than once, this action was not taken, and would not have affected
cases in which the denial was by force and not by law. To meet the
former situation the Republican party pledged itself in 1888. A Force
Bill, placing the control of Southern elections in federal hands was
considered. It received the enthusiastic support of Henry Cabot Lodge,
and was the occasion for another waving of the "bloody shirt." It passed
the House, with the aid of Speaker Reed, but in the Senate was abandoned
by the caucus and allowed to die in 1891. The South was left alone with
its negro problem. In the words of a Southern governor, "There are only
two flags--the white and the black. Under which will you enlist?"
The New South removed the negro from politics, but he remained, in
industry and society, a problem to whose solution an increasing
attention was paid. At the time of emancipation he was almost
universally illiterate and lived in a bankrupt community. Northern
philanthropy saw an opportunity here. The teachers sent south by the
Freedmen's Bureau stirred up interest by their letters home. In 1867
George Peabody, already noted for his benefactions in England and in
Baltimore, created a large fund for the relief of illiteracy in the
destitute region. His board of trustees became a clearing-house for
educational efforts. Ex-President Hayes became, in 1882, the head of a
similar fund created by John F. Slater, of Connecticut. Through the rest
of the century these boards, in close cooperation, studied and relieved
the educational necessities of the South. In 1901 the men who directed
them organized a Southern Educational Board for the propagation of
knowledge, while in 1903 Congress incorporated a General Education
Board, to which John D. Rockefeller gave many millions for the
subsidizing of educational attempts.
The negro advanced in literacy under the pressure of the new influences.
In 1880 seventy per cent of the American negroes over ten years old were
illiterate, but the proportion was reduced in the next ten years to
fifty-seven per cent; to forty-five per cent by 1900; and to thirty per
cent by 1910. As the negro advanced, his own leaders, as well as his
white friends, differed in the status to which they would raise him and
in the methods to be pursued. Some of his ablest representatives, W.E.B.
DuBois among them, resented the discrimination and disfranchisement from
which they suffered, and insisted upon equality as a preliminary.
Others, like Booker T. Washington, who founded a notable trade school in
Alabama in 1881, worried little over discrimination, and hoped to solve
their problem through common and technical education which might lead
the race to self-respect and independence.
Friction increased between the races at the South after emancipation.
Freedom and political pressure demoralized many of the negroes, whose
new feeling of independence exasperated many of the whites. Southern
society still possessed many border traits. Men went armed and fought on
slight provocation. The duel and the public assault aroused little
serious criticism even in the eighties, and the freedmen lived in a
society in which self-restraint had never been the dominant virtue. In
Alabama, in 1880, the assessed value of guns, dirks, and pistols was
nearly twice that of the libraries and five times that of the farm
implements of the State. The distribution of the races varied
exceedingly, from the Black Belt, where in the Yazoo bottom lands the
negroes outnumbered the whites fifteen or more to one, to the uplands
and mountains, where the proportions were reversed. But everywhere the
less reputable of both races retarded society by their excesses.
In spite of its unsolvable race problem the South was reviving in the
eighties and was changing under the influence of the industrial
revolution. Northern capital was a mainstay of its agriculture.
Transportation, manufacture, and city development found stimulation from
the same source. In 1884 the National Planters' Association promoted a
celebration of the hundredth anniversary of the export of the first
American cotton. In a great exposition at New Orleans they showed how
far the New South had gone in its development.
In the twenty years after 1880 the South became a modern industrial
community. Its coal mines increased their annual output from 6,000,000
tons to 50,000,000; its output of pig iron grew from 397,000 tons to
2,500,000; its manufactures rose in annual value from $338,000,000 to
$1,173,000,000, with a pay roll swelling from $76,000,000 to
$350,000,000. The spindles in its cotton mills were increased from
610,000 to 4,298,000. With the industrial changes there came a shifting
of Southern population. The census maps show a tendency in the black
population to concentrate in the Black Belt, and in the white population
to increase near the deposits of coal and iron. Factory towns appeared
in the Piedmont, where cheap power could be obtained, and drew their
operatives from the rural population of the neighborhood. Unembarrassed
by the child-labor and factory laws of the North, the new Southern mills
exploited the women and children, and were consuming one seventh of the
cotton crop by 1900. In Alabama, Birmingham became a second Pittsburg.
The Southern railway system was completely rebuilt after the Civil War.
In 1860 it included about one third of the thirty thousand miles of
track in the United States, but war and neglect reduced it to ruin.
Partly under federal auspices it was restored in the later sixties.
After 1878 it suddenly expanded as did all the American railway systems.
Texas experienced the most thorough change in the fifty years after the
Civil War. From 307 miles her railways expanded to more than 14,000
miles. Only one of the Confederate States, Arkansas, had a slighter
mileage in 1860, but in 1910 no one had half as much as Texas. The
totals for the Confederate area rose from 11,000 miles in 1870 to 17,000
in 1880, to 36,000 in 1890, to 45,000 in 1900, and to 63,000 in 1910.
After 1880 no Confederate State equaled Texas, whose vast area, suddenly
brought within reach of railway service, poured forth cotton until by
the end of the century she alone raised one fourth of the American crop.
Through the expanding transportation system the area of profitable
cotton culture rose more rapidly than the demand for cotton, and in
overproduction may be found one of the reasons for the decline in cotton
values in the early nineties. In the decline may be found an incentive
toward diversified agriculture. When cotton went down, farmers tried
other crops. The corn acreage in the ten cotton States passed the
cotton acreage before 1899, and with the diversification came no
decrease in the total cotton output, but an increase in general
agricultural prosperity. In many regions fruit culture and truck-raising
forced their way to the front among profitable types of agriculture.
In spite of the changes in industry and transportation the South
remained in 1910 a rural community when compared with the rest of the
United States. Out of 114 cities of 50,000 population in 1910, only 15
were in the Confederate area. But when compared with its own past the
South was developing cities at a rapid rate. Only New Orleans and
Richmond, in 1880, had 50,000 inhabitants. Atlanta, Charleston, Memphis,
and Nashville were added to this class by 1890. Texas had no city of
this size until 1900. But in 1910 she possessed four, Dallas, Forth
Worth, Houston, and San Antonio. As the cities increased in number,
bound together, and bound to the cities of the rest of the United States
by the ties of trade and society, the localisms of the South diminished.
The essential fear of negro control remained untouched, but in
superficial ways the Southerner came to resemble his fellow citizen of
whatever section.
The sectionalism which had made a political unit of the South before the
war was weakened. In the tariff debates of 1883 and later a group of
Southern protectionists made common cause with Northern Republicans.
Sugar, iron, and cotton manufactures converted them from the old
regional devotion to free trade. A fear of national power had kept the
old South generally opposed to internal improvements at the public cost.
The Pacific railroads had been postponed somewhat because of this. But
this repugnance had died away, and in the Mississippi River the United
States found a field for work that was welcomed in the South.
The Mississippi never fully recovered the dominance that it had
possessed before the war, but it remained an important highway for the
Western cotton States. The whimsical torrent, washing away its banks,
cutting new channels at will, flooding millions of acres every spring,
was too great to be controlled by States that had been impoverished by
war and reconstruction. In 1879 Congress created a Mississippi River
Commission. Unusual floods in 1882 attracted attention to the danger,
and thereafter Congress found the money for a levee system that
restrained the river between its banks from Cairo to the Gulf.
The mouth of the river, always choked by mud flats, was opened by the
United States in 1879. A Western engineer, James B. Eads, devised a
scheme by which the current scoured out its own channel and converted
itself into an ocean-going highway. He had already proved his power over
the Father of Waters by building the railroad bridge that was opened at
St. Louis in 1874. In 1892 other engineers completed a bridge at
Memphis.
The active development of the New South lessened the difference between
it and the rest of the United States, and brought it within the general
industrial revolution. By 1884 the trend was not noticeable. By 1890
the white population had divided over a political issue like the North
and West. In the years immediately following 1890 Populism was as much a
problem in the South as anywhere.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Most of the books relating to the South are partisan. The most useful
economic analyses are to be found in the writings of W.L. Fleming, U.B.
Phillips, and A.H. Stone. Special points of view are presented in A.B.
Hart, _The Southern South_ (1911), E.G. Murphy, _Problems of the Present
South_ (1904), E.A. Alderman and A.C. Gordon, _Life of J.L.M. Curry_
(1911), J.L.M. Curry, _A Brief Sketch of George Peabody_ (1898), J.E.
Cutler, _Lynch Law_ (1905), B.T. Washington, _Up from Slavery_ (1905),
W.E.B. DuBois, _Souls of Black Folk_ (1903), and J.L. Mathews, _Remaking
the Mississippi_ (1909). The _Annual Cyclopaedia_ is full of useful
details. The Annual Reports of the Peabody Fund, the Slater Fund, and
the United States Commissioner of Education contain statistics and
discussions upon Southern society. The Civil Rights Cases (109 U.S.
Reports) give the best treatment of the legal status of the negro, and
are supplemented by J.C. Rose, "Negro Suffrage" (in _American Political
Science Review_, vol. I, pp. 17-43,--a partial sketch only), and J.M.
Mathews, _Legislative and Judicial History of the Fifteenth Amendment_
(in Johns Hopkins University Studies, vol. XXVII). There were
interesting articles on the New Orleans Exposition, by E.V. Smalley, in
the _Century Magazine_ for April and May, 1885.