*After the devastation of the Civil War and Reconstruction, many Southern leaders felt they needed to change how the South did business.  They wanted to move away from growing staple crops, and industrialise as the North and Europe had.  They said they needed to become ‘Southern Yankees’ and create a New South.

*In some places this happened, although it was usually funded by Northern (and sometimes British) investors, so a lot of the real profits did not stay in the South.

*What would be natural industries for the South? (textile mills opened in North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia; cigar factories opened in Virginia and North Carolina)  Timber in the Appalachians (especially North Carolina) and iron and steel manufacturing in Nashville and especially Birmingham.  A lot of their products, though, were sent North (planks went North to become furniture, cloth went North to be dyed and made into clothes, iron and steel went north to be made into beams, machines, and tools).

*Many more railroads were also built, particularly leading to and from major cities such as New Orleans, Charleston, Montgomery, Mobile, and elsewhere, but they were still slow to enter rural areas and only a few linked the South to major Northern cities.  Later, Atlanta, Dallas, and Nashville also grew into railroad hubs.

*The Southern economy did grow, but slowly, largely because there were not enough educated workers, nor did Southerners have enough money to spend or to invest to really help industry grow.  What helped Northern industry grow so much? (conspicuous consumption—but the South couldn’t afford that)  

*Because business owners had limited funds, and Southern banks did not have much to lend, Southern factories could not grow as large or offer the same wages as Northern businesses, so southerners who wanted to work in factories often went north to work for better wages there.  In the South, workers might earn 6 cents to 50 cents a day, while the standard daily wage in the North was $1, and railroad workers might make $1.75 to $2, and some jobs even paid more.

*In many ways, therefore, the New South looked a lot like the Old South.  Most people were still farmers, even though many people, white and black, could not afford to buy land.  Unable to afford land, or often even the supplies needed to farm it, blacks and poor whites had to find other things to do or other ways to get the means to farm.

*Many southern planters could not afford to pay their workers, either, so rather than paying them, large landowners began to let people work the land under other systems.  In exchange for granting a family the use of some land, the landowner received a portion, usually one third to one half, of the family’s crops at the end of the year.  Because they shared their crops with their landlord, these farmers were called ‘sharecroppers.’

*Other poor families worked for rich planters, but rather than sharing their crops, they would pay a fixed rent.  This gave them more flexibility, partly because they were allowed to choose what they grew.  This gave them a slightly higher status.  Because they paid rent, they were known as tenant farmers.

*These sharecroppers and tenant farmers were encouraged to grow only cash crops on their plots, so they could give a better crop to their landlord of have the money to pay their rent.  This meant that the South quickly regained its cotton production and soon exceeded pre-War levels.  However, farmers often stopped growing enough food to feed their families, and had to buy it elsewhere.  Eventually the South, the most rural part of the country, had to import food.

*These systems inadvertently (or sometimes intentionally) created vicious cycles of debt for whites and blacks. At the beginning of the year, sharecroppers and tenant farmers had to but their seeds and other supplies, but they typically had to borrow money to do so, either from the bank, their landlord, or the local merchant, a class that grew richer and richer during this time.  Likewise, farmers often borrowed money to buy food, clothes, or supplies during the year.  When the crop was finally sold, the proceeds went to pay off this debt.  The next year, more money was borrowed to start planting again.  If crops failed one year, it might be difficult to pay off the debt, and the land and property would be seized by creditors.  

*Furthermore, the price of cotton fell badly after the end of the Civil War, making it even harder for small farmers to get out of debt or large landowners to spare money to invest in businesses.

*What did Northern workers who felt mistreated do to get rights?

*Just as Northern workers created Labour Unions, some Southerners created the Farmers Alliance.  It demanded that the government force railroads to ship agricultural products cheaply.  It also wanted the government to regulate interest rates so that it would be easier to repay loans.

*The end of Reconstruction also meant that the US Army was no longer in the South to protect the rights of African-Americans.  What had the XIII, XIV, and XV Amendments done? (ended slavery, granted civil rights, granted suffrage)  The Freedmen’s Bureau had also built schools and provided legal services to African-Americans.  Once they were gone, Southern states began to create ‘black codes.’

*Black codes contained oppressive provisions that included curfews (to keep blacks from gathering together after sunset), vagrancy laws (which let vagrants—blacks who did not work—be whipped, fined, or sentenced to a year’s labour and sold to a white man under a contract), labour contracts (obliging blacks to sign year-long contracts for which they were often paid at the end of the year so they could not quit), and land restrictions (allowing blacks to own or rent property only in rural areas, which essentially forced them to live on plantations).  Blacks could not vote, marry white people, own firearms, or exercise many other rights white people enjoyed.

*African-Americans were kept from voting through literacy tests (which required voters to read, but gave much harder tests to blacks than whites, grandfather clauses (which only let people vote if their ancestors had voted before 1866), and poll taxes (which kept poor people from voting).  Although the Ku Klux Klan vanished in the 1870s, terror and violence also kept blacks from voting.

*Some African-Americans sued for their rights, but usually lost their cases.  One of the most important was the Supreme Court case of Plessy v Ferguson, in which it was decided that it was acceptable to force Homer Plessy to ride in a railroad car for blacks only, because that railroad car was (supposedly) as good as the ones whites rode in.  This established the precedent of ‘separate but equal’—as long as blacks got accommodations as good as those whites got, it was all right for them to be segregated.  In fact, the separate facilities were almost never equal.

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