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THE S O U T H E R N L A N D S C A P E of 1880 bore the signs of the preceding twenty years. Symmetrical rows of slave cabins had been knocked into a jumble of tenant shacks. Fields grew wild because it did not pay to farm them. Children came upon bones and rusting weapons when they played in the woods. Former slaveowners and their sons decided which tenants would farm the best land and which tenants would have to move on. Confederate veterans at the court house or the general store bore empty sleeves and blank stares. Black people bitterly recalled the broken promises of land from the Yankees and broken promises of help from their former masters and mistresses. Everyone labored under the bur- dens of the depression that had hobbled the 1870s. Men talked of the bloodshed that had brought Reconstruction to an end a few years before.

Signs of a new South appeared as well, shoved up against the signs of the old. At every crossroad, it seemed, merchants put up stores of precut lumber. Hundreds of new towns proudly displayed raw red brick buildings and at least a block or two of wooden sidewalks. Investors began to put money into sawmills, textile factories, and coal mines. Young people of both races set out for places where they could make a better living. Railroads connected the landscape, cut- ting into clay banks, running across long sandy and swampy stretches, winding their way through wet mountain forests. Enthusiastic young editors talked of a "New South."

Shifting borders surrounded this South. Southern accents echoed into Indiana, Illinois, and Ohio; Northerners moved across the Kentucky and Arkansas lines; immigrants came to Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi; Southern farmers pro- duced for Northern markets up the coastline or across the river. Despite these porous boundaries, it seemed clear to most people that the South included the eleven states of the former Confederacy, that Kentucky was a Southern state in spite of its Civil War experience, and that the Southern mountains harbored a

CHAPTER ONE

3 Ayers, E. L. (2007). The promise of the new south : Life after reconstruction - 15th anniversary edition. ProQuest Ebook Central <a onclick=window.open('http://ebookcentral.proquest.com','_blank') href='http://ebookcentral.proquest.com' target='_blank' style='cursor: pointer;'>http://ebookcentral.proquest.com</a> Created from insu-ebooks on 2020-08-19 19:23:56.

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4 The Promise of the New South

Bringing cotton to market in Dalton, Georgia, 1900. (Duke University Library)

distinct, but distinctly Southern, region. West Texas and the southern tip of Florida, by contrast, seemed empty and disconnected from the South's history of slavery and war.'

Soil, rivers, and climate determined whether counties would flourish or de- cline, whether railroads and manufacturing would arrive, whether people would come or leave. New technologies and techniques offered sudden hope to areas that had been passed over for centuries, while districts that had long been at the center of the South's political and economic power lapsed into decay. Southern- ers abandoned old homes and took up new ones within the region, well aware of the different possibilities a hundred miles could make.

Vast plains stretched all along the South's coast from Virginia to Texas, from the Atlantic to the Gulf of Mexico. Tall pines, slow rivers, and swamps domi- nated the landscape. Above the falls on the rivers, the Piedmont's rolling hills and quick waters promised healthy agriculture and vibrant manufacturing. North of the Piedmont, the mountains and valleys of the Blue Ridge, the Cumberlands, and the Alleghenies enfolded a complex landscape of swelling peaks, narrow hollows, and fertile valleys; the Ozarks of Arkansas, far away from the other highlands, resembled them in most respects. The central plateau of Kentucky and Tennessee claimed farms good for livestock but unsuited for cotton.

Ayers, E. L. (2007). The promise of the new south : Life after reconstruction - 15th anniversary edition. ProQuest Ebook Central <a onclick=window.open('http://ebookcentral.proquest.com','_blank') href='http://ebookcentral.proquest.com' target='_blank' style='cursor: pointer;'>http://ebookcentral.proquest.com</a> Created from insu-ebooks on 2020-08-19 19:23:56.

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The subregions of the New South.

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6 The Promise of the New South

Number of black persons in 1870 and in 1910.

To the south of the Piedmont, a dark, narrow crescent called the Black Belt cut across from South Carolina up through Mississippi. The home of the ante- bellum South's more lucrative plantations, the Black Belt declined in the New South. The Mississippi River bisected the South from the tip of Kentucky, down between Arkansas and Tennessee, between Louisiana and Mississippi to the port of New Orleans. Rich soil and good transportation along the river's shores beckoned farmers of both races to build levees and clear the heavy growth of hardwoods. Sparsely settled rolling uplands covered much of Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas, offering cheap lands for enterprising farmers to grow cotton. Southerners converged on the Western prairies at the frontier of the South; by the turn of the century the district has a high proportion of its land in cotton.2

Great disparities marked the nine subregions of the New South. Both coastal plains contained thousands of square miles of sparsely populated land, while the rural districts of the Piedmont and central plateau seemed crowded. Black South- erners made up over two-thirds of the people in the Black Belt but accounted for only about a tenth of those in the mountains and on the Western Prairies. New settlers of both races rushed to the Atlantic and Gulf plains, the mountains, and the prairies, while blacks shunned the Piedmont and the central plateau and whites turned away from the Black Belt and the river counties. Thousands of new farms grew up along the southern and western edges of the region even as tenancy en- tangled the older districts.

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Quickly evolving systems of commerce heightened differences among places and people even as the systems tied them together. Although railroads, stores, and towns came into sudden prominence throughout the South, each place had its own local chronology. Any given year would find some places in a buoyant mood as a railroad approached or a new mill opened, while others, bypassed by the machinery of the new order, fell into decline. The arrival of a railroad could trigger many consequences: rapid population growth or population decline, a more diversified economy or greater specialization, the growth of a city or the death of small towns.3

Only a few events in the New South temporarily focused people on concerns beyond their localities. Political changes provided major landmarks that defined the period. The New South era began in the mid- and late 1870s when the bira- cial and reformist experiment of Reconstruction ended and the conservative white Democrats took power throughout the Southern states. Then, in the early 1890s, the largest political revolt in American history, Populism, redrew the political boundaries of the South and the nation. Business cycles, too, created common experiences across the South. The 1880s saw town and industrial growth in the South but steady economic pressure on farmers. The 1890s began with a terrible depression that lasted through half the decade, followed by a decade of relative prosperity. Within these broad patterns, the people of the New South lived lives of great variation and contrast.

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8 The Promise of the New South

Under Reconstruction, Republicans had hoped to form an alliance that would include influential whites as well as former slaves. Some party leaders stressed land redistribution while others emphasized the vote; some called for federal aid to education and others demanded civil rights. For a while, the party managed to hold together its alliance of former slaves, former Unionists, and former Northerners, all dedicated to economic prosperity and equal rights for all South- erners. But the difficulty of binding together a coalition across lines of race and class constantly wore at the Republicans in the South; voters and leaders began to defect in the face of enticement, animosity, violence, and defeat. The North- ern wing of the party turned away from their Southern compatriots as it became clear that Reconstruction was unpopular in the North and unlikely to succeed in the South without protection and aid from outside.4

Conservative Democrats "redeemed" one state after another, as the Demo- crats called it, driving Republican governments from power. Conservative gov- ernments opposed to Reconstruction took over in Virginia in 1869, in North Carolina in 1870, and in Georgia in 1871. Democrats regained dominance in Texas in 1873, in Alabama and Arkansas in 1874, and in South Carolina and Mississippi in 1876. Reconstruction's final gasp came in 1877, when Congress declared victory for the Democrats in contested elections in Louisiana and Flor- ida.5

Redemption did not descend in a sudden rush of Democratic glory, but arrived slowly, tentatively, awkwardly. Some counties remained in Republican hands long after Democrats won neighboring counties, years after their state govern- ment came under Democratic control. Some conservative Democrats compro- mised with their opponents, reaching out for black voters, trying to pull oppo- sition leaders into their ranks, offering appeals to Republican businessmen. In other counties, the Redeemers took power through brute force, intimidating and assaulting Republican officeholders and voters with random violence and the aid of the Ku Klux Klan.6

Many of the Redeemer Democrats bore impressive pedigrees and could claim distinguished service in the Confederacy. John Brown Gordon of Georgia, L. Q. C. Lamar of Mississippi, and Wade Hampton of South Carolina embodied the Dem- ocratic ideal of the citizen soldier determined to reclaim his homeland from in- terlopers. In counties and states across the South white veterans with education and property stepped forward to seize the power they considered rightfully theirs. Under Democratic rule, they promised, political bloodshed would cease, race relations would calm, the economy would flourish, and honor in government would prevail.7

The Democratic Redeemers defined themselves, in large part, by what they were not. Unlike the Republicans, the Redeemers were not interested in a bi- racial coalition. The Democrats would not seriously consider black needs, would not invert the racial hierarchy by allowing blacks to hold offices for which whites longed. Unlike the Republicans, too, the Redeemers would not use the state government as an active agent of change. Democrats scoffed not only at Repub- lican support for railroads and other business, but also at Republican initiatives in schools, orphanages, prisons, and asylums. Democrats assured landowning

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farmers that the party would roll back taxes. The Democrats saw themselves as the proponents of common sense, honesty, and caution where the Republicans offered foolishness, corruption, and impetuosity. The Democrats explained away their own violence and fraud, both of which soon dwarfed that of Reconstruc- tion, as fighting fire with fire. Democratic policies encouraged economic growth not through active aid, as the Republicans had done, but through low taxes on railroads and on farmland, with few restrictions on business and few demands on government. Democrats realized, as had the Republicans, that railroads were the key to economic growth in the last half of the nineteenth century.8

Watched over by friendly Democratic regimes, railroad companies worked fe- verishly in the New South. From the end of Reconstruction to the end of the century the South built railroads faster than the nation as a whole. Different lines raced from one subregion to another, competing for key territories; by 1890, nine of every ten Southerners lived in a railroad county. The construction of a railroad touched people all up and down the track. "From New Orleans to Me- ridian was a beehive of activity. Literally thousands of people were employed," a Mississippian recalled. "The women and children were busy producing vege- table crops, chickens, eggs, milk and butter and the men were butchering and delivering fresh meat and other supplies to the men working on the railroad. For the first time there was a big market for what people could raise in this area." Other farmers worked to cut crossties from their land. "I believe the people as a general thing are in better circumstances now than they have been in several years," Joe Vick wrote from Texas back to his aunt in Virginia; "one cause of it I reacon is because there is a Rail Road building right through this neighbor- hood and nearly every body has got afew dollars out of it."9

The railroad crews lived in rough camps. "We have not as orderly a set of men as may be imagined on the work," a young man wrote to his parents with considerable understatement. "They all carry pistols and yesterday there were three men shot in one camp." But the money was good. "Monday was pay day amongst the railroad workmen between here and Eureka," an Arkansas paper noted, "and several thousand dollars were passed into the hands of the labor- ers."10

Charley White, a young section hand on a Texas railroad, discovered the dangers of mixing ready money with the bawdy life of the railroad camp. Along with his compatriots, White visited "Miss Minnie's," a whorehouse along the line. He found "too much going on. Killing folks, and beating up, and slashing with knives." The attractions were considerable, though: "There was lots of women there. All kinds. Some old, some young, some half-naked, some dressed nice—just any type you wanted. "X)ne beckoned Charley to her room, but White was scared. The brother of one of the hands who had been loitering around the bunkhouse was "half eat up" with syphilis, terrible sores covering his entire body. "Some of the other men had it too, but they wasn't as bad off as he was." White decided to settle down: he met a nice young woman, "quit the railroad and got me a job working at a sawmill." n

Working on a train was dangerous. The record of accidents on one small line Ayers, E. L. (2007). The promise of the new south : Life after reconstruction - 15th anniversary edition. ProQuest Ebook Central <a onclick=window.open('http://ebookcentral.proquest.com','_blank') href='http://ebookcentral.proquest.com' target='_blank' style='cursor: pointer;'>http://ebookcentral.proquest.com</a> Created from insu-ebooks on 2020-08-19 19:23:56.

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10 The Promise of the New South

Railroads in 1870 and in 1890.

for one year gives some idea of the damage the railroad could inflict: "hand crushed, collision, killed, collision, foot struck, hip hurt, struck by #24, leg run over while switching and injury resulted in death, cut on head, finger cracked, thumb cracked and finger broken, struck by bridge and killed, leg broken, fall from train sustaining injuries resulting in death, found injured by side of road, run over and killed, skull fractured, death resulted, son of Rev. J. W. Miller killed, shoulder blade broken, run into No. 7 on middle track, hand crushed, negro boy run over and head cut off, leg run over necessitating amputation, wreck caused by broken wheel, killed." Yet the railroad was surrounded by an aura of glamour throughout the New South era. "All that they had said was true, and much more. People were crowded and seemed to be excited," the son of a poor farmer recalled of his first trip to the "Big Terminal" in Atlanta. "Hundreds of people, many of them hurrying, were pushing against each other, pages were yelling names, a big Negro was calling stations for departing trains; train bells ringing, steam escaping with strange and frightening sounds. . . . The strange lights, the queer smell of things, and the soft, heavenly feel of the velvet that covered the seats on the train, held us older children spellbound."12

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Towns that finally saw the railroad reach them could barely contain themselves. A small town in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas exulted: "Harrison Is a Rail- road Town At Last. The Construction Train Laid Yesterday the Steel Which Puts us in Touch With the World," proclaimed the headline of the local paper. The editor reported that two thousand people thronged the streets, cannons boomed, flags waved. The ice company expanded its electrical capacity, the town fathers ordered the bandstand painted, local merchants began a new iron and stone building, the Bradshaw Saloon received new fixtures, and the hotel even put in bathrooms.13

In places lucky enough to have a railroad, the station often became the most prominent feature of the landscape. Opelousas, Louisiana, got passenger service, and "the landing place of the road is crowded every evening by the people of the town. No one ever thinks of taking a walk in any other direction from that leading to the railroad tracks." The editor of the local paper thought he could discern "a very great change" in the town's citizens. "They are rapidly casting aside their old rustic country ways and are becoming metropolitan-like in ap- pearance and deportment."14

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12 The Promise of the New South

Fat Nancy Trestle Disaster in Orange County, Virginia, 1888. (University of Virginia Special Collections)

When the railroads found themselves and their passengers inconvenienced by the old-fashioned way of keeping time—every town in the country basing its own calculations on the passing of the sun and the turning of local clocks—it became clear that time would have to be made uniform if the ever-growing rail system was to operate efficiently and safely. In 1883 railroads took it upon them- selves to divide the country into four time zones, and the railroad became the arbiter of time as of so much else in the nation and in the South. "We consulted the clock [only] when we had to catch a train, the clock's strongest ally in clamping down on the human race and holding it in a fixed and rigid rhythm," a South Carolina man recalled. Yet there was no guarantee the trains could always adhere to their own standard. As residents of many hamlets and villages on the smaller lines in the South discovered, the train "was seldom there when the schedule said it would be, but occasionally it was, and they were amazed and angry when they missed it." The train, everyone came to realize, lived according to a schedule that suited the system, the mechanism. The locomotive passed through nearly a thousand Southern counties but it belonged to none of them.15

Throughout the 1870s and early 1880s Southern railroad companies experi- mented with ways to accommodate themselves to the different widths of track between North and South; some used cars with especially wide wheels that could operate on either the North's narrow gauge or the South's three-inch wider gauge,

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some used cars with adjustable axles, some used hoists to lift car bodies while the trucks underneath were changed. All these methods proved cumbersome and expensive, and so in 1885 the major railroads agreed to standardize nearly 13,000 miles of track of eccentric gauge, the great bulk of which lay in the South. The move was all made on one day: Sunday, May 30, 1886. Frantic work crews shoved thousands of miles of rail three inches closer together on that day. The integration and improvement never ceased: steel replaced iron, spur lines reached into ever more remote areas, new companies pushed aside those who got in the way of the system.16

While some general stores had grown up at junctions on Southern railroads in the 1850s, the clientele and impact of those stores had remained small. Slaves could buy nothing, and small farmers, who spent most of their energy producing for their household or local market, had little currency and little need for credit. Most of the things small farmers could not import or make themselves—shoes, harnesses, plows, hinges, nails—were crafted by local artisans, slave and free. Farm women usually made their families' clothes, sometimes with store-bought gingham, but more often with homespun; slave women and mistresses did the same work for plantation slaves. Infrequent purchases from local stores usually involved staples such as salt, molasses, and coffee. Planters, whose business depended on trade in international commodity and financial markets, often dealt with factors in New York or London. The factor made purchases abroad on behalf of their clients and shipped goods directly to the plantation.17

The situation changed after emancipation with the rapid emergence of country stores in the late 1860s and early 1870s. National laws written during the Civil War put most banks in the North and left stores to dispense the vast majority of credit in the Southern countryside. With cash scarce, Southern legislators created lien laws that allowed the use of unplanted crops as collateral for loans to get cotton and corn into the ground. Because the few Southern banks had little in- centive to lend either to small farmers or to rural stores, stores operated on credit dispensed by wholesalers, who in turn obtained credit from manufacturers or town banks. The stores increasingly stood at the center of the rural economy.18

Stores sped the reorientation of plantation-belt economic life. Many freedpeo- ple, at the demand of their landlords, concentrated on growing cotton and aban- doned their gardens; they turned to stores for everything they needed. Other freedpeople, working for wages and having some say over how they would spend their money, also turned to the store, eagerly purchasing symbols of their inde- pendence. Many planters used plantation stores to wring extra profit from their tenants, marking up goods substantially and doling out credit to keep tenants on the farm throughout the season. Independent merchants established stores as well, though, competing for the business of the freedpeople and white farmers. Both planters and merchants took a lien on the unplanted crop of their customers as security for the loan of goods and supplies. The lien proved a powerful political and economic weapon for those who wielded it. In legislative and court battles throughout the 1870s, planters and merchants scrambled for control over the crop liens of small farmers. In some localities, planters and merchants made compro-

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14 The Promise of the New South

mises that allowed both to do business, sometimes working together; in others, merchants decided there might be less competition in regions without powerful landlords. They left for the upcountry.19

Upcountry merchants had already begun establishing stores of their own. Farms outside plantation areas had been growing more cash crops even before the Civil War, as railroads proliferated and as high cotton prices beckoned. The war had temporarily halted cotton sales but they accelerated in the decade after Appo- mattox. In the first years after the war, pent-up world demand raised the price of cotton. Northern manufacturers and commission houses sent agents to drum up business in the South; they met eager clients behind the counters. Hundreds of new upcountry stores emerged to loan money, market crops, and make profits from the rapidly spreading cotton economy.20

"Have you all felt the affects of the low price of cotton," a son wrote his father fifteen years into the post-Reconstruction South. "It nearly ruined us. I did not get my house build. The farmers are very blue here. But getting ready to plant cotton again." Another farmer admitted that "I am holding my cotton, and it is still going down. I do not know what to do, but I guess I will sail in the same old channel." From Texas one farmer wrote of himself and his fellow sufferers: "I am afraid the Farmers will run the price of Cotton down to 4 cents again next fall."21

Asked how it was that Southern farmers fell into this cycle of futility, J. Pope Brown, a cotton farmer himself, answered the question impatiently: "That was by necessity, almost. You can not go into all of that. We were poor, had nothing to go on, had no collateral, and we just had to plant the crop that would bring money right away. We did not have time to wait." In the immediate postwar years farmers could count on cotton when they could count on nothing else; it was easily grown by a farm family, nonperishable, in demand, seemingly prof- itable, and easy to get credit for. The fertilizer brought by the railroads extended the growing season in the upcountry and reduced the risks of growing cotton in places beyond the plantation areas. By the 1880s, cotton production had spread to thousands of new farms, into the upcountry of Georgia, Alabama, and South Carolina as well as onto the Texas and Arkansas frontier. Through all the twists and turns of Southern politics, through all the fluctuations of the volatile Amer- ican economy, Southerners of both races grew more cotton.22

The farmers who pondered the problem of low cotton prices faced certain insurmountable facts throughout the New South era. "There is one thing I want to impress upon you," a farmer testifying before a federal commission studying the problem insisted. "Cotton is the thing to get credit on in this country. Ten acres of cotton will give you more credit than 50 acres of corn. . . . You can always sell cotton. You leave home with a wagon load of cotton and you will go home that night with money in your pocket; you load up your wagon with wheat or corn and come here with 100 bushels, and I doubt some days whether you could sell it." As a Texas newspaper pointed out, cotton "is practically a sure crop. There is never a total failure even under very unfavorable circum- stances." Unlike grain or vegetables, cotton would always be worth something.

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Cotton required no expensive machinery, no elaborate ditching or irrigation, no vast labor force, no arcane knowledge. From the viewpoint of the individual farmer, especially one with little capital to risk in experimenting with some new crop, cotton made sense.23

Precisely because more farmers became adept at raising more cotton at the same time as countries on the other side of the world greatly increased their production, the South grew far too much of the commodity for the region's own good. One farmer explained the cruel cycle. "When the fellow would come up at the end of the year with six short bales of cotton and a mule, the cotton farmer would say to him. 'Why did you not make more cotton? Here is a man that got ten bales.' He went back home and put in to make ten bales, and at the end of the year he had ten bales, and when he came to the farmer the latter said, 'Why did you not make more? Here is a man that made twelve bales, and here is another who made fifteen bales.' " After the farmer had struggled to make as much cotton as he could, he suddenly heard a new set of directions. " 'You fool, you have made too much; you have overdone the thing.' And he was doing what they told him to do all the time. We got in that fix and we did not know what to do. I was one of those fellows."24

This farmer, along with many thousands like him, "went on the idea if a man could make two bales of cotton where one grew before he was a benefactor." A good farmer had always been one who could make the land yield more. "The trouble about it was we started out making it at 20 cents, and then it went to 15, and then to 10, and when we learned to make it at 10 it went to 8, and when we thought we had learned to make it at 8 it went to 6, and when we had learned how to make it at 6 it went to 4."

After sharecropping and preaching for years, Charley White and his wife Lucille got a chance to buy 27 acres in Texas for $350. "The house wasn't much more than a shack," White recalled, but his wife never complained and the children were too young to care. "Lucille and me always had worked hard, both of us. We hadn't ever minded work. But looked like when we got some land that belonged to us it just set us on fire. We didn't seems to get half as tired, or if we did we didn't notice it. One day when we was cleaning up a field Lucille said, 'You know, Charley, even the rocks look pretty.' " The ambition that drove Charley and Lucille White drove many blacks in the New South.25

The cashbook of Daniel Trotter, a black farmer from Natchitoches Parish, Louisiana, showed how a black family pieced together enough for a farm. In 1899, his wife sold eggs, one or two dozen at a time, earning $5.30; she also contributed $7.80 from her sewing of dresses and jeans. The family sold four pigs and made $70.22 picking cotton. Meanwhile, Trotter made even more "cash money" by "fixing miller machinery," "fixing water clock," "bell clock," and guns. Some of this money the family spent on such things as stockings, mattress, paint, coats, onion sets, "arsh potatoes," "wrighting paper," stamps, "bluin," "sweet oil," sardines, pills, black pepper, a round file, bread, candy, shot, and ginger snaps, revealing that they enjoyed a standard of life above that of most black farmers. By the end of the year Trotter noted that his family's savings

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16 The Promise of the New South

totaled $175 in "Green Back" and $33 in silver. In 1900, the Trotters bought a "plantation" for an undisclosed sum.26

This was just part of the story, though, for Trotter also left a brief account of his farming life before the good year of 1899:

I married in Sep 25/1885 I work for Chaplin by month 1 1/2 year . . . I move onto H. T. Churman in 1887. I Live to Churman 4 years and made crop I moove to Mr. J. H. C. Cosgrove in 91 made 2 crops own Halves and Made 2 Crop with him Renting all together I Live to J. H. C. Cosgrove 4 years I moove to Mr. M. F. Atkins in 97 I Live with Mr. Atkins One year and Rent I moove to Mr. J. C. keyser in 98 I rented J. C. Keyser whole Place for 3 years.

Trotter recorded his labor and his accounting in a little booklet put out by a patent medicine company. As if to mock his ambition, a cartoon opposite his meticulous figures showed a familiar scene from the advertising of the day: a well-dressed white man looks down at a black child and says, "My, what a nice fat little boy!" and the child replies, "Golly, boss, that ain't no fat; dat's nuffin but M. A. Simmons' Liver Medicine. We can't git along widout in dis coun- try."27

While white landowners, especially absentee landowners, might sell remote or poor lands to blacks, prospective black landowners faced a disheartening situa- tion with regard to land in the Black Belt. "We air in veary bad condishion here," F. M. Gilmore, a black man from Arkansas, wrote the African Coloni- zation Society. "Land Lords has got us Bound To Do Just as they Say or git off of his Land, and we air Compeled to Do so. . . . and they say it is not entend from the begaining for a Dam negro to have. But, a small peace of Land in the South, an it is only 6 feet by 4 wide 4 ft deep." A black man, according to the whites Gilmore dealt with, "has no bisness with money by no means whatever, an ef He git Corn bread and fat meet and $12.00 . . .per year that is A plenty for ever head of A Negro.''28

"The best sign for the Negroes of our land," a sympathetic white woman observed, "is that they are fast separating into classes, a fact to which their white fellow-citizens often fail to attach the importance it deserves." Black Southerners increasingly differed among themselves in quite self-conscious ways. "Few modern groups show a greater internal differentiation of social conditions than the Negro American, and the failure to realize this is the cause of much

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confusion," W. E. B. DuBois pointed out. "The forward movement of a social group is not the compact march of an army, where the distance covered is prac- tically the same for all, but is rather the straggling of a crowd, where some of whom hasten, some linger, some turn back, some reach far-off goals before others even start, and yet the crowd moves on."29

Southern trains were divided into two cars, a "smoking" car for men and a "ladies" car for families and non-smoking men as well as for women. Custom had it that blacks would ride in the smoking car, but as a white women's suf- fragist from Ohio on her first visit to the South related, these cars offered only nauseating conditions: "All Southern trains run a compartment car for nigers, and men spit on floor in all cars so it is dreadful. We always go in looking for clean floor and seat—sure enough I wish I had on short skirts in such dirty cars."30

Apparently a growing number of black men and women shunned the spitting, cursing, and drinking they too often confronted in the "smoking" car. Unfor- tunately, they found a different kind of trouble when they attempted to move to better conditions. One well-dressed black man, asked by the conductor to leave the ladies' car after the train crossed the state line between Tennessee and Geor- gia, refused. Even after three young white men ordered him to move, he de- clined. The three whites assaulted him. When the conductor returned to get tick- ets, the black man sought the official's protection. The conductor told the white assailants to calm down and ordered the man whom they had beaten to go to the smoking car. "The negro's face was covered with blood," the Atlanta Consti- tution related. "His silk hat was mashed, and he was scared." He got off at the next station, many miles before his destination.31

"Self-respecting colored people would not go into the coach set apart for them" before laws forced them to do so, Mary Church Terrell recalled. In the late 1860s, her father bought a first-class ticket for himself and his young daugh- ter. Mary, five years old, enjoyed the trip until the white conductor came by while her father had stepped into the smoker. "As he pulled me roughly out of the seat, he turned to the man sitting across the aisle and said, 'Whose little nigger is that?' The man told him who my father was and advised him to let me alone. Seeing the conductor was about to remove me from the car, one of my father's white friends went into the smoker to tell him what was happening." Mary's father insisted, successfully, that their ticket entitled them to first-class accommodations. When they reached home, the girl tried to discover what she had done wrong. "I hadn't mussed my hair; it was brushed back and was per- fectly smooth. I hadn't lost either one of the two pieces of blue ribbon which tied the little braids on each side of my head. I hadn't soiled my dress a single bit. I was sitting up 'straight and proper.' " Her mother could only respond that "sometimes conductors on railroad trains were unkind and treated good little girls very badly."32

The railroad companies did not want to be bothered with policing Southern race relations and considered the division of coaches into black and white com- partments an irksome and unnecessary expense. Despite the railroad companies'

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18 The Promise of the New South

Percent of county population in villages of fewer than 2,500 people, 1880 and 1900.

resistance, though, growing tensions about race and gender, anger at the rail- roads, and political maneuvering pushed toward the separation of the races. In the late 1880s and early 1890s, the railroads became the scenes of the first state- wide segregation laws throughout the South.33

Walter Hines Page described a North Carolina railroad village in 1877. "The railway station was then a flimsy shanty that the country merchant had himself built in payment for the railroad's stopping its one daily passenger train if it were signalled." When the train stopped, as it did two or three times a week, it discharged a single passenger or a box or barrel for the merchant; it never took anything on. "Three families of importance lived near the railway station, and the little settlement dwindled down the muddy road to a dozen Negro shanties." One Baptist church, one Methodist church, and one intermittent school consti- tuted the place's organized life.

Twenty-five years later, Page could barely recognize the muddy hamlet. "Two railroads now run by the town and you may take a sleeping car on either one and go to New York in twenty hours, whereas twenty years ago it was a journey of fifty or sixty hours with several stops and there was no sleeping car. More

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important, "the town has mills and shops and paved streets and electric lights, a well-maintained private school and two public schools, one for whites and one for blacks. Society still divides itself into church-groups, but the violence of religious controversy is abated, especially among the men; for they now discuss the price of certain stocks in New York." Page's town was luckier than most, but its evolution was not unusual. Hundreds of places saw the same changes arrive with the same speed. "In the smart modern town, with its banks, and shops, and mills, and stores, and numerous other accessories of a nineteenth- century industrial community," another Southerner noted in 1895, "one finds it hard to recognize the sleepy medieval village of forty years ago."34

New villages emerged in every corner of the South, "buried in bends of the rivers, hidden behind mountains, perched on rises of ground beside bayous, and strung along thousand of miles of virtually impassable roads." These places, "known only to the natives, the drummers, Dun and Bradstreet, country politi- cians and postal inspectors," served as the stages where much of the history of the New South was played out. Every subregion of the South witnessed the emergence and evolution of villages, hamlets of fewer than 2,500 people.35

Villages beginning with a single store, church, or school quickly grew into Ayers, E. L. (2007). The promise of the new south : Life after reconstruction - 15th anniversary edition. ProQuest Ebook Central <a onclick=window.open('http://ebookcentral.proquest.com','_blank') href='http://ebookcentral.proquest.com' target='_blank' style='cursor: pointer;'>http://ebookcentral.proquest.com</a> Created from insu-ebooks on 2020-08-19 19:23:56.

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20 The Promise of the New South

larger settlements. The number of villages in the South doubled between 1870 and 1880, then doubled again by 1900, to over 2000 villages containing 1.2 million people. The South's larger towns and cities took off in the 1880s—the rate of urban growth nearly doubling the national average—and continued strong for generations. By 1910, more than 7 million Southerners lived in a town or city. The cities of the New South stood not as isolated islands in a vast rural sea but rather as the center of trade and ambition for dozens of smaller towns and cities. Overlapping and interlocking systems embraced virtually every village and town in the South. Influence, fashion, and capital moved down through these systems, while crops, migrants, and profits worked their way up. From their very beginning, the villages, towns, and cities of the New South worked as parts of complicated and interdependent networks.36

Even small towns brought pieces of the city deep into the rural South. "The improvements in transportation, the daily mail, the telegraph, have mobilized country life. Country people who formerly were satisfied with their weekly pa- per, who went to town annually or semiannually, in some instances not more than two or three times during a long life, can now go quickly, safely, pleas- antly, and cheaply several times a day," Harry Hammond pointed out. In town, "cheap coal, cheap lights, convenient water supply offer inducements; society and amusements draw the young: the chance to speculate, to make a sudden rise in fortunes, to get in the swim attracts others." The results were clear to see. "All these things, and many more of the same sort have acted and reacted be- tween the town and the country, and the country has become permeated with tendencies to town life and the effort to imitate."37

Southern boosters of the early 1880s told everyone who would listen that their region had entered upon the initial stages of a profound and beneficial transfor- mation. While the depression-plagued 1870s had seen only the spottiest and most halting kind of industrial development in the South, in the eighties capital, wages, and value of product all more than doubled. A host of journalists made names for themselves and their publications by justifying, cheering, defending, and aiding these starts at a new industrial South. Richard H. Edmonds of the Man- ufacturer's Record and Henry Watterson of the Louisville Courier-Journal jumped on every bandwagon of Southern industrialization. Hundreds of lesser counter- parts in remote corners of the South did the same.38

The editors' own success hinged on the success of the town where their paper was published, and it became increasingly clear to everyone that towns without industry could grow only so far and so fast. "Did you ever think what a factory working two hundred hands means to a town?" a paper in Alabama's piney woods asked its readers as it implored them to grant a right of way for a railroad for one of its local enterprises. "From it one thousand people get a living. . . . This comes from nothing, and is unlike a mercantile business that sends away from a town the cost of everything they sell, leaving only the profit."39

Many Southerners detested those who were willing to purchase Northern good will and capital by renouncing the actions and beliefs of their fathers. "I ask in Heaven's name, is it essential that a southern man must eat dirt or wallow therein,

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denounce his ancestry or ridicule their foibles, or otherwise degrade himself to prove his newborn loyalty and devotion to the new order of things?" one letter writer asked after an article by Henry Watterson urged the South to let go of the past and join the national mainstream.40

It was left to Henry Grady, the young and buoyant editor of the Atlanta Con- stitution, to construct a rationale that allowed the South to have it both ways, to be proudly Southern and yet partake of the new industrial bounty. Grady, a member of the generation that had come of age since Appomattox—he was thirty- six in 1886, when he became nationally famous—seemed to embody the South's new industrial growth and optimism. The son of a merchant, a graduate of the University of Georgia and the beneficiary of a year of postgraduate work at the University of Virginia, a correspondent for Northern papers, a champion of di- versified agriculture and the "cooperation" of the races, the attractive and per- sonable Grady rose quickly in the late seventies and early eighties. He became a privileged investor in Atlanta and a major figure in Georgia politics, giving him more than a rhetorical stake in the South and his city. He faced a difficult choice in 1886 when he got off the train in New York to make a speech before the New England Society of New York, where no Southerner had ever spoken before. Asked what he was going to say, Grady replied, "The Lord only knows. I have thought of a thousand things to say, five hundred of which if I say they will murder me when I get back home, and the other five hundred of which will get me murdered at the banquet."41

In his speech, Grady serenely exaggerated the changes that had come to the South in the preceding few years in politics, in race relations, in industrial and agricultural growth. He praised Abraham Lincoln as "the typical American" and joked that his fellow speaker William T. Sherman was "considered an able man in our parts, though some people think he is a kind of careless man about fire." But the dominant theme of his speech was that the New South had built itself out of devastation without surrendering its self-respect. "As she stands upright, full-statured and equal among the people of the earth, breathing the keen air and looking out upon the expanded horizon, she understands that her emancipation came because through the inscrutable wisdom of God her honest purpose was crossed, and her brave armies were beaten." Grady pushed his point, to make sure he was misunderstood neither by the North or the South: "The South has nothing for which to apologize. . . . The South has nothing to take back." Yet he "was glad that the omniscient God held the balance of battle in His Almighty hand and that human slavery was swept forever from American soil, the Amer- ican Union was saved from the wreck of war." The portly audience cheered through its tears, and those counting on Southern industry breathed a little eas-

In 1880, a mass of small workshops employed about three-quarters of all South- ern manufacturing wage earners. Beginning in the 1880s, however, the key Southern industries began to take shape. Over the next two decades, entrepre- neurs established factories in a broad arc through much of the Piedmont. The coastal plains stretching from Virginia into east Texas offered work at sawmills,

ier.42

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22 The Promise of the New South

in turpentine camps, and in phosphate mines. Lumber mills employed men, too, in Arkansas, west Tennessee, and western Kentucky. People in north Alabama, north Georgia, and east Tennessee earned wages in the coal and iron fields, while people in eastern Kentucky, West Virginia, and southwest Virginia could look to the expanding coal mines of the mountains. Even cotton-producing re- gions witnessed the development of a newly mechanized and more highly capi- talized cotton-processing business, as 17,000 workers manned the larger cotton gins and cottonseed-oil installations in towns throughout the Black Belt and the Cotton Uplands. In each subregion, cities provided bases for foundries, car shops, and regional manufacturing firms.43

Every measure of industrial growth raced ahead in the New South, the rates of change consistently outstripping national averages. The increase in value added compared favorably with the other industrializing economies of the nineteenth century. Productivity actually grew faster in the South than it had in New En- gland during its industrial revolution fifty years earlier.44

Southerners poured enormous amounts of sweat and ambition, along with the relatively little money they had, into the products the world market would buy. They rushed to fill the only gaps in the national and international economies they could find: cheap iron, cheap cloth, cheap coal, cheap lumber, turpentine, sugar, and tobacco products. At the same time, new manufactured goods from the North and abroad flooded the South, undermining small firms who had produced for the local markets. Like other backward economies vying with established indus- trial nations, the South turned out the few products the more fortunate industrial nations or the less fortunate non-industrialized nations were willing to purchase. Like other backward economies, too, the South endured low wages, absentee ownership, and little control over national policy.45

Communities in Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia watched as huge crowds of local blacks gathered at railroad stations to await transportation to the Missis- sippi Delta, the Louisiana rice or sugar fields, or the turpentine camps of the piney woods. "At the depot an interesting spectacle presented itself in the huge mass of luggage piled on the platform," a New Bern, North Carolina, newspaper reported in 1889. "Old meat boxes, various other boxes, barrels, trunks of all shapes and sizes, were piled ten feet high on the platform. The train could not accommodate all who wanted to go." "The negro exodus now amounts to a stampede," David Schenck of Greensboro wrote in his diary in January of 1890. "Nineteen passenger coaches filled to the doors, nine cars filled with baggage, 1,400 negroes, all pulled by a twelve wheeled consolidated engine. . . . I judge that between 5 and 10,000 have passed in the last fortnight, on their way to Mississippi, Arkansas, and Louisiana."46

Observers expressed widely varying opinions about just what all this move- ment among Southern blacks foretold. Some worried. "The disposition among the colored people to migrate now is strong, and is increasing," a white South- erner wrote in 1889. "In nearly all communities there are Negroes of whom none knows the coming, or the going, or even the real names. The Negro is restive, the white apprehensive, and both are growing more and more suspicious.

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Percent of families with a member engaged in manufacturing, 1900 (national quartiles).

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24 The Promise of the New South

Such a status is already half hostile even before an overt act is committed." Others fumed. "Our young negro men are becoming tramps, and moving about over the country in gangs to get the most remunerative work," one white testi- fied to the Industrial Commission. Only the "older men, with families" were willing to stay at one place any length of time.47

Southern whites could not help but be aware of the black movement around them. Orra Langhorne, a white woman sympathetic to black aspiration, de- scribed a scene in Harrisonburg, Virginia: "One evening during my stay, loud shouts and hurrahs reached our ears from the railroad station . . . and on in- quiring the cause we learned that 'Shumate's' gang was passing through town." Five hundred "able-bodied colored men" gathered by a white Virginian who acted as an agent for Iowa mining companies were preparing to leave, "and this hilarious parting between them and their friends covered the heart-ache of sepa- ration." While there was no talk of the sort of exodus that struck the Carolinas, Langhorne worried that "some invisible agency . . . is gradually drawing the colored people away from the South and scattering them all over the country."48

The states of the Upper South—Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, and North Carolina—saw the most active working of that "invisible agency," the greatest relative loss of black natives. In those states blacks tended to move in a northerly direction, while those in the Lower South tended to move to states directly to their west. Indiana, Illinois, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, Massachusetts, and New Jersey received substantial numbers of black Southerners around the turn of the century; the migrants totaled about 141,000 in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. Again, Orra Langhorne offered a clear-eyed portrait of this process: "A colored woman with a lively baby sat near me in the station-room and when I asked where she was going she began to tell me her simple story as if glad of someone to talk with." The young woman was from Charlottesville, but "wages were so low there colored people could not get enough to live on [and] a great many of them were going north and west. Her husband had been offered good wages in Pittsburgh and had gone a year ago; he had found plenty of work and sent for her and the baby and she was going to him." Langhorne "was sorry the young woman was going to leave Virginia," for she was "well- dressed, had good manners, could read and write, and seemed a sensible and prudent person." Such people were leaving the South by the thousands.49

So were white Southerners. In fact, many more whites than blacks fled the South. While the thirteen Southern states saw a net loss of 537,000 blacks be- tween 1880 and 1910, the loss of whites totaled 1,243,000 in those same de- cades. After 1900, when land in Texas and Louisiana became harder to get, Southern whites began to move to California and other parts of the Far West, places to which relatively few blacks had the means to go. All along, the South lost white population to every other part of the union.50

By the 1880s the planters, and especially their children, were leaving the plan- tations. "What was once the single occupation of the Southern gentleman," William P. Trent wrote in his essay, "The Dominant Forces in Southern Life," had become "the last that he would voluntarily assume." The "single occupa-

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tion" of the Southern plantation mistress had disappeared as well: "The aristoc- racy begotten of slavery in the South had died a slow, hard death as far as her sons were concerned, and slower and harder as regards her daughters," D. F. St. Clair observed near the end of the century.51

Philip Alexander Bruce, himself the scion of an antebellum planting family, coolly portrayed the decay of the plantation and its dominant class. "The steady emigration of the members of the new generation" had decimated a planting class economically buffeted for decades, especially in the older Southern states of the Atlantic seaboard, Bruce wrote. "When the survivors of the large planters passed away, as there were few of their sons willing to succeed them in the old homes, the estates were sold, and the proceeds divided among the scattered children." Agriculture now offered "no career, as formerly, to energetic and ambitious young men entering into active life." The only thing that had "pre- vented a complete disruption of the large plantation system in every neighbour- hood," Bruce pointed out, was "the inability in some places to secure pur- chasers." Although ordinary whites (and, he might have added, blacks) were buying up some of the land, "a vast extent of Southern soil is temporarily laps- ing into wilderness" for want of people with money to purchase it.52

One scene haunted white observers of the South: "Most of the ancestral homes have been abandoned by their owners for a residence in the cities," a traveler to the Black Belt wrote, "the white-columned porticos of the favorite colonial ar- chitecture now mouldering in decay, the wide and once hospitable front halls resounding only to the rough banter and quarrels of negro tenants and their chil- dren." A planter from Hawkinsville, Georgia, when asked what became of white children growing up in the rural South, answered that "most of them drift away from the farm. Some go to towns and hunt jobs, and things like that. . . . If a boy has any move in him he wants something better."53

Katherine DuPre Lumpkin's father, trained as a lawyer, could not make a satisfactory living for his family in Georgia's Black Belt. When "the expanding railroad beckoned," he answered the call even though it meant immediate and frequent moves for his family. "First came a middle Georgia town farther away," his daughter recalled, after that, other Georgia towns, and finally, a move to South Carolina. Within the next ten years the Lumpkin family lived in eight different places. "The humor was not a little wry when a country place where we remained for all of two years was dubbed by the older children 'Nomads' Rest.' Being very young I thought they were saying 'No Man's,' which all but confirmed my worst fears."54

Northerners considered Southerners as lazy and inefficient in the New South as they had in the Old. Ella Harrison was disgusted when she went down to Mississippi to campaign for woman's suffrage. "What they need is more independence and thrift—some northern snap—but you've no idea how pokey—slow—every one is," she wrote her father. "The niger and white man were both lazy before the war—niger to get a rest had to idle when master was not round, and Master had to idle to maintain his dignity. Now both are helpless." The only hope for the South seemed to be for such people to finish their blighted lives and make room

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26 The Promise of the New South

for a new generation. "When they die, and the future fellow who lives in this naturally rich land, gets 'grit,' 'gumpshun,' and 'get' into him then the natural opportunities of this part may become known." In the meantime, "death and education has much to do to redeem this south-land."55

To some white Southerners, the region faced greater danger from the triumph of Yankee values than from Southern laziness or imperiousness. A student news- paper at the University of Virginia put it bluntly: "it is very sad to see the old freedom from mean mercenary motives passing away, and instead, growing up in the breasts of our fellow Southerners, the sordid, cold blooded, commercial money idea that has always been the marked characteristic of other sections of the country." C. L. Pettigrew of North Carolina traveled out west to see for himself what the new land might hold. "You have no idea among that striving, rough and eager crowd, how I longed for the gentle form of manhood, just as brave, just as ambitious except for material things, which we have here in our best southern type," he wrote to a friend back home. Another Carolina boy, this one off at the Naval Academy, reported to his mother that he had been invited to New York for Christmas by his roommate. "I know I would have a glorious time there, as his people are very prominent there in financial circles and there- fore in social circles, since it is in the North." White Southerners wanted to enjoy the benefits of commercial prosperity and yet to feel superior to the bald economic striving of the North.56

Older whites sometimes expressed alarm at the extent to which younger Southerners had adopted the values of commerce. Henry Waring Ball of Missis- sippi observed that his young nephew had "gone to work. He asked his mother to let him help a little chum of his to deliver papers, and brought home in real triumph a nickel as the result of his first venture. He is very faithful and indus- trious at it, and says his chum will give him 25 cents a week for helping him." Such evidence of enterprise might have heartened other families, but not this one: "We laugh over it, but if it is an indication of his character, it is not a laughing matter. Few boys at 7 years would voluntarily hunt up work and be- come money makers—even at 25 cents a week. I know it would horrify either one of his grandfathers, beyond all measure, but times change, and we with them, alas!"57

Young people, on the other hand, could be perturbed by their elders' lassitude. " 'Come day, go day, God send Sunday' is more the motto of the free and go- easy life of the Boyds," S. D. Boyd, Jr., of Virginia complained in his diary. His parents and grandparents had not been "reared up to hard work. They had their slaves, their servants etc, were not accustomed to it in their youth, and hence cannot understand hard business. They take things easy, love to talk, to eat and to sleep but it does not come natural to them to come down to hard work." The Boyds were, their son observed, "a Procrastinating People . . . a people who do not feel altogether the great business importance of keeping an

. . CQ engagement.

Edwin A. Alderman recalled going to school in the wake of the war, "reciting Father Ryan's 'Conquered Banner' and the mournful threnodies of the period. I

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remember the sad and subtle mystery of my father's face as he sat on his gallery and gazed wistfully over the world which seemed so bright and alluring to my young spirit." Alderman admired his father, who "was striving in middle life to adjust himself to a new world, whose features he could not recognize, and in which he must live and work as he had in the world gone from him forever amid the flashing of the guns." Alderman counted himself lucky: "That he crossed the perilous bridge between the eras, safely and strongly, was his best legacy to me."59

Many other boys were less fortunate, for they inherited the confusion and bitterness of their elders. James Eleazar of South Carolina was twelve years old before he discovered that the South had lost the Civil War: "And it was one of the saddest awakenings I ever had. For hours on end I had listened to Grandpa tell of whipping the lard out of the Yankees on a dozen battlefields. Despite their odds in every battle, the matchless Lee and Jackson had cut the enemy's ranks to pieces." The tales Eleazar's grandfather told, though, somehow never ex- tended all the way to Gettysburg and Appomattox. "It was when I got to that point in our history book that I discovered the bewildering fact that the South had lost that war." The boy was "depressed for days and felt that we should go back and finish the thing right."60

Veterans of the Civil War worried that their sons and grandsons would mis- understand—or worse, forget—the struggles of their elders. All around them older men could sense a growing indifference of the young to the central events in their fathers' lives. A Texas man wrote to his state representative to enlist his help in telling "the sons of Confederates and the public generally" about the Lost Cause. "I know, however, the hard and faithful pull that is necessary to ever arouse the public mind sufficiently to come together and listen quietly and gently to the quivering voice of the old ex-Confederate Soldier. It's going to be very hard to impress this generation to ever see that we were loyal to the Constitution of the U.S. and unless the old Confederates take hold and at once the truest, best, and most patriotic people on earth will be handed down to the history of our country as traitors. And the coming generation will be in a condition to believe it too." Wade Hampton reaffirmed his faith in the cause to a fellow ex-Confederate officer: "I believe now, as always, that the South was right and that belief is as strong as that in the existence of a God." Hampton was worried, though: "Like you, I must deplore the dearth of senti- ment in the South, especially among the young men and in every public utter- ance I have tried to make them true to our lost cause and to their heroic fathers."61

One older man after another mourned the broken connection. "We of the Old South," the poet Paul Hamilton Hayne of Georgia wrote to a compatriot, "have need, God knows, to stand by each other staunchly. The new Generation hardly comprehends us." A South Carolina man complained that "most of the young men are willing to turn their backs on everything that we were taught to regard as sacred." J. R. Cole of Texas admitted to his diary that he was growing old, though he was only 53 years of age. "I live over the days of my youth and tell my children of my ups and downs, but the chariot of Time never stops and gray

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28 The Promise of the New South

hair, gray beard and wrinkles now almost conceal the young man of 1861 leav- ing College to join his brothers on the march to the field of battle."62

Sometimes, after a favorite war story failed to win the attention and respect he thought it deserved, Mel Barrett's father would lose his patience. " 'Ah,' Pa would say, 'You children simply don't understand.' And he would get up, leave the house, and go visit with Loyd Smith to whom he could talk with the assur- ance that, at least, Loyd would know about what he was talking." Other young men felt anger at the shadow the Civil War threw over their lives. "We were and are disinherited," Walter Hines Page's thinly disguised autobiographical protagonist exploded in The Southerner, "we who had no more to do with the Civil War than with the Punic Wars and no more to do with slavery than with the Inquisition, and yet we suffer the consequences of slavery and war."63

"I have met women, since we came here, capable, shrewd, and alive with en- ergy," Rebecca Harding Davis remarked with some surprise in 1887. "They manage plantations and shops; they raise stock, hold office, publish newspapers. Indeed, while Northern women have been clamoring for their rights, Southern women have found their way into more careers than they. They keep up with all the questions of the day." White women in the South often belied the stereo- types of languid Southern womanhood. They worked in many of the region's shops, farms, and businesses, often assuming control after the death of a hus- band, brother, or father. Southern women had taken over such roles in large numbers during the Civil War and its aftermath. More important, though, were the challenges and opportunities facing the new generation. A disproportionate number of women in much of the countryside, especially in the Atlantic seaboard states, meant that some would never find husbands. The decline of plantation life meant they could not follow the time-tested ways of establishing themselves. The ferment of the New South meant that many found new chances at indepen- dence.64

Young women seemed to live faster, more impetuously, than their elders. Carrie Hall wrote to her daughter with a mild warning: "Dearie, it sounds a little strange to me to hear a young lady speak of 'painting the town red.' It is not a very elegant expression." Theresa Green Perkins of Franklin, Tennessee, con- fided to her journal that her granddaughter was always on the move: "her 'set' go somewhere to dance every Friday night, at one or the other of their homes." A few weeks later Perkins "wrote this as a specimen of the way the youngsters of 13-15 are spending their holidays": her granddaughter went to a "storm party on Friday night, ditto Saturday night, church on Sunday night, a dance Monday night, a house party Tuesday evening and hay-riding that night, another storm party Wednesday night, ice cream supper Thursday night, and house party Fri- day night, and on Saturday girls were spending the night at her house." Perkins later "burned many papers that were in my old trunk," manuscripts of her own writings. "I would have prized them had my mother written them but the world moves too fast now. Children do not care for such things."65

Younger women had more serious concerns as well, though their loyalties sometimes seemed contradictory to outsiders. "It may be said of the average

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woman of the South that she is satisfied with her condition," Josephine Henry noted in the Arena. The South's white women were dedicated to the traditional virtues of quiet resolve, of working their good influence within the home and church. "She loves the church and believes in her pastor. She is Pauline in her ideas and therefore loves the music of her chains. But with all this there is pervading this class a strong under-current of sentiment in the direction of larger liberty." That direction of "larger liberty" pulled many younger women along in the New South. Thousands, black and white, joined women's clubs and re- form organizations; many thousands more worked to establish their economic independence. Though women could not vote in the late nineteenth century, a Southern woman recalled, "they sat in on the speaking and were as interested as the men." It would not be long before women sought to influence politics directly.66

David Schenck was appalled by an article in the Central Presbyterian in 1889, the product of a professor at Union Theological Seminary in New York. The professor "uttered more words of infidelity, in a brief sentence than I have ever read. He says that the account, in the Bible, 'of the creation, the fall of man and the deluge' is a poem, 'a simple, pure, chaste poem but only a poem.' " The full inspiration of the Bible, the professor asserted, "has been exploded in Ger- many and England and only remains in America where 'ignoramuses snort at Higher Criticism.' " Schenck admitted that his "faith was shocked and I know many a weaker Christian will find his faith trembling if not tumbling down when he reads it."67

"I appreciate the interest you take in my spiritual welfare, but really, Mamma, you are wasting time," Frank Patterson wrote. "You attribute my 'want of suc- cess' to my 'disregard for a higher power' "; Patterson assured her "if, as you seem to think, I could get my salary raised by reading the Bible and praying, I promise you I should not neglect it. As to believing it could not do that if it raised my salary a thousand fold, any more than you could have faith in praying to a stone idol, however hard you might try." Belief, he announced, is "only a matter of training and locality. If you were a Chinese mother you would proba- bly be reproaching me for my want of dependence on Josh." He maintained that he had "studied the Christian religion more, I imagine, than you ever did and it is to me nothing more than a superstition, a sweet, noble, beautiful superstition in many respects, a cruel, barbarous superstition in others." Christian mothers worried about their sons becoming infected with such ideas. "I want to ask you to pray especially for our boys, for John that he may not be led off by the new theology or whatever it is, but may ever be a sincere and an earnest Christian," Mary Manly wrote to her husband. "I do not crave wealth and honor for my children, but I do so long to have them all love and serve Jesus."68

Ministers sometimes risked discussing such matters in church. An Alabama newspaper praised a new Baptist minister because his style is "positive, urgent, convincing. There is no uncertainty hanging about his conclusions. They are orthodox, clear-cut and logical." On the other hand, members of some congre- gations believed their ministers were in over their heads. Oliver Bond described

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30 The Promise of the New South

with disgust a sermon he heard in Bamberg, South Carolina. "Brother Elkins entered the ring tonight against 'SPECULATIVE SKEPTICISM.' It is a good thing speculative skepticism couldn't hit back, else the preacher would have been knocked out of the pulpit."69

From the 1870s on, the national literary market of the late nineteenth century pushed Southern writers. American magazines proliferated: Lipincott's, Scrib- ner's, Harper's Monthly Magazine, Atlantic Monthly. These journals made a conscious attempt to represent the entire country; even editors with strong Re- publican sentiments bent over backward to give Southern writers a place. The growing numbers of educated people in the nation created a steady and growing thirst for fresh reading material, while the lack of an international copyright law encouraged American authors to write stories rather than books. The popularity of public readings also created a natural outlet for speakers who could recreate the dialects of regions genteel audiences could only read about. Those writers who could dramatize their own stories were in special demand.70

George Washington Cable of Louisiana achieved considerable renown. Born in 1844, the son of a Virginia father who had moved to Indiana, freed his slaves, and married a New England woman, Cable grew up a devout Presbyterian in New Orleans. After serving in the Confederacy, Cable, twenty-one years old, returned home to help support his mother and siblings by working on a news- paper. To fill space in the paper, Cable wrote ninety columns on the life around him and on the literature of England and America. Cable, who had been an ardent supporter of the South during the Civil War, began in the 1870s to ques- tion the injustice and brutality he saw inflicted against blacks. In 1875, he pub- licly protested the segregation of New Orleans's public schools; rebuffed by the newspaper's editor, he saved his outrage for the fiction he began writing in his spare time during these years.71

In 1873, when Scribner's sent Edward King to report on conditions in the postwar South, King met Cable and was so impressed by conversations with the young newspaperman that he persuaded his magazine to publish several of Cable's stories. Some city residents were angered by Cable's portrayals of Creoles, white natives of Latin descent, but other readers throughout the nation recognized in Cable's stories an authentic voice of the postwar South. Editors and readers in both North and South applauded one Cable story after another, soon gathered in his popular book Old Creole Days (1879).72

Cable's conflicting feelings about the South became clearer in his novel The Grandissimes (1880), published serially in Scribner's in 1879. Depicting the years immediately after the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, Cable portrayed a so- ciety not unlike the South after Reconstruction, a place marked by governmental corruption, racial conflict and confusion, violence, and economic turmoil. Cable insisted, despite the pleas of his editors, on building the novel around a legend of a noble runaway slave. In that legend a towering African prince, Bras Coupe, leveled a curse on his owner's plantation. For Cable, racial guilt and anxiety, like the curse, underlay the apparently carefree society of old New Orleans. Characters negotiated across blurred lines of race and respectability, as sensitive

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George Washington Cable and Thomas Nelson Page, from Harper's, May 1887.

men and women with one-eighth or one-quarter black ancestry struggled to find a place in a society divided by slavery, as dignified white men sought to find a way to maintain their honor, as an outsider sought to make sense of the tangle of families and secrets. Cable's novel was subtle and ambivalent, devoted to making palpable the difficult decisions faced by its characters, unflinching in its portrayal of the consequences of slavery and its aftermath: violence, insensitiv- ity, deception, lassitude, sexual immorality.73

Northern reviewers loved The Grandissimes, calling Cable "the first Southern novelist (unless we count Poe a novelist) who has made a contribution of per- manent value to American literature." William Dean Howells, the arbiter of American fiction in the Gilded Age, told Cable that the young Louisiana novelist had portrayed "a multitude of figures with a delicacy and unerring certainty of differentiation that perpetually astonished me." Southern reviews were generally favorable as well, though uncomfortable with a tone they deemed judgmental. The most forthright—indeed, ferocious—attack came in an anonymous pamphlet written by a New Orleans acquaintance of Cable's, a Creole priest. He attacked the book for Cable's "disguised puritanism, assuming the fanatical mission of radical reform and universal enlightenment," charging that the author had pros- tituted himself for "the prejudiced and inimical North." Reading the personal and bitter denunciation, Northern friends feared for Cable's safety.74

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32 The Promise of the New South

Thomas Nelson Page broke into sudden prominence a few years after Cable, discovered by the same editor. Because of his personal history, Page seemed qualified to speak for the vanquished Virginia aristocracy. A larger Northern readership worshipful of British literature found his voice poignant and compel- ling. Page, born in 1853, recalled the antebellum years with the fondness of a young white master. Even the war years had been exciting and chivalric for the boy, as Page and his brother played at war and endured some of its privations. When his father returned to the plantation after the fall of Richmond, though, "it seemed like a funeral," Page recalled. "The boys were near the steps, and their mother stood on the portico with her forehead resting against a pillar. . . . It was a funeral—the Confederacy was dead." The young Page, scion of two of Virginia's most prominent families, was forced to tutor cousins in Kentucky to scrape together enough money for school. By 1874 he had managed to earn a law degree from the University of Virginia and went into the practice of law. He also began to write. His first published work was a poem, written in black dialect, that recalled the glorious life of the antebellum years.75

This poem, and the enormously successful stories that followed, were fanta- sies, unbridled glorifications of a lost childhood, lost innocence, and a lost civ- ilization. The plantation tradition of Southern literature emerged complete in Page's first major story, "Marse Chan," written in 1881 but not published until 1884. The story was told by an old slave who recounted the tragic story of two young white lovers on neighboring plantations, driven apart by their fathers' political differences. The hero Channing ("Marse Chan") went off to war heart- broken over the sundered engagement. His beloved, hearing that Channing had made a public defense of her father's name, sent a letter to the front proclaiming her love. Channing, wearing the letter over his heart, was killed. His fiancee died not long after, and the two were laid side by side in the graveyard. The old slave, certain that the lovers would be married in heaven, longed for their pres- ence and for the good old days before the war, when black and white, male and female, had their fixed and secure places. The aged black man's view of the world allowed the tale to be told with unchecked sentimentality. White readers, North and South, wept unashamedly. While Cable was complex and problematic even when entertaining, Page was just what editors and readers had in mind. Soon, American magazines were filled with Southern fiction that celebrated the old order with the formulaic and uncritical voice of Thomas Nelson Page.76

"A foreigner studying our current literature, without knowledge of our his- tory, and judging our civilization by our fiction, would undoubtedly conclude that the South was the seat of intellectual empire in America, and the African the chief romantic element of our population," Albion Tourgee, a Northern man turned novelist after serving as a Republican judge in North Carolina during Reconstruction, observed in 1888. "It may be noted that a few months ago every one of our great popular monthlies presented a 'Southern story' as one of its most prominent features; and during the past year nearly two-thirds of the stories and sketches furnished to newspapers by various syndicates have been of this character." Tourgee recognized the reasons for the demand: the Northern reader had ready-made images of Southern characters, and "as long as the author does

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not seriously disturb these preconceptions, the Northern reader likes the Southern story because it is full of life and fire and real feeling." The Northern reader longed for such fire, "for it is getting to be quite a luxury to the novel reader to find a story in which the characters have any feeling beyond a self-conscious sensibility which seems to give them a great deal of trouble without ever ripening into motive or resulting in achievement." Fiction was one of the few Southern products that could hold its own in the national marketplace.77

Atticus G. Haygood, a prominent Methodist minister, described a scene on the Macon and Brunswick Railroad in the late 1870s, where a lumber crew rode home after delivering a raft of timber. "We saw a very black negro and a fair- haired youth drinking out of the same black-bottle. They sat promiscuously and drank, smoked, laughed, sang, whistled, and danced together. One young fellow knew the potent notes and they sang 'fa, so, la' while he beat time. . . . He sings a sort of wild tenor we used to hear at camp-meeting. . . . Perhaps we ought to be ashamed . . ., but we did enjoy their songs." Black and white Southerners continually influenced one another, every day and in every facet of life.78

Black Southerners made the railroad their own in their music. The earliest student of black folk songs discovered that guitar players prided themselves on their ability to evoke the train. "The train is made to whistle by a prolonged and consecutive striking of the strings, while the bell rings with the striking of a single string. . . . And when 'she blows for the station,' the exclamations may be heard, 'Lawd, God, she's a-runnin' now!' or, 'Sho' God railroadin'!" A lyric from a version of "John Henry," the product of black railroad construction crews in West Virginia, dramatized the pull of the wages and the prestige asso- ciated with such steady and high-paying work:

Where did you get that pretty little dress? That hat you wear so fine?

Got my dress from a railroad man, Hat from a man in the mine.

"When the blues began, the countryside was quiet," one student of the blues has written. "Loudest of the sounds to break the stillness was the roar of the steam train as it traced its way through the lowlands, leaving a smudge of smoke against the blue sky. A brief moment of excitement as it passed, a shrill whistle, dipping and wailing like a blues and it would be gone."79

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