The New South

Economic Diversification

Realizing that their dependence on one crop (cotton) had made them weak during the Civil War, Southerners began to diversify their new economy.

• Tobacco cultivation and curing methods were improved
• Rice and cane sugar also became vital crops
• Cotton was not completely abandoned, it just served a new role as industry expanded
• Rail services benefitted agriculture and other industries like mining, timber, etc.
• Hydroelectric power was widely used for the first time in the South

Changing Politics
After the Civil War, the South's political landscape was most heavily affected by the Redeemers and their interactions with other groups.

• The Redeemers sought to restore the South to what it had been (discrimination and all)
• Philanthropists like John F. Slater supported piblic education for all
• Redeemer successes in education and other fields gave Democrats electoral success in 1874
• Most whites believed themselves superior to blacks but wished them no ill will

Race Relations in the New South
"An exclusionary attitude infused the South-" despite their new legal protection, blacks were systematically oppressed and excluded.

• Many blacks went from slavery to "wage slavery" as underpaid tenant farmers or sharecroppers
• Blacks' allies were "self-serving," like members of the Populist Party
• The Fifteenth Amendment was circumvented through stringent voting requirements and near-impossible qualification tests
• Plessy v. Ferguson notoriously upheld the creation of "separate but equal" facilities
• Some blacks like W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington attempted to lead blacks on the path towards equality

The Compromise of 1877
In exchange for the 1878 presidential election, Rutherford B. Hayes agreed to remove Federal peacekeepers from the South,

• The bankers and industrialists who proposed the Compromise were essentially left in control of the South
• Many historians condemn the event as undoing years of progress toward equality