The New South, 1877–90
The era of conservative domination, 1877–90
The Republican regimes in the Southern states began to fall as early as 1870; by 1877 they had all collapsed. For the next 13 years the South was under the leadership of white Democrats whom their critics called Bourbons because, like the French royal family, they supposedly had learned nothing and forgotten nothing from the revolution they had experienced. For the South as a whole, the characterization is neither quite accurate nor quite fair. In most Southern states the new political leaders represented not only the planters but also the rising Southern business community, interested in railroads, cotton textiles, and urban land speculation.
Even on racial questions the new Southern political leaders were not so reactionary as the label Bourbon might suggest. Though whites were in the majority in all but two of the Southern states, the conservative regimes did not attempt to disfranchise African Americans. Partly their restraint was caused by fear of further federal intervention; chiefly, however, it stemmed from a conviction on the part of conservative leaders that they could control African American voters, whether through fraud, intimidation, or manipulation.
Indeed, African American votes were sometimes of great value to these regimes, which favoured the businessmen and planters of the South at the expense of the small white farmers. These “Redeemer” governments sharply reduced or even eliminated the programs of the state governments that benefited poor people. The public school system was starved for money; in 1890 the per capita expenditure in the South for public education was only 97 cents, as compared with $2.24 in the country as a whole. The care of state prisoners, the insane, and the blind was also neglected; and measures to safeguard the public health were rejected. At the same time these conservative regimes were often astonishingly corrupt, and embezzlement and defalcation on the part of public officials were even greater than during the Reconstruction years.
The small white farmers resentful of planter dominance, residents of the hill country outvoted by Black Belt constituencies, and politicians excluded from the ruling cabals tried repeatedly to overthrow the conservative regimes in the South. During the 1870s they supported Independent or Greenback Labor candidates, but without notable success. In 1879 the Readjuster Party in Virginia—so named because its supporters sought to readjust the huge funded debt of that state so as to lessen the tax burden on small farmers—gained control of the legislature and secured in 1880 the election of its leader, Gen. William Mahone, to the U.S. Senate. Not until 1890, however, when the powerful Farmers’ Alliance, hitherto devoted exclusively to the promotion of agricultural reforms, dropped its ban on politics, was there an effective challenge to conservative hegemony. In that year, with Alliance backing, Benjamin R. Tillman was chosen governor of South Carolina and James S. Hogg was elected governor of Texas; the heyday of Southern populism was at hand.
William MahoneCourtesy Meserve-Kunhardt Collection
Jim Crow legislation
African American voting in the South was a casualty of the conflict between Redeemers and Populists. Although some Populist leaders, such as Tom Watson in Georgia, saw that poor whites and poor blacks in the South had a community of interest in the struggle against the planters and the businessmen, most small white farmers exhibited vindictive hatred toward African Americans, whose votes had so often been instrumental in upholding conservative regimes. Beginning in 1890, when Mississippi held a new constitutional convention, and continuing through 1908, when Georgia amended its constitution, every state of the former Confederacy moved to disfranchise African Americans. Because the U.S. Constitution forbade outright racial discrimination, the Southern states excluded African Americans by requiring that potential voters be able to read or to interpret any section of the Constitution—a requirement that local registrars waived for whites but rigorously insisted upon when an audacious black wanted to vote. Louisiana, more ingenious, added the “grandfather clause” to its constitution, which exempted from this literacy test all of those who had been entitled to vote on January 1, 1867—i.e., before Congress imposed African American suffrage upon the South—together with their sons and grandsons. Other states imposed stringent property qualifications for voting or enacted complex poll taxes.
Socially as well as politically, race relations in the South deteriorated as farmers’ movements rose to challenge the conservative regimes. By 1890, with the triumph of Southern populism, the African American’s place was clearly defined by law; he was relegated to a subordinate and entirely segregated position. Not only were legal sanctions (some reminiscent of the “Black Codes”) being imposed upon African Americans, but informal, extralegal, and often brutal steps were also being taken to keep them in their “place.” (See Jim Crow law.) From 1889 to 1899, lynchings in the South averaged 187.5 per year.
Booker T. Washington and the Atlanta Compromise
Faced with implacable and growing hostility from Southern whites, many African Americans during the 1880s and ’90s felt that their only sensible course was to avoid open conflict and to work out some pattern of accommodation. The most influential African American spokesman for this policy was Booker T. Washington, the head of Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, who urged his fellow African Americans to forget about politics and college education in the classical languages and to learn how to be better farmers and artisans. With thrift, industry, and abstention from politics, he thought that African Americans could gradually win the respect of their white neighbours. In 1895, in a speech at the opening of the Atlanta Cotton States and International Exposition, Washington most fully elaborated his position, which became known as the Atlanta Compromise. Abjuring hopes of federal intervention in behalf of African Americans, Washington argued that reform in the South would have to come from within. Change could best be brought about if blacks and whites recognized that “the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremest folly”; in the social life the races in the South could be as separate as the fingers, but in economic progress as united as the hand.
Booker T. Washington, first principal and chief developer of Tuskegee Institute in Alabama.Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
Enthusiastically received by Southern whites, Washington’s program also found many adherents among Southern blacks, who saw in his doctrine a way to avoid head-on, disastrous confrontations with overwhelming white force. Whether or not Washington’s plan would have produced a generation of orderly, industrious, frugal African Americans slowly working themselves into middle-class status is not known because of the intervention of a profound economic depression throughout the South during most of the post-Reconstruction period. Neither poor whites nor poor blacks had much opportunity to rise in a region that was desperately impoverished. By 1890 the South ranked lowest in every index that compared the sections of the United States—lowest in per capita income, lowest in public health, lowest in education. In short, by the 1890s the South, a poor and backward region, had yet to recover from the ravages of the Civil War or to reconcile itself to the readjustments required by the Reconstruction era. David Herbert Donald