Civil War - Was a

¶ … Civil War - was a social war, ending in the unquestioned establishment of a new power in the government, making vast changes - in the course of industrial development, and in the constitution inherited from the Fathers..." (Ransom). There can be no doubt that the post-Civil War South experienced sweeping changes at both the societal, economic and race relations levels that would echo for decades to come, indeed to our modern time.

Were these changes adequately and accurately nomered "The New South?" It is irrefutable that the situation in the south was new; however, whether the idea of the "New South" as envisioned by the Reconstructionist ideal remains a matter of debate. According to the Reconstruction Acts of 1867, the rebel states were divided into military districts and made subject to the military authority of the United States of America (Texas State Library).

In retrospect, many authorities consider the military state which existed in the south in the post Civil War era to have been a stimulus to industrialization. No longer was the south an agrarian-based society, supported by the wealth of plantations and worked by myriad slaves. A new wave of industry from the north invaded the south like a Hun horde.

This change to industry was not immediately beneficial; indeed, studies of the antebellum era show how dependent upon cotton production and export the economy of the whole of the union was (Ransom). In the decades following the collapse of the south in the Civil War, the entire economy of the south had to be rebuilt. Their currency had been decimated, and the slave-driven cotton industry existed no more. Instead, former plantation-owning "landlords" were forced to break up their land and rent it to the now freed slaves as tenant farms.

Post Civil War, the economy of the United States rose by 2%, the economy of the south by only 1%. The south became lost in a cycle of poverty that lasted for decades (Ransom). After the war, the economy of the "New South" changed, but it remains dubious if that change was for the better. In an attempt to recuperate the economy, the south began to rely heavily upon grants from the Federal Government to rebuild. Industrialization grew, with a new emphasis being put upon factories rather than cotton production.

In this way, the economic restructuring of the south changed the society indelibly. No longer were plantations the center of society; rather, more and more people flocked to the cities to take jobs in emerging industries. Many cities in the south soon grew to rival those of the industrial northeast in size. One leader of the "farm to factory" movement was Richard H.

Edmonds, who, as editor of The Manufacturer's Record, had two goals: to encourage outside investment in the South's economy, and to promote every possible form of industrial development (Schultz, Tishler). Three major industries emerged: cotton, tobacco and iron. It's arguable that the cotton and tobacco industries did not stray far from their antebellum roots; however, the majority of the factories were funded by Northern investors.

No different was the emerging iron and steel industry of the post-Civil War South - by the early 1900s, the factories were owned almost exclusively by the Northern Andrew Carnegie (Schultz, Tishler). The emergence of factories did more than impact society as a whole with a race to the cities; race relations were impacted as well. The majority of the new factory jobs were held by whites, with blacks doing only unskilled labor.

Mill owners justified the hiring of all whites as making up for the antebellum disparity that had existed when blacks had the majority of agricultural "jobs," if their former slave labor could be called that. At the political level, after the ratification of the XIII Amendment, many Southern states passed "Black Codes" forbidding the owning of property by blacks (Schultz, Tishler). Many white Southerners also claimed that blacks weren't citizens, and blacks were not permitted to vote until the passage of the XV Amendment.

Even after blacks were considered citizens, groups of white Southerners acted to keep them from voting or from having the same rights as white citizens. The Ku Klux Klan, or KKK was one such group aimed at intimidating blacks from voting or exercising their other legal rights. Jim Crow laws were enacted in many Southern states, declaring separate facilities for blacks and whites in everything from courts, schools, restaurants and rest rooms.

Needless to say, this racial tension continued to exist, and arguably still exists today even after the Civil Rights era.