The “Gilded Age” often evokes images of crowded, sordid cities in the Northeast. Yet the South was not immune from rapid industrialization either. With the plantation system irrevocably altered by the Civil War and Reconstruction, it became clear that the South must modernize and embrace towns and industry if it hoped to thrive in the late 19th century.

Figure 1. The ambitions of Atlanta, seen in the construction of such grand buildings as the Kimball House Hotel, reflected the larger regional aspirations of the so-called New South. 1890.

The New South

“There was a South of slavery and secession,” Atlanta Constitution editor Henry Grady proclaimed in an 1886 speech in New York. “That South is dead.”^[1] Grady captured the sentiment of many White southern business and political leaders who imagined a New South that could move beyond its past by embracing industrialization and diversified agriculture. He promoted the region’s economic possibilities through an alliance of northern capital and southern labor from which both sides might benefit. Grady and other New South boosters hoped to shape the region’s economy in the North’s image. They wanted industry and they wanted infrastructure while maintaining a distinctly southern identity that was proud of its heritage. This vision did come to pass, in a fashion. While cities and towns did grow and thrive, the South’s lineage of racialized violence and social hierarchy would endure.

A “New South” was desperately needed. The Confederacy’s failed insurrection wreaked havoc on the southern economy and crippled southern prestige. Property was destroyed. Lives were lost. Political power vanished. And four million enslaved Americans—representing the wealth and power of the antebellum White South—threw off their chains and walked proudly forward into freedom. Moreover, the North’s overwhelming advantage in manufacturing and infrastructure played no small role in the Confederacy’s defeat.

Emancipation unsettled the southern social order. When Reconstruction regimes attempted to grant freedpeople full citizenship rights, anxious White southerners struck back. From their fear, anger, and resentment they lashed out, not only in organized terrorist organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan but through political corruption, economic exploitation, and violent intimidation. White southerners took back control of state and local governments and used their reclaimed power to disenfranchise African Americans and pass “Jim Crow” laws segregating schools, transportation, employment, and various public and private facilities. The re-establishment of White supremacy after the “redemption” of the South through Reconstruction contradicted proclamations of a “New” South. Perhaps nothing echoed back to the barbaric southern past than the wave of lynchings—the extralegal (outside of the law) murder of individuals by vigilantes—that washed across the South after Reconstruction. Whether for actual crimes or fabricated crimes or for no crimes at all, White mobs murdered roughly five thousand African Americans between the 1880s and the 1950s.

Economic Development in the South

New South boosters struggled to wrench the South, ever mindful of its past, into the modern world. The railroads became their initial area of focus. The region had lagged behind the North in the railroad building boom of the mid-nineteenth century, and postwar expansion facilitated connections between the most rural segments of the population and the region’s rising urban areas. Boosters campaigned for the construction of new hard-surfaced roads as well, arguing that improved roads would further increase the flow of goods and people and entice northern businesses to invest in the region. Crucially, the South shifted from 5-foot gauges to the standard 4-foot gauges used by the rest of the country in 1886. This may seem like a small change, but it drastically expanded the economic and social links connecting North and South. The rising popularity of the automobile after the turn of the century only increased pressure for the construction of reliable roads between cities, towns, county seats, and the vast farmlands of the South.

Along with new transportation networks, New South boosters continued to promote industrial growth. The region witnessed the rise of various manufacturing industries, predominantly textiles, tobacco, furniture, and steel. Two of the most significant businesses to arise from the New South included the American Tobacco Company of North Carolina—which later evolved into Pall Mall and Lucky Strike cigarettes—and Coca-Cola, headquartered in Atlanta. Northern Alabama’s rich mineral wealth also facilitated a booming iron and steel industry. While agriculture, cotton in particular, remained the mainstay of the region’s economy, these new industries provided new wealth for owners, new investments for the region and new opportunities for the exploding number of landless farmers to finally flee the land. Industries offered low-paying jobs but also opportunities for the rural poor who could no longer sustain themselves through subsistence farming. Men, women, and children all moved into wage work. At the turn of the twentieth century, nearly one-fourth of southern mill workers were children aged six to sixteen, and nearly forty percent were women. Wages were often only half of what an equivalent worker in a New England mill town might earn.

In most cases, as in most aspects of life in the New South, new factory jobs were racially segregated. Better-paying jobs were reserved for White people, while the most dangerous, labor-intensive, dirtiest, and lowest-paying positions were relegated to Black people. Black women, shut out of most industries, found employment most often as domestic help for White families. As poor as White southern mill workers were, southern Black people were poorer. Some White mill workers could even afford to pay for domestic help in caring for young children, cleaning houses, doing laundry, and cooking meals. Mill villages that grew up alongside factories were Whites-only, and African American families were pushed to the outer perimeter of the settlements.

Pop goes southern industry

To this day, Coca-Cola is often seen as the quintessential American consumer product. Its success has a foot in both the New South and the Civil War which preceded it. Wounded while fighting for the Confederacy, John Stith Pemberton became addicted to morphine. Wracked by stomach pain, he attempted to devise—and market—an alternative that did not use morphine. His first attempt was a blatant copy of an existing concoction of French wine and cocaine. When temperance laws in Atlanta banned the sale of alcoholic drinks, Pemberton went back to the drawing board. His solution used liberal amounts of sugar and caffeine, laced with coca leaf extract (not cocaine as the white powder it’s known as today, but from the same coco plant). The drink was named after this, plus the caffeine and flavoring coming from the cola nut. (The coco leaf extract was eventually removed from the formula and is no longer in the drink today.)

Figure 2. By some accounts, this is the first coupon ever printed. This ticket for a free glass of Coca-Cola was first distributed in 1888 to help promote the drink. By 1913, the company had redeemed 8.5 million tickets.

Pemberton died shortly after selling his formula, which soon became wildly popular. Its success was contingent on advertising in mass media, a national rail system, and financial capital to bottle and ship the product on a massive industrial scale. As historian Richard White wrote of Pemberton, “this casualty of the Old South invented the most famous product of the New South.”^[2]Pemberton used mass printing to distribute coupons for a free glass of Coca-Cola and made the soft drink ubiquitous by advertising on streetcars and billboards, two novel features in booming Southern cities such as Atlanta.

Lynching

Lynching was not just murder, it was a ritual rich with symbolism. Victims were not simply hanged, they were mutilated, burned alive, and shot. Lynchings could become carnivals, public spectacles attended by thousands of eager spectators. Rail lines ran special cars to accommodate the rush of participants. Vendors sold goods and keepsakes. Perpetrators posed for photos and collected mementos. And it was increasingly common. One notorious example occurred in Georgia in 1899. Accused of killing his white employer and raping the man’s wife, Sam Hose was captured by a mob and taken to the town of Newnan. Word of the impending lynching quickly spread, and specially chartered passenger trains brought some four thousand visitors from Atlanta to witness the gruesome affair. Members of the mob tortured Hose for about an hour. They sliced off pieces of his body as he screamed in agony. Then they poured a can of kerosene over his body and burned him alive.

Figure 3. A crowd gathered for the lynching of African American Will James in Cairo, Illinois, on November 11, 1909. Participating in a lynching was seen by some White southerners as both a day’s entertainment and a chance to defend the honor of White women. Frequently participants collected gruesome mementos or sent postcards depicting victims’ corpses. After Reconstruction, images such as these reinforced the concept that proper order had been restored to a “redeemed” South.

At the barbaric height of southern lynching in the last years of the nineteenth century, southerners lynched two to three African Americans every week. In general, lynchings were most frequent in the Cotton Belt of the Lower South, where Black southerners were most numerous and where the majority worked as tenant farmers and field hands on the cotton farms of White landowners. The states of Mississippi and Georgia had the greatest number of recorded lynchings: from 1880 to 1930, Mississippi lynch mobs killed over five hundred African Americans; Georgia mobs murdered more than four hundred. Like so many hallmarks of the New South, it had its origins in the antebellum era. At that time, “slave patrols” dotted the landscape in search of escapees and possible rebellion. The pursuit and punishment of suspected Black criminals devolved into private hands.

Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a number of prominent southerners openly supported lynching, arguing that it was a necessary evil to punish Black rapists and deter others. In the late 1890s, Georgia newspaper columnist and noted women’s rights activist Rebecca Latimer Felton—who would later become the first woman to serve in the U.S. Senate—endorsed such extrajudicial killings. She said, “If it takes lynching to protect women’s dearest possession from drunken, ravening beasts, then I say lynch a thousand a week.”^[3] When opponents argued that lynching violated victims’ constitutional rights, South Carolina governor Coleman Blease angrily responded, “Whenever the Constitution comes between me and the virtue of the White women of South Carolina, I say to hell with the Constitution.”^[4] These comments by Felton and Blease underscore how lynching was frequently justified: by appealing to the virtue of White womanhood and portraying these violent deeds as honorable acts of protection.

Resistance to Lynching

Black activists and White allies worked to outlaw lynching. Ida B. Wells, an African American woman born in the last years of slavery and a pioneering anti-lynching advocate, lost three friends to a lynch mob in Memphis, Tennessee in 1892. That year, Wells published Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases, a groundbreaking work that documented the South’s lynching culture and exposed the myth of the Black rapist. She prefaced her work by saying, “Somebody must show that the Afro-American race is more sinned against than sinning, and it seems to have fallen upon me to do so.”^[5]

The Tuskegee Institute and the NAACP both compiled and publicized lists of every reported lynching in the United States. In 1918, Representative Leonidas Dyer of Missouri introduced federal anti-lynching legislation that would have made local counties where lynchings took place legally liable for such killings. Throughout the early 1920s, the Dyer Bill was the subject of heated political debate, but, fiercely opposed by southern congressmen and unable to win enough northern champions, the proposed bill was never enacted.

More Racial Violence

Lynching was not only the form of racial violence that survived Reconstruction. White political violence continued to follow African American political participation and labor organization, however severely circumscribed. When the Populist insurgency created new opportunities for Black political activism, White Democrats responded with terror.

The Wilmington Massacre of 1898

Figure 4. These Black citizens of Wilminton posed for a photograph in 1898. Black people were the majority of the population in Wilmington until the massacre of 1898.

In North Carolina, Populists and Republicans “fused” together and won stunning electoral gains in 1896. White Democrats were shocked at losing an election for the first time since Reconstruction ended. Remember that during the Reconstruction Era (1865 to 1877), Black southerners had been elected to office and were increasingly participating in the political process. In the beginning of 1867, no African American in the South held political office, but within three or four years “about 15 percent of the officeholders in the South were Black—a larger proportion than in 1990.”^[6] Most of those offices were at the local level, though there were 17 Black Congressmen in the early 1870s. This pattern all changed with the end of Reconstruction, however, and most political gains for Black southerners were reversed because of intimidation and racism.

In North Carolina, disgruntled farmers and mostly lower-class White voters aligned with the pro-Black Republican party and began to make strides in politics. In response, the White Democrats in North Carolina formed “Red Shirt” groups, paramilitary organizations dedicated to eradicating Black political participation and restoring Democratic rule through violence and intimidation. Launching a self-described “White supremacy campaign” of violence and intimidation against Black voters and officeholders during the 1898 state elections, the Red Shirts effectively took back state government. But municipal elections were not held that year in Wilmington, where Fusionists controlled the city government.

Before the coup, Wilmington had a majority-Black population, with Black people accounting for about 55 percent of its roughly 25,000 people. Black people accounted for over 30 percent of Wilmington’s skilled craftsmen, such as mechanics, carpenters, jewelers, watchmakers, painters, plasterers, plumbers, stevedores, blacksmiths, masons, and wheelwrights. In addition, they owned ten of the city’s 11 restaurants, 90 percent of the city’s 22 barbers, and one of the city’s four fish and oysters dealerships. Two brothers, Alexander and Frank Manly, owned the Wilmington Daily Record, one of the few Black newspapers in the state and reportedly the only Black daily newspaper in the country.

Figure 5.  Armed rioters stand in front of the burned-down “Record” press building during the Wilmington, N.C. race riot in 1898.

After manning armed barricades blocking Black voters from entering the town to vote in the state elections, the Red Shirts drafted a “White Declaration of Independence” which declared “that that we will no longer be ruled and will never again be ruled, by men of African origin.” Four hundred and fifty-seven White Democrats signed the document. They also issued a twelve-hour ultimatum that the editors of the city’s Black daily paper flee the city. The editors left (and avoided a lynching mob that went to find them that night), but it wasn’t enough.

At 8:15 am on election day, November 10, politician and White supremacist leader Alfred Waddell accompanied about 2,000 Red Shirts to Wilmington’s armory to get rifles, then headed to the two-story publishing office of The Daily Record. For publishing a “defamatory” article about White women, the mob broke into the Manley brothers publishing press, vandalized the premises, doused the wood floors with kerosene, set the building on fire, and gutted the remains. At the same time, Black newspapers all over the state were also being destroyed. In addition, Blacks, along with White Republicans, were denied entrance to city centers throughout the state.

Following the fire, white vigilantes went into Black Wilmington neighborhoods, destroying Black businesses and property, and assaulting Black inhabitants. As the violence spread, Waddell led a group to Republican Mayor, Silas P. Wright. Waddell forced Wright, the Board of Aldermen, and the police chief to resign at gunpoint. Around 4:00pm, Waddell was declared Wilmington’s mayor … a position he retained until 1906.  To ensure their gains, the Democrats rounded up prominent fusionists, placed them on railroad cars, and, under armed guard, sent them out of the state. The mob installed and swore in their own replacements. It was a full-blown coup.

It is estimated that by the end of the day, Waddell’s orders led to the murder of between 60 and 300 black people, and to the banishment of about 20 more. Along with Alex and Frank G. Manly, the brothers who had owned The Daily Record, more than 2,000 blacks left Wilmington permanently, forced to abandon their businesses and properties. This greatly reduced the city’s professional and artisan class and changed the formerly Black-majority city into one with a White majority.

Jim Crow Laws

It is often supposed that oppressive laws targeting Black Southerners—called the Jim Crow system—began as soon as federal troops departed the South at the end of Reconstruction. The beginnings of Jim Crow are actually more complicated. Laws mediating social relations between Whites and Blacks actually began to surface in the late 1880s and early 1890s, fully fifteen years after Reconstruction ended. Simply put, in order to segregate sidewalks, restaurants, trolleys, and public bathrooms, cities must first be built that could sustain these public amenities. There would, after all, be no need for such laws in the plantation South, where such new developments did not exist and large-scale landowners could dominate local society with impunity.

Discrimination in employment and housing and the legal segregation of public and private life also reflected the rise of a new Jim Crow South. Southern states and municipalities enforced racial segregation in public places and in private lives. Separate coach laws were some of the first such laws to appear, beginning in Tennessee in the 1880s. Soon schools, stores, theaters, restaurants, bathrooms, and nearly every other part of public life were segregated. So too were social lives. The sin of racial mixing, critics said, had to be heavily guarded against. Marriage laws regulated against interracial couples, and White men, ever anxious about relationships between Black men and White women, passed miscegenation laws and justified lynching as an appropriate extralegal tool to police the racial divide.

Voting Suppression

In politics, de facto limitations of Black voting had suppressed Black voters since Reconstruction. Whites stuffed ballot boxes and intimidated Black voters with physical and economic threats. And then, from roughly 1890 to 1908, southern states implemented legal, de jure disenfranchisement. They passed laws requiring voters to pass literacy tests (which could be judged arbitrarily) and pay poll taxes (which hit poor White and poor Black Americans alike), effectively denying Black men the franchise that was supposed to have been guaranteed by the Fifteenth Amendment. By not explicitly mentioning race, these laws followed the letter, if not the spirit, of the Constitution. Those responsible for such laws posed as reformers and justified voting restrictions as for the public good, a way to clean up politics by purging corrupt African Americans from the voting rolls.

The “Lost Cause”

With White supremacy secured, prominent White southerners looked outward for support. New South boosters hoped to confront post-Reconstruction uncertainties by rebuilding the South’s economy and convincing the nation that the South could be more than an economically backward, race-obsessed backwater. And as they did, they began to retell the history of the recent past. A kind of civic religion known as the “Lost Cause” glorified the Confederacy and romanticized the Old South. White southerners looked forward while simultaneously harking back to a mythically imagined past inhabited by contented and loyal enslaved people, benevolent and generous masters, chivalric and honorable men, and pure and faithful southern belles. Secession, they said, had little to do with the institution of slavery, and soldiers fought only for home and honor, not the continued ownership of human beings. The New South, then, would be built physically with new technologies, new investments, and new industries, but undergirded by political and social custom.

Henry Grady might have declared the Confederate South dead, but its memory pervaded the thoughts and actions of White southerners. Lost Cause champions overtook the South. Women’s groups, such as the United Daughters of the Confederacy, joined with Confederate veterans to preserve a pro-Confederate past. They built Confederate monuments and celebrated Confederate veterans on Memorial Day. Across the South, towns erected statues of General Robert E. Lee and other Confederate figures. Alfred Waddell, the White supremacist responsible for the massacre in Wilmington was later the keynote speaker at the unveiling of the Confederate monument at the Forsyth County Courthouse, where he was praised as a “gallant” soldier and proclaimed: “I thank God that monuments to the Confederate soldiers are rapidly multiplying in the land. I rejoice in the fact for many reasons, but chiefly because of its significance from one point-of-view.”^[7]

By the turn of the twentieth century, the idealized Lost Cause past was entrenched not only in the South but across the country. In 1905, for instance, North Carolinian Thomas F. Dixon published a novel, The Clansman, which depicted the Ku Klux Klan as heroic defenders of the South against the corruption of African American and northern “carpetbag” misrule during Reconstruction. In 1915, acclaimed film director David W. Griffith adapted Dixon’s novel into the groundbreaking blockbuster film, Birth of a Nation. (The film almost singlehandedly rejuvenated the Ku Klux Klan.) The romanticized version of the antebellum South and the distorted version of Reconstruction dominated popular imagination for decades, manifesting in successful movies such as Gone with the Wind (1939) and Disney’s Song of the South (1946).