There were three principal areas of industrial advancement in the South. If there was a New South at all, that New South began to emerge economically and industrially during the days of Reconstruction. The three major areas that we need to examine were the cotton, iron and tobacco industries. But, before we look at those three industries, we need to talk about the South attempting to rebuild its war-torn transportation and communication systems.

Southerners first turned, in the immediate years after the war, to rebuilding their former railroad lines and to expanding those lines as rapidly as possible. Between 1865, war's end, and the early 1870s, nearly 8,000 miles of track were laid in the South. That continued throughout the 1870s so that by 1880 there were some 20,000 miles of track compared with the total of 10,000 before the war broke out. By the end of the 1880s, the entire track mileage of the South had increased to over 40,000 miles. The same kind of building and rebuilding took place in the major port cities. The federal government of the United States has long had a tradition in the aftermath of war, having blown the hell out of our enemy, we immediately give as much money as possible to rebuild what we have just finished destroying. The federal government followed this practice in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War. Vast sums of money, millions and millions of dollars, were granted to Southern port cities like New Orleans, Mobile, Galveston, Texas, to rebuild their ports and to make the South a major commercial center.

Cotton Industry:

Following the rebuilding of the transportation system, Southerners turned first to trying to create a new cotton industry. It was, indeed, in cotton that there was the first sign of industrial advancement in the immediate aftermath of the war. There had been some processing of cotton in the South in the years before the Civil War. But, for the most part, the bulk of Southern cotton, whether grown in the Upper South or in the emerging black belt down through Alabama and Mississippi and Louisiana was sent outside the South for processing. A good amount of it, before the war, went to England and to France in international trade. The bulk of it went to the New England states in the famous textile mills of New England. Much of the capital, for investment purposes--capital that men like Henry Grady, Richard Edmonds, and others tried to lure South--went first into building cotton mills, cotton processing factories. It literally seemed as though every jerk-water town in the South, of which there were many, wanted to have its own cotton mill. It became a matter of civic pride. Almost every member of the town would invest. The little child who had saved a few pennies in the cookie jar, the little old widow who had put a few dollars away for a rainy day, all invested in the building of a local cotton mill. Still, most of the capital investment by the end of the 1870s came from the North and from foreign investors. New England textile manufacturers eager to escape labor unions in Massachusetts, in New Hampshire, and elsewhere began moving some of their operations south in the 1880s. They began investing more and more heavily in building new mills in Alabama, in North Carolina, and elsewhere. The growth of mills proceeded so rapidly. By 1880 there were 160 cotton mills throughout the South. By 1890, there were over 400 cotton mills. North and South Carolina led the way.

Labor in the mills: Blacks and whites both worked in the cotton mills. The blacks, however, rarely, if ever, were allowed to work on any of the machinery. Male African-Americans were hired as boiler-stokers, as yard men moving things back and forth across the mill yard. There were hired for a variety of unskilled labor tasks. The justification that white mill owners gave for not hiring African-American men or women to tend the machinery was fascinating and indicative of the Southern attitude and the Southern mindset. Mill owners argued that, in the years before the Civil War, black agricultural workers had all the advantages. They had the most number of jobs in agriculture. It was black slaves who were picking the cotton in the fields, who were taking care of the rice, and the indigo, and other major Southern agricultural products. So, on the basis that blacks had enjoyed a monopoly of agricultural labor before the war, now the new cotton mill owners said, "whites deserve a break." It was a kind of generational accounting system, if you will. Besides, said many Southern mill owners, whites were far more qualified to work on complex machinery. But, there was a more significant reason as to why black workers were not kept, were not put to work on the machinery. They were kept waiting in the wings as a reserve labor pool. If white workers in Southern cotton mills threatened to join a union, if they threatened to go on strike, the mill owners would say, "Fine. You boys go out on strike if you want to. You're all fired. I've got other people I can bring in." The blacks were second-class citizens kept waiting to make sure that unionization did not take hold in the South.

Iron and Steel:
Now, here again, there had been some iron manufacturing in the South before the Civil War. The major Southern mill was called the Tredegar Iron Works in Richmond, Virginia, the South's leading industrial city before the Civil War. But, the Tedegar Works was one of only a handful of such iron producing plants in the South before the Civil War. Indeed, the absence of those plants was one of the reasons the South lost the Civil War.

By the mid-1870s, however, Southerners were beginning to tap the rich iron and coal regions of the section. By 1875, Southerners were mining about four and a half million tons of coal per year. By 1900, coal production in the South had become one of the two most important sources in the entire world. In conjunction with tapping in to the rich coal deposits, Southerners began building iron works and tapping into the rich deposits of iron ore throughout the region. By the end of the 1870s, the iron industry was one of the industrial phenomenon occurring not only in the South, but throughout the entire nation. During the decade of the 1880s, the growth of the iron industry in the South was nothing short of phenomenal. Whole new towns mushroomed up around the new furnaces and the new factories. The leading example of a city built by iron was Birmingham, Alabama, which essentially did not exist in 1879, but was a major regional city of some forty to fifty thousand people within a fifteen to twenty year period. Here, as in cotton, the initial investment for iron and coal came from Southerners themselves. But, here also, as in cotton, increasingly, investment came from outside the borders of the South. By the end of the 1880s, for example, one of the leading iron manufacturing magnates of the country, Andrew Carnegie, had begun to recognize the importance of the South, industrially, and begun to make large scale investment in the construction of Southern iron works.

Tobacco:
The South had grown a great amount of tobacco in the years before the Civil War. It had processed only a small amount of the total product. Here and there, a large plantation that grew tobacco would have a tobacco factory. Perhaps ten black slaves overseen by a white foreman would work in this little tobacco processing plant. After processing, the tobacco would be put on boats, sent downriver to a port, and shipped either to continental Europe, to England, or to the Northern United States. As in cotton, as in iron, Southerners eager to move from farm to factory began the building of tobacco processing plants during the 1870s, first, in small numbers, then, by the end of the decade, in increasingly large numbers.

In 1880, a new piece of machinery gained a patent from the United States patent office. That new piece of machinery was a cigarette-making machine, a machine that would manufacture cigarettes. The days of the old roll-your-own were over with. (Appropriately enough, that cigarette-manufacturing machine was patented by a Virginia teenager). Durham, North Carolina became, during the 1880s, the center of a growing and booming tobacco empire that began to spread its cancer-filled tentacles throughout the United States. Soon, Virginia and Kentucky began to compete with North Carolina as centers of tobacco processing and manufacturing. By 1900, the Southern profits from tobacco were about fifty-five million dollars a year.

As in cotton, as in iron, the initial investment in the manufacturing and processing of tobacco came from Southerners themselves. And, here again, the story, I'm sure, is becoming very familiar to you: Northern investors and foreign investors began, by the turn-of-the-1880s, to take control of the industry. By 1900, the economic control of the Southern and, therefore, the nation's, tobacco industry, lay firmly in New York City, a good amount of it in the hands of the house of J. P. Morgan, the most important financial institution in the nation.

What does all this mean? That for all the talk of the "New South," for all the movement from farm to factory, in many respects, the South was not a "New" South by 1900--at least it was not an economically independent entity as many Southerners had hoped to create. In virtually every economic sphere, in tobacco, in iron, in cotton, in a variety of other activities, Northern investors, between the 1880s and about the turn-of-the-twentieth-century, achieved control. In the years before the Civil War, one of the major complaints among some Southern leaders was the lack of industrial development in the South, the lack of economic independence in the South. As a leading writer put it in the middle of the 1850s, "Southern children are born in Northern-made cradles, they are buried in Northern-made coffins, and, throughout their lives, they use Northern-made goods." The aim of the Gradys, the aim of the Edmondses, was to achieve that kind of economic independence. And yet, in large measure, they failed in that task.

We can even argue that by 1900, the South, in many ways, was as much or more a colonial economy of the North than it had been when the war broke out in the early 1860s. This is fascinating because it means that Northerners, particularly the Radical Republicans that we talked about in our last lecture, achieved one of the major goals of Reconstruction. They did build anew. They built a new, or began to build, a new economic system in the South, a new economic structure that would change, eventually, the nature of Southern society, and they had tied the South, more closely than ever, to Northern apron strings. Economically, if possible, the South by 1900 was more dependent than ever before upon the North. And so, economically, despite the changes that had occurred, the New South was only the Old South wearing a new uniform.

Copyright 2004 University of Wisconsin System Board of Regents