The New South & The

Trans-Mississippi

West

The Exodusters—first major black out-migration from a less-than-hospitable South

Relations between the South, West, and Northeast—South, West exploited for Northeastern benefit, but really everyone was an exploiter in a sense

A group of “Exodus”ters waiting on a levee for a steamboat that

will take them west to farm in places like Kansas on the Great

Plains.

The Southern Burden

The gospel of a “New South”—Grady wanted to “out-Yankee the Yankee,” BUT…saying and doing are two separate things—what held the region back?

A cotton-dominated economy—low cotton prices; some diversity attempted; George Washington Carver’s peanuts

Agricultural ladder—a theory about hired hand, sharecropper, tenant, and landowner

Crop lien system—spring credit, fall debt—creditor owned rights to the crop: “debt peonage” another form of slavery

A black sharecropper’s shack.

Boom in textiles—cotton, cheap white labor

Tobacco and cigarettes—Jewish immigrants

Environmental costs—migrating tree harvests cause barren hillsides, erosion, sterility

Birmingham Steel—absorbed by U.S. Steel

Late start in industrializing—catch up

Undereducated labor—education spoils?

The isolated southern labor market—new social ideas unwelcome by those in power

Washington Duke, who, along with his sons, built a cigarette empire with the

American Tobacco Company, and whose

fortune endowed Duke University.

A statue of Duke on the Duke University

campus.

Life in the New South

Hunting—relief from work,

tedium, food; cockfighting

Farm entertainments—work-sharing festivals: contests, quilting; courting often the result

Town—Saturdays, holidays, court week

Rural religion—segregated by race, gender; camp meetings

Laissez-faire race relations—for sectional harmony, North said they’d keep hands off, just don’t disenfranchise the Freedmen—a promise not kept by the South

Supreme Court rules that Civil Rights Act of 1866 and 14th Amendment don’t apply to private individuals, just states?

Women posing at southern

quilting bee.

Jim Crow laws –everywhere except stores and streets

Plessy v. Ferguson—S.C. blesses “separate but equal,” which is inherently unequal; average of 187 lynchings per year in 1890s

END OF READING

The Jim Crow character from a popular minstrel song that inspired the name for segregationist laws that spread across the South.

“Come, listen, all you gals and boys, I'm just from Tuckyhoe; I'm gwine to sing a little song, My name's Jim Crow. Chorus: Wheel about, an' turn about, an' do jis so; Eb'ry time I wheel about, I jump Jim Crow.”

Jump down, turn aroundTo pick a bale of cottonJump down, turn aroundTo pick a bale a day. Chorus:Oh Lordy, pick a bale of cotton,Oh Lordy, pick a bale a day. That nigger from ShilohCan pick a bale of cottonThat nigger from ShilohCan pick a bale a day.Chorus: Me and my gal can pick . . . . Me and my wife . . . . Me and my buddy . . . . Me and my poppa . . . .

Takes a mighty big man to . . . .

Western Frontiers

Moving frontiers—skips, spots,

east, north

Variety of Indian cultures—environment determined culture

William Gilpin, a western booster—

limitless; RR’s and cheap land; billion John Wesley Powell—limits

Water as a key resource—not land; water rights

Chimney Rock in Nebraska was the most-mentioned

landmark in pioneer diaries.

John Wesley Powell, the one-armed Civil War veteran and

western explorer; William Gilpin.

The War for the West

Policy of concentration—initially, limits

to hunting grounds; whites squatted on lands given “as long as waters run,” begged for protection

Chivington massacre—Sand Creek

Buffalo soldiers—hair of buffalo

General John Pope, demoted commander of the Army of the Potomac and loser of 2nd Bull Run, who vowed to wipe

out the frustrated Sioux Indians after the New Ulm Massacre in Minnesota. Captured 1800 Sioux; Lincoln cut

execution list down to 38—settlers outraged.

John Chivington

Buffalo Soldiers

Black Kettle

Battle of Little Big Horn—three

columns: Custer’s blundered in too quickly

Colonel George Armstrong Custer, one of the most

courageous and the youngest Union general in

the Civil War, lost every man under his personal command

that day.

The battle site became

an instant tourist

attraction.

Sitting Bull had just undergone the grueling Sun Dance and did not participate in the battle.

Chief Joseph—1300-mile

chase by Gen. Miles to Canada ending in Oklahoma

Suzette La Fleche and Helen Hunt Jackson—lectured, lobbied, organized: A Century of Dishonor

The Dawes Severalty Act—concentration on reservations had failed, so sever individuals from tribes; 160 acre farms?; land left over went to homesteaders, speculators

Helen Hunt Jackson and Chief Joseph.

Wounded Knee

Wovoka, the Paiute Indian who began the Ghost

Dance religion in Nevada; a Ghost Dance shirt that

some believed would be impervious to white man’s

bullets.

Results of the “Battle” of Wounded Knee, looking like a Nazi massacre in

WWII.

The band of Indians had been fleeing through the cold when they were ordered into Wounded Knee. The next morning federal soldiers began confiscating their weapons, and a scuffle broke out between a soldier and an Indian warrior. The federal soldiers opened fire, killing 290 men, women, and children. The gunfire was so haphazard that the soldiers killed more than 25 of their own men in the crossfire. Even though it wasn't really a battle, the massacre at Wounded Knee is considered the final battle of the Indian Wars, which had lasted 350 years

Juan Jose Herrera and the White Caps—resistance of Anglo “invaders” by as many as 700 masked nightriders in Las Vegas area—courts did heavy lifting for Anglos

Mexican immigrants—powerless contract, seasonal laborers living in segregated barrios

Formation of regional communities—small village bases preserved cultural identity, places to return after labor in Anglo world

A new racial triad—black, white and brown in Texas brought more complexity to race relations

Boom and Bust in the West

Prostitution—50,000 earned high wages

working “cribs,” saloons, dance halls, brothels

Environmental costs of mining—hydraulic mining, heavy deforestation, smelter pollution

Railroad land grants—CP going east and UP west for loans ($48,000 per mile in mountains)and land (200-400 sq. mi. per mi.); Chinese, Irish

The meeting of the Central Pacific and

Union Pacific at Promontory Point, Utah.

The Final Frontier

Home on the Range— “long drive,” “nesters,” “woolies,” range wars

Western Boom and Bust—over-investment crashes with over-grazing, disease, drought, 1886-1887 blizzards

Boomers and Sooners—two million acres of former Indian land

Homestead Act—It could be free, BUT…

Bonanza farms—160 acres works in East, BUT…

Religion—evangelical protestants, circuit riders

Joseph Glidden, man who got the patent for barbed wire. He beat out

many competitors.