So ED/CD Differs in each Region
As Two Ships spends the better part of two or three chapters outlining the evolution of the American South and its distinctive ED context. In this short introduction, I can only make several fundamental observations on that history.
Ignoring the effects of climate and economic comparative advantage, the South was settled by different ethnic/racial groupings, developed a distinctive economic base radically opposite of the hegemonic North, and logically established policy systems to accommodate its own configuration of values and priorities. These elements produced a soil from which Progressivism could not take root. Southern “First Settlers” set in place state governments that were radically different in key ED-related values and relationships. The South put in place, as early as the seventeenth century, an agricultural-export economy, based on slave (initially Native American) workforce, and a reproduction of the English and Irish medieval “manor” economy, complete with lords and damsels in distress.
The North’s cities in this time period set up an agricultural economy (that did not export and so its products were available domestically to support urbanization) supplemented by a trade economy based on ships, ship-building, extractive industries and non-agricultural occupations (sailors, fishermen for example). It was no accident that in 1792, Salem was the nation’s seventh largest city and Newport CT the eighth, Gloucester, the eleventh. NYC grew around this nexus and financing-capital markets/insurance of trade. Gee, how things change (sarcastic irony)?
The 18th and early 19th century South did not meaningfully urbanize or industrialize, and did not “enjoy” immigration as did the North. New England town-building had no counterpart in the South. The South’s largest city, New Orleans (second in per capita income to NYC), was Spain/France’s equivalent of NYC and not typical of southern cities. Aside from New Orleans the South’s largest city in 1860 was Louisville KY (68,000)–Charleston SC was 40,000 and Richmond VA only 38,000 (by comparison NYC over 1 million, and Philadelphia 565,000). Southern states did not promote city-building, relying on plantations (the manor) as their economic base. Such “cities” as existed served as collection points and ports of export.
Ships from Salem and New England carried the South’s cotton in the nineteenth century, just as they transported its enslaved workforce during the eighteenth century. New England’s manufacturing gazelles, its textile mills, turned southern cotton into clothes for American consumption. And so the Tidewater South was a serious player in eighteenth century America. But the South of Washington and Jefferson changed dramatically starting around the Jefferson’s post-1800 administration.
Early in our Early Republic Era (the first decade in the nineteenth century) the South’s previous tobacco-indigo-based agricultural-export economy underwent a huge transformation. Innovation in the agricultural medieval context necessarily involved agricultural production or a major shift in agricultural products. With indigo and tobacco in notable decline (both exhausted soil fertility), a new export crop was needed.
The invention of the cotton gin (in Georgia) supplied the technology necessary to switch to cotton production. Cotton production required lots of cheap labor (there was no technology for cotton-picking equivalent to a McCormick hay/grain reaper) that would work under difficult conditions. Tidewater plantation owners (Maryland, Virginia and northern North Carolina) sold their increasingly surplus slaves to a new crop of entrepreneurial Scotch-Irish migrants (remember Scarlet O’Hara’s dad, Gerald O’Hara, the founder of Tara Plantation) who had grand ideas to establish a new type of plantation around cotton production, in mostly unsettled (by whites) land suitable to cotton.
So horribly and tragically Scotch-Irish slave owners forcibly relocated the slaves into Georgia, Mississippi and Alabama (which became states in 1817 and 1819), then Arkansas (1836), Kentucky and Tennessee. This little-known “Passage to the Interior” (sometimes called the “second middle passage”) moved in aggregate over one million African-Americans (see Ira Berlin, the Making of African America, 2010). Native Americans were also physically removed from these areas (the infamous post-1830’s “Trail of Tears”).
Forced migrations populated the cotton (and Black) Belt. With technology, entrepreneurship, capital investment and workforce in place, the South’s agricultural-export economy, resting on its “gazelle” cotton plantations was revitalized, new “slave” states added to the South and “King Cotton”, in a fashion similar to our infamous “Oil and Gas Industry” ruled over the South’s economy for the next one hundred years. At this juncture, the South had economically “doubled-down” on non-urban agricultural economic base. This arguably was the first “New South”.
Tidewater and Cotton Belt policy systems were dominated by plantation owners and agricultural-support businesses. Sam Bass Warner’s Privatism thus had different meaning in the South where there were no New England town/shareholder democracy or Privatist merchants/early industrialists. The predominant level of governmental administration was the state itself, and its subdivision, the county. City-building such as it was, founded thinly-populated logistics centers, the “cotton town” (later mill and mining) which closely resembled the infamous “company town”.
Infrastructure, the key to northern ED and urbanization, was needed only to the extent of getting the goods to export ports. So while the North built industries around steel, locomotives, even steamboats and canals, the southern infrastructure was a secondary priority. By 1861, the North laid 22,000 miles of track; the South only 9,000. Export was the South’s chief ED strategy. A large expanse of fertile land and low-cost slave labor were the South’s edge in global competition. The South supplied nearly 80% of Britain’s cotton needs.
New England shippers transported the cotton, and until 1819, slaves from Africa. Without exaggeration, New England’s manufacturing revolution, and maritime sector, were closely tied to the South’s agricultural-export base. In contrast, the South relied on northern manufacturing for its manufactured goods. Only 8% of southern locomotives were made in the South by 1861. Fueled by plentiful supplies of southern wood, not northern coal, most southern railroads were shorter in length, and commenced operations only in the 1850’s.
There was, aside from a rising New England abolitionism, a divisive tension between the two regions, however. Southern global export required as close to “free trade”, low tariffs and minimal national protectionism as could be negotiated in Washington. The fledgling northern manufacturing sectors, including textile, needed serious tariffs to protect it from British competition. In an Era so reminiscent of today (albeit turned upside-down), trade (globalism) and protectionism were primary issues on our federal agenda. In 1828 the “Tariff of Abominations” took effect, cementing in place Whig protectionism. This generated a constitutional crisis. They talked not only about impeachment, but succession–the “sanctuary city” of its day.
Reconstruction and the Reestablishment of a Southern Policy System: an Overview
There were two Reconstruction periods: Presidential (1863-67) and Congressional (1867-77). During the Presidential Reconstruction the South retained most of its sub-state governments, and subject to military control, state legislatures continued. Border states and Tennessee (President Johnson from Tennessee) were admitted into the Union (1866) and Congress.
Emancipation altered forever the previous “southern” policy system, the 1865 Thirteenth Amendment ended slavery. The 1866 Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed African-American citizenship, but it did not extend voting rights. In March 1865 Congress created the Freedman’s Bureau to protect the rights of former slaves and provide them with medical care, education, and a savings bank. Over President Johnson’s veto its powers were expanded to try any who deprived Freedman of their civil rights, including the right to make/sell contracts and property. This legalized sharecropping contracts and urban employment. None of this stopped several states from adopting the so-called “Black Codes” that castrated Freedman civil and economic rights. The KKK and other terrorist groups sprang up to control Freedman.
In frustration, the northern electorate in November 1866 swept Republicans to majorities in every northern state legislature and two-thirds majority in both houses of Congress. By early 1867 Congress broke with Johnson (later attempted impeachment), and took over the Reconstruction policy. The ten states of the Confederacy that remained outside of the Union were broken into five military districts, enforced with 20,000 Union troops.
The Black franchise dramatically changed the southern state and municipal policy system as Congress required southern states to extend the franchise to Blacks, and to permit the election of African-American office holders. In Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina (the Black Belt), Blacks were a majority. Certain Confederate officers and officials were denied suffrage and southern war debts repudiated–bankrupting many southern financial institutions and property owners.
The final “Reconstruction” constitutional amendment, the Fifteenth, which provided Blacks the right to vote was proposed in 1868 and ratified in 1870. Ratification became an intensely partisan affair with Democrats mostly opposing it, and Republicans in favor. This will be important to the reestablishment of southern state and local policy systems. A motley coalition of southern “Whigs”, i.e. Republicans, Black Freedmen, northern emigres (usually known as carpetbaggers), and opportunistic southern Democrats (usually businessmen, called scalawags) swept into victory in southern cities, towns and state legislatures. Between 1867 and 1869, this coalition dominated state constitutional conventions in the eleven former Confederate states, and subsequently led the approval of these constitutions. This post-1867 policy system created by this coalition approved several ED strategies (see below) hugely affecting the future of southern ED, and. in combination with the Panic of 1873, shaped a second round of southern state gift and loan clauses.
Ratification was essentially required of southern states to be admitted back to the Union and readmitted to Congress. Without extending the franchise to Blacks, it was likely southern states would elect Democrats to Congress, and that threatened Democrat control over the Senate. This overlap with partisanship laid the foundation for a “wing”, the Bourbon Democrats, to develop, permitting the Democrats to achieve a majority in the House in 1874. In 1876, the Democrats came within one electoral vote of winning the Presidency–more on that later.
The Democrats became the party opposed to Republican-controlled Congressional Reconstruction, and after the 1873 Panic, Democrats ousted the short-lived Republican coalition from most southern municipal and state legislatures and my the mid-late 1870’s overthrew the earlier Republican state and municipal policy systems and replaced them with entirely new policy systems–with new state constitutions– dominated by a political coalition known today as “Redeemers”–redeeming the South from northern-imposed reconstruction (see below).
From this time on, the South, and most of its state and local policy systems would be exclusively controlled by the Democratic Party. The one-party “Solid South”, “yellow dog” Democratic Party will dominant the South, and southern ED for one hundred years–until 1980. The intensity of one-party control over such a period of time, will increasingly become a major factor in the distinctiveness of southern ED (and CD), necessarily pave a uniquely southern path that openly contested its northern industrial hegemonic conquerors.
All this came to an end with the 1876 Presidential election between Samuel Tilden (D) vs. Rutherford B. Hayes (R). Reconstruction’s “actual” end, according to historians of southern reconstruction, reflecting different definitions of Reconstruction’s correct purpose, is still debated, however. Most current historians extend the date into the 1890’s.
Tilden won the popular vote but was one vote shy of an electoral majority. Three states were subsequently contested in the House–twenty votes in total. Hayes needed all twenty, Tilden one. An 1877 Congressional commission awarded all twenty to Hayes–the consequence of a backroom deal, dubbed the Compromise of 1877, which traded absence of a southern filibuster for removal of federal troops from the South and a federal commitment to subsidize southern railroad infrastructure, and other internal ED improvements, intended to facilitate southern industrialization and business development.
President Hayes withdrew the military, but no federal assistance for southern infrastructure or business development was ever approved.
Ron W. Coan 