Overview
Proponents of the New South envisioned a post-Reconstruction southern economy modeled on the North’s embrace of the Industrial Revolution.
Henry W. Grady, a newspaper editor in Atlanta, Georgia, coined the phrase the "New South” in 1874. He urged the South to abandon its longstanding agrarian economy for a modern economy grounded in factories, mines, and mills.
Although textile mills and tobacco factories emerged in the South during this time, the plans for a New South largely failed. By 1900, per-capita income in the South was forty percent less than the national average, and rural poverty persisted across much of the South well into the twentieth century.
Rural agrarian poverty
After the Civil War, sharecropping and tenant farming took the place of slavery and the plantation system in the South.
Sharecropping and tenant farming were systems in which white landlords (often former plantation slaveowners) entered into contracts with impoverished farm laborers to work their lands. Those who worked the fields shared a portion of the crop yield with the landlord as payment for renting the land. Under the sharecropping system, the landlord typically supplied the capital to buy the seed and equipment needed to sow, cultivate, and harvest a crop, while the sharecropper supplied the labor. In other tenancy farming arrangements the laborer, not the landowner, took responsibility for purchase of seed and equipment.
Photograph of black and white men and women picking cotton in a field.
Photograph of black and white men and women picking cotton in a field.
Sharecroppers in Georgia, c. 1910. Both white and black farm laborers worked in the sharecropping system. Image courtesy Georgia Archives.
Yet, because prices on cotton and other crops remained low, sharecroppers and tenant farmers often fell into a cycle of indebtedness called debt peonage: farmers found that the money they made selling their crops at the end of the growing season was not enough to pay back the loans they had taken out for seed, tools, farm equipment, and living expenses, leaving them owing more after a year of labor than they had when they started. [How is that possible?]
This system left both black and white tenant farmers living in dire poverty. In addition, since no one had any money to spend, the southern economy stagnated.^1
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An economic vision for a new South
Enter Henry W. Grady, editor of the Atlanta Constitution, a newspaper in Georgia’s capital city. In a series of impassioned public speeches and articles, Grady envisioned a southern economy enriched with broadly expanded manufacturing facilities and commerce. Grady and like-minded southerners referred to this regional economic remake as the “New South.”
Step-by-step explanation:
