The New South
- Investment into building railroads but remained mostly agrarian
- Tenant Farming: Paying rent to plantation owners and also farming the land
- Often people were forced to work because they couldn’t pay off debt
- Solid South:
- South could be relied on to vote Democratic until the 1960s
- Jim Crow Laws, Plessy vs Ferguson, Brown vs Board
- Enforced racial segregation
- Reality that south is not protected by Republican govts
- Foner blames the failure of Reconstruction on Johnson
- Giving land back to formal confederates as part of stage of reconstruction
- Land could have been re distributed
- 40 acres and a mule WT
- Would have made the Black people independent and buffered gaainst the realities of their economic situation
- Would have been able to build wealth AND all the profits of their labor
- Instead, were left landless and desperate
- Only skill they had was agricultural, and they did not own any land
- Could either rent land or engage in sharecropping
- Sharecropping is sharing a portion of crops and land with the landlord but getting to keep some and getting paid for yourself
- Land was used for exploitation instead
- Land owners did not have a lot of cash but needed someone to work the land
- People with no jobs that have agricultural skills
- Sharecroppers provided with home, seeding, etc
- Give a portion of crop to their owner as payment, up to half
- If freed man owned his land he would get to keep 100%, but the sharecroppers only got to keep 50% of their crop
- Income is limited and leaves them poor
- Sharecroppers were not paid until Fall
- No money to buy seed, tools, etc
- If needed, a crop lien was used to borrow the money to buy it
- Money was taken out of payment for the year
- debt peonage occured from crop lien which caused exploitation and cycle of poverty
Jim Crow Laws
- Enforced social segregation
- Further legitimized by Plessy vs Ferguson
- Separate but Equal doctrine, allowed to separate
- Overturned by Brown vs Board
- Unanimous decision that segregation of schools is unconstutional
- Tried to limit voting successfully of African Americans
- Poll tax, literacy tests, grandfather clauses