Here are the slides for the second lecture (The New South) in the spring 2012 semester of History 122 at Missouri State University.

1. The New South
I. The Failure of Reconstruction
II. “Redemption”
A. Prologue: Mississippi
B. The Redeemers Seize Power
III. Prospects for African-Americans
IV. The Economic Landscape of the New South
A. The Sharecropping System
B. Southern Industry
The Slaughterhouse Cases (1873) retrenchment
Home Rule poll tax
Rutherford B. Hayes/Samuel Tilden Jourdan Anderson
Compromise of 1877 Exodusters
“Solid South” Benjamin “Pap” Singleton
Politics of the “Bloody Shirt” sharecropping
Colfax Massacre “King Cotton”
U. S. v. Cruikshank crop lien
Redeemers Henry Grady

2. The Failure of Reconstruction
1. Declining support in the North
a. Panic of 1873
b. Corruption of the Grant administration
c. Weariness
2. Legal challenges (Slaughterhouse, etc.)
3. Hostility from the white South

3. The Slaughterhouse Cases (1873)
- Origins: meatpackers in
Louisiana challenge a monopoly
granted to a New Orleans
slaughterhouse
-USSC upholds monopoly, saying
that 13th and 14th Amendments
focused upon the freedom of “the
slave race”
Impact
1. Narrows the scope of the 14th Amendment’s protections
2. Most of citizens’ rights remained under the control of state, not
fed’l, governments

4. A Democratic Party broadside from the election
Give Me Liberty!: An American history, 3rd Edition
of 1866 in Pennsylvania Copyright © 2011 W.W. Norton & Company

5. Give Me Liberty!: An American history, 3rd Edition
Map 15.5 The Presidential Election of 1876 Copyright © 2011 W.W. Norton & Company

6. Colfax (Louisiana) Massacre
Easter Sunday, April 1873

8. The Freedmen’s Bureau, an engraving from Give Me Liberty!: An American history, 3rd Edition
Harper’s Weekly Copyright © 2011 W.W. Norton & Company

9. The “Redeemers”
- White supremacists
- Goals
1. dismantle the Reconstruction state
2. reduce the political power of blacks
3. reshape South’s legal system in interest of labor
control/racial subordination
- The Redeemer Governments:
Low taxes
Fiscal retrenchment:
“Spend nothing unless absolutely necessary.”

10. How do the “Redeemers” maintain
power after Reconstruction?
Political shenanigans
- Electoral fraud
- Poll taxes
- Registration laws
- “Grandfather clauses”
Changes in criminal laws
- Vagrancy and “anti-enticement” laws
- Sharpened penalties for petty thef
- Expansion of convict labor system
Reforming “local” government
Gerrymandering: redrawing political districts
* Violence

11. United States v. Cruikshank (1876)
- The U. S. Supreme Court overturns the only three federal
convictions that had resulted from Colfax Massacre.
- The Court found that the 14th Amendment only empowered
the federal government to stop violations of citizens’ rights
by the states
- The 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection/Due Process rights
did not apply to the actions of individuals
- Provides a virtual green light to acts of terror in areas where
local officials could/would not prosecute such acts.

12. The Prospect for African-Americans
Thwarted in efforts to participate in public life, where do
African-Americans look?
- Opportunities for advancement
Education
Church
Business
- Migration?
Abroad? Liberia
The West? Exodusters

14. Above: African-American migrants await a
steamboat for passage to points west and,
eventually, Kansas.
Left: Benjamin “Pap” Singleton,
organizer of the Exoduster migration to Kansas

15. Give Me Liberty!: An American history, 3rd Edition
Farmers with Cotton in the Courthouse Square Copyright © 2011 W.W. Norton & Company

16. The Sharecropping System
Defined: a labor system in which tenant farmers (black and white)
worked small plots of land for property’s owners (whites),
producing cash crops (namely cotton)
- at end of the year, tenants paid their rent with share of that
season’s crop
Compromise:
1. owners’ desire for control and reliable/powerless
labor supply
2. tenants’ desire for land and some measure of independence
Why cotton?
A cash-poor society
Many advantages

17. A black family in the cotton fields after the Civil War,
Give Me Liberty!: An American history, 3rd Edition
photographed in 1867. Copyright © 2011 W.W. Norton & Company

18. Give Me Liberty!: An American history, 3rd Edition
Map 15.1 The Barrow Plantation Copyright © 2011 W.W. Norton & Company

19. Henry Grady
Prophet of a new, industrialized South