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2 Elements of Democratic Solidarity and Discontent industry, economics, Calvinist Religion, and Jim Crow sentiment is all right . . . where your home is. but downtown, no. . . . [T]he dog that snaps the quickest gets the bone. Friendship is very nice for a sunday afternoon . . . around the dinner table with your relations, talking about the sermon that morning. but nine o’clock monday morning, [those] notions should be brushed aside like cobwebs. . . . [When doing] business . . . [a man] ought not to have a relation in the world—and least of all a poor relation. —Daniel Drew Reconstruction was only the first major element that would serve as a glue and, later, a solvent of the solid Democratic south. The era, with its attendant “syndrome,” certainly left a set of powerful attitudes to serve as a basis for sectional ethos. but succeeding events only crystallized and hardened the original mold. The making of the new south, in terms of attracting industry after the war, went leagues in the direction of bequeathing Dixie with a stubborn set of uncompromising business values, economic shibboleths, and societal beliefs. The hardening of Jim Crow, with the simultaneous move to excise the African American from politics, dominated an era as disfranchisement and segregation helped snuff out sporadic labor insurgencies and the Populist movement. The result was, more than anything else, additional lessons in how race, religion, patriotism, and other issues could divide poor whites and blacks along an axis of emotion, to their mutual and seemingly perpetual detriment. Making the New South: Industrialization and Societal Values The Reconstruction syndrome, along with its heavy attendant traits and predilections , was powerfully fortified in the south by the region’s subsequent nineteenth-century experiences. The cataclysm of civil war ushered in pro- 22 / Chapter 2 found and remarkable changes in the southern pattern of life—human, physical , political, legal, economic. The conflict settled the question of whether the eleven Confederate states would comprise a separate nation. some were dragged kicking and screaming back into the Union, and the Union itself was preserved. A fifth of all southern white males did not emerge from the conflict; they were dead. Another tenth was maimed or without limbs. only one in three southern white males survived the cataclysm intact—and that only in a purely physical sense. shell shock, battle fatigue, and post-traumatic stress disorder were not yet part of the military lexicon. As with most wars, the lion’s share of the fighting was done by the plain people who owned few if any slaves and little land. The Civil War was yet one more installment in the world’s long history of a “rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.” Dixie had been the clear military loser in the conflict and as such embarked upon a period unknown by any other group of American citizens before or since—occupation by a foreign military power. Although at most only 22,000 federal troops occupied the eleven former Confederate states (on average just 2,000 per state)—and the vast majority of those confined themselves to town garrisons—the psychological effect was devastating.1 it was a blow from which the southern psyche has, perhaps even now, not yet fully recovered. yet the war brought other changes in the southern way of life, at least as profound and far-reaching as these, the most obvious. Culture, society, work, and the economy all changed dramatically. Prior to the hostilities, Dixie could best be described as an agrarian society comprised of large and small farms alike. Afterward wealthy planter elites were, to invoke perhaps a crude generalization, left with land but no labor, the freedmen with labor but no land. After talk of “forty acres and a mule” faded and an economic reconstruction was ruled out, the southern states groped for some new arrangement to replace the slave-based, forced-labor system that had been abolished by, first, the emancipation Proclamation and, then more completely, the Thirteenth Amendment. now that the slaves had been, in a quick succession of constitutional amendments, granted their freedom (Thirteenth), civil rights, equal protection, and due process under the law (Fourteenth), and right to vote (Fifteenth), the slave-based agricultural system that had dominated the south since colonial times had to be replaced. The predominant solution in the southern countryside, sharecropping and tenancy—while solving the riddle of planters with land but no labor, and freedmen and poor whites with labor but no land—was a prescription for...

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