Chapter Overview

This chapter links two regions into one story. It opens with the tale of the Exodusters, black southerners who were driven from the South by poverty and violence and drawn to the West by the opportunities of cheap land. Though their history and geography differ in most ways, both regions had underdeveloped public sectors, depended on outside human and capital resources, and hence saw themselves as colonial economies. Both provided the nation's industrial centers with vital raw materials and markets for manufactured goods. Both resorted to segregation and violence to maintain racial caste systems.

The Southern Burden

After the Civil War, some southerners saw industrialization as one way to restore prosperity. But the southern economy remained wedded to cotton. The shortage of credit and cash gave rise to tenantry and sharecropping. That system left most poor black and white farmers hopelessly in debt. Even the rapid, if belated, growth of industries could not overcome the poverty of the region, which lacked both expertise and an effective educational system. More fundamentally, the low wages in southern agriculture made it difficult to attract skilled labor and enough outside capital to develop a more diversified economy.

Life in the New South

For whites in the postwar South, life was often lived in tension between the pleasurable attractions of sport and leisure and the more restrictive ideals of Christian piety. Most social activities reflected the rural character of the South and fell into male and female domains. Especially during "court week," town offered a variety of entertainments and opportunities to do business. More than the town, however, the church was at the center of southern life. The annual camp meeting illustrated the fact that besides spiritual uplift churches provided welcome chances to socialize.

Racial division overshadowed that of gender. White southerners constructed a new social system to replace slavery. Once the North adopted a laissez-faire approach to race relations, the South created a "Jim Crow" system of racial segregation. Newly erected legal codes forbade blacks and whites from mingling. Blacks could not compete for most jobs. The Supreme Court gave segregation constitutional authority in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896).

Western Frontiers

Conflicts also affected settlement of lands beyond the Mississippi. Indians, Hispanics, and newly arrived white settlers held markedly different attitudes toward the natural environment. Europeans saw nature as something to exploit systematically. Indians' religious beliefs encouraged a view of the land as a complex web of animals, plants, and other natural elements, all with souls.

White development of the Great Plains and mountainous West was held back by two barriers: the difficulty of transportation, and the scarcity of water. The Homestead Act of 1862 and the completion of the transcontinental railroad made settlement and development more attractive.

The War for the West

To remove the Indians, whites adopted a policy of concentrating them on reservations. When that failed, violence resulted. One climactic battle occurred when Sioux and Cheyenne forces trapped Colonel George Custer's cavalry along the Little Big Horn River in 1876.

But such victories could not stem the flood of white settlers, the spread of disease, or the slaughter of the buffalo that all undermined Indian cultures. Under the well-intended Dawes Act, reformers tried to draw Indians out of communal tribal cultures and turn them into independent farmers. But that idea struck as hard a blow to Indian life as did war. Similarly, Hispanos in the Southwest saw their way of life challenged as, sometimes with violence, more often by legal and political means, Anglos deprived Hispanos of their land and political influence. A new wave of immigration from Mexico also changed the character of the Hispanic Southwest.

Boom and Bust in the West

Western industries fell into a pattern of boom and bust, economic concentration, and wage-labor specialization. Silver and gold strikes brought waves of fortune hunters. Then followed the railroads, which linked the region to urban markets in the East and Europe and gave the railroad companies enormous influence over the region's economic and political life. As with the industrialization and development of the East, the West witnessed its own form of urbanization.

Cattle ranchers soon drove huge herds of steer to the new railheads; large corporations came to dominate the cattle industry. Violence sometimes erupted between sheep and cattle interests, but nature proved even more violent as blizzard and drought took the boom out of the cattle business.

The Final Frontier

The lure of cheap land under the Homestead Act brought a flood of farmers into the high plains. But the best lands were far from free and farmers required expensive equipment to meet the conditions of the western environment. Farm families faced sod houses, prairie fires, blizzards, and rural isolation. Among those who stayed, the church, as in the South, offered some solace and social life. Also as in the South, alienation from the mainstream of industrial America would breed resentment and, ultimately, political revolt.