Origins of the New South, 1877–1913

A History of the South

C. Vann Woodward

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 1981
• eBook ISBN: 9780807158210
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

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CHAPTER I

THE REDEEMERS

ANY honest genealogy of the ruling family of Southern Democrats would reveal a strain of mixed blood. The mixture sprang from a forced union with the house that had been Democracy’s bitter rival for the throne. A Mississippian once whimsically acknowledged this union. “A few years after the war,” he wrote, “all lovers of good government in the South concluded to celebrate a marriage. The high contracting parties were Whiggism and Democracy and the ceremony took place in 1875, though the betrothal may antedate that time.… As is usual in such cases the parties have now one and the same name, but the Whig party is no more dead than is one of our fair damsels, because she has concluded to cast her lot with the man of her choice for weal or for woe.”¹

The fact was that instead of assuming the submissive role suggested by a change of name, Whiggery often took the dominant position—along with the bulk of desirable offices. A North Carolina editor who described himself as one of the “unterrified Democracy” boasted that “the Democratic nominees for Governor since the war had been Worth, a Whig; Ashe, a Whig; Merrimon, a Whig; Vance, a Whig; and Jarvis, who was too young before the war to have had much political leaning one way or another.” The Democrats of the First North Carolina District had in that period nominated five men for Congress, “every one of them former Whigs,” and the state supreme court was “composed of three sterling Democrats, all former Whigs.” By 1884 it appeared that “the Democrats of today admire Henry Clay just as much as the men of Whig traditions.”² On the other hand, so repugnant had the marriage with their old enemies been to the Whigs that it was not until eight years after the war that the very name “Democratic” was avowed by the Conservative party of North Carolina.

The Whiggish tendency was widespread. “It is almost impossible to find a disciple of Benton among Southern Democrats,” wrote an observer in 1882. The older generation had “apparently determined to adopt the views of the old Whigs,” while the younger leaders were uninterested in Jacksonian dogma.³

Henry Watterson, thoroughly in accord with all but details of the New Order, took occasion to attack Colonel Arthur S. Colyar, commander of the dominant wing of the Tennessee Democrats. Colyar, he charged, was “in sympathy with the iron, coal, and manufacturing interests of Tennessee exclusively, and, being an old high-tariff Whig, has not emancipated himself from the crude opinions which prevailed among the shortsighted and narrow minded political economists among whom he grew to manhood.” The reply came promptly from the Nashville Daily American: “Better be careful, Mr. Watterson, the Democratic party of Tennessee is made up, at least in part, of old Whigs, and, being now all of the same family, it might hurt the party to establish that the old Whigs were ‘short sighted’ and ‘narrow-minded!’” If the Ken-tuckian were uninformed, he might make inquiry in his own state concerning the master of all those “narrow minded political economists.” “His name was Clay, and no doubt some of the old men will remember him.”⁴

All in all the union was a mésalliance. With every crossroad hustings and county courthouse the memorial of some battle between the old parties, any semblance of domestic harmony was likely to be forced and artificial. “I despise the very name of Democrat,” declared a Democrat of Whig background from the Lower South. “There is not a principle or a tradition belonging to the organization which I approve.” Another unwilling adherent described himself as “in principle an Old Line Whig, but, under existing circumstances, in practice and from necessity, a Southern Democrat.”⁵ Even the name Democrat fell into general disuse in the South during the seventies and eighties. The substitute, “Conservative,” though originating in the battle against “Radical” Republicans, proved too appropriate a name to abandon for many years. In some states it was adopted as the official name of the party, sometimes in combination, “Conservative and Democratic Party.” “Conservative” was not dropped from the official title of the Democratic party of Alabama for forty years after the war.

The shape and character of salvation promised the South by “Redemption” are in some measure revealed by the extrapolitical concerns of the “Redeemers.” The first ex-Confederate state to be restored to Democratic rule, Tennessee had as her first Democratic governor, General John C. Brown, a former Whig and brother of the ante-bellum Whig governor Neill S. Brown. Governor John Brown took prominent part in the ambitious schemes of Thomas A. Scott for a southern transcontinental railroad and served as vice-president of Scott’s Texas and Pacific Company. Later he became president of the Bon Air Coal Company, and at the time of his death he was president of the expanding Tennessee Coal, Iron, and Railroad Company. His successor, also a former Whig elected by the Democrats, was James D. Porter, a Confederate veteran. After two terms in office, Governor Porter was elected president of the Nashville, Chattanooga and St. Louis Railroad. He was also a director of the Tennessee Coal, Iron, and Railroad Company, along with several other financial enterprises of Nashville.⁶

The dynamic leader of this Whig-industrialist wing of Tennessee Democrats was Colonel Colyar. There were, according to Watterson, six prominent newspapers in the South that supported every Republican and opposed every Democratic policy. Three of these were published in Tennessee, and the “king” of this whole school of journalists was Colonel Colyar, who controlled the Nashville American. Watterson described him as a brilliant captain of industry, “backed by abundant capital of protected industries” issuing orders to his lieutenants throughout the Lower South.⁷ His paper fought the free traders and the railroad commissions and defended the policies of the Tennessee Coal, Iron, and Railroad Company, of which Colyar was a director and general counsel. The company leased the convicts of the state penitentiary for an annual rental of $101,000. “One of the chief reasons which first induced the company to take up the system,” explained Colonel Colyar, “was the great chance which it seemed to present for overcoming strikes.”⁸ Governor Albert S. Marks, who succeeded Governor Porter, was a kinsman and former law partner of Colonel Colyar.⁹

Redemption came early in Virginia and was accomplished under peculiar auspices—a combination of Confederate Democrats, conservative Republicans, old-line Whigs, and Negroes. This mongrel group left “Democrat” out of the party name entirely, and for thirteen years was known simply as the Conservative party. “This combination,” according to one historian, “was effected by city capitalistic leaders, and to it (and them) was entrusted the inauguration of the new regime.” The city man’s rule of a countryman’s state had as the first Conservative governor a Carpetbagger-Republican and banker from Norfolk, Gilbert C. Walker. The nine men who acted as an executive committee for the state central committee of the Conservatives were all residents of Richmond, and for years all state conventions of the Conservatives were held in that city.¹⁰

The General Assembly that laid the foundation of the New Order passed two bills of great consequence in quick succession. One of these provided for the sale, at a sacrifice, of the state’s valuable holdings in the stock of its own railroads, a sale which proceeded at “immense loss” until virtually all the state roads had fallen into private hands, usually those of expanding Northern railroad systems. The railroads retained the special privileges and exemptions enjoyed under state ownership, but were relieved of state control or regulation—an arrangement which made virtually inevitable “railroad control over the legislature.”¹¹

The second measure, passed within two days of the railroad bill, was the Funding Act of 1871. The act fastened upon an impoverished, war-broken state an annual interest upon the funded debt almost equal to the entire revenue of the state. The funding and railroad acts were obtained by corrupt pressure methods of a combination of bankers, bondholders, and railroads. To a recent student it is clear that “if ever Virginia bowed to money interests and pressure against the will of her people and contrary to the exigencies of the situation, it was on this occasion.”¹² Launched in this manner, the Hamiltonian financial policy of the Conservatives soon occupied such a conspicuous place in the new system that the party members came to be known as the “Funders.”

Railroads continued to share honors with bondholders in the degree of influence they exerted over the Conservative party. Whether the Funders or their rivals were in power the railroads were prominently represented. General William Mahone’s extensive railroad interests led him to seek power in the Conservative party and to take perhaps the largest individual part in bringing the Conservatives to power.¹³ Out-of-state railroads, gaining predominant influence with the Conservatives, then assisted in overthrowing Mahone’s schemes and driving him into a political revolt that removed the Conservatives temporarily from office. Even after defeat, subsequent reorganization, and return to power under the name “Democratic,” the party remained thoroughly identified with railroad interests. This is clearly indicated by the composition of the state committee of the party in the seventies, eighties, and nineties, during which period nearly every state chairman was a railroad president or director.¹⁴

Despite Kentucky’s failure to secede and join the Confederacy, no state below the Ohio River presented a more solidly Confederate-Democratic front in the decade after Appomattox. For a short time after the fear of Radical and Negro votes was quieted, a rift in the ranks opened between a weak “Bourbon” wing led by J. Stoddard Johnson’s Frankfort Kentucky Yeoman, and a powerful “New South” or businessman’s wing, whose spokesman was Henry Watterson’s Louisville Courier-Journal. The struggle was uneven and short-lived.¹⁵

Watterson’s policy called for “an intelligent appeal to the business interests and conservative elements of Northern society” and a firm alliance of those elements against radicals of all sorts. He demanded a program of subsidies, tax exemptions, and privileged franchises in order to accommodate Eastern capital and encourage its flow into the state. The constant theme of New-South editors and orators was cheap resources, business opportunities, railroad developments, and commercial enterprise.¹⁶ “Even though they might look like Southern colonels,” writes one student of the new leaders of Kentucky, “with goatee and moustaches, and speak like Southern orators, retaining these outer trappings of the olden days, the program of the ‘New Departure’ was a program of surrender.”¹⁷ The “Bourbon” opposition soon faded into the past. By September 7, 1880, Watterson could write in the Courier-Journal of the old secession leaders that “not one of them remains upon the stage of active political life.”

A multitude of interests, both in and out of the state, were served by the New Order in Kentucky, and joined in loyal support of its leaders. The railroads, the great wholesale merchants, the liquor and tobacco interests—none should be overlooked. It would be a mistake to identify the new structure with any one of its pillars and buttresses. However, the Louisville and Nashville Railroad should be singled out for special notice, not only because of its unique importance in Kentucky, but because of its remarkable influence in the affairs of other states to the southward into which it penetrated. By process of aggression, colonization, city building, and acquisition, the “L and N” gained predominance in Kentucky, and established connections with Memphis, New Orleans, Mobile, Atlanta, and Savannah. “Having here in Louisville a Railway Emperor and a Railway Bismarck,” Watterson wrote, celebrating the latest “coup de chemin de fer” of the L and N, it was not to be wondered at that they were “making a ‘United Germany’ of the Southern railways which were lying about loose … instead of leading to Louisville as they should.”¹⁸

It was characteristic of the times that in its battles to achieve monopoly, which differed in no essential from similar struggles the nation over, the L and N managed to identify its cause with that of the downtrodden South. This is the more curious in view of the road’s service to the Union army during the war, the passage of control and ownership to Northern and European capital, and the appearance in the lists of its directors of the names Jay Gould, Thomas Fortune Ryan, Jacob Schiff, and August Belmont.¹⁹ As chief lobbyist and leading light of its legal staff, however, “General Basil W. Duke, C.S.A.,” as he described himself in the title of his Reminiscences, served the L and N for twenty years. Not only in his Confederate military record, but in his family connections, his striking appearance (including the standard mustache and goatee), his literary service to the Confederate memories, and his chivalrous and attractive personality, General Duke was all that the age expected in the Kentucky colonel of the old school.²⁰

“The only inducement for railroad companies to enter politics— become parties to the dirty work—is to protect their property,” remarked Milton H. Smith, president of the L and N. He was the first to admit that this inducement alone was considerable. It was found necessary to retain “legislative agents” in various states, lawyers in all county seats through which the road ran, and in strategic places friendly judges, legislators, and officeholders of all sorts with passes in their pockets or relatives on the L and N pay roll.²¹

Revealing light is shed upon the nature of Redemption and of the Redeemers of Alabama by following the course of the Louisville and Nashville empire builders in that state. Albert Fink, one of the ablest railroad superintendents of his time, foreseeing the immense potentialities of the undeveloped mineral resources of northern Alabama, began soon after the war to make large investments in that region for the L and N, subsidizing numerous developments and encouraging the building of new towns. In this manner there were affiliated with the fortunes of the L and N many of the new industries, along with a rising class of industrialists. In the front ranks of these men was James W. Sloss, said by the Birmingham Iron Age to be “identified with the development of the industrial interests of Alabama to a greater extent than any other man in the State.”²² Sloss was closely associated, in business as well as in politics, with the most prominent leaders of the Democratic party in Alabama. Although the Panic of 1873 resulted in the transfer of ownership to Northern and European capital, the L and N continued as in the past to work in close co-operation with the state Democratic organization.²³

Behind the fury of partisan conflict during Reconstruction there proceeded a struggle between the L and N and a rival system for access to the riches of the mineral region of northern Alabama. The opposing system, the Alabama and Chattanooga Railroad, seeking to divert ore shipments from Louisville to Chattanooga for smelting, was linked in its fortunes with the Republican party through the investments of such men as Henry Clews, Russell Sage, and William D. (“Pig-Iron”) Kelley. During Reconstruction both railroads were beneficiaries of extravagant state-government aid that virtually bankrupted the state. Liabilities assumed for these two railroad systems alone, in the form of loans and endorsements of bonds, accounted for $17,000,000 of the total estimated $25,000,000 “debt” incurred after the war. That the system of state aid was inaugurated by the provisional Democratic government and manipulated to the advantage of a number of prominent party leaders did not deter the Democrats from playing up the state debt as the most sensational charge against the Carpetbag government.²⁴

The election of 1874 had more than a racial or political significance, for it would determine not only the fate of the Republican party and Reconstruction in Alabama but also which of the financial interests involved would be able to make the best possible settlement with a state government they had both brought to the point of bankruptcy. Walter L. Fleming wrote that “the campaign fund was the largest in the history of the state,” and mentioned especially the contributions of “northern Democrats and northern capitalists who had invested in the South or who owned part of the legal bonds of the state.”²⁵ It should be remembered, however, that it was just this question of the “legality” of bonds that would be determined by the outcome of the campaign to which the Northern capitalists contributed. The Conservatives won by a large majority. The L and N was by this time firmly identified with the downtrodden South and the victory of White Supremacy in Alabama.

George S. Houston, Redeemer governor of Alabama, descr...

Table of contents

• COVER
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• PREFACE TO THE PRESENT EDITION
• PREFACE TO THE ORIGINAL EDITION
• CONTENTS
• CHAPTER I THE REDEEMERS
• CHAPTER II THE FORKED ROAD TO REUNION
• CHAPTER III THE LEGACY OF RECONSTRUCTION
• CHAPTER IV PROCRUSTEAN BEDFELLOWS
• CHAPTER V THE INDUSTRIAL EVOLUTION
• CHAPTER VI THE DIVIDED MIND OF THE NEW SOUTH
• CHAPTER VII THE UNREDEEMED FARMER
• CHAPTER VIII MUDSILLS AND BOTTOM RAILS
• CHAPTER IX SOUTHERN POPULISM
• CHAPTER X REVOLT AGAINST THE EAST
• CHAPTER XI THE COLONIAL ECONOMY
• CHAPTER XII THE MISSISSIPPI PLAN AS THE AMERICAN WAY
• CHAPTER XIII THE ATLANTA COMPROMISE
• CHAPTER XIV PROGRESSIVISM—FOR WHITES ONLY
• CHAPTER XV PHILANTHROPY AND THE FORGOTTEN MAN
• CHAPTER XVI BONDS OF MIND AND SPIRIT
• CHAPTER XVII THE RETURN OF THE SOUTH
• CRITICAL ESSAY ON AUTHORITIES
• CRITICAL ESSAY ON RECENT WORKS
• INDEX