Woodward C. Vann - Origins of the new South: 1877-1913

A HISTORY OF THE SOUTH

VOLUMES IN THE SERIES

I THE SOUTHERN COLONIES IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY, 1607-1689
by Wesley Frank Craven

II THE SOUTHERN COLONIES IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY, 1689-1763
(forthcoming)

III THE SOUTH IN THE REVOLUTION, 1763-1789
by John R. Alden

IV THE SOUTH IN THE NEW NATION, 1789-1819
by Thomas P. Abernethy

V THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOUTHERN SECTIONALISM, 1819-1848
by Charles S. Sydnor

VI THE GROWTH OF SOUTHERN NATIONALISM, 1848-1861
by Avery O. Craven

VII THE CONFEDERATE STATES OF AMERICA, 1861-1865
by E. Merton Coulter

VIII THE SOUTH DURING RECONSTRUCTION, 1865-1877
by E. Merton Coulter

IX ORIGINS OF THE NEW SOUTH, 1877-1913
by C. Vann Woodward

X THE EMERGENCE OF THE NEW SOUTH, ,1913-1946
by George B. Tindall

Volume IX

ORIGINS OF THE NEW SOUTH
1877-1913

A HISTORY
OF
THE SOUTH

Volume IX

EDITORS
WENDELL HOLMES STEPHENSON
E. MERTON COULTER

BY C. VANN WOODWARD

With a critical essay on recent works
by Charles B. Dew

LOUISIANA STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS
THE LITTLEFIELD FUND FOR SOUTHERN
HISTORY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS

ISBN-13: 978-0-8071-0009-7 (cloth)
ISBN-13: 978-0-8071-0019-6 (paper)

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 77-168397

Published by Louisiana State University Press
Copyright 1951, 1971, by Louisiana State University Press
and the Littlefield Fund for Southern History,
the University of Texas
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
Designed by Robert Josephy
2009 printing

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

T HE twenty years that have passed since this book was first published have witnessed unprecedented changes in the region about which it was written, an unprecedented amount of historical publication on the period it treated, and some significant changes in the way history is written and the questions that are asked of it.

Most striking are the changes that have overtaken the South since 1951. Long unique among the regions of the nation for abrupt and drastic breaks in the continuity of its history, the South in the last two decades has been overwhelmed with changes equal to or perhaps exceeding in abruptness and extent of social upheaval any preceding period, including the one covered in this book and even the period preceding it. As pointed out in the preface to an earlier printing, the shadow of an anachronism had already overtaken the title of the volume. What could be regarded as the origins of living institutions with ties of continuity running back to the 1870s at the time the book was written, could no longer be so regarded. The New South had already slipped into history and taken its place as one of several Old Souths of the past, just as distinctive and just as superseded. The author, of course, did not share then the advantages of perspective that these years of change afford the present reader.

The outpouring of historical scholarship during these twenty years is related to the swiftness and abruptness of social change that accompanied it. Changes in the present have always provoked new questions about the past and stimulated the rewriting of history. The amplitude and range of scholarly research on the South in the period 1877 to 1913 published since 1951 are indicated by the extensive bibliography compiled by Professor Charles B. Dew for this edition. Containing thousands of titles, it lists new works on virtually every subject treated in this book. On some subjects numerous monographs and articles have appeared in the last two decades. Even though the Critical Essay on Authorities for the original edition was not so exhaustive as the bibliography Professor Dew has prepared, a comparison of the two bibliographies suggests that more has probably been written on the subject since 1951 than in all the years before.

Republishing the original edition of 1951 without any revision is certainly not meant to suggest that the historical scholarship of the last twenty years has made no contribution worthy of notice. On the contrary, it has significantly increased our understanding of the subject in hundreds of ways. Had I written the book in the early 1970s instead of the early 1950s, I should have taken advantage of this recent scholarship and produced a different and, I hope, a better book. I should also have had the advantage of the added perspective and the stimulus of new questions raised by the swift changes and historical developments of recent years. It is even possible that I should have been able to make use of some of the new historical techniques, methods, and insights that have matured in the last two decades to improve the quality of scholarship.

But that would have been a different book, the product of another period, written under other circumstances and influences. Faced with a somewhat similar problem, Richard Hofstadter once wrote that after a period of years a book acquires an independent life, and the author may be so fortunate as to achieve a certain healthy detachment from it, which reconciles him to letting it stand on its own. In that spirit, I have decided to risk letting this book stand on its own. Revision where it is needed must be the task of others. More important, a new synthesis awaits the pen of a historian with another world view, fresher insights, and perhaps a different philosophy of history. It would already appear to be time for him to be about his work.

C.V.W.

New Haven, May, 1971

A MERICAN historians, generally speaking, have taken the New South at its word and accepted its professions of nationalism to justify a neglect of regional history. After a more-or-less detailed treatment of the South duriyng Reconstruction, the general histories of the United States have been governed by the tacit assumption that the South is adequately covered by the various phases of national history, and the perverse section is disposed of with cursory reference to progress, poor whites, and the race problem. The historians cannot be blamed for this neglect, as Southern scholars themselves have connived in it and sometimes justified it.

Part of the difficulty lies in the phrase New South. It is not a place name, as is New England, nor does it precisely designate a period, as does the Confederacy. From the beginning it had the color of a slogan, a rallying cry. It vaguely set apart those whose faith lay in the future from those whose heart was with the past. It suggested moods ranging from forthright recantation to an affable and uncritical optimism. It was invariably ladened with a hopeful nationalism suggesting that the lately disaffected South was at last one in faith with the countryor would be as soon as a few more bonds were sold, another appropriation was passed, the depression was ended, or the new railroad was completed. Those who have undertaken to write of the New South have not always been careful to dissociate themselves from the implication of the phrase as a popular slogan. Unconsciously, perhaps, they have emphasized those aspects of the regions history that are most congenial to the New-South mentality.

If it were possible to dispense with a phrase of such wide currency, I would not use the name New South except to designate an ill-defined group of Southerners. Unfortunately, the vocabulary of the subject and period is cluttered with a remarkable number of clichs that give the historian trouble and lead to popular misapprehension. In addition to New South there are, for example, Bourbon, poor white, Solid South, Redemption. Some of them are productive of so much mischief that I have consciously avoided them. Others, equally mischievous, seem unavoidable. The historian may deplore the injustice of the term carpetbagger when it falls alike upon the just and the unjust, but he is no more able to dispense with it than was the carpetbagger himself.