Module 1: Introduction to the Post-Civil War South

 

The Civil War was the single most important break point in American history. That it plays the same role in our S&L southern ED history should be logical. Thus far our history argues after 1800 the United States developed into two, competing, and dramatically opposed regional economies and their regional policy systems polarized from the start. Bluntly during the Early Republic (antebellum South) our nation had yet to unite and agree on a common set of governance principles, and was unable to rationalize or meaningfully integrate their wildly divergent economic bases. While there is no denying there was overlap, both were in aggregate agricultural, democratic politically, and even the South flirted with industrialization, but socially and culturally there were very serious differences and this reflected upon regional ED strategies and produce dramatically varying goals.

The Civil War simply put destroyed the economic base of the South, burnt what few cities it had developed, and reduced to ashes what manufacturing and transportation infrastructure it had developed. It destroyed a generation, and left for generations after a bitter legacy that one might argue still has yet to be reconciled.More to the point, the South was devastated;  it remains to this day the nation’s poorest region.

To be sure, the South today has recovered from the Civil War’s economic devastation–but it took the better part of one hundred years to do so. A good part of the reason why it took so long was an imposed Reconstruction crushed southern policy systems, the loss of southern policy/political autonomy which today expresses itself in a decentralized federalism, and whatever else, Reconstruction formally ended slavery and enfranchised Blacks. Economically, however, Reconstruction left a negative heritage–for both white and black, rich and poor. The South was at an economic and political crossroads–presiding over a destroyed antebellum economic system, destroyed by an industrial power, it seemingly had little choice than to in some fashion integrate itself into the dominant system.

In such a context, one might think there would be no “going back” to the antebellum South–a “back to the future” deja vu economic path. Except that’s what happened. Why that happened does much to explain the South’s lost years until WWII, and it also reinforced the divergent regional approaches to economic development. The South wound up neither accepting nor rejecting either of the two ED paths. Whatever else it did it created an immense economic and political lag between the two regions, an open sore some might say, that never healed. Economic development was in many ways, the ground zero, the vortex policy area that could not escape, nor could not heal that open wound. The evolution of American economic development, as a policy area and a profession, was savagely reshaped and distorted as a consequence.

Reconstruction (1865-76) was the ‘hinge” transition period between the antebellum/Early Republic and the post-Civil War Eras.  The North proceeded into the industrial Gilded Age, and the South formed Redeemer policy systems and re-fabricated as best it could the antebellum South. The latter proved a near-absolute disaster, producing decidedly mixed economic economic results that left the South in what seemed to be perpetual poverty and political isolation. As to its policy systems, Jim Crow is remains a contemporary fixation in our current political polarization. In the last few years we are now engaged in tearing down monuments and changing institutional names that draw from during this still hotly controversial period.

Southern reconstruction is a strange, fascinating, albeit brief period, but as an economic developer it is surprisingly rich in its heritage and insight. More than any other lesson, it demonstrates how a jurisdiction’s policy system is fundamental to the formulation and implementation of ED policy.

In many, many ways the period discussed in the next two modules (1865-1880) focus on the development of post-Civil War southern policy systems. The first (the Civil War and Reconstruction) argues that Reconstruction was horribly botched in terms of economic development.  We still suffer from that legacy. Instead of opening a new Age as the 1815 Treaty of Vienna did for Europe, Appomattox and the Reconstruction offered an incoherent and grossly incomplete peace, with no discernible path into modernity nor national economic integration. It left in the South a political vacuum that the South filled with a reconstructed antebellum economy, jerry-rigged to incorporate industrialism as need be to allow the low wage, low service, export agricultural economy to persist–in an ever increasing hostile global environment.

During the twenty years after Reconstruction’s end (1876), the South struggled to refashion its policy system–the required first step for effective MED strategies and programs. MED was caught in the cross-hairs of that struggle, inserting a wedge between North and South.  MED/CD periodically erupted into policy wars throughout our subsequent history. But in many ways, the South’s Redeemer “Divided Mind” concerning which path it should follow, industrialization or agriculture, also meant the South was at war with itself. That “Divided Mind” is outlined in the module following the Civil War and Reconstruction.

I argue it took twenty years to essentially accommodate its antebellum cotton-dominated agriculture base to its Redeemer policy systems. That it took so long to fabricate what proved to be an ineffective, morally reprehensible, and thoroughly flawed policy system burdened its MED strategies and programs, and often tilted them into directions at odds with long-term economic growth and national integration. That will open us up to our fifth mini-series (E) that will be introduced in the module entitled “the First New South“. Southern industrialization and urbanization did develop after 1880. Still, southern economic growth was fragile, encumbered by lack of capital that by the first decade of the 20th Century allowed Gilded Age northern Big Cities to economically reconquer the South, leaving it little more than a northern colony in the minds of many.

That heritage added salt to the unhealed wounds, and contributed to the South’s 20th Century MED path.

For those in need of a brief description in what is a poorly understood period of our history, I include below an optional outline of Reconstruction, designed to supplement the next two modules.

Optional Background

Overview of Federal-Imposed Reconstruction

There were two Reconstruction periods: Presidential (1863-67) and Congressional (1867-77). Most of what we know about Reconstruction today relates to the Congressional period. During the Presidential Reconstruction the South retained most of its sub-state governmental sovereignty, and while subject to military control, state legislatures continued to function “normally”. While today’s students are told in textbooks that Reconstruction ended in 1876, Tennessee (President Johnson’s home state) was the first to be readmitted into the Union (1866) and allowed Congressional representation. By 1876 only two states had not been readmitted. The first take away is that Reconstruction at most was a decade; for many states it was half that–the other half was near-anarchy sanitized by the Union Army.

Emancipation effectively ended the pre-Civil War “southern” policy system. It also revolutionized the Deep South cotton empire. In other words, “the Civil War was transformational”–as if the reader didn’t know. The 1865 Thirteenth Amendment ended slavery and the 1866 Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed African-American citizenship; it did not extend voting rights to Blacks, however. The last “Reconstruction” constitutional amendment, the Fifteenth in 1868, provided Blacks the right to vote was ratified in 1870. Its ratification became highly partisan with Democrats mostly opposing it, and Republicans in favor.

Polarization proved important as it coincided with Reconstruction’s establishment of one-party (Democratic) southern S&L policy systems–a “Solid South”. One-Party non-competitive policy systems are significantly different in their processes and policy-making than competitive two-party. For this reason alone, and there are plenty more, it is necessary to view American S&L ED in regional terms.

In March 1865 Congress created the Freedman’s Bureau to protect and integrate former slaves into politics, society and the economy and specifically to provide medical care, education, and a savings bank. If the North evolved its ethnic immigrant “machine” it might be with some exaggeration that I consider the Freedman’s Bureau (a Federal-level CDO, with branches in each state and major cities/counties) to be its equivalent. Arguably, one might also consider the Bureau as an agricultural workforce agency. The 1866 federal Southern Homestead Act provided temporary preferential homesteading to 46 million acres of southern land, with Bureau oversight.

One might wonder if this model can serve as a starting point for an attack on rural poverty/decline. The Bureau, after a glass of good bourbon, could be construed as a CD-equivalent to the MED Tennessee Valley Authority–if properly designed/decentralized.” Over President Johnson’s veto the Bureau’s powers were expanded to try any who deprived Freedman of their civil rights, including the right to make/sell contracts and property. This, for better or worse, effectively legalized sharecropping contracts and urban employment for freed slaves. That, however, didn’t stop several states from adopting “Black Codes” in the immediate aftermath of the war, although state “Black Codes” were eventually nullified.

In frustration at Reconstruction’s slow pace and southern anti-black reactions, the northern electorate in November 1866 swept (radical) Republicans to majorities in every northern state legislature, and two-thirds majority in both houses of Congress. By early 1867 Congress had broken with Johnson (and shortly attempted impeachment), and taken over the Reconstruction policy. The ten states of the Confederacy that remained outside of the Union were broken into five military districts, enforced with 20,000 Union troops with some loss of state sovereignty.

In the years that followed each state individually strove to meet federal requirements to be readmitted to the Union and Congress. Among these requirements were incorporation of the three recently approved constitutional amendments into new state constitutions and their electoral processes. With passage of the three constitutional amendments in place, the Congressional period was characterized by a state/sub-state electoral process that was tossed completely upside down when compared to the antebellum period. The franchise was removed from Confederate elites; slaves were free to vote–and did. The effect on southern state policy systems varied state to state, further shaken and stirred by the Panic of 1873, and the incremental evolution of new state and local political/economic coalitions that rose in reaction to both.

But in the intervening years–until the state was readmitted and it reconstituted its state and local sovereignty through passage of yet another round of state constitutions–the Reconstruction/transition policy systems, local and state, entertained any number of MED strategies at both levels in an effort to not only restore their economy, but to change it as well. Whatever their merits, and there is case to be made they were quite helpful in furthering the South’s long term economic growth, the political and cultural blow back that resulted from Reconstruction was decidedly a barrier of such magnitude to balanced , modern-era economic growth. Among other effects, the Reconstruction legacy reinforced and reconstructed yet another stab at a distinctly southern “back to the future path/strategy for economic development and growth.

Supposedly, Reconstruction ended with the 1876 Presidential election. That hotly contested election did not produce an electoral victory for either Samuel Tilden (D) or Rutherford B. Hayes (R). Tilden won the popular vote, but was one vote shy of an electoral majority. Voting in three states was challenged in the House–twenty electoral votes in total. Hayes needed all twenty, Tilden only one. An 1877 Congressional commission awarded Hayes all twenty–the consequence of a backroom deal, dubbed the Compromise of 1877.

The Compromise traded an absence of a southern filibuster for removal of federal troops, and a federal commitment to subsidize southern railroad infrastructure and other internal ED improvements intended to facilitate southern industrialization and business development–a sort of federal Marshall Plan.  With considerable irony, Reconstruction ended only because southern Congressional votes resolved the partisan dispute. This is because by 1876 only two southern states (of the eleven) had not been readmitted to the Union.

President Hayes withdrew the military, but no federal assistance for southern infrastructure or business development program ever materialized. There was no Civil War Marshall Plan for the American South.