NEW SOUTH

Although often used by historians simply to designate the post-1877 period, the term New South is most prominently identified with a program of regional industrialization and agricultural diversification promoted by southern publicists, businesspeople, and politicians in the late nineteenth century.

The Civil War and Reconstruction had given certain antebellum southerners' dreams of a business-oriented, manufacturing South a new significance. The vision of a New South described by Edwin De Leon in magazine articles in the early 1870s was taken up by skillful propagandists like Henry Grady of the Atlanta Constitution, Henry Watterson of the Louisville Courier-Journal, and Richard Edmonds of the Manufacturers' Record and became a favored prescription for a rejuvenated Dixie. Instead of cultivating a few staple crops, the South, with the aid of northern investment, could become a land of industry, entrepreneurship, and scientific farming. In addition, although insisting upon white supremacy, the New South should devote itself to sectional reconciliation.

Southern industry, notably textile milling, did boom after the end of Reconstruction. Grady and his peers proclaimed their vision to have been realized. But, in fact, the region remained disproportionately poor, characterized by staple-crop monoculture, low-wage industry, and external ownership of much of its resources.

The catchphrase "New South" has not been the exclusive property of the Grady movement, however. Groups ranging from Union occupying forces in Confederate South Carolina to the twentieth-century Communist party issued publications entitled New South.