Nation of Nations 3/e Davidson, Gienapp, Heyrman, Lytle, and Stoff
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THE CHAPTER IN PERSPECTIVE

As Chapters 15 and 16 (on the Civil War and Reconstruction) made clear, sectionalism had long been a source of conflict in American society. The Civil War was fought in part to prevent the forces of sectionalism from dividing the Union. Even so, the regional geographies, economies, and cultures of the South and the West continued to set them apart as distinct sections. In both sections, ethnic and racial conflict led to widespread violence and the development of social caste systems to justify segregation of African Americans, Indians, Hispanics, and Asians. But the West and South cannot be viewed as regions isolated from the increasingly industrialized Northeast and Midwest; far from it. As this chapter will show, the process of industrialization and urbanization described in Chapters 18 and 19 had a powerful impact on the South and West, even though both regions depended heavily on agriculture and the exploitation of natural resources.

OVERVIEW

As its title indicates, this chapter is in some ways two stories in one. That is why the chapter opens with the story 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. Their story links the two regions. Though their history and geography differ in most ways, important similarities link the regions. Both 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. And both resorted to segregation and violence to maintain racial caste systems.

The Southern Burden

After the Civil War many Southerners saw industrialization as one way to restore prosperity. But the southern economy remained wedded to cotton. The shortage of credit and cash for wages gave rise to tenantry and sharecropping. That system left most poor black and white farmers hopelessly in debt. Even the rapid growth of industries like railroads, textiles, and tobacco could not overcome the poverty of the region. The problem was not so much that the South was a "colony" of the industrial North. Rather, the rapid natural increase in population and low wages in southern agriculture made it difficult to attract skilled labor and enough outside capital to help the South develop a more diversified economy.

Life in the New South

Southerners not only rebuilt the region's economy after the Civil War, they constructed a new social system to replace slavery. Once the North adopted a laissez-faire approach to race relations, the South was able to create a "Jim Crow" system of segregation. Newly erected legal codes forbade blacks and whites from mingling in almost any public place. Thus, blacks and whites were socially separated and blacks could not compete for most jobs. The Supreme Court gave segregation constitutional authority in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). The Court would not view separate facilities as discriminatory so long as they were equal, though they seldom were.

Southern social life was separated along gender lines as well as racial ones. Most social activities reflected the rural character of the South and fell into male and female domains. When not working, men loved to hunt, gamble, and court danger. Women socialized around more domestic activities like quilting. Most rural folk looked forward to trips to town. Especially during court week town offered a variety of entertainments and opportunities to do business. More than the town, however, church was at the center of southern life. Here too services were generally divided along gender lines. Besides spiritual uplift church provided a welcome chance to socialize.

Western Frontiers

The conflicts of race also affected the changing settlement of lands beyond the Mississippi. That came about partly because Indians and newly arrived white settlers held markedly different attitudes toward the land. Europeans saw nature as something to exploit systematically and were prepared to do so through a system of world markets. Indians exploited the land in their own ways, but their populations were less dense and their religious beliefs encouraged a view of the land as a complex web of animals, plants and other natural elements, all with souls of their own.

The intense development of the West's resources thus threatened the Indian way of life. Beyond Indian resistance, two barriers limited white settlement: the difficulty of transportation over vast distances and the scarcity of water. The Homestead Act of 1862 and the completion of the transcontinental railroad by 1869 made settlement and development more attractive in the West. Visionaries like William Gilpin underestimated the limits imposed on the West by the scarcity of water. John Wesley Powell had a more realistic view of the water problem, but his ideas were too restrictive for those who saw the West as a new garden landscape.

The War for the West

To remove the Indians, whites adopted a policy of concentrating them on reservations. When that failed, violence resulted. After the 1862 uprising of the Santee Sioux in Minnesota sporadic guerrilla wars erupted between whites and Indians. 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 Dawes Act reformers tried to draw Indians out of communal tribal cultures and turn them into independent farmers. That well-intended reform struck as hard a blow to Indian life as did war. Similarly, Hispanos in the southwest saw their way of life challenged by the spread of Anglos to their region. 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, more urban in character, also changed the character of the Hispanic Southwest.

Boom and Bust in the West

Silver and gold strikes brought the earliest waves of fortune-hunters into the West, particularly in California, Nevada, and parts of the Rockies. Then followed the railroads, which linked the region to urban markets in the East and Europe. The builders of the railroads often resorted to ruthless and corrupt means as they raced to link the West to the East. They exploited both Chinese and Irish laborers. Control over transportation gave the railroad companies enormous influence over the region's economic and political life.

Cattle ranchers soon moved huge herds of steers into the vacated grasslands and drove them along the cattle trails to the new rail heads. As with railroads, large corporations came to dominate the cattle industry. Violence sometimes erupted between sheep and cattle interests. But in the end nature proved even more violent, as blizzard and drought from 1886-1887 took the boom out of the cattle business.

The Final Frontier

The growing demand for food and lure of cheap land under the Homestead Act also brought farmers into the once lightly settled high plains. Conflict often erupted as ranchers and farmers each tried to impose their ways on the land. But the farmers, like the ranchers, eventually ran up against harsh realities. The best lands were far from free and farmers required expensive equipment to meet the conditions of the western environment. Droughts, grasshopper plagues, prairie fires, blizzards and rural isolation were among the difficulties facing farm families in the western plains. Many left defeated, but among those who stayed, the church offered some solace and social life. Eventually the frustrations of western farmers boiled over into an agrarian revolt which will be described in Chapter 21.

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