Nation of Nations Concise 2/e Davidson, Gienapp, Heyrman, Lytle, & Stoff
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As its title indicates, this chapter links two regions into one story. Hence the chapter opens with the tale 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. Though their history and geography differ in most ways, important similarities link the two 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 some 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 South came late to industrialization, and lacked both expertise and an effective educational system. More fundamentally, the 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

For whites in the postwar South, life was often lived in tension between the pleasurable attractions of sport and leisure and the more restrictive ideals of Christian piety. In addition, social life was separated along gender lines. Most social activities reflected the rural character of the South and fell into male and female domains. When not working, men loved to hunt and gamble. 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, the church was at the center of southern life. Here too services often separated men and women; churches were primarily female domains. The annual camp meeting illustrated the fact that besides spiritual uplift churches provided welcome chances to socialize.

Division by gender was overshadowed, however, by division by race. 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 racial 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.

Western Frontiers

Conflicts also affected-in different ways-the changing settlement of lands beyond the Mississippi. That came about partly because Indians, Hispanics and newly arrived white settlers held markedly different attitudes toward the natural environment. Europeans saw nature as something to exploit systematically. Indians altered and 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.

White development of the resources of the Great Plains and mountainous West was held back by two barriers: 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 Dakota (Sioux) in Minnesota sporadic guerrilla wars erupted between whites and Indians. One climactic battle occurred when bands of Sioux and Northern Cheyenne forces trapped Colonel George Armstrong Custer's Seventh 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. Nor could well-intentioned reform reconcile contrasting cultures. Under the Dawes Act, reformers tried to draw Indians out of communal tribal cultures and turn them into independent farmers. But the idea of individual land allotments 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 which swelled the railroad towns, more urban in character, also changed the character of the Hispanic Southwest.

Boom and Bust in the West

Whites often caused the West to develop nature's resources; as with industrial development, such industries fell into a pattern of boom and bust, economic concentration, and wage-labor specialization. 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. Control over transportation gave the railroad companies enormous influence over the region's economic and political life. Railroad builders wielded their power ruthlessly, resulting in a distinct ambivalence of Westerners toward the indispensable rails.

Cattle ranchers soon drove huge herds of steers to the new rail heads extending into the vacated grasslands of the plains. 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 in the mid-1880s took the boom out of the cattle business.

The Final Frontier

The lure of cheap land under the Homestead Act also brought a flood of farmers into the once lightly settled high plains. 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. Sod houses on treeless land, prairie fires, blizzards and rural isolation were among the difficulties facing farm families in the western plains. Among those who stayed, the church, as in the South, offered some solace and social life. Also as in the South, alienation from the mainstream of industrial America would breed resentment and ultimately political revolt.

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