Synthesis Essay: The New South After The Civil War

During the 1880s, Henry Grady from Atlanta, Georgia coined the phrase the “New South”. He started this phrase due to the fact he believed the South should stray from agrarian culture and focus on industrial expansion. This dream of Grady did not go as planned. The south found itself sinking even deeper into poverty, depending on the North even more for goods and resources, and the criminal rate was exponentially increasing. Besides the low wages and availability of convict labor, the South was struggling to maintain a steady income due to its lack of economic development. The Fifteenth Amendment only made that harder for white slave owners as slaves made up most of the work force in the South. “As late as the 1930s, President Franklin D. Roosevelt would declare the South the nation's “number one” economic problem.” (Foner, 649). After the Civil war, everything in the South would change, and the Reconstruction

Slavery was such a norm anything else seemed crazy, and after the Civil War, the Fifteenth Amendment abolished slavery, and this was a dramatic change to the South. Even though, by law, slaves were said to be free, they were neither free or treated as such. The mindset of Southerners did not change, and African Americans were still deemed as lower than white men, and certain states still operated with segregated communities. This cruelty to African Americans was also exercised by law enforcement. African Americans were easily arrested for petty crimes, such as, raising their voice to loud, and vagrancy, to name just a few. How African Americans were treated socially in the South after the Civil War, fits into the question, were African Americans free after the war, and no, they were not. Legally they were, by law they were, which you think would end that question instantly, but it didn't. African Americans were treated cruel even after the Fifteenth