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This introductory chapter provides an overview of the institutional transformation of the American South after the U.S. Civil War. Although the emancipation of former slaves and political upheavals of Radical Reconstruction are perhaps the most evident features of this institutional transformation, it touched upon almost every aspect of Southern society, ranging from urban life to class structure to the organizations that populated the region's agriculture and industry. The New South that resulted after Radical Reconstruction evidenced a more capitalist and market-driven society than its antebellum counterpart. Enduring uncertainty was a defining feature of this transition between precapitalist and capitalist institutions. The chapter then formulates a general theory regarding the evolution of uncertainty over the course of institutional transformation, and discusses the specific transitions toward capitalism that occurred in the economy of the U.S. South during the postbellum era.

This chapter assesses whether the class structure of the South changed in the postbellum era and whether different individual and locational attributes predicted who would come to occupy preferred social positions. It suggests another source of categorical uncertainty during Reconstruction and beyond. While many Southern journalists and politicians celebrated the expansion of an entrepreneurial middle class at the time, this class actually declined numerically in the proverbial New South. Moreover, the “decaying” planter class was remarkably persistent, both in its dominance of the top of the wealth distribution and its involvement in the postwar industrialization of the region. The social categories of planters and middling Southerners that were deployed in popular discourse—and within the “New South Creed”—thus had little in common with the reality of class structure following the Civil War.

This chapter argues that familiar paths to economic development such as investments in railroad infrastructure, banking, and market centers, produced unpredictable returns for Southern communities in the decades after the war. Confronted with new forms of commerce, boosters faced not only uncertainty in anticipating how much economic and demographic growth to expect from their communities, but also categorical uncertainty in deciding what paths to economic revitalization might be possible. Under conditions of profound change, the most reliable approach for postbellum communities to secure capital investments, attract new residents, and increase the production of local goods was to create organizational forms that were present in other comparable communities, thereby avoiding accusations of idiosyncrasy. This produced a remarkable pattern of economic underdevelopment, and by 1900, most small Southern towns were tied to cotton monocropping and a homogeneous pattern of retailing.

This concluding chapter summarizes the evidence gathered for the postbellum South and compares it with other postemancipation projects in the Americas. The common pattern of gradual emancipation seen in former colonial possessions in the Caribbean and South America has considerable similarity with early efforts to manage uncertainty in the era of Radical Reconstruction. As in the case of the American South, those postemancipation projects soon fell victim to competing claims and mobilization among landowners, workers, and other parties, leading to profound and durable uncertainty in the economies of former slave societies. Even in the twenty-first century, some of this durable uncertainty remains as the United States struggle with the legacies of slavery and emancipation.

This short coda discusses how the Civil War figures in the narrative of chance’s rise in America. Though often taken to announce the broad emergence of chance in American thought and culture, the Civil War is actually less of a dramatic break, not only because discourses of chance had already emerged (and indeed, shaped experiences of the War) but also because providential thinking powerfully survived in the postbellum period. Taking Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s The Gates Ajar as a case study, the coda suggests how America continues to grapple with the possibilities of chance.

The chapter discusses the meaning of the ubiquitous notion of a “New Negro” which appears periodically in postbellum American society. Most scholars have failed to penetrate the rich and varied cultural sources of the black masses. The Negroes came to occupy an increasingly prominent place in the natural consciousness during the postwar era in the United States. Knowledge of the historical Negro is still obscured by the myths and stereotypes of the past. The problem with the concept of the New Negro is that it has not centered upon crucial external developments. One study concluded that Negroes were infantilized by the system of slavery. They were virtually reduced to a state of perpetual childhood where their sense of self came from the master class upon whom they depended and who constituted their only “significant others”. The concept of the New Negro requires serious modification.

After the Civil War, gender and racial expectations remained fluid. The antebellum social hierarchy could not be completely resurrected and the postbellum society could only function with some sort of reciprocity. These expectations changed on every level- from courtship to common law marriage to legal marriage. Women of New Orleans demanded the right to be free from violence.

The chapter opens with the arrival of a celebrated Spiritualist from the North, Cora L. V. Hatch Daniels, who has traveled with her baby girl and Colonel Nathan Daniels to New Orleans. Daniels–formerly an officer with the Native Guard, now a federal register–had many social and political connections with the black Creoles. The young family’s sojourn ends tragically. The Afro-Creoles make notable social and political advances, including admittance to French Freemasonry’s affiliates and equal access to public schools. Chaotic postbellum politics switches into high gear under the carpetbagger administration of Governor Warmoth. Henry Rey’s séance circle enters its heyday, and the chapter delves into the topics of the spiritual communications and the popular messengers, especially venerated Catholic Church leaders. The passing of Valmour in 1869 and Lieutenant Governor Oscar Dunn in 1872 are discussed. The chapter ends with Rey being appointed to the lucrative position of Third District Assessor.

Stephen Crane published his classic novel about the Civil War, The Red Badge of Courage, in 1895, a full three decades after hostilities ended. Crane's tale, a major document of American realism, incarnates the ex post facto spirit. Crane's novella of a black stable hand who loses his face while saving a white child alerts us to another element in the postbellum détente that hampered dissent: the modernized reach of the doxa. The Red Badge of Courage and The Monster were both products of the post-Reconstruction depths, a temporal congruity too often overlooked in their usual isolation as narratives about, respectively, the Civil War and small-town parochialism. The Monster (1899) was also the context for his reimagining of the clash between North and South. The tale about the ostracizing of a physician for his allegiance to a damaged black stable hand is a strongest evidence for Crane's alienation from his culture's ideological rigidities.

This chapter demonstrates that, with social relations in a state of flux after the war, many Irish editors pressed an agenda that sought to break down, rather than build up, walls around the American polity. By demanding the right, bought with their blood, to pledge simultaneous loyalty to their new and old homes, the Irish successfully broadened how postbellum Americans thought about citizenship and mobility. The postbellum years were a period of fluidity in which notions of nationality and citizenship, turned upside down by war, were redefined. Immigrant groups, such as Irish Catholics, whose numbers were being continually augmented by a steady stream of newcomers, sought to use their military service as a lever to establish equality between native-born and naturalized citizens.

This chapter discusses political reform through an examination of transatlantic liberal ideas about public opinion, political participation, and the party system. Liberal men of letters demonstrated an unwavering belief in politics by continuing their involvement in public life, offering sharp postbellum criticisms and expressing the same sense of duty that prompted their earlier attacks on slavery.

The fourth chapter analyzes the top tier of an ethnic network that brought credit from global financiers to the merchants and farmers of the Gulf South. Through the lens of Lehman Brothers, this chapter explores how networks carried global investment to the Gulf South. This occurred in an era where business transactions were based on trust, which was often fostered by shared ethnicity—largely confining Jewish and non-Jewish networks to separate spheres. Lehman Brothers, for example, worked closely with Jewish-owned banking houses such as Lazard Frères, J. W. Seligman & Co., and Kuhn, Loeb & Co., in much the same way that Anglo-American banks such as J. P. Morgan & Co. cultivated networks with other non-Jewish businesses. Utilizing these ethnic networks, Lehman Brothers brought international investment to America, and continuing to rely on ethnicity to build trust, the firm loaned money to scores of cotton businesses in the Gulf South, many of which were also operated by Jews. With access to this credit via ethnic networks, these businesses could survive downturns in the economy and thrive in the postbellum milieu.

This book begins by focusing on one of the earliest race histories of the postbellum period, The Rising Son; or, Antecedents of the Colored Race, authored by fugitive slave and abolitionist William Wells Brown. No stranger to racial agitation or prognosis, Brown had been an active participant in the antislavery movement. During the controversy over the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, he fled to England to avoid recapture and reenslavement, and played an important role in the transatlantic abolitionist community, a closely knit group of black abolitionists who lectured throughout Europe from the 1830s to the beginning of the Civil War. It was no surprise, then, that Brown, as he had done throughout the antebellum period, utilized the power of the pen to right the injustices of the past and present.

This chapter treats the Far West, the Upper South, and the Midwest in the mid-to-late 1850s as a laboratory for a variety of lynching violence that would become widespread in the postbellum era. The cultural conflict over the direction of criminal justice took on particular intensity at midcentury, as a result of reformers' success in modifying criminal law, increasing attention to and concerns about perceived threats to sectional identity, and the challenges posed by the rapid growth of a novel, multicultural social landscape with the American incorporation of California and the ensuing Gold Rush. Within these dynamic southern, midwestern, and western cultural and legal contexts, lynchers performed collective violence that protested the administration of criminal justice, particularly the adjudication of homicide cases.

This concluding chapter reflects on the changing perceptions of clerkship that arose in postbellum America. The Civil War had offered some opportunities for these young men to exercise their manhood where clerkships had failed them. Another method was to apply for the “freedoms” of a wage economy during the postwar period. No longer young men on the make, they would become either union members or company men within hierarchical corporations, depending on their access to that capital. Furthermore, the chapter argues that these nineteenth-century clerks' stories of the self and the social help illustrate how capitalism—including the cultural narratives that tout its opportunities and explain away its inequalities—has shaped Americans' worldviews to this day.

This chapter traces the emergence of modern southern gospel forward from its Reconstruction roots. It pays attention to the abiding influence of the songbook publisher, songwriter, romantic poet, and melancholic Civil War veteran Aldine S. Kieffer. As the more creative half of the Ruebush–Kieffer songbook publishing empire, Kieffer played an inimitable role in the industrialization of southern gospel at a pivotal moment when shape-note music education was transitioning from a paraprofessional recreation to a commercialized economy based on songbooks and increasingly professionalized music teachers and singers. In the process, this chapter makes the first comprehensive case in extant scholarship for Kieffer as the most important originator of modern southern gospel discourse, an archetypal figure whose work in early southern gospel infuses the music with a lasting concern for tensions between the self and society that arise from sociocultural upheaval in the postbellum South.