The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction

by Edward L. Ayers

At a public picnic in the South in the 1890s, a young man paid five cents for his first chance to hear the revolutionary Edison talking machine. He eagerly listened as the soundman placed the needle down, only to find that through the tubes he held to his ears came the chilling sounds of a lynching. In this story, with its blend of new technology and old hatreds, genteel picnics and mob violence, Edward Ayers captures the history of the South in the years between Reconstruction and the turn of the century.

Ranging from the Georgia coast to the Tennessee mountains, from the power brokers to tenant farmers, Ayers depicts a land of startling contrasts. Ayers takes us from remote Southern towns, revolutionized by the spread of the railroads, to the statehouses where Democratic Redeemers swept away the legacy of Reconstruction; from the small farmers, trapped into growing nothing but cotton, to the new industries of Birmingham; from abuse and intimacy in the family to tumultuous public meetings of the prohibitionists. He explores every aspect of society, politics, and the economy, detailing the importance of each in the emerging New South. Central to the entire story is the role of race relations, from alliances and friendships between blacks and whites to the spread of Jim Crows laws and disfranchisement. The teeming nineteenth-century South comes to life in these pages.

When this book first appeared in 1992, it won a broad array of prizes and was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. The citation for the National Book Award declared Promise of the New South a vivid and masterfully detailed picture of the evolution of a new society. The Atlantic called it "one of the broadest and most original interpretations of southern history of the past twenty years.

Genres: History, American History, Nonfiction, Civil War, Race, 19th Century, The United States Of America

592 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1992

About the author

Edward Ayers is President Emeritus of the University of Richmond, where he now serves as Tucker-Boatwright Professor of the Humanities. Previously Dean of Arts and Sciences at the University of Virginia, where he began teaching in 1980, Ayers was named the National Professor of the Year by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching in 2003.

A historian of the American South, Ayers has written and edited 10 books. The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. In the Presence of Mine Enemies: Civil War in the Heart of America won the Bancroft Prize for distinguished writing in American history and the Beveridge Prize for the best book in English on the history of the Americas since 1492. He was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2013.

A pioneer in digital history, Ayers created "The Valley of the Shadow: Two Communities in the American Civil War," a website that has attracted millions of users and won major prizes in the teaching of history. He serves as co-editor of the Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States at the University of Richmond's Digital Scholarship Lab and is a co-host of BackStory with the American History Guys, a nationally syndicated radio show and podcast.

Ayers has received a presidential appointment to the National Council on the Humanities, served as a Fulbright professor in the Netherlands, and been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Reviews

[Jessi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ayers evocatively writes of both the promise and disadvantage of the "New South" of the 1880's and 1890's. In the end, he makes a strong case what limited the south the most on the national scene was its brutal legacy of racism, segregation, disenfranchisement, and lynching.

[David Carniglia · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a very informative book, very comprehensive; but maybe too wide-ranging. The chapter on race relations was probably the best; and there's plenty of race-related aspects in other chapters as well. That's not to say that race was the only significant issue in the post-Civil War South, but it was the most powerful issue.

Although the book is well-written, and ably supported with photos, illustrations, and a plethora of charts and other data, there's maybe too much territory (thematically more than literally) to maintain a central focus. We've got, in addition to race and politics: agriculture, towns, cities, commerce and banking, the railroads, labor relations, women's suffrage, temperance, religion and domestic life, literature...As mentioned, race crosses over to other themes, as does womens' perspective, and politics.

What shakes out of this intricate arrangement are some big picture items (populism, peonage, the significance of cotton), and some fascinating tidbits (the invention of coca-cola, the standardization of railroad gauges, and time zones). But there's bits and pieces of many topics dotting each chapter. Given the format, that's inevitable, but that makes a textbook survey out of what might've been a more specialized analysis.

It's interesting to know, for example, that the country store was one of very few venues that wasn't segregated, and that a sense of commonality and mutual respect was observed between hunters and fishermen regardless of race. But I was not expecting the lengthy description of how such stores were sustained by an elaborate, informal credit system. In other instances, though, more detail might've helped; for example, with the share-cropping and peonage systems.

The implicit point, that these measures to contain and control the black population were a legalized substitute for slavery, points out the irony between the existential belief that blacks, who had to be kept out of the mainstream of (white) Southern society, were nevertheless crucial in sustaining the white-controlled economy that this society rested on.

Another topic that was deeply involved in both race and politics, disenfranchisement, gets plenty of coverage here. A cunning bunch of laws, in these various states (particularly the completely subjective "understanding" clauses), were deliberately written to get around the mandates of Federal laws to exclude as many black voters as possible. Here the author's statistics make his point with devastating impact: some states' voting participation dropped to a fraction of the levels common in years prior to more restrictive voting legislation.

In short, this book succeeds best as a resource and reference on the Gilded Age era in Southern history. But some topics could use a few more chapters, and other topics might've been relegated to notes. The broad focus is not limited to the number of topics or themes. What for example, was particularly Southern about the development of railroads in this era? Or rural life? Or Populism? And so on. Even the race issue, central as it is to understanding Southern society, wasn't only a Southern concern.

With the exception of the chapter on Southern writers, which rightly gives Mark Twain due regard, Missouri is apparently not included as part of the South. Ok, there's no rules about that--but both Kentucky and West Virginia are counted; I would probably add Missouri if I were to include the other two states.

A useful book on Southetn history; maybe not start-to-finish, but there's plenty here worth thinking about.

[David Bates · Rating 5 out of 5]

Edward L. Ayers’ 1992 work The Promise of the New South is in many ways a complimentary work to Woodward’s Origins of the New South, drawing on an intervening generation of scholarship to craft a social history of Southern life in the aftermath of Reconstruction. Ayers’ South is a region emerging from a past of turmoil and devastation, in which “symmetrical rows of slave cabins had been knocked into a jumble of tenant shacks” and “fields grew wild because it did not pay to farm them. Children came upon bones and rusting weapons when they played in the woods.” Rather than defining the people of the post-Redemption South by their poverty and increasingly institutionalized injustice, Ayers seeks to recapture the hopeful spirit many felt in those years, and the yearning for “a fresh start, a chance to catch up with the rest of the nation while avoiding the mistakes of the North.” Everywhere Southerners of both races were on the move, seeking better lives down roads and expanding railways, settling in the new villages and towns that were rising to become the focal points of rural county life. If the terrors of Redemption were fresh memory, the world that emerged from its fire and ash was no blessed salvation. As a correspondent of the Atlantic Monthly wrote in 1882, “there was everywhere a sense of hollowness, of the unreality of the issues and grounds of dispute between the parties; a half-suppressed cry – sometimes agonizing in its intensity . . . They were ‘waiting for a chance,’ to use an expression which one constantly hears from them.’” Ayers’ captures the expanding horizons, cultural invention and tortuous economic frustrations that defined lives, but also the passionate reaching out of Southerners for a world which in many ways always fell short of being born. “You stand for the yearning, upward tendency of the middle and lower classes” Ayers quotes Tom Watson as calling to a gathered crowd in the winter of 1892. Here he follows Woodward more than halfway in his interpretation of the Populist groundswell; the last and greatest of many moments of burning promise before the ominous silence of the Solid South took hold. Focused on the social dimensions of Southern history, Ayers’ account is free to focus on the regional consequence of the failure of the People’s Party rather than engaging Woodward’s larger historical framework.

[Samantha · Rating 2 out of 5]

so.....

this book read like a textbook. one faith you inject into the author of a book on an historical subject is that they will color their account with as much personality as historical observation allows.

yet, instead of providing adequate criticism of the new south, as such a title like "Promise" would, well, promise, it read like a grocery list of aspects of the new south lifestyle.

the most interesting chapter was the one on POPULISM, arguably the least exciting subject in American history, so Kudos for that, and any dissection of black life was relegated to a paragraph's worth of material shoved in at the end of each chapter.

the parts about rural to urban migration proved rather entertaining, insomuch as, people at the end of the 19th century in the south are retards, and the subject really writes itself. additionally, any parts about religion were good reads.

he reserves the last TEN pages of a 440 page book about the horrifying circumstances confronting the black population as a whole, so that was a little disturbing.

add in two convoluted and useless chapters about music and literature, a lot of incoherent sentence structure, at least 20 grammatical errors, too many commas...and, voila, 2 stars.

it took me three months to make it through this book.

[Dan Gorman · Rating 4 out of 5]

1/27/2017: This thorough but long volume tells the story of the South after Reconstruction failed. Ayers does a good job showing the inroads that railroads, telegraphs, and other modern technology made into the South. He makes it clear that these innovations did not disrupt a credit-based economy that tied many poor farmers — white and black — in place. And then there was the Jim Crow system, with all its violence, authoritarianism, and paranoia. I liked that Ayers devoted significant passages to the African American experience in the New South, showing in detail how black authors and intellectuals, as well as ordinary people, protested the conditions into which they were forced. Two chapters of the book felt like padding, as if Ayers wanted to shove excess material into the final draft. Yet the book remains educational and fascinating. Some passages are so elegant that they feel like a joy to read.

11/26/2018: I do not remember which two chapters felt like padding. Re-reading this book, I better appreciated Ayers's narrative of fusion politics (black politicians and voters cutting deals with white Democrats) giving way to the disfranchisement of black voters. This book's discussion of Populism reinforces the discussion of the movement in Jackson Lears's "Rebirth of a Nation" and Robert McMath's "American Populism."

[Alex · Rating 2 out of 5]

An important work on Reconstruction and Gilded Age Southern life, but not a very rewarding one. His frequent use of the word "mulatto" to refer to mixed race people in his text (as opposed to in quotations) was wildly inappropriate and should have been edited when the book was reissued. I found his treatment of jazz in New Orleans overly reliant on secondary sources and showed little familiarity with working musicians or the race relations in the city that produced it. Ultimately, Ayers went too big and painted in broad strokes that left his book at once unwieldy and overwhelming. While this is a classic in modern scholarship, it is not one that I enjoyed nor would I recommend. Ayers' contribution to the field is critical, but it is time to move on. Big picture histories serve a purpose, but rarely do they serve their topics well, and this is no exception.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

A terrific, engaging look at the South just after Reconstruction ended. The book encompasses diverse subjects (books, singing, mining, politics, alliances, race, women, catalogs, logging, country life, town life, general stores, farming, trains...the list is exhaustive) and is bound to teach even the strongest of Southern scholars a thing or two about the region. It tells its story using clips from newspapers and journals, zeroing in upon the human element to depict the struggles and concerns of the people at the time. The 15th anniversary update includes a note from the author which help to frame the time period in which he worked on it, and helps the reader to get a general understanding of how he wrote it.

[Patrick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Magnificent history of a forgotten period and region, the South from the end of Reconstruction after the 1876 presidential election until the early Twentieth Century, when democracy (both for blacks and poor whites) was basically ground out of existence through brutality and state terrorism. Some great revelations about the Populist Party, it's threat to the existing social order, and the methods used to crush it.

[Ted Hunt · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best book on the post-Reconstruction South that is out there. It shows that there was not one "New South" evolving in a linear fashion, but many "souths," changing in fits and starts, in a far more complicated way than previous studies have presented. And for music fans, there is a great chapter on the music of the era, which examines the origins of the musical forms that became country, jazz, and blues.

[Greg · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent! Ayers provides a dense and demanding overview of the culture, politics, economics, religion, and arts of the New South between Reconstruction and the Atlanta Race Riots. Well written and persuasive in its arguments.