We begin our blog on Gilded Age Virginia 1880-1900 with “Promise of the New South” for the non-elite amidst rapid industrialization, and “Paradox of Southern Progressivism” to explain the rise of urban upper middle class reformers, beginning with prohibition efforts in the late 1800s. “Appalachia” focuses on the predominantly white yet still bi-racial region including Virginia and Pennsylvania, and “Race Relations in Virginia, 1870-1902” addresses the history of residual bi-racial society in Virginia following Reconstruction.
The rural black experience in Virginia is addressed in “A Nation Under Our Feet”, and “Freedpeople in the Tobacco South” looks at Virginia’s black agricultural workers and their relations with former masters and the changing tobacco world economy 1860-1900. “Lynching in the New South, 1880-1930” studies the atrocity comparatively in Georgia and Virginia, and “A Murder in Virginia” studies an example of bi-racial cooperation to find justice under the threat of lynching.
For book reviews at The Virginia Historian.com in this historical period addressing other topics, see the webpage for Gilded Age, New South, Civil Rights, New Dominion (1889-present). General surveys of Virginia History can be found at Virginia History Surveys. Other Virginia history divided by topics and time periods can be found at the webpage Books and Reviews.
Promise of the New South
Edward Ayers wrote The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction in 1992 and reprinted in 2007. It is now available on Kindle and in paperback. Ayers offers “the other half” of the New South besides the powerful businessmen who prevailed in state politics. This book focuses on the economically and socially non-elite. Railroads brought competing and conflicting visions and versions of a New South. Class as much as race kept southerners apart, even as railroads through the diverse elements together in the newly emerging commercial terminals.
Lower-class whites, evangelicals, women and blacks all have their say here. And while black-white relations remained flexible over this period, including widespread black enfranchisement into the 1890s, the impulse towards a multi-racial Populism is sacrificed at the color line, and the promise of prosperous community on big business principles resulted in widespread anxiety, resentment and crisis.
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*Edward L. Ayers and John C. Willis edited The Edge of the South: Life in Nineteenth Century Virginia in 1991. It is out of print but available online new and used in paperback. Learn more to buy “Edge of the South” for your bookshelf.
*Michael B. Chesson wrote Richmond after the War in 1981. It is out of print but available online used in paperback. Learn more to buy “Richmond After the War” for your bookshelf.
*Jack P. Maddex Jr. wrote The Virginia Conservatives, 1867-1879: A Study in Reconstruction Politics in 1970. It is out of print but available online used. Learn more to buy “Virginia Conservatives” for your bookshelf.
*Alan W. Moger wrote Virginia: Bourbonism to Byrd, 1870-1925 in 1968. It is out of print but available online used. Learn more to buy “Virginia: Bourbonism to Byrd” for your bookshelf.
*James M. Lindgren wrote Preserving the Old Dominion: Historic Preservation and Virginia Traditionalism in 1993. It is out of print but available online new and used. Learn more to buy “Preserving the Old Dominion” for your bookshelf.
Paradox of Southern Progressivism
William A. Link wrote The Paradox of Southern Progressivism in 1992. It is available on Kindle and online new and used. Reformers sought to develop democratic movements, initiate legislation, and establish state bureaucracies for social control in the areas of temperance, race relations, education, public health, child labor and woman suffrage. They met resistance endemic in Southern rural culture that prized volunteer organizations and local political control of society, so they could not sustain enforcement, regardless of legislative successes.
Link uses many examples from the upper south to explain how urban middle-class advocates came to accept racial segregation to gain reform legislation and thereby weakened their own reforms. Millworkers opposed child labor reforms, farmers removed children from school to help with crops, mountaineers resisted school consolidation, voters denied women the franchise, and liquor was widely available during state prohibition before the national amendment.
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*Henry C. Ferrell wrote Claude A. Swanson of Virginia in 1985. It is out of print but available online new and used. Learn more to buy “Claude A. Swanson” for your bookshelf.
*C.C. Pearson and J. Edwin Hendricks wrote Liquor and Anti-Liquor in Virginia 1619-1919 in 1967. It is out of print but available online used. Learn more to buy “Liquor and Anti-Liquor” for your bookshelf.
Appalachia
*John Alexander Williams wrote Appalachia: A History in 2002. It is now available on Kindle and in paperback. It comprehensively surveys the place of Appalachia, populated by Virginians and Pennsylvanians in the 18th and early 19th centuries. The change from the log cabin to white houses of sawn lumber suggested the rising wealth as the lowland southern culture extended into the mountain frontier during the 19th century, bringing rapid industrialization after the Civil War.
Following WWII, widespread deindustrialization and out migration occurred bringing a declining influence from railroads and coal mines, and increased roles for federal agencies such as the U.S. Forest Service and the National Park Service.
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*Ronald D. Eller wrote Millers, Millhands and Mountaineers: Industrialization of the Appalachian South, 1880-1930 in 1982. It is out of print but available online used. Learn more to buy “Millers, Millhands and Moutaineers” for your bookshelf.
*Crandall A. Shifflett wrote Coal Towns: Life, Work, and Culture in Company Towns of Southern Appalachia, 1880-1960 in 1991. It is out of print but available online in paperback new and used. Learn more to buy “Coal Towns” for your bookshelf.
*William A. Link wrote A Hard Country and a Lonely Place: Schooling, Society and Reform in Rural Virginia, 1870-1920 in 1986. It is out of print but available online used. Learn more to buy “Hard Country and a Lonely Place” for your bookshelf.
*G. Terry Sharrer wrote A Kind of Fate: Agricultural Change in Virginia, 1861-1920 in 2000. It is out of print but available online used. Learn more to buy “A Kind of Fate” for your bookshelf.
Race Relations in Virginia
Charles E. Wynes wrote Race Relations in Virginia, 1870-1902 in 1961. It was reprinted in 2012 and is now available in paperback. Complete ostracism, segregation and disenfranchisement for the African American did not come to Virginia until the 20th century, after the 1900 segregating railroad act and the 1902 Virginia Constitution. Virginia treated blacks better on the whole that any other southern state except perhaps South Carolina and Mississippi. However there was no “Negro rule” under the Readjuster Party of William Mahone even though legislative protections, public education and political participation were extended to blacks.
The racism of segregation and disenfranchisement was not immutably a feature of southern society. White supremacy was not generally demanded in the public sphere, and there was no popular demand for black disenfranchisement; the conservative Democrats of the disenfranchising 1902 Constitution welched on their promise to submit it to a ratification vote, and it would have failed.
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*Howard N. Rabinowitz wrote Race Relations in the Urban South, 1865-1890 in 1978. It is out of print but available online used in paperback. Learn more to buy “Race Relations” for your bookshelf.
*Jane Dailey wrote Before Jim Crow: The Politics of Race in Postemancipation Virginia in 2000. It is available on Kindle and online used. Learn more to buy “Before Jim Crow” for your bookshelf.
A Nation Under Our Feet
Steven Hahn wrote A Nation under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration in 1993 and reprinted in 2005. It is now available on Kindle and in paperback. Hahn links the slave era with the 20th century’s Great Migration through his analysis of rural grassroots immigration patterns. Emigration, separatism, self-help and racial solidarity formed the bedrock for social organization and political activities. By 1900, one fifth of the rural black population were property owners who formed the backbone of the Colored Farmers Alliance during the late 1880s.
The purchase of family land holding was a result of relationships based on family, neighbors and community institutions. The emphasis on rural blacks who were most of the African-American population replaces earlier historian emphasis on urban related emphasis on “liberal” political analysis related to American, French and Haitian ideals of civil and political equality and interracial democracy.
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Freedpeople in the Tobacco South
Jeffrey R. Kerr-Ritchie wrote Freedpeople in the Tobacco South: Virginia, 1860-1900 in 1999. It is now available in paperback. He examines the postwar political economy of Virginia’s emancipated tobacco workers, from their interactions with former masters to define free labor to larger market forces of the global capitalization of the tobacco industry.
Even though confronted with political and workplace, Conservative victory at the polls, and the decline of the Freedman’s Bureau, African-American tobacco workers in Virginia maintained a certain economic independence. The 1873 Panic and its extended depression, competition from western and international tobacco producers, and loss of demand for dark tobacco with the rise of the cigarette industry, all led to a manufacturing monopoly seizing control of tobacco.
Both the collapse of legal protections to sharecroppers afforded by crop lien laws and the emergence of the monopolistic American Tobacco Company led to a temporary rise in farmers’ alliances and elected representatives. Though these faltered in the long run, younger African-Americans migrated to urban Virginia, West Virginia mines and Northeast cities and sent home money. Falling prices in the 1890s forced many white planters to sell off parcels of their acreage, and older black generations were able to gain a plot of land so that by 1900, more than a quarter of African-Americans in the dark tobacco belt were independent farmers.
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*Crandall A. Shifflett wrote Patronage and Poverty in the Tobacco South: Louisa County, 1860-1900 in 1982. It is out of print but available online new and used. Learn more to buy “Patronage and Poverty” for your bookshelf.
Lynching in the New South
Fitzhugh Brundage wrote Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880-1930 in 1993. It is now available in paperback. He tracks the course of mob violence as the extreme form of racial control, although whites were also lynched. Lynchings as planned attacks against individuals were most often carried out against accused murderers, but sexual crimes or even verbal offences sometimes met with retribution for motives of chivalry and honor.
Over a fifty-year period, Brundage studies the 86 lychings in Virginia and the 460 in Georgia, describing the complex and contradictory character of the violence as it varied geographically within states and across time. Rarely occurring in towns or cities with rapid economic transformation, it flourished as a means of social control within the boundaries of the plantation South where there was sharecropping, mono-agriculture and strict segregation. Racial violence there was initially unopposed either by institutions or individuals.
One-third of the book is devoted to the opposition to lynching and its eventual disappearance. In Virginia, there was a strong conservative white opposition to lynching, perhaps more due to a concern for law and order than racial justice. In Georgia, Progressive reformers along with religious and civic organizations mobilized against it.
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*Samuel N. Pincus wrote The Virginia Supreme Court, Blacks and the Law, 1870-1902 in 1990. It is out of print but may be available in your central library or by interlibrary loan.
A Murder in Virginia
Suzanne Lebsock wrote A murder in Virginia: Southern Justice on Trial in 2003. It is now available in paperback. The 1895 murder of a white farm woman in rural Lunenburg County, Virginia brought about the accusation and trial of one black man and three black women implicated by the black man, William Henry (Solomon) Marable, a sawmill worker from North Carolina. At first Governor Charles T. O’Ferrall, former U.S. Representative and Colonel of Confederate Cavalry, feared a lynching, and dispatched a regiment of Richmond militia to guard the jail.
The racially integrated jury convicted all four defendants, but crusader John Mitchell of the black Richmond Planet assembled a white defense team supported by the black Richmond Women’s League. The appeals mistrials and trials before all white juries led to the acquittal of the three women and the conviction of Marable to hanging. Marable implicated a white man as an accomplice just before his execution. The remarkable of Gilded Age cooperation between whites and blacks was suppressed in Jim Crow Virginian histories.
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*Edgar Toppin wrote Loyal Sons and Daughters: Virginia State University, 1882-1992 in 1992. It is out of print but may be available in your central library or by interlibrary loan.