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How did the economy of the New South differ from and resemble the past economy?
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The economy of the New South retained similarities to the past with sharecropping replacing slavery, maintaining racial and economic inequalities. However, it also differed through industrialization, with growth in railroads, mining, and textiles, creating new urban centers and opportunities. Wealth remained concentrated among a few white families, but the region began diversifying agriculture and investing in public education, leading to improved literacy rates and some economic mobility for those willing to adapt.
While many economic changes happened in the period referred to as the New South, racial segregation and abusive labor practices for poor and especially black people are still a major hallmark of the era. Jim Crow laws and "separate but equal" policies worked to keep black people from accessing economic or political resources and kept massive numbers of black people in jail where the 13th amendment worked hand-in-hand with convict leasing systems to keep a huge number of black people suffering under systems of captivity and forced labor.
The primary changes that did occur were in the forms of labor people participated in. Plantation labor transformed from slavery into the nearly identical "sharecropping," but factories were also built, and mining operations and railroads expanded tremendously. Many poor descendants of rural settlers, who did have land, were also coerced during this time by factory and mining operations, which worked to move...
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them to cities or company towns. This created dense, industry-based population centers and increased many people's economic dependence on their employers and on waged labor overall.
In many ways, the economy of the New South was quite similar to that of the old. Sharecropping took the place of slavery in many places, and many poor whites and blacks found themselves tied to land through debt with few prospects of upward mobility. Wealth was in the hands of a select few whites, though many of the families who had been wealthy in antebellum times lost everything during the war.
On the other hand, the New South's economy was quite different from that of the old. Many of the old plantations were broken up into smaller farms, as the former planters did not see any point in keeping large farms without their slave labor. These smaller farms diversified into raising beef cattle, corn, and hay. The New South also invited railroad investment into the region, as well as iron production and a textile industry. While the region would grow slowly compared to the North, which was rapidly becoming a haven for immigrants, the economy of the postwar South was becoming industrialized, and this offered more opportunities for those willing to take them. Education also grew as an industry in the region—one of the greatest legacies of Reconstruction was funding public education. Literacy rates in the South significantly improved after the Civil War.