In 1861, the South Carolina legislature viewed Abraham Lincoln’s presidential election as a threat to the institution of slavery. It called for a state convention and voted to secede from the United States. Six more slaveholding states followed: Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas. These states were part of an agricultural regional economy particularly dependent on cotton, through a plantation system that relied on the labor of enslaved black people. Four more slaveholding states also threatened to secede: Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina. Together, these eleven states formed the Confederate States of America. Meanwhile, the western part of Virginia formed the new state of West Virginia, which was admitted into the Union in 1863.
The Civil War, which lasted from 1861 to 1865, was a pivotal point in U.S. and world history. It created internal refugees of more than 1 million formerly enslaved Africans from the slaveholding South, an estimated 200,000 of whom fought for the Union Army. Of the 40,000 black soldiers who died fighting on the side of the Union, 75 percent died of disease. In addition to Blacks, the U.S. Colored Troops also included Asian, Pacific Islander, and Native American soldiers. This led some to view the war as an imperial and colonial one, due to fundamental questions such as the status of Chinese labor and the settlement of Indigenous lands. The war was bloody, deadly, and destructive, with an estimated death toll of up to 750,000, mostly in southern and border states, and mostly from infection and disease. Formerly enslaved Blacks comprised the majority of civilian deaths. More than one in five Southern men between the ages of 20 and 24 in 1860 died in the war. By the end of the war, governments in many places in the South were gone; infrastructure, homes, and farms, destroyed.
At the end of the war, plantation owners quickly instituted an exploitative system of sharecropping and tenant farming. Sharecropping was far harsher than tenant farming, requiring sharecroppers to rent both the land and tools, plant what the landowner wanted, and pay the landowner the majority of the harvested crops. Formerly enslaved black people comprised the majority of sharecroppers, whereas poor Whites were more likely to be tenant farmers, with the freedom to plant what they wanted and keep a greater share of their crops (though they were still under the thumb of landowners). There emerged a kind of agricultural ladder with wageworkers and sharecroppers at the bottom, tenant farmers in the middle, and property owners at the top. This created a racial labor rivalry in which white wageworkers seeking work on farms were often rejected in favor of cheaper black workers. In addition, Black Codes criminalized the everyday behavior of newly freed black people and fed a system of convict leasing, in which state governments leased convicts out for labor, which filled public coffers in every confederate state except Virginia for 60 years.
Far from resolving the question of race in America, Reconstruction efforts following the Civil War sparked the formation of the Ku Klux Klan in 1865. The White League and other white terrorist organizations sought to restore the white supremacist rules of the Old South and overthrow Reconstruction’s Republican governors. The Klan declined in the mid-1870s once the system of Jim Crow restored white supremacy but reemerged in 1915 in response to labor competition and massive immigration, particularly from southern and eastern Europe.
During the period following the war, fierce debates took place over the question of “coolie†(specifically indentured Chinese) labor, used both by plantations in the South (e.g. Louisiana, Alabama) and by railroad companies in the West. Coolies came to represent both cheap labor for planters and industrialists following Emancipation, and despised racial rivals for white industrial workers. Both of these views animated the U.S. regime of Asian exclusion that reigned for the duration of the 19th Century and more than half of the 20th Century. In Coolies and Cane: Race, Labor, and Sugar in the Age of Emancipation, historian Moon-Ho Jung tells this story from the years following the end of the Civil War:
“By the summer of 1871… most of Alabama’s Chinese railroad workers would find their way down to Louisiana… Approximately five hundred Chinese laborers abandoned the Alabama and Chattanooga Railroad at once, making their way to Mobile and thence to various locales in Louisiana…
S. L. James, who leased and ran the state penitentiary in Baton Rouge, was among the first employers to resort to financial inducements, luring Chinese laborers from Alabama and nearby sugar plantations… at twenty-two dollars per month in March 1871. Anxious to maximize production, James soon employed more than 150 Chinese workers to operate the penitentiary’s cotton mills at night to supplement the day shift supply of convict labor. High wages alone, however, proved inadequate to contain and retain them. In June 1871, the Chinese organized an uprising that had to be suppressed by the police. After trying them for a few more months, James reportedly discharged them all ‘in disgust.’ Legions of sugar planters welcomed these and other Chinese workers with open arms and pocketbooks…â€
Meanwhile, the forced removal of Indigenous peoples opened up new land available for cultivation in the west. This in turn created demands for transportation such as railroads and for technological innovations in farming. By 1900, one man could produce as much as 20 in 1860, and 430 million new acres had been converted to farmland. The massive surplus production drove prices down, which was good for city dwellers but bad for farmers—they found themselves squeezed out of the demand for goods being imported from the agricultural economies in South America and Europe.
This led people to organize. The 1867 Granger movement, which started as a social project, became politicized with the emergence of economic crises such as the 1873 panic. Railroad monopolies, which also controlled grain storage, became the target of Grangers, farmers’ alliances, and industrial unions, all demanding collective ownership of equipment and mills, shared banking (early credit unions), and regulation through state laws.
Learn more about resistance in this time period.