The New South

Georgia’s most prominent character during the years of the Redeemers was not a politician but rather a newspaper man who became the “Spokesman of the New South.” Henry W. Grady, editor of the Atlanta Constitution, endorsed the Bourbon Triumvirates Brown and Gordon for office in his influential editorials, while imagining a South in harmony with the North’s industrial aspirations.  In a speech delivered in 1886 to a meeting of the New England Society at Delmonico’s Restaurant in New York City, he cautiously apologized for the southerners’ part in the Civil War and for defending slavery. Grady then waxed eloquent over the virtues of a “New South,” assuring his listeners that the South had learned its lesson.

Grady and other promoters of the New South “prosperity” endorsed a program of developing industry, diversifying crops for the South, and moving toward a more harmonious system of race relations in which blacks stayed 'in their place' and deferred to white leadership.  These goals were to be connected to the Old South’s romantic virtues of civility and heroism, and the notion that slavery, although better dead, had been a benign institution. 

The Lost Cause

Old South memories played out through the Civil War and the Lost Cause.  Whites invented a collective memory of the past based on the myth of harmonious race relations.  The Lost Cause has been called a civil religion where believers could worship at the shrine of fallen heroes and revere the lost saints of the battlefield.  In Richmond elaborate measures were taken to establish and maintain the reputations of Robert E. Lee as a great general and Jefferson Davis as a worthy president of the Confederacy through immense statues planted on Monument Row.

Women and the Lost Cause

White southern women made a powerful contribution to the creation of the Lost Cause collective memory.  In the years just after the war, they formed Ladies’ Memorial Associations that raised money for the grisly task of finding the remains of southern soldiers slain on battlefields or those who had died in hospitals. Re-interring them in church graveyards, town cemeteries, or later on in Confederate cemeteries, and decorating their graves became part of their Lost Cause mission.   By the 1890s, many of these same women had formed the United Daughters of the Confederacy, where they focused on raising statues to the common soldier in towns across the South, preserving historic landmarks, such as Lee’s Chapel at Lexington, Virginia, and funding grand projects such as the Confederate Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery. Just as women found their way to celebrate the Lost Cause, veterans founded the United Confederate Veterans Association and the Sons of Confederate Veterans, which provided the Old Confederate veterans with reunions, parades, and barbecues in memory of their sacrifices.

The New South and Education

Although some New South apologists marched ahead while looking to the region’s past, Henry Grady saw the future of the South in technological institutions. Hence he lobbied for the creation of the Georgia School of Technology (today Georgia Institute of Technology), which opened in 1888 and initially trained young men for industrial and vocational work.  Other southern states followed this example. Grady made sure that Atlanta’s name became a symbol for technological advancement in the region;   thus he helped bring to the city three cotton expositions in 1881, 1887, and 1895 that brought jobs and dollars to the state and raised a banner over a New South.