AP U.S. History Practice Test 11

How New Was the New South?

Boosters of a “New South” in the 1880s and 1890s promised that railroads, textile mills, and iron furnaces would free the region from its dependence on cotton and bring it into the national industrial economy. Some of that promise was realized: Birmingham became an iron and steel center, and cotton mills spread across the Carolina Piedmont.

Yet industrial growth rested on the same foundations that had limited the region before the war. Northern investors supplied much of the capital and claimed much of the profit, mill owners relied on low-wage labor, and most Southerners, Black and white, remained tied to the land. Tenant farming and the crop-lien system kept farmers in debt and bound to cotton even as prices fell. Above all, the region’s leaders built economic modernization on a political order that excluded African Americans from power. The New South was new in its factories more than in its social structure.

Interpretation written for PrepBanq practice (secondary source, historian’s perspective)