Southern Capitalists by Laurence Shore

Author:Laurence Shore [Shore, Laurence]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, United States, State & Local, South (AL; AR; FL; GA; KY; LA; MS; NC; SC; TN; VA; WV), 19th Century
ISBN: 9781469647845
Google: MQlpDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Published: 2018-08-25T00:43:18+00:00

6. Across War and Reconstruction Old Leaders and Economic Reorientation

31 July 1871. The University of Georgia at Athens. The Alumni Society asks Benjamin H. Hill to deliver an address to the university. Hill, a former slaveholder and representative of slaveholders, had been a Union man before secession but a great ally of Jefferson Davis during the war. In 1867-68 he had been one of the most virulent opponents of Congress’s Reconstruction Acts, raging that “I was disfranchised … and my slaves had the right to form the government under which I lived.” Two years later a disastrous venture in cotton planting and free black labor had ruined him financially. But Hill now strides to the speaker’s platform and makes an impassioned plea for Southern compliance to the Reconstruction measures. And he does much more. He speaks at length about the South’s economic history and the best program for the South’s future. He urges Southerners “to do many things which these very derided Northern people have done.” In particular, he argues that Southerners must now “find in our children that skilled labor which was impossible in the ignorant negro slave”1

Hill had compelling personal reasons to change his views. By 1871 he was no longer a lawyer-planter, but a lawyer-railroad entrepreneur. Moreover, to win a bid on a railroad lease he had had to join forces with his longtime, bitter political opponent, former governor Joseph E. Brown. Brown, at this time, was a member of the ruling Republican party. Hill was thus tainted by Republican business associates. Public justification of his new activities necessarily involved development of a new position on the proper political and economic response of Southerners to Reconstruction.2

Justification began in December 1870, in the form of a letter to the people of Georgia. Hill advised acceptance of and obedience to the very measures he had vowed never to accept. The sudden convergence of Hill’s new views and new interests, however, had not sat well with some Georgia Democrats. This segment of white society hurled the charge of traitor at him. His popularity plummeted. The 1871 Athens address damaged him further. To many Georgians he came across as a self-serving critic of Southern civilization, as he identified causes of previous Southern economic weaknesses and framed an agenda that glorified a Northern model.3

Yet this address would become a basis of Hill’s political success within a few years, when he reemerged as one of Georgia’s Democratic leaders (United States congressman, 1875-77, and United States senator from 1877-82). The address would also become the basis of journalist Henry W. Grady’s “New South” vision. To be sure, the address was self-serving and correctly labelled as such. But it was self-serving in an immensely clever way. Hill successfully embedded his personal interest in a program for regional prosperity. Enunciation of this program or of some variant would become central to the success of “Redeemer” politicians. Even Joseph E. Brown, who had actually joined the despised Republicans, could and did emerge as a Democratic leader after

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