The migration westward, which has been a constant factor in American development since early times, continued unabated after the Civil War; indeed the restless spirit aroused by the four years of conflict undoubtedly tended to increase this steady shift toward the West. By 1890 approximately a fifth of the native Americans were to be found in states other than those in which they had been born. 95,000 natives of Maine, for example, were to be found in Massachusetts; 17,000 were in California; and considerable numbers in every state between the two. The North Carolinians were equally well distributed. 43,000 were in South Carolina, 18,000 in Texas, and 5,500 in Washington. Every state had contributed to populate every other, although in general the migration tended to take place on east and west lines, and predominantly westward.
Within the westward-moving tide of population were swirling eddies—cities—which tended to attract to themselves larger and larger proportions of the surrounding people. In 1870 two men in every ten lived in cities whose population was 8,000 or more; by 1890 another man in every ten had forsaken rural life. Large cities like Boston and New York sucked in surrounding districts, and so constituted metropolitan centers with problems new to American life. Such cities as Birmingham, Kansas City, and Seattle were just appearing in 1880, but their growth was very rapid; Los Angeles increased ten fold and Minneapolis thirteen, between 1870 and 1890; Denver, having received ten newcomers between 1860 and 1870, added 102,000 in the following twenty years. In the country as a whole the concentration in cities was most marked in the area north of the Potomac and Ohio rivers and east of the Mississippi; the South remained rural, as before the war. With the growth of urban population came questions of lighting and water supply, street railway transportation and municipal government, industry, education, health and morals.[2]
Immigration, another constant factor in American development, underwent important changes during the twenty-five years from 1865 to 1890. Greater in prosperous years and smaller during years of depression, the inward tide reached its climax in 1882, when 789,000 aliens reached the new world. That year, in several respects, was a turning point in the history of immigration into the United States. It was in this year that the Chinese were excluded; that immigration from Italy, Austria-Hungary, and Russia became of sufficient size to be impressive; and that the first inclusive federal immigration act was passed. The immigration law of 1882 defined, in general, the policy which the nation has pursued ever since. It placed a tax of fifty cents on all incomers to be paid by the ship companies; it forbade the landing of objectionable persons, such as convicts and lunatics; and it placed on the owners of vessels the expense of returning immigrants not permitted to land. All these provisions were amended or developed in later laws, like that of 1885 forbidding persons or corporations to prepay the transportation of laborers or to encourage immigration under contract to perform work. The greater part of the foreign population settled in the manufacturing and urban North. Put into simplest terms, the census of 1890 showed that of every hundred aliens who had come to the United States between 1870 and 1890, thirty-seven were to be found in the states from Maine to Pennsylvania, four from Delaware to Texas, forty-seven from Ohio to Kansas and twelve in the Far West (for the most part Chinese).
Of the great economic interests of the United States, the most widespread was agriculture. In the Northeast, to be sure, the amount of improved farm land had been growing steadily less since 1850 and the people had been turning their energies into other activities. In the South, on the other hand, agriculture formed the main economic resource and the twenty-five years following the war were, for the most part, consumed in recovering from that struggle. Although conditions varied from place to place, the situation in many portions of the South was little short of pitiable. Not only were factories, public buildings and railroads, houses and barns, tools and seeds destroyed, capital and credit gone, mining at a standstill and banks ruined, but bands of thieves infested many districts, federal officers were frequently dishonest and defrauded the people, and the entire labor system was wiped out at a stroke. The negroes had not been ideal workmen as slaves; now, as freedmen, they found difficulty in adjusting themselves to the economic obligations of their new status, and evinced a tendency to rove about restlessly, instead of settling down to the stern task of helping to rebuild the shattered South.
It was manifest that the first problem was to revive the agricultural activities of the old days, and that the main resource must be cotton, the demand for which in the markets of the North and of Europe was such as to make it the best "money crop." A labor system was introduced known as share-farming or cropping. Under this system the plantation owner who had more property than he could cultivate under the new conditions let parts of his land to tenants, supplying them with buildings, tools, seed and perhaps credit at the village store for the supplies necessary for the year. The tenant, who had neither money nor credit with which to buy land, furnished the labor, and at the harvest each received a specified share of the product, commonly a half. The system had its disadvantages; it kept the farmer always in debt, and since the only valuable security which the plantation owner had was the crop—the land being almost unsalable—he insisted on the cultivation of cotton, which was a safe crop, and avoided experimentation and diversification. On the other hand, the system enabled the land owner to take advantage of the labor supply and to supervise the untutored negro,—and it kept the South alive. In addition to the large plantations, cultivated by several tenant farmers, the number of small farms tilled by independent owners or renters increased. Due to this tendency and to the opening of many small holdings in the Southwest, the size of the average farm diminished, so that the small farmer began to replace the plantation owner as the typical southerner.
Owing to the insistence of land owners upon cotton culture, the South first caught up with its ante-bellum production in the cultivation of this staple, for shortly before 1880 the crop exceeded that of 1860. The production of tobacco, the second great southern crop, sharply shifted after the war from the Atlantic Coast states, except North Carolina, to the Mississippi region, especially to Kentucky. Maryland, indeed, never again produced much more than half as great a crop as she did in 1860, while Virginia did not equal her former record until the opening of the twentieth century, although the South as a whole recovered in the late eighties. Rice culture, likewise, did not recover readily for South Carolina alone produced almost as much in 1860 as the entire South in 1890, and not until the development of production in Louisiana after 1890 did the crop assume its former importance. The production of sugar in Louisiana in 1890 was but little greater than it had been in 1860, and in the production of cereals the South did not keep pace with the upper Mississippi Valley before 1890. On the other hand the rapid growth of Texas was one of the outstanding features of southern development during the period, for that state improved an amount of farm land between 1870 and 1890, roughly equivalent to the combined areas of New Hampshire, Vermont, and Massachusetts. There was observable, moreover, a certain hopefulness, a certain resiliency of purpose, a pride in the achievements of the past and in the possibilities of the future. In these respects the South was a new South by 1890.
Greater than the South as a food-producing area, was the belt of states from Ohio and Michigan to Kansas and the Dakotas:
Where there's more of reaping and less of sowing,
That's where the West begins.
The increased occupation of the public lands, the growth of population, improvements in transportation and the greater use of agricultural machinery, which could be employed to advantage on the large and relatively level farms, led to developments that were destined to have an important effect on the history of the nation. Agricultural machinery, such as the reaper, had been known long before the war, but the reduction of the labor supply from 1861 to 1865 had compelled farmers to replace men with machines. A reaper that merely cut the grain and tossed it aside, gave way at last to one which not only cut the grain, but gathered it into sheaves and bound the sheaves with twine. So great was the effect of the harvester upon western agriculture that William H. Seward declared that it "pushed the frontier westward at the rate of thirty miles a year."
Due to the facts already mentioned, the number of mid-western farms increased nearly a million from 1870 to 1890, and the acreage in improved farm land grew by an amount equivalent to the combined areas of the British Isles, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Denmark, with a generous margin to spare. The production of corn, wheat, oats and other cereals became so great as to demand an outlet to the East and to the markets of the world. Elevators for the storage of grain were constructed with a capacity of 300,000 to 1,000,000 bushels, and improvements were made in the methods of loading and unloading the product. Despite the growth of the agricultural interests of the Middle West, however, the farmer did not reach prosperity. For twenty years after 1873 prices fell steadily both in the United States and in other countries of the world, and the agricultural classes found themselves receiving a smaller and smaller return for their products. Unrest grew to distress, and distress to acute depression, while the demands of the farmers for relief frequently determined the trend of mid-western politics.[3]