The Civil War destroyed the South's infrastructure and the slave system that fueled the region's economy. In its place new industries grew in the years following the conflict. The region's cities expanded at unprecedented rates. Meanwhile, white and black residents of rural areas found themselves facing new and severe challenges. White farmers faced mounting debts and often lost their farms. Former slaves soon found their new freedoms being chipped away through a combination of debt peonage, crop liens, and lengthy incarceration for petty offenses. Thousands of whites and blacks in Georgia left the countryside for the emerging cities.
Early labor movements founded by the Knights of Labor, among others, and agrarian protests led by populist reformers spoke to the problems that urban workers and farmers faced in the years following the Civil War. In Georgia's cities, a fledgling trade union movement slowly emerged. By the turn of the century, unions had made major inroads in Atlanta and the rest of Georgia, despite fierce opposition from the region's new industrialists.
For former slaves, the initial years after the Civil War initially marked a time of freedom. But the region's new industrialists quickly made ties with the old planter class. They created a system of convict labor in the 1860s and 1870s designed both to keep former slaves in line on the region's plantations and to provide cheap forced labor to build a transportation infrastructure. They also constructed the system to allow industrialists to use convict labor to staff the South's industries.
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