So familiar, it sends a chill:
“Spend nothing unless absolutely necessary,” Gov. George F. Drew advised the Florida legislature in 1877, and lawmakers took his advice to heart, abolishing the penitentiary, thus saving $25,000, and abandoning a nearly completed Agricultural College, leaving the state without any institution of higher learning, public or private. Alabama’s Redeemers closed public hospitals at Montgomery and Talladega and Louisiana’s were “so economical that . . . state services to the people almost disappeared.” Similar reductions affected provisions for the insane and blind as well as appropriations for Southern paupers, despite the lingering effects of the economic depression….Public education–described as a “luxury” by one Redeemer governor–was especially hard hit, as some states all but dismantled the education systems established during Reconstruction. Texas began charging fees in its schools, while Mississippi and Alabama abolished statewide school taxes, placing the entire burden of funding on the only state in the Union in which the percentage of native whites unable to read or write actually rose between 1880 and 1900. [emphasis added]
Read the whole quote from Reconstruction at Blog2L2.
Foner, E. (1988). Reconstruction: America’s unfinished revolution, 1863-1877. New York: Perennial Classics.
