rase "New South" or to have been the first to bring it to public attention. He had used it as early as 1874 in an editorial, and he knew then that it had been used by others before.
The term New South was first used in 1862, less than a year after the start of the war. Captain Adam Badeau then edited a new newspaper called The New South, dedicated to the idea that the South was inaugurating a new era. No comprehensive program was included as to what this new South would be like, and the newspaper was in fact heavily military in tone. The newspaper was not widely read and did not last long, and the name faded from memory. The term was used in a positive sense five years after the war, standing now as a symbol for a specific and indigenous movement of social, economic, and intellectual regeneration. In the years immediately following the war, Southerners responded in a number of different ways to their defeat and to the revolutionary changes brought about by emancipation. Some were still filled with hatred and belligerence and wanted to restore the old order by giving the Negro a status as near slavery as possible, while others despaired of all programs to save the region and instead proposed mass migration. Most Southerners did not see these as real choices, however, and were instead drawn to the idea of a new order to fit the circumstances.
The phrase "the New South" would still be in use into this century, though it did not necessarily refer to the same movement started in the nineteenth century. In 1919, Holland Thompson would write that there was indeed a New South, though it did not necessarily conform to the way the term was usually used, since he saw that term as more often misunderstood:
Men have written as if the phrase indicated a new land and a new civilization, utterly unlike anything that had existed before and involving a sharp break with the history and the traditions of the past. Nothing could be m...