Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Preface to the new edition
- Acknowledgments
- A note to the reader
- Chapter 1 What did freedom mean?
- Chapter 2 The legacy of slavery
- Chapter 3 The myth of the prostrate South
- Chapter 4 The demise of the plantation
- Chapter 5 Agricultural reconstruction
- Chapter 6 Financial reconstruction
- Chapter 7 The emergence of the merchants' territorial monopoly
- Chapter 8 The trap of debt peonage
- Chapter 9 The roots of southern poverty
- STATISTICAL APPENDIXES
- DATA APPENDIX
- Epilogue
- A Bibliography of Literature on the South after 1977
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 9 - The roots of southern poverty
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 October 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Preface to the new edition
- Acknowledgments
- A note to the reader
- Chapter 1 What did freedom mean?
- Chapter 2 The legacy of slavery
- Chapter 3 The myth of the prostrate South
- Chapter 4 The demise of the plantation
- Chapter 5 Agricultural reconstruction
- Chapter 6 Financial reconstruction
- Chapter 7 The emergence of the merchants' territorial monopoly
- Chapter 8 The trap of debt peonage
- Chapter 9 The roots of southern poverty
- STATISTICAL APPENDIXES
- DATA APPENDIX
- Epilogue
- A Bibliography of Literature on the South after 1977
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Twenty-odd years ago … I fondly imagined a great era of prosperity for the South. Guided by history and by a knowledge of our people and our climatic and physicial advantages, I saw in anticipation all her tribulations ended, all her scars healed, and all the ravages of war forgotten, and I beheld the South greater, richer and mightier than when she molded the political policy of the whole country. But year by year these hopes, chastened by experience, have waned and faded, until now, instead of beholding the glorious South of my imagination, I see her sons poorer than when the war ceased his ravages, weaker than when rehabilitated with her original rights, and with the bitter memories of the past smouldering, if not rankling, in the bosoms of many.
Lewis H. Blair, A Southern Prophecy: The Prosperity of the South Dependent upon the Elevation of the Negro, 1889. Reprinted (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1964), p. 15.No event was more significant to southern history than the Civil War. For generations southerners continually referred to The War, wrote of The War, even dated the events of their lives by the years elapsed since The War. It is easy, of course, to understand this preoccupation. The South's defeat in the Civil War destroyed much of the framework of antebellum southern society, and what replaced it was often designed on radically different lines. Gone was slavery. Gone were the plantations. Gone were the cotton factors. In their place were sharecroppers, tenant farms, and rural merchants.
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- Information
- One Kind of FreedomThe Economic Consequences of Emancipation, pp. 171 - 200Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2001