But it is an absolute fact that it was a key component of the southern economy and trying to recover from the sudden change in that economy left the southern states in a permanent economic doldrum that persists until this day.
Not really. A substitute system quickly grew up. Sharecropping. It had the added advantage in that poor whites could, and were, brought into the same system. There was less investment, the actual purchase of the workers was not required nor was the costs of feeding and maybe housing them, but in many ways was the same.
What hurt the South the most was the lack of industrialization. Very little of the South industrialized along with the North, there was no incentive for the wealthy to do it, they had their plantations. There wasn't a banking system in the South to match the North, so anybody in the middle class who tinkered around the edges had difficulty raising capital grow beyond what a small group of people could afford. So outside of a few gunsmiths and such like Griswald, foundries of any size were rare.
Post-war, it was even worse. The wealthy were even more entrenched in their plantations, at least those that survived, and what little homegrown attempts at industrialization were swamped by companies up North selling off or moving their obsolete equipment down South. This kept wages depressed because the obsolete equipment required more manpower for the same amount of output due to inefficiencies and greater maintenance requirements. So the South kept slipping behind.
Regardless of intent, a system was put into place that ensured that most of the profits were reaped by the wealthy and any possibility of advancement was capped for everyone else. This more or less stayed the same until the post-WWII era when some companies started to move more advanced manufacturing to take advantage of the lower costs. With the buildout of the interstate system, cost of transportation was cut dramatically and that led to a boom in industrialization starting in the 1950s and peaking in the mid-1970s. At that point, it all depended on what the wealthy families in the various states wanted. Those that liked being big frogs in a little pond, blocked attempts to attract manufacturing and later tech, those states stayed poor. Those who wanted to be a bigger frog in a much bigger pond didn't fight as much and even encouraged the new developments and those states did very well. Or at least better. |
