Masters without Slaves: Southern Planters in the Civil War and Reconstruction

To one degree or another, the slaveholders shared rule in the USA with the commercial capitalists until they were defeated in the Civil War. This book discusses their ideological and economic transformation at the end of the civil war and the beginning of Reconstruction. They believed that slavery was absolutely necessary to govern African Americans and to produce cotton and the other crops that underlied their wealth. They believed in the inferiority of African Americans and had no taste for free or freed labor. As a class they were destroyed. Many left the United States for Brazil and Cuba where African slavery still persisted. Others retreated into middle class and working class occupations, bereft of their former power. A significant minority adjusted to the new order and attempted to recast Southern agriculture on a basis that was formally free labor, but sought to achieve the same power as slavery. What comes through in this book was that the fundamental problem of Southern agriculture under American capitalism until mechaniziation came after World War II was labor shortage and the demands of first the slave owners and later the capitalist plantation owners to keep the workers and farmers who tilled the land, Black and white, from reaping the wealth. By the end of the 19th century, when most of the former slave owners had either been eliminated or amalgamated with North Industrial capital, the "New South" arose with Jim Crow violence, apartheid, and denial of democracy, the create a permanent Black labor force for Southern Agriculture without the rights and power of free men.