By Matt Underwood Cotton was still an important crop, even if they couldn’t produce at the same ridiculously high margins as when they had slaves working the fields. If you still had the cotton fields then you still had a means of accumulating wealth (and thus power). They also had the wealth accumulated during legal slavery, wealth creates more wealth. They had wealth to buy slaves and farmlands before ie they were wealthy to begin with. The georgia colony trustees didnt give out 5000 acre plots of land on the savannah river to colonists from english debtors prisons.
Here, the settlers would have to conform to Oglethorpe’s plan, in which there was no elected assembly. Three major laws governed the colony. The first dealt with the distribution of land. The second and third reflected Enlightened ideals. No slavery was permitted in Georgia, and the possession of alcohol was prohibited. Each debtor was to receive 50 acres of land to farm. This land could not be sold. Silkworms were transported from Europe with the hope of developing a silk industry in Georgia’s mulberry trees.
Unfortunately, the plan itself was a miserable failure. Georgia residents complained that some citizens received fertile land while others were forced to work uncooperative soil. Since they could not buy or sell their land, they felt trapped. The mulberry tree plan failed, because the trees in Georgia were the wrong type for cultivating silk. The alcohol ban was openly flouted. Cries to permit slavery followed as the Georgians envied the success of their neighbors. Eventually many simply fled the colony for the Carolinas. King George revoked the charter in 1752 and Georgia became a royal colony. One of the world’s best organized utopian experiments came to an abrupt end.
This is honestly one of the most fascinating and yet sad parts of American history: the impact of Reconstruction. In many of these places for a period of around a decade or so, newly emancipated and later enfranchised Black voters exercised considerable influence on the then-Republican legislatures that the Federal government installed following the Civil War. But over time, the Federal government was no longer as committed to defending these voters and the coalitions that they built in the South as the Republicans in Congress lost political capital. Eventually Southerners who were often Confederates themselves or sympathizers would work their way back into power in state legislators and pass the restrictive laws we group together as Jim Crow laws.
This is very true. It is interesting to note that even though the south lost the civil war, the plantation owners and those who held power before the war, managed to keep their power and control over the black population long after the war. This was largely due to the fact that they were the only ones with any money or resources, and therefore, they were able to buy off politicians and pass laws that kept them in power.
Rutherford B. Hayes has my eternal scorn for what he did to reconstruction. Reconstruction was doomed by then. It was stillborn, wrongly executed from the beginning, thanks to that bastard Andrew Johnson, who prevented measures that would have truly broken the power of the slavers who started the rebellion.