Southern slave owners remained politically powerful after the Civil War. In Texas, former slave owners made up more than half of all state legislators until the late 1890s. Counties that elected more slave owners had substantially worse outcomes for blacks until the early 20th century.
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.… Continue reading
Matt Underwood