e destroyed or dilapidated; and under military rule things had simply been kept going. Everything had to be reconstructed" (Warren 275). Despite the war damage the basic resources of the South were not destroyed or fundamentally diminished. Predominantly an agricultural region, its farm lands and labor force remained essentially intact. Because the South had never invested much of its wealth in railroads and industries, there were comparatively few of these to rebuild. Most of the damage was repaired within a few years. New factories, railroads, and businesses were begun which would surpass anything the South had known before the war. In the years to come, the South would more and more resemble the North's diversified economy and society, with towns and cities rising up among the farms and plantations.
During the Civil War, the ruling class of Southern whites
(big landowners, slaveholders, businessmen, lawyers, and other professionals) had suffered the greatest losses in wealth and property. These aristocrats who had led the secession movement were often blamed for causing the war and its suffering. But taken as a whole the elite had lost very little of their former prestige. Since they had governed the South before 1865, there now seemed every reason to believe that they would keep on governing with general public consent, if only the North would leave the South alone: "Thus, while the ending of slavery
entailed dramatic legal effects, other aspects of society did not change as dramatically, if at all" (Engerman 53).
Just as the Civil War did little to change the social hierarchy of the South it did little to change white attitudes toward African Americans. Slavery disappeared much faster than the race prejudice, which had grown up with it. Slavery, after all, was an institution invented to procure cheap labor.
The most general substitute for slavery came to be the sharecrop system in which plantations and farms were d...