What was the fate of the planters and their plantations following the American Civil War?
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It seems that a number of later historians have questioned that interpretation.
In 1982 Eric Foner published an article called "Reconstruction Revisted" where he reviews relevant new developments in the historiography of the 1960s and 1970s. He writes:
Challenging the contention that the Civil War signaled the eclipse of the old planter class and the rise to power of a new entrepreneurial elite, social histories of localities scattered across the South demonstrated that planters survived the war with their landholdings and social prestige more or less in tact. (The areas investigated, it should be noted, were ones which largely escaped wartime military action.)
The footnote on this statement refers to studies based on Southwest Georgia and certain counties in Virginia. On the other side it also mentions that "James Roark's Masters without Slaves (New York: Norton, 1977) argues that the planter class declined in power and prestige after the Civil War."
Here is another article from 1975 which focuses on Alabama, "Planter-Merchant Conflict in Reconstruction Alabama" by Jonathan M. Wiener. It shows that in the case of at least one Alabama county, the planter class did largely survive the war with most of their land holdings, even though they did need to morph into a new "planter-merchant" class in order to survive post-bellum. Overall, this would seem contradict DeBois' interpretation. Wiener argues:
The evidence suggests that the planter elite which emerged from the war and Reconstruction was not "stripped of its economic foundations", nor had a "revolution in land titles" occurred; by 1870, after a decade of war and Reconstruction, the planter elite was relatively wealthier, and controlled more of the land, than it had before the war. At the same time, the persistence rate of the old elite families was unchanged from the pre-war period.
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