By Jim Wiggins

The seeming prosperity of the antebellum South — at least for whites — has often been contrasted with the poverty of the postbellum South, with the difference usually explained by the devastation of war and the uncompensated confiscation of property in slaves. In sum, “The damnyankees did it!”

But most historians know better. The effects of war and abolition were plain enough, but their impact was only short term. Over the longer term, Gavin Wright of Stanford says, “postbellum regional backwardness [was] firmly rooted in the antebellum era,” during which the façade of prosperity had obscured widespread hardship.

During that antebellum period, historian Roger Ransom says, “there were two ‘Souths,’ a slave South that experienced growth and expansion and a non-slave South that was far less prosperous.” Yes, the white South in the antebellum period, with one-quarter of the nation’s population, did have two-thirds of its wealthiest citizens, but it also had an alarmingly disproportionate share of its poorest. The reason, historians agree, was slavery. The same system that made fortunes for a few stifled the economic prospects of the many.

The reason is not complicated. Slave labor was the cheapest labor, giving a competitive advantage to those who could exploit it. But this cheapest labor to use was the costliest to acquire, giving a competitive advantage to those who already had wealth, who then, with slave labor, gained even more. It had been so from ancient to modern times. Throughout history, in slave-societies, wealth did not trickle down; it gushed upward.

And, with that accumulated capital, the slavocratic oligarchs did not act as “job creators.” With few exceptions, says Wright, they were “indifferent or hostile” to investments in industry, infrastructure or education in the South.

Instead, they invested their profits in more slaves, which of course only compounded the original inequality. For the slaveholding One Percent, this made good business sense. For the average white southerner, it was disastrous.

Over the antebellum decades, as wealth inequality increased, the percentage of whites owning slaves and land declined. Despite the independent, yeoman-farmer ideal, by the 1850s, between 30 and 50 percent of all Southern whites were landless, surviving as tenant farmers or itinerant wage workers. And the wages weren’t good compared to those in the North.

Whether for a skilled blacksmith or an unskilled laborer, the ready alternative of enslaved workers depressed earning potential. Again, for every one northerner moving South, three Southerners moved North. For every one European migrating to the South, seven migrated to the North. For most, the South was not a “land of opportunity.”

Who “drove Old Dixie down”? Far more long-lastingly than Union cavalry raiders, the slavocrats’ system of slavery did. The same system which the Confederacy was created to preserve had perverted the South’s democracy and crippled its economy.

In 1855, the self-emancipated Frederick Douglass observed that in the South, black slaves and white nonslaveholders were “plundered by the same plunderer.”

From the perspective of 1997, Wright concluded that the looting hadn’t ended with abolition. “The most enduring legacy of slavery,” he said, “was the persistence of a bifurcated society in which economic elites did not identify with the well-being of the majority of the population,” whether white or black, whether prewar or postwar.

But how did the One Percent get away with the plunder? Douglass noted their use of the age-old tactic of divide and rule, their incitement of “the enmity of the laboring white man against the blacks.” Meaning, racism. Prewar and postwar. For the white majority, though, it was a plainly self-destructive racism.

JIM WIGGINS is a retired Copiah-Lincoln Community College history instructor.