In fiction Southern planters end up poor after the Civil War. I'm sure some of them did,

[raccoon]

but somehow I don't think it was as widespread as you'd think from historical fiction.

Your thoughts?

[RoyGBiv]

1. One must define "planter" rather clearly ...

The standard definition of a planter was one who owned 20 or more slaves before the Civil War. For this class, the financial impact of emancipation was negligible in large part due to the failure of the Federal government to confiscate lands and redistribute the wealth among the former slaves. Tenancy farming and sharecropping quickly replaced the slave system, and Northern investment in the ravaged Southern infrastructure (good for business, doncha know) assured the elites of the antebellum era maintained their status.

However, these were a minority of slave owners in the South. For those who owned few slaves or, much more common, those whose links to the slave owning class was intermittent, the end of slavery as well as the wholesale destruction of vast swaths of the South were a severe burden. The yoeman farmer class, for example, was devastated, and many of these in fact became sharecroppers themselves.

As far as fiction is concerned, novelists of the era generally come in two varieties: those who paint a romanticized picture and those who neglect to research the intricacies of the Southern class systems prior to and after the Civil War. For the latter variety of fiction writer, the "planter class" constituted pretty much the whole of the white South, which leads to the picture they portray in their writing. This is similar to what the romantic writers do as well, but the subtle difference is that the lower classes of whites are generally ignored altogether.

A couple of books:

Ransom and Sutch, _One Kind of Freedom: The Economic Consequences of Emancipation_

James Roark, _Masters Without Slaves: Southern Planters in the Civil War and Reconstruction_

[raccoon]

2. I'll look into those books. nt