This chapter assesses whether the class structure of the South changed in the postbellum era and whether different individual and locational attributes predicted who would come to occupy preferred social positions. It suggests another source of categorical uncertainty during Reconstruction and beyond. While many Southern journalists and politicians celebrated the expansion of an entrepreneurial middle class at the time, this class actually declined numerically in the proverbial New South. Moreover, the “decaying” planter class was remarkably persistent, both in its dominance of the top of the wealth distribution and its involvement in the postwar industrialization of the region. The social categories of planters and middling Southerners that were deployed in popular discourse—and within the “New South Creed”—thus had little in common with the reality of class structure following the Civil War.
