scholarly journals The Intergenerational Effects of a Large Wealth Shock: White Southerners After the Civil War

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philipp Ager ◽  
Leah Platt Boustan ◽  
Katherine Eriksson
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Intergenerational Effects ◽  
White Southerners ◽  
Wealth Shock

scholarly journals The Intergenerational Effects of a Large Wealth Shock: White Southerners after the Civil War

2021 ◽  
Vol 111 (11) ◽  
pp. 3767-3794
Author(s):  
Philipp Ager ◽  
Leah Boustan ◽  
Katherine Eriksson
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Intergenerational Effects ◽  
White Southerners ◽  
The Us ◽  
Us Civil War ◽  
Wealth Shock

The nullification of slave wealth after the US Civil War (1861–1865) was one of the largest episodes of wealth compression in history. We document that White Southern households that owned more slaves in 1860 lost substantially more wealth by 1870, relative to Southern households that had been equally wealthy before the war. Yet, their sons almost entirely recovered from this wealth shock by 1900, and their grandsons completely converged by 1940. Marriage networks and connections to other elite families may have aided in recovery, whereas transmission of entrepreneurship and skills appear less central. (JEL D31, G51, J15, J24, N31, N32)

Look Away! Dixie’s Landed!

2018 ◽  
pp. 123-154
Author(s):  
Nina Silber
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
New Deal ◽  
Lost Cause ◽  
White Americans ◽  
Gone With The Wind ◽  
White Southerners ◽  
Civil War Era ◽  
The New Deal

The pro-Confederate Lost Cause memory of the Civil War continued to have considerable staying power during the 1930s, seen most notably in the popularity of the book and film versions of Gone With the Wind. At the same time, the Lost Cause was adapted to fit the sensibilities of this era. Many white Americans, for example, were drawn to the suffering of Civil War era white southerners in light of the economic trials of the 30s. Conservatives also doubled-down on the Lost Cause narrative as they pushed back against aspects of the New Deal agenda, as well as a reawakened civil rights movement and anti-lynching campaign. Finally, conservatives adapted the Lost Cause story to target Northern radicals and communists as the same kind of agitators who punished white southerners during Reconstruction. Black activists and communists tried to expose the racist and unpatriotic underpinnings of the Lost Cause but often fell short.

Reunited with Bands of Iron

2019 ◽  
pp. 17-44
Author(s):  
R. Scott Huffard
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Travel Narratives ◽  
New South ◽  
White Southerners ◽  
The North ◽  
New Development ◽  
Cultural Power ◽  
Expansion Strategies

This chapter details how white southerners used the economic and cultural power of the railroad to reunify with the North and to move beyond the sectional tensions of the Civil War. For white southerners, the memory of the war and the destruction of the region’s railroads inspired calls for new development. Travel narratives and arguments from boosters like Henry Grady show how these elites saw the railroad as critical to idea that a New South would rise. The chapter then goes into a discussion of how northern railroad corporations like the Illinois Central and Louisville & Nashville pursued southern expansion strategies after the Civil War. Finally, the chapter discusses a key moment of reunification in 1886, when southern railroads shifted the gauge of thousands of miles of track to match the northern standard gauge.

Epilogue

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melissa Milewski
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
African Americans ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Global History ◽  
White Southerners ◽  
The World ◽  
Progressive Force ◽  
Judicial Systems

African Americans’ experiences in southern courts during the eight-and-a-half decades after the Civil War is part of a larger, global story of struggles for rights within the courts. White southerners’ efforts to control people of color through the courts is also part of that wider, global history. The very structure of judicial systems often enabled them to serve as both a conservative and a progressive force. In many countries around the world, the courts have been used both to uphold elites’ power and to challenge that same power....

You Must Remember This

2018 ◽  
pp. 155-182
Author(s):  
Nina Silber
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil War ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Black Americans ◽  
Racial Oppression ◽  
World War ◽  
White Southerners ◽  
War Narrative ◽  
At Home

In the lead up to World War II, and in the course of the war itself, memories of the Civil War were deployed once again. This time, the war, the fight against slavery, and Lincoln in particular, assumed noteworthy prominence, reminding Americans of the importance of fighting a just and moral war. However, this created a challenging rhetorical environment for cementing a united homefront – including both white southerners and African Americans. White southerners, like Douglas Freeman, tried to keep Confederates prominent in the Civil War narrative, while black Americans used the new emphasis on Lincoln to talk about racial oppression at home and abroad. An anti-communist backlash, in the end, helped silence voices that focused on problems of racial oppression.

How to Litigate a Case Against a White Southerner

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melissa Milewski
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
African Americans ◽  
White Southerners ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Civil Cases ◽  
White Southerner

Chapter 2 traces the legal journey of African Americans who succeeded in litigating cases against white southerners in the 35 years after the Civil War. In many cases, they litigated suits against the very whites who had enslaved them. The chapter discusses why black southerners turned to the courts and the obstacles they met in attempting to litigate suits against whites. It follows black southerners as they hired lawyers, testified before crowded courtrooms, and appealed their suits to their state’s highest courts. It discusses as well why white lawyers represented black litigants, the motivations of white and black witnesses in such suits, and the considerations of juries and judges deciding civil cases between black and white southerners.

scholarly journals "Living in the File": Kinship & Political Surveillance in Post-Civil War Greece

2017 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 303-313 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine Pendakis
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Political Identity ◽  
Narrative Interviews ◽  
Intergenerational Effects ◽  
Cultural Logic ◽  
State Surveillance ◽  
Fathers And Sons ◽  
The Relationship

Little attention has been paid to the ways in which political surveillance practices have historically intersected with a cultural logic of kinship or actual kin relationships, despite the fact that intergenerational effects of state surveillance have been observed. This article aims to open up this important avenue of research through a reflection on the relationship between kinship, political surveillance and state persecution in post-civil war Greece. Drawing on narrative interviews and borrowing from the emerging ethnographic work on the agentic qualities of state documents, this article analyzes the unexpected ways in which the citizen file (fakelos) created a form of political inheritance for the children of leftists. I argue that a cultural logic of kinship was central to anticommunist surveillance practices after the civil war and that these practices ultimately rendered political identity a matter of lineage, something transacted through patrilines, fixing fathers and sons (and sometimes uncles and nephews) in a shared political genealogy. 

Challenging Whites’ Bequests

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melissa Milewski
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
White Americans ◽  
White Southerners ◽  
The Right

Chapter 3 examines cases in which masters had set aside money in their wills for their slaves to be emancipated and sent to Liberia upon their owner’s death. In the 35 years after the Civil War, former slaves who had been sent to Liberia or had been slated to be sent to Liberia brought suits in southern courts over these wills to try to gain funds that had been left for their emigration. There, in postwar courts, their suits appealing to white men’s last testaments would often fare well before judges and juries of white southerners, who sought to uphold the right of white Americans to do what they wished with their property upon their death.

The Post-Civil War Racial Separations in Southern Protestantism: Another Look

1977 ◽  
Vol 46 (4) ◽  
pp. 453-473 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth K. Bailey
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Racial Attitudes ◽  
Higher Learning ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Methodist Episcopal ◽  
Public Office ◽  
White Southerners ◽  
Methodist Episcopal Church ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Scholars who have assessed the racial attitudes of southern Protestants in the late nineteenth century have strangely neglected the pronouncements of two outspoken bishops of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. Affirming in the 1880s that white southerners would “never tamely and without protest submit to the intrusion of colored men into places of trust and profit and responsibility,” Bishop George Foster Pierce insisted that blacks had no “right on juries, [in] legislatures, or in [other] public office.” And he frowned equally on their pursuit of higher learning; advanced schooling instilled expectations of advancement “far above the station he [the Negro] was created to fill,” the churchman felt, including hopes for interracial mating. Nor was the succeeding senior Southern Methodist bishop more liberal in outlook.

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