Revolutions such as the Civil War change names: they do not at once change human relationships. Mankind is reconstructed not by proclamations or legislation or military occupation, but by time, growth, education, religion, thought.
When the South got on its feet again after Reconstruction and took account of itself, what did it find? It found 4,000,000 ignorant Negroes changed in name from “slave” to “freeman,” but not changed in nature. It found the poor whites still poor whites; and the aristocrats, although they had lost both property and position, were still aristocrats. For values, after all, are not outward, but inward: not material, but spiritual. It was as impossible for the Negro at that time to be less than a slave as it was for the aristocrat to be less than an aristocrat. And this is what so many legal-minded men will not or cannot see.
What happened?
Exactly what might have been predicted. Southern society had been turned wrong side up by force, and it righted itself again by force. The Ku Klux Klan, the Patrollers, the Bloody Shirt movement, were the agencies (violent and cruel indeed, but inevitable) which readjusted the relationships, put the aristocrats on top, the poor whites in the middle, and the Negroes at the bottom. In short, society instinctively reverted to its old human relationships. I once saw a man shot through the body in a street riot. Mortally wounded, he stumbled and rolled over in the dust, but sprung up again as though uninjured and ran a hundred yards before he finally fell dead. Thus the Old South, though mortally wounded, sprung up and ran again.
The Struggle in South Carolina
The political reactions after Reconstruction varied, of course, in the different states, being most violent in states like South Carolina, where the old aristocratic régime was most firmly entrenched, and least violent in North Carolina, which has always been the most democratic of Southern states.
In South Carolina then, for example, the aristocrats in 1875 returned to political supremacy.
General Wade Hampton, who represented all that was highest in the old régime, became governor of the state. A similar tendency developed, of course, in the other Southern states, and a notable group of statesmen (and they were statesmen) appeared in politics—Hill and Gordon of Georgia, Lamar and George of Mississippi, Butler of South Carolina, Morgan of Alabama, all aristocrats of the old school.
Apparently the ancient order was restored; apparently the wounded man ran as well as ever. But the Old South, after all, had received its mortal wound. There had been a revolution; society had been overturned. The institution on which it had reared its ancient splendour was gone: for the aristocrat no longer enjoyed the special privilege, the enormous economic advantage of owning his labourers. He was reduced to an economic equality with other white men, and even with the Negro, either of whom could hire labour as easily and cheaply as he could. And the baronial plantation which had been the mark of his grandeur before the war was now the millstone of his doom.
Special privilege, always the bulwark of aristocracy, being thus removed, the germ of democracy began to work among the poor whites. The disappearance of competitive slave labour made them unexpectedly prosperous; it secured a more equable division of wealth. With prosperity came more book-reading, more schooling, a greater feeling of independence. And this feeling animated the poor white with a new sense of freedom and power.