Some simply tried to live as the always had, having small parties, buying things they could not afford, and many more refusing to seek work, believing it was beneath them to engage in manual labor or be ‘in trade’ (run a shop, work in a bank, etc.) which was something that carried a stigma in the pre-Civil war era. Over time their estates were confiscated due to taxation and they slowly starved to death. They simply blinded themselves and refused to see the world as it had become and would be. They lived in denial of the situation.
This is abject nonsense. I wrote my thesis on post-Civil War Alabama and Georgia, with a specific concentration on the Chattahoochee River Valley, with slight excursions into coastal South Carolina and the Savannah River Valley. As part of that process I reviewed pretty much all the relevant census, property, probate and deed records, as well as any directories, professional associations, etc. that were available. Records reveal that the overwhelming majority of pre-war planters adapted and wound up (after a period of adjustment) pretty much back where they were to begin with. A simple review of the census will show that the big names in the counties along the CRV were largely the same family names in 1880 that they were in 1860. Many of those families continue today.
There may have been a stigma associated with 'being in trade' in the very stratified society of England at that time and earlier, but no such stigma obtained in the South. Most pre-war planter families had holdings in mercantile firms, banks, cotton factor firms, etc. The aristocratic society of Charleston was firmly based on trade, as was the somewhat less aristocratic (but no less haughty) society of Eufaula AL.
While taxation is a bugbear for us today (quite deservedly), the level of taxation in the South in the 1870s was not going to cause anybody to go under.
Families that declined (and there were a number) generally did so because fathers and sons were killed in the War. A less romantic but thoroughly documented cause for the failure of some old families. Usually the substance of the estate was consumed in caring for minor children. Even then, the survivors tended to marry into other old families and thus continued, although under a different name. You can trace these winding byways through the probate court records.
Margaret Mitchell popularized a fictional version of the post-Civil War South in Gone With the Wind. It has misled many, even though it never happened.
Good Lord, were all the other topics taken?
I keeed! I keeed! :0)