First you must understand it was not about slavery it was about the old sin of greed.
2nd you must understand the only jobs were powling behind a mule and working cotton mill. and of course you know after the war they took land and gave it to black persons and a cow or mule....
3rd There was no American money anywhere in the South. The people only had worthless Confederate money. The Southern banks could not loan out any money because they didn’t have any. To make matters worse, the price of cotton fell drastically on the world market. Before the war, most of the world cotton supply was grown in the South. During the last year of the war, the Black people stopped growing cotton, so England began looking for places in its colonies where it could grow cotton. The British planted very much cotton in their colonies, especially in Egypt and India. As a result, there was too much cotton on the world market. The price of cotton fell. Everybody in the South became poor. The economy of the South was in ruins. During the next eighty years, the world market price for cotton remained low. The South had nothing but cotton, so the South remained poor until World War II.
https://www.cs.unm.edu/~sergiy/amhistory/ch21.html
don’t let this thread rewrite history
I guess powling behind a mule isn't as bad as powling around with terrorists (to use Sarah Palin's phrase).
The early cotton mills were in the North (which gave the mill owners common political interests with the cotton planters before the war). The cotton mills in the South came later.
"Forty acres and a mule" might have been a good policy (provided that the government paid for the land and did not just seize it) but it wasn't implemented except briefly in a small area.