As was the vibrant northern economy. There was no market for much of the manufactured goods without the South and no cotton for the textile mills. The south stayed poor after the war because they insisted on maintaining pre-Civil War social and political institutions that were not compatible with a free labor market economy
Nonsense. The South stayed poor because all of the capitol available in the postwar years was sent to the developing west. There was no money to loan to Southern industrialists until the 1890s and even then each state was saddled with millions in debt incurred by crooked yankees who were appointed to office when elected officials were deposed by the victors of the war: your rotten radical party you now call the GOP. The Southern states were occupied militarily until 1877 and their political institutions were imported form New England. How you manage to live with a head stuffed so full of nonsense is a mystery. Are all yankees ignorant socialists or is it just you few who visit these threads?
There's simply no way you could actually believe all of this rot unless you wanted to be decieved by the marxists who taught you in college.
That's pure bunk.