At best that supports AnAmericanMother's post about it portraying a created Southern Myth about the GoodOldDays
At worst 
At best that supports AnAmericanMother's post about it portraying a created Southern Myth about the GoodOldDays
At worst
I had two sides of the family though. One side were small urban (Charleston, Augusta) tradesmen during and after the War and were determinedly upwardly mobile and urban. They tended to sugar-coat and romanticize the War.
The other side were Alabama plantation owners, but real hardworking farmers, not the effete aristocrats of GWTW legend. Anybody who looked over the plantation account books and property tax returns (as I did . . . to the point of weariness) realized immediately that farming is a business proposition and takes a good deal of talent and skill.
In fact, the topic of my thesis was exploring the difference between the myth and the reality of the experiences of post-War Southern families.
The Margaret Mitchell theory was that the soft, aristocratic Southern planter class was destroyed by the War and supplanted by white trash dirt farmers (the Slatterys) who brought in greedy pursuit of filthy lucre and changed the South forever.
But I found in my research that the families that were wealthy before the War found ways, by hook or crook, to restore their fortunes relatively quickly afterwards. Even if they were completely beggared by the War and Reconstruction. One gg grandfather was left penniless with a wife and three children - he was a lawyer and banker before the War, his money was worthless and he was attaindered because he was a Confederate officer and forbidden to practice law. He used two of his old artillery horses to run a carting and delivery service until he could get the family back on its feet. Eventually, of course, he was back banking and practicing law and prospered until his death in 1917. The other gg grandfather on that side went right back to farming - and persuaded his emancipated slaves to stay on and take a wage to help him make a crop. (All of this can be demonstrated, by the way, from contemporaneous records, not golden-hued reminiscence long after the fact.) He too died very wealthy, although everything was taken from him but his land.
It's the old saw that if you divided all the money in the world up equally, after the passage of a certain amount of time the same people who had most of the money to begin with will wind up with it again. Talent, hard work, resilience, strong moral fiber . . . those people persist and are not wiped out, or not for long.
So really, the true story of the post-War Southern experience is less romantic but much more encouraging than the legend.