See, there you go. People who might have invested didn’t, because the usual suspects would describe them as carpet baggers, and commit terrorist acts to destroy their investment. People who would have worked with them to build the south were intimidated into not doing so, for fear of being called scalawags, and having their families murdered.
Anyone local who wanted to use a developed brain would leave, as the neo-confederates would be threatened by anyone trying to better themselves or their community.
It took years to recover from that. Thankfully, neo-confederates are a small minority, mostly laughed at.
My brother’s father in law talks the biggest neo-reb line you can imagine, but does that to cover his cooperation with a non-US manufacturer for which he is a distributor. Once we understood each other, with noone else around we got along just fine.
For the Lord’s sweet sake, bubba-—they WERE carpetbaggers and scalawags not “investors”— they were thieves. There wasn’t any mystery, the “usual suspects” as you call them were the citizens of the South, who knew them for what they were, and that is why they were run out of town on a rail.
Someone comes into your town at the side of an imposed military government, empowered by Freedmen’s bureaus of corrupt kleptocrats who ripped off their own people. It took the removal of the Union army of occupation, and people pulling themselves up by their own hard labor and personal investment... to THEN work with proper investment channels to develop and recover from the devastation.
The Radical Republicans would have NONE of any kind of recovery that they did not 1.)profit from and 2.) control. These same were mighty glad Lincoln wasn’t around anymore, the same ones who profited greatly from “shoddy” and the misery of war. Stanton and his corrupt pals, who tried to off Seward as well, and impeached Johnson.
Some kind of “community organizer’s” view of the post war South—clintonian in scope and malaprop wording—”investors” and “developers”—LOL. Like Ambassador Dodd’s naivete in 1933 Germany— no clue.