Please, don't paint us all with that broad brush.

As a Southerner … I have seen and still live with the damage done by the Civil War, mostly by what came after. Poverty and exploitation. Carpetbaggers.

Understand this: Northern politicians, industrialists and bankers were the deus ex machina that controlled the Southern planters.

If you're at all interested in what the South was like before the war, read Frederick Law Olmsted's Cotton Kingdom. Olmsted (yes, the designer of Central Park) was a writer for the New Yorker in the 1840's-50's. He was a social peer of the Beechers, and a committed aboitionist who abhorred slavery. Not all southerners owned slaves … many were small free-hold farmers (Jeffersonian yeomen), poor but proud.

The Southern Tenant Farmers Union was organized in the early years of the Depression, serving a membership of poor farmers, black and white. That's one of the reasons it was so violently suppressed. For a portrait of the South in that time, read All God's Dangers by Theodore Rosengarten.