this was typically the planter or “plantation class.”
And let’s completely neglect the fact that the actual planters, the people creating the actual economic value, were slaves kept in hovels because they were considered to be base animals, rather than people, and the “plantation class” were a bunch of lazy fucks who’d never bother to learn how to plant, or harvest, anything.
The planter class never recovered from the War, and agrarian republicanism languished without its stewards.
See above.
If only they’d ever bothered to learn anything whatsoever, and put their own muscle into it, they might have continued some kind of successful farming!
By the way, just so everyone knows, one of the rarely quoted reasons these “Fine Southern GentlemenTM” wanted African slaves, is that those African slaves knew how to grow rice. And not a single fucking white person ever bothered to learn how, which is why the US no longer grows a significant rice crop.