Irony on ironies

From The Intergenerational Effects of a Large Wealth Shock: White Southerners After the Civil War by Philipp Ager, Leah Platt Boustan, and Katherine Eriksson. From the asbstract:

The nullification of slave-based wealth after the US Civil War (1861-65) was one of the largest episodes of wealth compression in history. We document that white southern households with more slave assets lost substantially more wealth by 1870 relative to households with otherwise similar pre-War wealth levels. Yet, the sons of these slaveholders recovered in income and wealth proxies by 1880, in part by shifting into white collar positions and marrying into higher status families. Their pattern of recovery is most consistent with the importance of social networks in facilitating employment opportunities and access to credit.

I am sure I have posted on this but cannot find it. I have for the past year been doing some genealogical work for my mother, but lately as much for myself. The worm's eye view of history is fascinating.

We had family on both sides in the Civil War. My earlier post, which I cannot locate, was commenting on the respective trajectories post-Civil War. Those who were small-lot farmers, and who often were on the Federalist side, had a hard time after the war. They returned to their farms and nothing much improved until they began to migrate a couple of generations later. Their farms were preserved after the war but it locked them in to farming.

Those who had plantations suffered, as the above research indicates, by far the largest fall from economic power. They fought on the Confederate side, some suffering mortal wounds, some suffering disabling wounds. When they returned, the economic system on which they, and their prior couple of generations, had built fortunes, was permanently rendered null and void. They lost the capital invested in slaves. Their plantations were destroyed. With emancipation the whole old wicked model was destroyed.

They had no choice but to drop everything and start anew, as opposed to the small-lot farmers who tried to keep going with their small lots. Within ten years after the war, all of the plantation families had switched into law, medicine, manufacturing, publishing, etc. Within a generation, all had moved from their home states, most into large cities or developing cities.

Having lost everything, they were forced to take risks they would not have taken and entered fields of endeavor which they would not otherwise have pursued, moved to places they would not otherwise have chosen to live.

The irony is that in many respects the Civil War was both the most calamitous economic blow and yet also the means of delivery for each and all of them to become far more prosperous.

The additional irony is that that prosperity drew them away from the rural areas into cities, hollowing out the human capital which earlier had allowed a greater rural functionality than existed afterwards.

The final irony is that those who fought the just war, the small farmers with the Union, were locked into trying to make an outmoded system of small-lot agriculture work for another couple of generations whereas those who lost everything eventually benefited more and sooner.