they where very rich until the 13th amendment was signed (after the civil war) and southern plantation owners had to let their slaves free and did not have any help working on their plantations.
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That much is true in almost any conflict, the middle and lower class do the fighting and the dying while the wealthy and privileged pull the strings. Very few slave owners ever carried a rifle or a musket. Rural farmers came out of the Southern States--Kentucky, Tennessee, etc; unlike Northerners, they could not afford the legal practice used in Northern states of "buying" a stand-in for their military duties. Towards the end of the war, plantation owners and the wealthy landed class in the South took up arms to bolster the tremendous losses they suffered in a last heroic effort to "save the glorious South".
According to most people I know ,the most average city in the world is London, Ontario. Possibly because it has lower class, high class, just above or below middle class, but alomost no middle class familys there.
There were always social classes. A lot of it depended on which family you were born in. For example, if you were born into a lower class family then it was more than likely you were going to be low class to, and vice versa.
It is basic economics: if slavery is outlawed, they lose their property (slaves) and their ability to make a living (growing crops). They also have to compete for jobs and goods with the freed slaves, and deal with the consequences of an impoverished lower class. Of course, they could have just paid their ex-slaves a lower wage, which is what happened after Reconstruction.
'un soldat de 2ème classe' is a 'second-class soldier', the lower rank of militarymen in France.