Were plantation owners some sort of noblity/aristocracy in the US?

Were plantation owners some sort of noblity/aristocracy in the US?

>nobility means rich people
Amerifat education

Yes, but they were relatively powerless compared to the Tycoons of the late 19th century

SLAVEOWNERS ARE NEITHER NOBLE, NOR ARISTOCRATIC, SO, NO.

They were neither but they were wealthy and were the power behind the south seceding. They were the elites of the old south, but many lost everything after it.

The South had an Aristocracy, but don't think it was all that great of an Aristocracy.

Hold your horses friend, I am not even Amerifat. Just curious.
How their power looked like before the industrial revolution?
What do you mean? Never heard of it.

They filled an analogous but not exactly identical role in the antebellum South, and certainly liked to think of themselves as the American Aristocracy, but their political power stemmed from very bourgeois things like having lots of money and land alone, without the traditional European aristocracy's divine right that they layered over their money and power to give it legitimacy. Plantation owners used religion to some degree to justify slavery, but even their contemporaries didn't truly buy it and it was more dehumanizing blacks than bolstering their own moral position.

Well since the Industrial Revolution didn't really start in full in the US till after our civil war then no, very few had any money left by then due to losing their slaves and some of their land.

So they just became common people after the war? After losing plantations and slaves. I can't kinda image such person becoming a shoemaker or something.

They didn't lose their plantations. They just started breaking it up into parcels to rent out instead of having it be worked by slaves. The sharecropper system didn't break down until a series of strikes and increasing mechanization in the 1940's forced sharecroppers off their land. The plantation owners' class still own their lands, for the most part, they're just agribusinesses like you find through the rest of the country now.

some of them were ruined but most just lost their slaves, after the war large landowners set up the sharecropping economy where they would break up their holdings into numerous small plots that would be leased by single families in return for a percentage of their produce. In some places it was also contracted that the tenants could only buy seed and tools directly from the land owner, which might be a cost in excess of their entire year's produce.

This system proved to be far more profitable for the landowners than slavery ever had been...which was exactly what Adam Smith predicted in the 1770s when he crunched the numbers and ran a cost benefit analysis on slavery vs. sharecropping. But nobody listened.

In Europe, classes were more or less defined by land ownership, but in many parts of the New World where land was plenty and easily acquired, the number of slaves owned was what separated upper and lower classes. This was primarily true in the American South.

Ok, thanks guys, now things become to be more clear for me.

>which was exactly what Adam Smith predicted in the 1770s when he crunched the numbers and ran a cost benefit analysis on slavery vs. sharecropping. But nobody listened.
everyone but the american south and brazil listened

Also money is more defining in the new world compared to the old world due to an overall lack of monarchies and nobles. To those in the new world except maybe Canada the concepts of things like nobility and peerage are totally foreign.

They wanted to be, modeling themselves after British aristocracy, but ultimately they just remained rich, and some like the Lee family became the Ultrarich.

They had no special rights but they did have an enormous amount of influence in congress. In a sense the ones that weren't in congress but influencing it were kinda among the first lobbyists, maybe even farther back?

haha fair enough

They did have incredible influence in Congress and the Supreme Court but that was the same for all of the rich WASPs up north too, or anybody with enough money to donate heavily to campaigns. Besides lobbying antebellum was much more of a state-level thing. The point I was trying to make is that they were heavily admiring of and inspired by British high society, like the attention to decorum.

Say the Civil War never happened and slavery was around, how fucked would the South be once the industrial revolution rolled by? I can't help but feel that the South would've been boned no matter what and I also can't feel a single shred of sympathy for it

I agree with that point, they admired the old world and their hierarchial class systems, likely because it reminded me of how the slaves are lower than them on the social totem pole.

Yeah, it's not usually brought up today but the the states containing 75% of the US's economy and most of its agriculture and industry had all outlawed slavery by 1803 (with the slave trade banned even in the South a few years later). The British Empire outlawed slavery by 1833. The French Empire did it in 1848.

Likely they would've ended slavery not long after but kept them as non citizens, likely leading to a revolt since in some states, blacks were a majority, as well being a confederation, it was more about the state than country so it's possible it could've just fragmented. As for the industrial capabilities, I might be wrong on this so someone call me out if I am, but the only major industrial city there was Birmingham Alabama, often referred to as the Pittsburgh of the South.

They are referred to as the plantocracy

>European noble's ancestor is some faggot who got lucky helping out x dynasty's founder and gets elevated to a high social class
>American Southern aristocract is some faggot who got lucky being descendent of x family member who came among the first generations of colonials in the New World and established themselves politically and economically
They are literally by all norms the equivalent to a European noble/aristocracy.

The only state by the Civil War era I think, though I could be wrong, that was majority populated by slaves was Florida, which had over three times as many slaves as it did whites.