Yes. And it did, well locally anyway. My great grandfather (maternal), fought in the civil war for the South to preserve his "right" to govern his affairs the way he saw fit. Reading some of his letters would ring chords in the Libertarian movement today. His thesis was that a government "of the people" should be "of the people" all the way down, and by that he meant that he believed that states were better able to make laws about how their citizens were treated and lived than Washington was (which he felt was 'controlled' by rich industrialists in the North). His children suffered tremendously post-war when all of the processes and mechanisms by which their economy operated were uprooted all at once.

Now sometimes that is the only way that you can change things enough. Just rip the bandage off and damn all the hairs its going to pull out. I don't have a good analogy for the impact it had on them, perhaps if the government suddenly outlawed the use of cars or any form of non-public transportation it would throw a similarly sized wrench into the mix.

The southern economy did practically collapse after the Civil War.

Slaves were freed. Infrastructure was destroyed. A quarter of the white male population was dead. These factors together led to a large drop in per capita income, but it's impossible to try and assign levels of responsibility to each one. [1]

It's also worth noting that the formalized system of slavery was replaced with a de-facto slavery system called sharecropping [2]. Sharecropping involved forced borrowing of work necessities at a high interest rates. It led many farmers, both black and white, into the grip of wage slavery [3].

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reconstruction_Era#Material_dev... 2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharecropping#United_States 3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_slavery

It came close. Shortly thereafter, slavery was replaced with Sharecropping. I don't remember much about that from my US History classes, but I'm under the vague impression that it wasn't much of an improvement.

Cherry-picked, out-of-context quote from wikipedia: "Though the arrangement protected sharecroppers from the negative effects of a bad crop, many sharecroppers (both black and white) were economically confined to serf-like conditions of poverty."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharecropping#United_States

You never heard of the Reconstruction? The South went into severe poverty for decades after the Civil War.