ABSTRACT
The decades following the American Civil War were fi lled with examples of ill-planned industrialization, social disorganization, political-economic disarray, and collective cognitive disorientation. This chaotic synthesis that characterized the birth of modern urban/industrial America was centered, in part, in the devastated South, where a defeated aristocracy, a restless white populace, and a massive, newly-freed, African-American slave population attempted to exist. There were several elite responses during this time, on both regional and national levels, which were actually attempts to reassert the rigid class and racial orders reminiscent of the antebellum South.
