The Shifting of Class and Color lines in the South: A Look at the Impact of the Civil War.
The Civil War did more than its share of turning worlds around. Throughout the United States there was a reformation of class structure that was not just reserved for the newly freed black population: the aristocratic south was forced to redefine what their place was in society, the poor whites would be raised into a more equal position, and the black population would have to come to terms with their new freedoms. These changes did not come without a price. William Faulkner touches remarkably on all of these ideas in his piece entitled Wash and another work, Victory Mountain.
As Sherman and others fled through southern towns and cities, burning, pillaging, and destroying, they took with them more than monetary goods. They ripped a mentality out by the vary roots and foundations. The southern soldiers would return home to find that they no longer had one. Many times they would eat no better than they had at battle. The impact on the social order was devastating. The high southern society that lived for their balls and parties, doing so with the help of slave labor, would now have to learn what it really meant to work. In Faulkner's Wash, the reader meets two unlikely acquaintances, Wash and Sutpen. Sutpen is a former aristocratic Southern plantation owner, and Wash is what would have been referred to as "white trash." After the war Sutpen finds himself fallen from his thrown and reduced to owning a small shanty store and Wash elevated as his employee. The most important thing to note about the shift in class structure can be seen by looking at the former behavior of Sutpen and Wash with how they behaved after the war. Before the war Wash felt himself cheated because he was put well below the slave, ".it would seem to him [Wash] that that world in which Negroes, whom the bible said was cursed by to be brute and vassal to all men of white skin," The narrator continues, "were better found and housed and even clothed than he and his" (Wash 538).
