The sons of slaveholders quickly recovered their fathers’ wealth

Yet in the case of southern slaveholders, who lost much of their wealth after the abolition of slavery in America and General William Sherman’s scorched-earth “march to the sea”, those millionaires who were indeed temporarily embarrassed seemed to recover quite quickly. By the next census, in 1880, the sons of slaveholders had recovered the wealth standings of their fathers compared with those who grew up in non-slaveholding households. Unlike white slaveholders after the civil war, intergenerational transmission of black wealth one century later seems much more fragile.

Source: www.economist.com