The Union Army victory over the Confederate Army transformed the South into a quasi-captive nation, a region that remains the poorest of the United States well over a century later. The situation was similar to that in South Africa two decades later when the British defeated the Boers (descendants of the original seventeenth-century Dutch settlers). As the British would later do with the Boers, the US government eventually allowed the defeated southern elite to return to their locally powerful positions, and both US southerners and Boers soon gained national political power. The powerful white supremacist southern ruling class helped further militarize the United States, the army practically becoming a southern instititution. Following the effective Reconstruction experiment to empower former slaves, the US occupying army was withdrawn, and African Americans were returned to quasi-bondage and disenfranchisement through Jim Crow laws, forming a colonized population in the South.

— An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States (ReVisioning American History) by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz (Page 140)