Doing Business With Local Rich Autocrats?

There's a parallel here to how imperialist powers prefer dealing with centralized, autocratic, local elites because you can just do better business with them. The Northern elite felt that to make money and keep things moving without disturbance, which was the stronger party in the south. They decided pretty simply, oh, the white Southerners. So let's let them have their moral victory. Let's let them reassume control of their states without doing any of the reforms that people like Senator Sumner or Growski knew would have to happen. And they agreed to all of that because it was good business, basically.