Truly white aristocrats who inherit all their wealth are a galaxy-brained racial elite.

Also, posted this in the other comment section:

Southern plantation farming was incredibly inefficient and utterly ruined the land it was practiced on - something that was recognized (and criticized) as early as George Washington. So they did build their plantations in fertile areas, but exhausted the soil and did very little to let it recover until George Washington Carver (unrelated) started spreading crop rotations around ~1900.

The aristocrats made a shitton of money relative to the average person, but they were much, much poorer - both individually and as a society - than the industrialized North. Northern farming, even, was much more efficient - but the Southern aristocracy perpetuated their system because control was more important than money. In the slavery (and sharecropping) system, the plantation class effectively ruled little fiefs of dependent ‘free’ farmers and unfree (legally or practically) Black labor, able to exercise wide-reaching control not just economically, but also socially, culturally, and politically. Given the choice between more luxury or more power, they chose more power, and used that power to perpetuate their sickened systems.