This was indeed the Egypt of the Confederacy,—the rich granary whence potatoes and corn and cotton poured out to the famished and ragged Confederate troops as they battled for a cause lost long before 1861.
Du Bois describes the economic significance of Dougherty County, Georgia, to the Confederacy and offers a historical judgment on the Confederate cause.
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After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness…
So the Cotton Kingdom still lives; the world still bows beneath her sceptre.
By 1830 slavery seemed hopelessly fastened on the South, and the slaves thoroughly cowed into submission.
This, then, is the end of his striving: to be a co-worker in the kingdom of culture, to escape both death and isolation, to husband and use his best powers and his latent genius.