Going onward, the occupation of the South by the North lasted over a century and produced not only widespread poverty in the entire Southern region, but also the hard-to-dislodge stereotypes about stupid rednecks, backwater knuckle-draggers, etc. that continue to this day.
Whatever political power that was allowed in the South by the North was the minority of people who were genuine race-haters propelled into office as Democrats to serve as moral whipping boys for the North, while the workaday people of the South, both whites and blacks, wrung their hands and buried their heads in fear -- unable to fight back again after having lost so much and so many in the last go-round.
The continual westward expansion allowed everyone to sweep the unremarked death of the Republic under the rug until 1959, when with the addition of Alaska and Hawaii, there was no longer any frontier to escape to. Now, with all need for escape from oppression turned inward, oppression is winning. Satan has captured the field.
Lasted?? Past tense? Where'd you get that? It's over?
Don't think so -- as witness the joke at Judy Woodruff's Election Night table in 2008, about North Carolina and their "Dukes of Hazzard" voters, ha ha, who fortunately (halcyon days! tra-la and halloo!) are losing their state to snotty Up East parvenues who act like they now own the place and plan to drive the Tarheels back up into their hollows and mountain forests like they were Montagnards.