The rise of the Snopes clan the descent of others

And so at last, of course, the Snopes clan triumphs in William Faulkner's The Hamlet - as the last section, The Peasants, in which the trio of Ratliff - the seemingly smartest and wittiest character in the novel - along with the completely hapless and obsessed Armstid and a 3rd character, Bookwright? - think they're duping Flem Snopes into selling them the old Varner property because they know that there's buried "treasure" that is old coins and silver that the original patriarch had buried for protection during the Civil War. Ratliff is really smart - in that he's the first to realize that Snopes has fooled them: setting it up so that they would believe there was buried loot, apparently hiring someone else to dig at night and draw the attention of the 3 guys, probably bribing the douser who leads them to a few buried coins - all to exact a far-too-high price for the property, in which the old mansion sits in ruins. At the end of the novel we see Flem Snopes packing his family belongings and heading to the county seat, Jefferson -he's on to bigger things than Frenchman's Bend can offer - and the 3 guys and others staying behind - final image is of the now completely deranged Armstid digging feverishly and needlessly on the worthless property he now owns. In some way, Faulkner shows that at the least this society of the new South is open to those with talent and drive - it's not controlled by those who inherited wealth but by those who seize wealth - but he also shows the cruelty and barbarity of modern capitalism: the rise of the Snopes clan and of Flem in particular takes place at the expense of or almost literally on the backs of others: people like Armstid are crushed, and nobody cares. Blacks in the new South play almost no role in this novel - atypical for Faulkner - as they play an ambiguous role in the society: obviously the blacks of the South are far better off in the 20th century than in the 19th but their so-called freedom has not brought them any access to wealth, power, or prestige - all of the social and economic machinations that Faulkner chronicles in The Hamlet take place within the white community of Frenchman's Bend - the blacks are marginalized, and perhaps in this case, a novel of cruelty and deceit,  better off so.