CORNELL 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 THE 
 
 ANNA S. GURLEY 
 
 MEMORIAL BOOK FUND 
 
 FOR THE PURCHASE OF BOOKS 
 IN THE FIELD OF THE DRAMA 
 
 THE GIFT OF 
 
 William F. E. Gurley 
 
 CLASS OF 1877 
 1935 
 
^173 .C55rL"''>^er.ny 
 
 The 
 
 V.27 "'"'^"y Library 
 
 M&.&<'om 
 
 o«n 3 ^924 030lg7ff 
 
 Date Due 
 
 ;,^K 
 
 S'Da 
 
 §ttrr^^55 
 
 JM 
 
 |eil|62K? 
 
 ^ij c 
 
 i^:^ 
 
 h j«%%(^ ^ 
 
 PRINTED IN 
 
 («r 
 
 NO. 23233 
 
gg B Cornell University 
 
 iStSlf I.J T -1 
 
 p^ Library 
 
 The original of tliis book is in 
 tine Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924030985851 
 
THE COTTON KINGDOM 
 
GRADUATES' EDITION 
 
 VOLUME 27 
 
 THE CHRONICLES 
 
 OF AMERICA SERIES 
 
 ALLEN JOHNSON 
 
 EDITOR 
 
 GERHARD R. LOMER 
 
 CHARLES W. JEFFERYS 
 
 ASSISTANT EDITORS 
 
JOHN C. CALHOUN IN LATER LIFE 
 Photograph. In the collection of L. C. Handy, Washington. 
 
 JOHN C. CALHOUN IN 1826 
 Painting by G. B. King. In the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington. 
 
THE COTTON KINGDOM 
 
 A CHRONICLE 
 
 OF THE OLD SOUTH 
 
 BY WILLIAM E. DODD 
 
 NEW HAVEN: YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS 
 
 TORONTO: GLASGOW, BROOK & CO. 
 
 LONDON: HUMPHREY MILFORD 
 
 OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 
 
 1920 
 
n,' 
 
 
 Copyright, 1919, by Yale University Press 
 
 862639 
 
 11 J ' '1 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 I. THE LOWER SOUTH IN 1850 Page 1 
 
 II. THE RISE OF THE COTTON MAGNATES " 24 
 
 III. THE SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY OF THE COT- 
 
 TON-PLANTER " 48 
 
 IV. LIFE AND LITERATURE IN THE LOWER 
 
 SOUTH " 71 
 
 V. RELIGION AND EDUCATION " 97 
 
 VI. THE PLANTER IN POLITICS " 118 
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE " 147 
 
 INDEX " 155 
 
ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 JOHN C. CALHOUN IN LATER LIFE. Photo- 
 graph. In the collection of L. C. Handy, 
 Washington. 
 
 JOHN C. CALHOUN IN 1826. Painting by G. 
 B. King. In the Corcoran Gallery of Art, 
 Washington. - Frontiapiece 
 
 THE LOWER SOUTH BEFORE THE CIVIL 
 WAR 
 
 Map by W. L. G. Joerg, American Geograph- 
 ical Society. Facing page i 
 
THE COTTON KINGDOM 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 THE LOWER SOUTH IN 1850 
 
 The region which in the middle of the last century 
 was known as the Cotton Kingdom extended a 
 distance of more than a thousand miles from South 
 Carolina to the neighborhood of San Antonio, 
 Texas. The breadth of this country, from north to 
 south, ranged from two hundred miles in Carolina 
 and Texas to six or seven hundred miles in the 
 Mississippi Valley. The land on which cotton 
 could be easily grown measured perhaps as much 
 as four hundred thousand square miles in 1850, if 
 we count Texas, Arkansas, and Florida, which were 
 then, however, yielding only small crops. Large 
 areas in the lower South were not suited to cotton 
 culture, although they contributed to the cotton 
 kingdom other economic resources of no small 
 
2 THE COTTON KINGDOM 
 
 value. The pine barrens of South Carolina, Geor- 
 gia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana could 
 produce immense quantities of lumber; and the 
 hills and mountains of the two Carolinas, Georgia, 
 and Alabama supplied a large portion of the grain 
 and the whisky consumed on the plantations. 
 
 The cotton belt is a well-watered country with 
 an annual rainfall almost twice as great as that 
 of Illinois or New York. Moreover the snows 
 of the lower Appalachians which lie upon the 
 densely wooded highlands and towering mountains 
 during half the year are carried off through the 
 eastern half of the cotton country by numerous 
 rivers whose average volume is as great as that 
 of the Susquehanna or the Ohio. In addition to 
 these large streams of water there are thousands of 
 smaller rivers, rising among the hills and struggling 
 through the marshes of the low country, which 
 enrich the land and furnish unsurpassed facilities 
 for transportation. In lower South Carolina and 
 Georgia the network of navigable waters brings 
 every parish into touch with Charleston or other 
 coast towns. Farther west the Chattahoochee, the 
 Tombigbee, the Yazoo, the Mississippi itself, the 
 Red, the Sabine, the Trinity, the Brazos, and 
 the Colorado form systems of communication 
 
THE LOWER SOUTH IN 1850 3 
 
 which make it easy to market all sorts of crops — 
 particularly cotton, which can be hauled profit- 
 ably a hundred miles to the river wharves. It is 
 thus a fact of great importance in the study of 
 the lower South that the larger part of the cotton 
 region, somewhat like the tobacco region of colo- 
 nial times, is within easy reach of Atlantic or 
 Gulf ports. 
 
 The soil of the cotton belt, though not so fertile 
 as that of the upper Mississippi valley, was ex- 
 ceedingly productive. In South Carolina and 
 Georgia it had a reddish hue like that of the Vir- 
 ginia up-country; in Alabama and Mississippi it 
 was dark like that of the prairie region of the 
 Middle West; and everywhere it was soft and easily 
 tillable. It produced corn as readily as cotton, but 
 wheat did not thrive on so loose and open a soil. 
 The seasons were so long that two or often three 
 crops of vegetables were raised in a year, with 
 the warm sun and abundant rains as the benevo- 
 lent allies of the farmer. Peas, potatoes, beans, 
 and fruit could be grown so quickly and abun- 
 dantly that the problem of subsistence during the 
 Civil War, for example, was much simpler than 
 in any of the European countries fighting in the 
 Great War. 
 
4 THE COTTON KINGDOM 
 
 But before the cotton-planters overran the coun- 
 try during the two decades preceding the begin- 
 ning of this story, this area was virgin country and, 
 with the exception of certain prairie districts, was 
 covered with dense forests, while its river-bottoms 
 were still tangled, impenetrable swamps. And 
 even as late as 1860 the clearing of new lands was a 
 large part of the planter's work. This was done by 
 cutting away the brambles and dense undergrowth 
 and then "deadening" the larger trees by a process 
 of belting or taking away the bark near the ground 
 and thus preventing further growth. This clearing 
 of the forests let the sunlight fall upon the soil 
 and enabled the planter to produce his first crop 
 at a minimum of expense. But the tall, dead 
 trees, from which the winds tore off branches and 
 strewed them over the ground, gave the country- 
 side a somber, despoiled appearance, and seemed 
 the skeletons of the monarchs of the forest cry- 
 ing aloud against the desecration of nature and 
 the sheer waste of the finest timber in the 
 world. 
 
 The immediate profits of cotton-growing were so 
 much more easily realized than the remote rewards 
 of conservation that the spoliation of timber-lands 
 continued witha ruthlessness unparalleled elsewhere 
 
THE LOWER SOUTH IN 1850 5 
 
 in the world. Men became hardened to this work 
 until the felling of trees became a pastime; and 
 when there was nothing else for slaves to do, they 
 were sent to the "new grounds" to cut timber 
 and burn logs with the idea that older land would 
 soon need to be abandoned and the new be added 
 to the arable fields. West of South Carolina the 
 land was bought at government sales at a dollar 
 and a quarter an acre or was even seized without 
 the formality of a purchase by squatters who 
 entered the public domain, built their cabins, 
 cleared patches of land, and then defied the Federal 
 officials to oust them. The ease with which one 
 might raise a crop of cotton and the relatively large 
 returns which it brought drew men of all classes 
 to the lower South. Thousands of square miles of 
 rich lands within easy distance of navigable rivers 
 gave the people of the region a sense of new oppor- 
 tunity, a feeling that the world belongs to him who 
 can exploit it, and a restless craving for a new life 
 and wide acres — all of which influenced pro- 
 foundly not only the lower South but the whole 
 course of American history. Between 1820 and 
 1850 almost anything seemed possible to the enter- 
 prising man of the cotton country. 
 
 Until 1830 Indian tribes held immense tracts in 
 
6 THE COTTON KINGDOM 
 
 Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. The Chero- 
 kees, the Creeks, the Choctaws, and the Chicka- 
 saws counted many thousand warriors; they dwelt 
 upon good cotton lands and, what was worse, they 
 had been taught many of the arts of civilization by 
 the Federal Government and had been encouraged 
 to become orderly citizens of the United States. 
 This policy tended to make of the Indian a per- 
 manent holder of his land; and in many, many 
 instances these "wards of the nation" had become 
 owners of good homes, masters of slaves, and suc- 
 cessful cotton-planters. 
 
 The planters of Georgia first, and later those of 
 the other States who coveted these lands with a 
 covetousness unimagined by the kingly exploiter of 
 Naboth's vineyard in ancient times, vowed that 
 the Indians should not be allowed to develop 
 settled, civilized communities. Since the planters 
 were represented in Congress and the natives had 
 recourse only to executive protection, the contest 
 was most unequal; and, when President Jackson 
 gave the Indians over to the tender mercies of their 
 enemies, there was no help for them. The planters 
 had their way, and the Indian lands were rapidly 
 converted into cotton plantations. Pretty cot- 
 tages and squahd wigwams, fertile fields and wild 
 
THE LOWER SOUTH IN 1850 7 
 
 hunting-grounds, negro slaves, horses, and farming 
 implements all had to be sacrificed without any 
 other reparation than doles of money and such 
 lands as the Indian could settle beyond the Red 
 River. 
 
 Having secured the vast area of land, the plant- 
 ers had then to obtain the labor requisite to cul- 
 tivate their new acres. Between the close of the 
 second war with England and the annexation of 
 Texas this problem solved itself. On the river- 
 bottoms of Maryland, Virginia, and North Caro- 
 lina, or in the counties which bordered on the 
 piedmont region of those States, there were more 
 than a million slaves whose numbers doubled every 
 twenty years. Since the demand for tobacco had 
 not greatly increased since 1800, there was no 
 profitable employment for these growing hordes of 
 blacks. The owner of slaves in this region could 
 not move to the up-country west of the Blue Ridge, 
 for there were no roads or canals by which to trans- 
 port the wheat and corn which would be his chief 
 crops in the new country. If he went still farther 
 west to Kentucky or Missouri, he found tobacco- 
 growing already well past the stage of profitable 
 employment of slaves. There were left the wide 
 prairies of Indiana and Illinois, but as the laws of 
 
8 THE COTTON KINGDOM 
 
 those States did not recognize slavery the well-to- 
 do Southerner could not go there except at the 
 sacrifice of the larger part of his property. 
 
 The slaveholder of the older South might emi- 
 grate to the lower South, taking his negroes with 
 him, or he might sell his servants and eke out a 
 living for himself and his family on the old home- 
 stead. It was a hard choice, but it could not well 
 be avoided . Thousands emigrated and added their 
 numbers and wealth to the cotton belt; other 
 thousands sold their slaves and thus added to the 
 increasing volume of labor needed to clear the 
 forests and grow the cotton crops of the lower 
 South. Year after year masters and slaves found 
 their way to the new economic El Dorado, and 
 year after year the influence and power of the 
 planters became more evident to the rest of the 
 country. 
 
 In the tobacco country or among the foothills of 
 the older South another and larger class of people 
 found that society was fast hardening around them 
 and was compelling them to take subordinate 
 social stations. They likewise emigrated, and 
 many, very many, of them went to the Northwest, 
 where they "took up" lands and raised just 
 enough grain and pork to sustain their families. 
 
THE LOWER SOUTH IN 1850 9 
 
 Even more of them went tc Alabama and Missis- 
 sippi, where they obtained a small tract of land, 
 bought a negro with their first crop of cotton, and 
 set up as planters "on the make." These pioneers 
 became the most resolute and uncompromising of 
 all the enemies of the Indians and the most ardent 
 advocates of the institution of slavery. 
 
 Thus practically the whole increase of the slave 
 and the white population in the older South was 
 emigrating and most of it was going to the new 
 cotton region. In some counties of the seaboard 
 States, such as Virginia, the population decreased 
 by Kklf in one or two decades, and everywhere the 
 lands and houses of well-to-do people declined in 
 value. Jefferson's magnificent home sold in 1829 
 for about $3000; Madison struggled manfully but 
 in vain to avoid disposing of his family servants; 
 and John Randolph talked about running away 
 from his plantation to avoid bankruptcy. What 
 was the reason for this state of affairs? 
 
 Old Virginia and her neighbors were caught be- 
 tween the upper and the nether economic mill- 
 stones. Disavow it as they would, their most 
 profitable product was the slave who could be sold. 
 Negroes alone increased in value. It is no wonder 
 that statesmen of the older South saw in this 
 
10 THE COTTON KINGDOM 
 
 traffic a means of rehabilitating their decHning 
 commonwealths. ' 
 
 The census of 1850 gives the lower South, in- 
 cluding Arkansas, 2,137,000 white people and 
 1,841,000 blacks, nearly all of whom were slaves — 
 a total population of nearly 4,000,000. The great 
 majority of whites lived in counties where slavery 
 had little influence; and nearly all the slaves lived 
 in the cotton belt, that is, in the districts within 
 easy reach of the rivers. The upbuilding of this 
 region had been accomplished almost entirely 
 within thirty years, and the period of rapid growth 
 and change had now come to a close. 
 
 Practically all the produce of these lower South- 
 ern States was exported. Their cotton sold in 
 1850 for $102,000,000; their sugar, for $14,800,000; 
 and their rice, for $2,600,000 — a total of $119,- 
 400,000. The exports of the whole country were 
 only $203,000,000 in 1850, but while the larger part 
 of these exports thus originated in the cotton States, 
 less than a fourth of all the imports came through 
 Southern ports. Charleston, for example, exported 
 from $8,000,000 to $10,000,000 worth of goods 
 
 ' The lure of the lower South drew also from Boston. New York, 
 Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh, enterprising and ambitious young men, 
 like Sergeant Prentiss and John A. Quitman, who in a few years ba- 
 came great planters and inSaential public leaders. 
 
THE LOWER SOUTH IN 1850 11 
 
 each year, but imported scarcely over $2,000,000. 
 The balance of trade was also against Mobile and 
 other Southern cities. But because nearly half the 
 people of the cotton States were property, the per 
 capita wealth of the planter was much greater 
 than that of the Easterner; and, notwithstanding 
 the most unfavorable balance of trade against his 
 section, he made great display of his wealth. 
 
 Rapidly increasing wealth makes one himger the 
 more for still greater wealth and a wider area for 
 one's operations. Even before the Indians had all 
 moved across the Mississippi, the planters began 
 a most vigorous campaign for the annexation 
 of Texas. From New Orleans, Vicksburg, and 
 Natchez, from Mobile and Montgomery, even from 
 Charleston and Savannah, adventurous men and 
 prospective planters hurried into the disputed 
 region, took up lands, and began the cultivation 
 of cotton and the ipiportation of slaves from the 
 older South. They were winning for the United 
 States a new and promising empire. With equal 
 zest and enthusiasm men from Tennessee, Ken- 
 tucky, and Missouri hastened to join their South- 
 ern brethren and to help them wrest the coveted 
 province from the hand of Mexico. The Revolu- 
 tion of 1836 brought independence to the Republic 
 
12 THE COTTON KINGDOM 
 
 of Texas and eventually annexation to the Amer- 
 ican Union, through a coalition of Southern and 
 Western party groups. The Mexican War followed, 
 and still other vast areas of land were annexed to 
 the United States. What cotton-planters wanted. 
 Congress somehow found a way to grant. 
 
 Nor was the case wholly different in the greater 
 matter of the national tariff. When, in 1828, the 
 South and the West united to place Jackson in the 
 President's chair, it was definitely understood that 
 the "tariff of abominations" was to be abolished 
 or greatly reduced. The exigencies of national 
 politics caused Jackson to falter and delay. South 
 Carolina allowed the new President four years to 
 make up his mind. When he was still uncertain in 
 1832, that State proceeded to nullify the offensive 
 national statute; the President then threatened war; 
 South Carolina thereupon paused; but the outcome 
 was the definite abandonment of the higher tariff 
 policy in favor of the lower rates of the compromise 
 tariff of 1833. Every South Carolinian thought 
 that the planters had once again had their way; 
 and South Carolinians were scattered over all the 
 cotton States. 
 
 If ever people were taught to believe themselves 
 invincible in politics, it was the people of the cotton 
 
THE LOWER SOUTH IN 1850 13 
 
 country during the two decades which preceded 
 1850. A vast region of rich cotton lands had been 
 rapidly opened up to them; the natives had been 
 driven beyond the distant Red River; a new State 
 embracing more than two hundred and fifty thou- 
 sand square miles had been annexed; and the 
 protective tariff policy by which Eastern manu- 
 facturers sought to possess the American markets 
 free from competition had been abandoned. Why 
 then might not the gentleman of the lower South 
 boast of his growing riches and of his control of 
 national affairs? 
 
 The lower South had been and still was an 
 outwardly irreligious, dram-drinking, and dueling 
 section. The French priests had built a compact 
 religious community in and about New Orleans, 
 but they had not pushed this work up the rivers 
 and out into the great stretches of country where 
 plantation life was dominant. Nor was their easy- 
 going moral system entirely adapted to the needs 
 of rural life. The cathedral church, the monastery, 
 and the parochial schools filled the round of the 
 priest's life and duties. The saving of souls in 
 distant plantations was not his especial concern. 
 Dueling and card-playing and horse-racing were 
 
14 THE COTTON KINGDOM 
 
 not beyond the range of his own interests; why 
 should he stir up a crusade against them? The 
 faith of the Roman Cathoh'c Church was, therefore, 
 comparatively stagnant in the lower South. Aside 
 from a few churches in Louisiana and Charleston, 
 firmly established parishes in Mobile, and a diocese 
 in Florida, this branch of the Christian Church 
 had not become a force in the planter civilization. 
 If the founders of the Roman Catholic Church 
 in the lower South were content to let the planters 
 go their own way and to confine their activities to 
 the larger towns, the builders of the Church of Eng- 
 land were no more enterprising. They established 
 their churches in Charleston, Savannah, and other 
 towns, and set up chapels of ease in the outlying 
 parishes — half-way houses, as it were, to the true 
 church in the city — but they were not consumed 
 with zeal to save the lost souls of the hordes of 
 men who filled up the back country. Gambling 
 and horse-racing and card-playing were to the 
 Anglican clergy what they were to the Catholic 
 priests, a means of hastening weary hours away. 
 Even dueling among vestrymen of high standing 
 was not to them one of the crimes to be denounced 
 from the pulpit. They condoned slavery at first 
 and later proclaimed it God's way of saving the 
 
THE LOWER SOUTH IN 1850 15 
 
 souls of the heathen. Good sermons were indeed 
 read on Sabbath days in the churches of Charles- 
 ton and the other cities, and many charities occu- 
 pied the attention of the Episcopahans of the 
 lower South; but these gentle ministrations did 
 not affect the red-blooded men and women who 
 were building in the open country the foundations 
 of a great section of the American Union. 
 
 Men of the cotton country might live freely, 
 might partake of the joys of this world, and might 
 even deny the fundamentals of the Christian faith 
 without feeling that everlasting penance must be 
 done in the world to come. Nor was there great 
 religious or social scruple if aristocratic blood ran 
 in negro veins or if fine young gentlemen kept half- 
 breed mistresses. Only one must not bring one's 
 hybrid offspring to Mardi Gras or seat them with 
 the family in the cathedral church in New Or- 
 leans or St. Michael's in Charleston. Men drank 
 the best and oldest wines of France till they were 
 wholly drunk; they built the best of theaters and 
 engaged troupes of actors from England whose repu- 
 tations for immorality would have scandalized all 
 New England; they even lured assemblies of clergy- 
 men to witness their races and take chances on 
 their steeds. There was thus an un-Puritan and 
 
16 THE COTTON KINGDOM 
 
 continental sort of life in the older communities 
 of the young cotton kingdom which was in time 
 wholly to disappear. 
 
 Another vanishing social group consisted of the 
 high English gentry whose grandfathers had been 
 received at the Court of St. James in the days of 
 the Georges or who had chased the famous Black- 
 beard or who had even turned sea-robbers them- 
 selves. They, too, had made their fortunes in the 
 unsettled eighteenth century; but in the decades 
 which preceded 1850 they were fast disappearing 
 from among the increasing numbers of cotton- 
 planters. They had spread themselves over the 
 lands of South Carolina, built their houses far in- 
 land, and mingled their blood with people of less 
 aristocratic mold. The Pinckneys, the Rhetts, 
 and the Petigrus were merged into the new aris- 
 tocracy of the country, although they still owned 
 houses in Charleston, held pews in the oldest 
 churches, and made a fetish of their St. Cecilia 
 Society, into whose sacred precincts unhallowed 
 feet seldom dared to tread. By the middle of the 
 century it was not so much the State of South 
 Carolina that drew out the loyalty and devotion 
 of the planter aristocracy; the building of a new 
 economic and social order based on an enlarged 
 
THE LOWER SOUTH IN 1850 17 
 
 planter group occupied men's thoughts and pur- 
 poses in much the same way that the spread of 
 Kultur has become the mission of the Pan-German 
 party of our day. South Carolina contributed 
 most to the making of that lower South which was 
 to dominate so large a part of the national thought 
 in the two decades before the Civil War. 
 
 An important racial element was contributed to 
 the life of South Carolina by the French Hugue- 
 nots of high intellectual endowment and even liter- 
 ary culture whose ancestors had driven in family 
 coaches and had read good books for three genera- 
 tions. Unsurpassed in commercial pursuits, they 
 heaped up fortunes which made their names 
 known on both sides of the Atlantic during the 
 Revolution and the decades which followed the 
 adoption of the Federal Constitution. But aris- 
 tocratic groups seldom maintain themselves. The 
 Huguenots were fast merging into the planter- 
 lawyer class, and when cotton became king in the 
 South, their quaint accent was about all that re- 
 mained to mark them as a race apart. 
 
 In New Orleans were old French families dating 
 back to the days of the Grand Monarque himself, 
 who had houses on St. Charles, Royal, or Toulouse 
 street, owned plantations on the river or offices 
 
18 THE COTTON KINGDOM 
 
 on Canal Street, and attended French opera in the 
 evening. Their wealth was invested in slaves or 
 sugar or cotton; their quaint old coaches were seen 
 along the Strand or the Esplanade; and their chil- 
 dren took dancing lessons with French masters 
 who showed both young and old what was good 
 form in France. 
 
 So many Spaniards had come into the colony 
 during the Spanish rule and so many English roy- 
 alists from Revolutionary America that society 
 was wonderfully mixed in New Orleans. All 
 nationalities, including Germans and Italians, 
 entered into the life of the lower Mississippi. And 
 there were many Creoles with the blood of several 
 races in their veins. Octoroons and half-breeds 
 and pure blacks made up the free negro population, 
 which had a life of its own unlike that in any other 
 city in the country. Some negroes were gentlemen 
 with a standing amongst other gentlemen which 
 would scandalize good Southerners of today. In 
 New Orleans as in Charleston, there were negro 
 owners of slaves who played a considerable part 
 in the civic life, were among the stanchest de- 
 fenders of slavery as an institution, and were 
 bitterly opposed to all who talked of setting free 
 their slaves. 
 
THE LOWER SOUTH IN 1850 19 
 
 Outwardly New Orleans was the most European 
 of all American cities in 1850, and its music, litera- 
 ture, and manners were European quite as much 
 as American. But the tone was changing. Hill- 
 house and Story, Slocomb and Eustis, were names 
 of families that did not remind one of either France 
 or Spain. And there were many street names that 
 bespoke the influence of the Yankees who had 
 long ruled the city with a strange lack of reverence 
 for old things and old times. New Orleans was 
 definitely passing from the epoch of Catholic and 
 fur-trading supremacy to that of Protestantism 
 and cotton. Dr. Clapp, the great Boston preacher, 
 and General Gaines, the hero of many battles, 
 were the visible evidences of a new era; yet it must 
 be recognized that French influence contributed 
 much that was valuable to the plantation system. 
 
 The hills of North Carolina, Virginia, and Ten- 
 nessee reared thousands and tens of thousands of 
 plain, poor folk who made the bone and sinew of 
 the lower South. They knew nothing of the gentle 
 ways of Charleston or of the French manners of 
 New Orleans. They built their cabins all over the 
 up-country from what is now Charlotte to Atlanta; 
 they overran northern Alabama and the Tombigbee 
 Valley; and they "took up" lands in Mississippi 
 
20 THE COTTON KINGDOM 
 
 and Louisiana. It was they who made by far 
 the larger part of the new country. While the 
 older Virginians brought with them their slaves 
 and their good middle-class manners, and while 
 the gentry of Charleston and New Orleans boasted 
 of their families and their culture, these people ad- 
 hered firmly to their stern Presbyterian faith or to 
 the warmer reUgious emotionalism of the Baptists 
 and Methodists. 
 
 To be sure, many of these settlers from the 
 poorer districts of the older South were not saints 
 or of the stuff of which saints are made, but there 
 were enough of the earnest and devout to make 
 the salt for the saving of the whole social lump. 
 Slowly these elements were merged with the older 
 order, learned somewhat of the elegance and form 
 which made the Carolina and Louisiana stocks so 
 attractive, and contributed the largest element to 
 the new society which the world always associates 
 with cotton and slavery. 
 
 For the moment a good deal of the religious 
 inheritance from Jonathan Edwards, Whitefield, 
 and Wesley, which the "new light" preachers had 
 delivered to the poorer white people of the South, 
 was lost in the migration to the cotton country. 
 The frontier has always been indifferent to formal 
 
THE LOWER SOUTH IN 1850 21 
 
 religion. The free life of the forest, the conflict 
 with the Indians, and the struggle with nature 
 tended to make men forget the catechism and 
 the hymnal. Nor did the easy-going manners of 
 the older planters, the horses, the hounds, and the 
 illicit loves with squaws and negro women, stiffen 
 the backbone of personal morality. An affair of 
 honor, a duel which always followed the slightest 
 insult among men of family, was attractive to men 
 who were just climbing to the higher rungs of the 
 social ladder; and where law and social solidarity 
 developed slowly these newer men quickly learned 
 to defend themselves, to be the avengers of their 
 own and their family's wrongs. Every man carried 
 his weapon in his pocket and he was not slow to use 
 it. Public gatherings were not the safest places for 
 men of hot tempers. 
 
 And where the weather at all seasons was open, 
 court days, barbecues, and even religious gather- 
 ings, not infrequently were the scenes of encounters 
 between gentlemen and of fisticuffs between men 
 of lower degree. Feuds and lawsuits were en- 
 gendered and prolonged to the great satisfaction of 
 lawyers and hangers-on of the courts. To these 
 occasions of legal conflict were added the myriad 
 suits about land titles and preemption claims which 
 
22 THE COTTON KINGDOM 
 
 gave sustenance to a host of attorneys. Where 
 money came easily it went easily. Sergeant Pren- 
 tiss, a New England lawyer-orator of the first 
 importance in the cotton kingdom, received a fee 
 of $50,000 for the conduct of a single case in the 
 Supreme Court of Mississippi; and Reuben Davis 
 became a state-wide hero in the defense of an 
 acknowledged murderer. 
 
 As one reviews these elements and forces that 
 entered into the make-up of the lower South in 
 1850, it becomes plain that this was a region of 
 immense potentiality. Its great waterfalls might 
 run the wheels of many thousand industrial plants, 
 if Southerners ever turned their minds in the di- 
 rection of manufacturing. Its fertile lands might 
 feed cattle enough to supply the whole national 
 demand for meat. Its harbors were ample for 
 large fleets of ocean-going vessels. The people 
 who had rushed in, dispossessed the native In- 
 dians, cleared the lands, became planters, estab- 
 lished commonwealths, and sent spokesmen to 
 Congress, were native Americans, with rare excep- 
 tions. They were tobacco farmers from the older 
 South, poor whites from all the Atlantic States, 
 Carolina gentlemen, French settlers in Louisiana, 
 
THE LOWER SOUTH IN 1850 23 
 
 and Scotch-Irish farmers from the mountain dis- 
 tricts of Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia. 
 The German element, which had formed so large 
 a part of the Southern population at the time of 
 the Revolution, could be detected only in proper 
 names here and there and in an occasional Verein. 
 Their language, manners, and religion had nearly 
 everywhere given way to the dominant Anglo- 
 Saxon civilization. The lower South was a region 
 of vast opportunity but of wavering democratic 
 faith; it was a region of American traditions, except 
 in its growing devotion to slavery. If its political 
 and social leaders should succeed in uniting all its 
 groups, in moderating its growing ambitions, and 
 in educating its great mass of illiterate people, it 
 must of necessity become one of the greatest sec- 
 tions of the United States and dictate to a large 
 extent the course of national history. Would these 
 conditions be adequately met.'' Was it possible for 
 the planters to develop the wisest counsels? 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 THE BISE OF THE COTTON MAGNATES 
 
 The amalgamation of the various elements and 
 forces of the population which composed the 
 cotton States in 1850 was strikingly paralleled by 
 the rapid concentration of economic power in three 
 or four thousand famihes who lived on the best 
 lands and received three-fourths of the returns 
 from the yearly exports. Two-thirds of the white 
 people of the South had no connection with slavery 
 and received only a very small part of the returns 
 of the community output. A thousand families 
 received over $50,000,000 a year, while all the 
 remaining 666,000 families received only about 
 $60,000,000. While these figures do not show such 
 extreme concentration of wealth in a few hands as 
 the facts of our own day disclose, they do neverthe- 
 less reveal a dangerous tendency. 
 
 Though there was some discontent even in the 
 South at this menace of concentrated wealth, no 
 effort was made to limit the size of men's fortunes. 
 
 24 
 
THE RISE OF THE COTTON MAGNATES 25 
 
 The tendency was to divide the great numbers of 
 slaves owned by one master into plantation groups 
 of something like a hundred each. A thousand 
 acres of land and a hundred slaves made a unit 
 which was regarded as the most productive; but 
 one man might own ten such units and never 
 be made to bear inheritance or super-taxes. The 
 Hairstons owned as many as 1700 slaves dis- 
 tributed over plantations in Virginia, Alabama, 
 and Mississippi; Howell Cobb of Georgia was 
 pointed out as the master of a thousand negroes; 
 while the Aikens of South Carolina and Joseph 
 Davis (brother of Jefferson Davis) of Mississippi 
 were counted as milUonaires. 
 
 There was something factitious about the grow- 
 ing wealth of the great masters. The number of 
 slaves owned was believed to be an index of wealth. 
 The greater the number of slaves one owned, the 
 greater one's riches; and the number of slaves 
 increased rapidly, even in the cotton belt. As 
 fortune would have it, the price of cotton tended 
 to rise during the period of 1845 to 1860. This rise 
 in prices added a hundred per cent to the value of 
 land, and it also added nearly a hundred per cent 
 to the value of each slave. A cotton-planter had 
 only to be a kind master and a reasonably good 
 
26 THE COTTON KINGDOM 
 
 manager, or employ good overseers, and he could 
 not avoid the rapid accumulation of wealth. He 
 simply grew rich. 
 
 The rising price of cotton naturally increased 
 the output of the plantations and gave the owners 
 of slaves a sense of security which they had not 
 known in the older South for fifty years. Be- 
 tween 1850 and 1860 the annual cotton crop in- 
 creased from 2,500,000 to 5,000,000 bales, and thus 
 more than doubled the wealth of the planters. 
 What exaggerated the situation was the fact that 
 these huge crops did not meet the demands of 
 European and New England mills. Thus every 
 way one turned, the fortunes of the cotton-growers 
 increased and the difficulties of regulating or limit- 
 ing the evil of slavery increased. Here seems to be 
 an illustration of the saying that prosperity is 
 quite as unfortunate in its effects as poverty. 
 
 Every year added to the wealth of him who had 
 and seemed to take away from him who had not. 
 A healthy negro man was worth in 1845 about 
 $750; in 1860 the same slave, although fifteen years 
 older, was worth in the market a third more, and a 
 young negro man or woman readily sold for $1500. ' 
 
 ' New Orleans Picayune, August 8, 1838: "Seven slaves were sold 
 by the sheril yesterday, without guarantee, at an average of $1,S38." 
 
THE RISE OF THE COTTON MAGNATES 27 
 
 There was no help for it. Economic laws concen- 
 trated the wealth of the South in the cotton region. 
 Owners of slaves, as we have already seen, did not 
 like to sell their servants, but they did sell them 
 under these circumstances, and there was a con- 
 stant stream of unwilling slave emigration from 
 the tobacco country to the lower South. Cotton 
 proved to be the irresistible magnet. It was doubt- 
 less these conditions which moved Lincoln to make 
 his remarkable statement of 1854 that he did not 
 know what to do about slavery: "I surely will not 
 blame them for not doing what I should not know 
 how to do myself. If all earthly power were given 
 me, I should not know what to do as to the existing 
 institution."' 
 
 But while the great planters were undoubtedly 
 absorbing a disproportionate part of the wealth of 
 the South, and while economic conditions were 
 daily making more difficult the problem of the 
 statesman who really loved the country, much if 
 not most of this outward wealth found its way out 
 of the cotton region. Leading Southern towns ex- 
 ported annually three or four times as much as 
 they imported. New York, on the other hand, im- 
 ported twice as much as she exported. Each year 
 
 ' The Peoria Speech of October 4, 1854. 
 
28 THE COTTON KINGDOM 
 
 $100,000,000 worth of foreign goods came into the 
 United States through her custom-house, while 
 only $50,000,000 worth went out that way. The 
 same thing was true of Philadelphia and Boston. 
 The cotton-planters, with their wide-spread fields 
 and their troops of negro laborers, were buying 
 the bulk of their goods in the North and selling 
 the whole of their output either to Europe or to the 
 North at prices fixed in the world market. The 
 merchants of New York, Boston, and Philadelphia 
 thus reaped enormous profits. 
 
 In the realm of finance and banking there was a 
 still stronger limitation upon the concentration of 
 the profits of the cotton industry in the lower South. 
 Men were chiefly interested in supplying their daily 
 necessities from their own plantations, and the only 
 commercial goods which they used were purchased 
 from the North. As a result the planters paid little 
 attention to matters of banking and credit. Al- 
 though New Orleans was one of the greatest export- 
 ing cities in the country, the amount of money on 
 deposit in her banks was insignificant. Less than a 
 third of the returns on the cotton which annually 
 left her docks ever found place in her financial 
 institutions. On the other hand. New York or 
 Philadelphia always had on deposit more money 
 
THE RISE OF THE COTTON MAGNATES 29 
 
 than the total value of her exports. What was 
 true of New Orleans was true of the cotton belt as 
 a whole. Though the cotton, rice, and sugar of 
 the South sold for $119,400,000 in 1850, the total 
 bank deposits of the region amounted to only some 
 $20,000,000. Ten years later, when the value of 
 the crops had increased to more than $200,000,000, 
 less than $30,000,000 were deposited in the banks 
 of the cotton and sugar belt. 
 
 Nor was it different in the matter of loans or 
 specie or banking capital. While agricultural pro- 
 duction was concentrated in the comparatively 
 small area where cotton could be grown and the 
 returns all seemed to be going to the planters, the 
 evidence is conclusive that far the greater part of 
 the proceeds was left in the hands of those who 
 supplied the South with its necessaries and its 
 luxuries. The earnings of the slave plantations 
 were thus consumed by tariffs, freights, com- 
 missions, and profits which the Southerners had to 
 pay. Southern towns were only marts of trade, 
 not depositories of the crops of surrounding or 
 distant areas. Thus while the planters monopo- 
 lized the cotton industry, drew to themselves the 
 surplus of slaves, and apparently increased their 
 wealth enormously, they were really but custodians 
 
30 THE COTTON KINGDOM 
 
 of these returns, administrators of the wealth of 
 Northern men who really ultimately received the 
 profits of Southern plantations and Southern 
 slavery. 
 
 If some planters saw this dangerous tendency 
 and sought frantically to check it, the majority of 
 men were oblivious of it and endeavored to emu- 
 late the delusive riches of the great planters. The 
 small farmer, the tenant, and the piney-woods 
 squatter, so well described by Frederick Law Olm- 
 sted, ' all contributed to the power and prestige of 
 the industrial leaders. They produced but little 
 surplus — a bale of cotton, a little fresh beef or 
 pork, poultry, and eggs. This produce they 
 carried on ox-carts or rickety wagons drawn by 
 poverty-stricken horses te the nearest plantation 
 towns and bought in exchange a New England 
 bonnet for the wife. New England shoes for the 
 husband and sons, or a little coffee or molasses for 
 the family table. Although these people rarely 
 became members of the privileged order, ^ they 
 were closely bound to it, tributary in their small 
 way to the great planter aristocracy. 
 
 ' Olmsted, Frederick Law, A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States, 
 New York, 1856; A Jour-ney in the Back Country. New York, 1860. 
 
 ' Hiram G. Rumiels of Mississippi, who rose to be Governor in 
 1836, belonged to this ckss. 
 
THE RISE OF THE COTTON MAGNATES 31 
 
 Another class of Southerners contributed in 
 similar manner to the master group. They were 
 the so-called "crackers" or "hill-billies" of north- 
 ern Georgia and north-central Alabama, and the 
 poorer whites who dwelt on the semibarren lands 
 which the planters refused to cultivate or had 
 worn out by their reckless methods of cultivation. 
 They sometimes owned a few slaves, made a score 
 of bales of cotton, and raised some wheat and corn 
 for the planter market. Their net returns amounted 
 to $100 or $200 per year and their homes bore a 
 somewhat better aspect than did the cabins of the 
 piney-woods people. The great majority of South- 
 ern whites belonged to these classes. They lived 
 on the poorer lands in the cotton belt — on the 
 hills that border the lower reaches of the Appala- 
 chian Mountains or on the sandy ridges of Lou- 
 isiana and Texas. They were the inarticulate 
 masses. Sometimes, as in the case of Andrew 
 Johnson, twice Governor of Tennessee, or Joseph 
 E. Brown of Georgia, the inveterate enemy of 
 Jeflferson Davis during the Civil War, they might 
 rise to power and influence, but the great masses 
 of them could hardly hope to see better days. 
 
 Like the piney-woods men, the farmers and ten- 
 ants of the hills were all dependents of their greater 
 
32 THE COTTON KINGDOM 
 
 neighbors, willing hangers-on of a system which, 
 if they but knew it, could give them no promise of 
 better things. The reasons for this dependency 
 were two: many of these ne'er-do-wells were but 
 the distant cousins of the rich, the cast-oflFs of the 
 fast-growing cotton aristocracy; many others were 
 prospective planters, hopeful that they or their 
 sons might migrate to some new cotton region 
 with a little store of savings, preempt a tract of 
 government land, buy a slave or two, and set up 
 as planters. It was from such classes in Virginia 
 or the Carolinas that many, if not the majority, 
 of the great cotton-planters had come. The lowei 
 South was as yet too big for these farmers and 
 tenants to entertain and nurse the hopeless envy 
 that cankers our own industrial life. They were 
 not altogether contented; but they were far from 
 dangerous. Moreover the planters were a demo- 
 cratic folk in their manners. They were too near 
 the poor in point of time and descent to hold their 
 heads as high as their social prestige might have 
 tempted them to. They endeavored consciously 
 to make and keep friends with their poorer neigh- 
 bors — for these neighbors had the ballot. They 
 were the "freemen " to whom every returning mem- 
 ber of Congress must make his appeal against 
 
THE RISE OF THE COTTON MAGNATES 33 
 
 Yankee tariflFs and Yankee abolitionists; and their 
 votes had made possible the annexation of Texas 
 and the war with Mexico, by which the power and 
 even the riches of the planters had been greatly 
 increased. The lower South was a social unit ex- 
 cept for the poor slave, of whom our knowledge 
 comes only through the writings of his master. 
 
 The two millions of blacks on whose sturdy 
 shoulders this kingdom of cotton was securely 
 fastened were inexorably bound to the system. 
 Willingly or unwillingly, they increased its soli- 
 darity and lent enchantment to the life of the 
 planter. They boasted of the limitless lands of 
 their masters, of the incomparable horses of "ol' 
 massa, " of the riches of "ol' massa's" table and 
 the elegancies of "ol' massa's great house." What 
 their inmost thoughts were is not likely ever to be 
 known. They certainly produced the greater part 
 of the cotton and sugar of the South; they dis- 
 liked the whites who did not own slaves; and they 
 were even more cordially disliked by those same 
 whites. And this mutual dislike tended to fasten 
 the bonds of slavery more closely and to prevent 
 any rift between the planters and their less for- 
 tunate white brethren by keeping the slaves loyal 
 to their masters and by deterring the poor whites 
 
34 THE COTTON KINGDOM 
 
 from sympathizing with any aboHtionist move- 
 ment. Every class of Southern society, therefore, 
 was disposed to lend power and influence to the 
 owner of great plantations, save only a bare rem- 
 nant of mountaineers who were too remote to feel 
 the kinship of the masters or the racial antipathies 
 between lowland whites and blacks. 
 
 The ancestors of these mountaineers were the 
 pioneers of Revolutionary times who had pressed 
 into the mountains of Alabama, Georgia, and even 
 South Carolina, men of tough fiber and hardy 
 natures, men who bore some of the best colonial 
 names. There in the mountains they had re- 
 mained. Their ideals were still those of 1776, and 
 their practices were those of social and economic 
 equality. To them the Declaration of Indepen- 
 dence was a reality and Thomas Jefferson the 
 greatest man of all history save one. They lived 
 in isolated valleys, on the sides of fertile mountains, 
 or on the banks of roaring streams. They spent a 
 great part of their Hves in hunting and fishing, 
 and they distilled their corn and fruits into strong 
 liquors just as the western Pennsylvanians had 
 done in the time of Washington. They did not 
 like the great planters; and their leaders in the vari- 
 ous legislatures were often courageous opponents 
 
THE RISE OF THE COTTON MAGNATES 35 
 
 of the plantation system. But they were too few 
 to impede the course of events. They were way- 
 ward obstacles in the path of progress, mere an- 
 noyances of the great ones of earth. Their cultural 
 isolation was complete. 
 
 The roads that led into the mountain districts 
 that these men inhabited were very poor, often 
 mere bridle-paths. The great roadways had left 
 the mountaineers undisturbed, for they connected 
 one river settlement with another. The more 
 important of these roads passed from the older 
 South through Camden and Columbia to Augusta 
 and Savannah, or through Charlotte, Greenville, 
 Atlanta, and Montgomery. A highway known 
 far and wide was that which passed from Louis- 
 ville through Nashville into Alabama at Hunts- 
 ville on the Tennessee River, and thence over the 
 mountains to Montgomery and Mobile. A branch 
 of this road set off from Nashville toward Mem- 
 phis, whence it ran parallel to the Yazoo River, 
 and so on to Natchez. All this Alabama and 
 Mississippi region was, of course, connected with 
 Louisiana and Texas by similar highways which 
 passed through Memphis and Vicksburg. It is 
 therefore clear that all important roads led to the 
 great cotton districts. 
 
36 THE COTTON KINGDOM 
 
 This tapping of the cotton belt was also carried 
 on by the railroads which were built during the two 
 or three decades preceding the Civil War. The 
 mother-road of all was the Charleston and Augusta 
 Railway, which was the first to tap the Georgia 
 cotton belt. Another and more important railway 
 was projected from Augusta to Atlanta and thence 
 to western Georgia and Montgomery. An exten- 
 sion of this road was then built to Chattanooga 
 and thence to Memphis, thus binding together the 
 Tennessee valley and the cotton belts of Georgia 
 and South Carolina, with an outlet to the sea 
 at Charleston. Another railway was built from 
 Savannah to Macon, Georgia, and thence to Mont- 
 gomery, with offshoots into the fertile cotton 
 counties on either side. Thus two systems con- 
 nected the eastern cotton country with the sea- 
 board. They ran alm^ost parallel, but the crops of 
 cotton were so abundant that they both received 
 ample support. 
 
 Two great roads also passed through Mississippi 
 from north to south — one connecting Mobile, 
 Memphis, and Cairo, Illinois, the other connecting 
 New Orleans and Memphis. The cotton belt east 
 of the Tombigbee was closely bound to Charleston 
 and Savannah; the region west of the Tombigbee 
 
THE RISE OF THE COTTON MAGNATES 37 
 
 was bound by two systems to Mobile and New 
 Orleans. All were better connected with the grain 
 and stock country of the Middle West than with the 
 Middle States and the East. A map of these roads 
 and communications is a map of the cotton belt. 
 The railway, that mighty maker of events, tied 
 together the various planter sections and supple- 
 mented the river systems which had given the 
 lower South its start in history. Everything thus 
 tended to make the remote mountaineers depend- 
 ent on the richer counties, and little was done to 
 open the way for them to enter into the great 
 family of planters. 
 
 The same influence and factors tended to bind 
 the older tobacco-growing sections of the South to 
 the masterful cotton communities. The tobacco 
 counties of the three States of North Carolina, 
 Virginia, and Kentucky contained about one- 
 fourth of the population of those States, but their 
 crops were worth, in 1850, $10,000,000, and in 
 1860, $20,000,000. This was the money-making 
 crop of the region, and a very large portion of it 
 was sold in the lower South. Both master and 
 servant chewed tobacco or "dipped" snuflf in ex- 
 cessive quantities. The tobacco was manufac- 
 tured into "plugs" or "snuff" in Richmond and 
 
38 THE COTTON KINGDOM 
 
 Danville and was shipped south in long caravans 
 of covered wagons much resembling the Conestoga 
 wagons of Pennsylvania and the western plains. 
 But as the railroads came into their own just before 
 the outbreak of the Civil War, these overland 
 trains steadily lost their trade. 
 
 What they lost, however, in tobacco they gained 
 in whisky, which was distilled in ever-increasing 
 quantities in the mountains of Virginia and North 
 Carolina. Loaded with casks and crocks filled 
 with the corn and rye whisky or the peach and 
 apple brandy of the high and remote mountain 
 fastnesses, these wagons gathered in trains as they 
 approached the rich cotton belts. It was an in- 
 teresting spectacle to see at eventide the lank and 
 wiry forms of the drivers and owners of the so- 
 called tobacco wagons as they built their fires on 
 the outskirts of Southern towns or on the roadside 
 to cook their next day's rations. Their great up- 
 country horses, tethered to fences or the limbs of 
 trees, fed upon oats while their masters ate bread 
 and bacon, drank deeply from their jugs of liquor, 
 and ended each meal with liberal quids of tobacco. 
 These were the nomads of the South, the mediators 
 between the tobacco-growers and the corn and rye 
 whisky producers on the one hand, and the cotton- 
 
THE RISE OF THE COTTON MAGNATES 39 
 
 growers on the other. In return for the tobacco, 
 the whisky, and even the home- woven cloths of the 
 back country, the cotton men gave raw cotton for 
 the CaroHna and Virginia mills which were already 
 rising in the larger towns, as well as coffee and 
 trinkets for the households of the remote districts 
 where people knew of the planters only through 
 the tales of their wagoners and these welcome 
 evidences of their existence. 
 
 Another commercial group not much talked of 
 but ever present at sales, on railroad trains, and on 
 steamboats, bound together even more closely the 
 articulate elements of the lower South and the 
 older tobacco States. These slave traders had 
 either offices or agents in every black district of 
 the older South. When a planter died, failed in 
 business, or divided his estate, they plied a profit- 
 able trade. And why not? If it were a positive 
 blessing to own slaves, how could it be a sin to buy 
 and sell them? Negroes were bought and sold for 
 the lower Southern market, driven over the long 
 highways to Alabama or Louisiana, and sold for 
 whatever profit there was in the business; but if 
 droves of negroes could be gathered at such places 
 as Norfolk or Louisville, they were stowed safely 
 in the holds of ships and were finally discharged 
 
40 THE COTTON KINGDOM 
 
 at the great slave marts of the cotton country. 
 Some of the returns for cotton which might have 
 been placed on deposit in the banks of New Or- 
 leans or Mobile thus found their way to Virginia 
 or Kentucky and helped to bind together the in- 
 terests of planters everywhere. 
 
 From Tennessee, Kentucky, and the Northwest, 
 cattle raisers, pork packers, and drovers of mules 
 also turned south for their best markets. Wheat, 
 corn, and oats accompanied the mules and steers 
 upon their journeys, for the lower South did not 
 then produce sufficient grain for home consump- 
 tion. Consequently the great highways, the rail- 
 roads, and the steamers all pointed southward, 
 and the north-bound traveler met droves of mules, 
 hogs, or steers going to Charleston, Augusta, or 
 Montgomery. Cotton goods or bags of cotton, 
 sugar, and coffee, and sometimes cloths from Man- 
 chester or edged tools from Sheffield, came back in 
 payment. While this trade did not bind the lower 
 South so firmly to the Northwest, it did tend to 
 bind the Northwestern farmers and merchants to 
 the lower South, for the chief, if not the only, 
 market for mules was in the South and it was the 
 plantation negroes who consumed vast quantities 
 of salt meat. 
 
THE RISE OF THE COTTON MAGNATES 41 
 
 Even the merchants in Baltimore, Philadelphia, 
 New York, and Boston felt in a somewhat similar 
 way the influence of the cotton region. Their ship- 
 ments to the lower South grew with the increas- 
 ing crops of cotton, and Eastern banks carried 
 for Southern merchants large deposits with which 
 they were loath to part when the time of reckoning 
 came. This strong economic pull was strengthened 
 by a greater social influence: wealthy young men 
 of the East went to the homes of the planters for 
 their wives, and ambitious young slaveholders in 
 the cotton belt married in Philadelphia, New York, 
 and Boston. The best families of the older com- 
 munities of the North had much Southern blood 
 in their veins, and the first families of the South 
 had quite as much Northern blood in theirs. Henry 
 Wise, an ardent pro-slavery man, had married 
 a Sergeant of Philadelphia; James Chestnut of 
 South CaroHna was half Pennsylvanian; Mrs. 
 Jefferson Davis was the granddaughter of a Gover- 
 nor of New Jersey; even the Roosevelts of New 
 York named their children for their Barnwell 
 kin of Charleston. Stephen A. Douglas married 
 a North Carolina heiress who owned a plantation 
 and a hundred slaves in Mississippi. A powerful 
 Senator from Indiana v/as the owner of a slave 
 
42 THE COTTON KINGDOM 
 
 plantation in Kentucky. Every such union added 
 to the power and the sway of the cotton-planters. 
 
 So attractive were the profits and the allure- 
 ments of the wide-spreading cotton fields that 
 thousands of men and women living outside the 
 cotton belt invested in farms or plantations, 
 according to their financial resources.' In North 
 Carolina, Virginia, and Maryland there were men 
 in almost every county who owned plantations or 
 parts of plantations in the cotton belt. . In Lynch- 
 burg, Richmond, Norfolk, Washington, and Balti- 
 more there were scores and even hundreds of men 
 who drew their incomes from the cotton fields. If 
 the present easy and flexible corporation system 
 had been developed and applied to cotton-growing 
 before 1850, it is very probable that very much 
 greater sums of eastern capital would have found 
 investment in lands, slaves, and cotton. 
 
 Such were the economic forces which were fo- 
 cused in the lower South and which magnified the 
 self-importance of planters when they appeared at 
 Newport or Saratoga. Not only was cotton king 
 in the lower South, but it was fast extending its 
 sway over old States like Virginia and over great 
 
 ' This is a subject which needs investigation by some painstaking 
 student of American social and economic life. 
 
THE RISE OF THE COTTON MAGNATES 43 
 
 t 
 
 commercial centers like New York. Why might 
 not planters aspire to rule the land and direct the 
 policy of nations beyond the Atlantic? And this 
 was just what they determined to do. Only they 
 would set their own house in order before they 
 invaded other lands. 
 
 As the cotton lands showed alarming signs of 
 exhaustion, the planters concerted plans for a more 
 scientific agriculture. The heavy rainfall of the 
 lower South gradually washed the best soils of the 
 uplands into the rivers, and the unending plough- 
 ing and harvesting of cotton on the same lands 
 tended to destroy the productive capacity of great 
 areas. Red "gullies" and wide "old fields" cov- 
 ered with broom sedge spoke in emphatic tones 
 of the need of a better system of cultivation. 
 
 To remedy the evil of this condition of the land, 
 Edmund Ruffin was employed by South Carolina 
 to teach her planters a better way. In other States 
 rotation of crops, shading of the hard pressed land, 
 conserving of forests and unexhausted soils were 
 the talk of every planters' gathering. Local, state, 
 and sectional societies were organized to check the 
 evil. Men who had said that "no agricultural 
 staple has ever produced so great an effect upon 
 the civilization of the world as cotton, " now felt 
 
44 THE COTTON KINGDOM 
 
 that if some reform were not efPected the decline 
 and fall of the cotton kingdom was as certain as 
 ever had been that of the Roman Empire, the his- 
 tory of which they read with deep interest. 
 
 The remedy which they proposed was remark- 
 able, if not revolutionary: the South should enter 
 purposely upon a career of manufacturing. 
 
 The planters know that their production of cotton is at 
 a sacrifice which looks to ruinous consequences because 
 the substance of their land is annually wasting away. 
 The remedy which we now insist upon is for the plant- 
 ers to resolve that the cotton mills shall be brought to 
 the cotton fields; that they have been paying toll to 
 the English mill long enough. The cotton fields of the 
 United States* extending from the Atlantic t6 the Rio 
 Grande, embrace in their wide extent 500,000 square 
 miles. The interest of all planters in this great field is 
 the same. State lines are imaginary when the sacrifice 
 of cotton-growing labor is the question; old issues in 
 politics may rest in forgetfulness; and the whole South 
 may act as one state in giving a prosperous direction 
 and division to the labor of the best-trained, ihost 
 eSicient, and regular force of workers on the face of the 
 globe. But a part of this force must be taken from the 
 soil and put into the mills. Spindles and looms must 
 be brought to the cotton fields. This is the true location 
 of this powerful assistant of the grower. ' 
 
 ' J. D. B. De Bow: Industrial Resources of the Southern and Western 
 States, vol. i, p. 229. 
 
THE RISE OF THE COTTON MAGNATES 45 
 
 If this manufacturing were to be brought to the 
 lower South, negro labor would be used. And this 
 was tried in South Carolina and Georgia with re- 
 sults that were more than ordinarily satisfactory. 
 In 1852 in the Saluda mills at Columbia, 128 
 slaves and children of slaves were employed to run 
 5000 spindles and 120 looms. The cost per laborer 
 per annum was only $75 as against $116 for the 
 white laborer of the North. Nor was this an iso- 
 lated experience. By 1860 Southern mills con- 
 sumed nearly 200,000 bales of cotton per year. 
 Woolen mills were established in Virginia and 
 North Carolina. Eastern capital was already 
 seeking investment in such establishments, and 
 skilled laborers and managers from New England 
 and Europe were waiting to put up machinery. 
 The up-country and piney-woods whites were seen 
 to be valuable as future labor reserves. 
 
 Thus the needs of the South, the warning of 
 failing lands, the plentiful supply T)f cheap labor, 
 and the abounding water-power were about to 
 start the cotton-planters upon a course of conserv- 
 ing their lands, manufacturing their own cotton, 
 and employing profitably thousands of poor whites 
 who had not been accustomed to work more than 
 a few months in the year. If the new movement 
 
46 THE COTTON KINGDOM 
 
 should prove successful, it was thought that cities 
 would grow up, that greater markets for live stock 
 would be created, that rotation of crops would 
 become the rule, that soils would be fertilized and 
 preserved, and, \^hat was more important, that 
 the lower South would complete her monopoly — 
 for the planters would have no competition from 
 the cotton of Egypt or India, and they would at 
 the same time keep the manufacturer's profits and 
 all the freight charges for themselves. ' 
 
 With things taking this turn. Southern leaders 
 saw, or thought they saw, manifest destinj^ beckon- 
 ing to them in Mexico and Central America. Their 
 institutions were apparently the best in the world, 
 their economic position incomparably the best, 
 and their future beyond the power of man to 
 imagine. Cuba and Mexico were in the hands of 
 weak and backward peoples, and the poor Central 
 American States were in still worse plight. None 
 but selfish Englishmen could wish to stay the hand 
 of conquest in those regions, and all true friends 
 of mankind must wish the guiding hand of Anglo- 
 Saxon slaveholders to be applied to Indian and 
 
 ' It was not so clearly perceived that these Southern interests would 
 become similar to those of the North and that Southern politicians 
 would cease their war upon the protective policy of the industrial 
 States. 
 
THE RISE OF THE COTTON MAGNATES 47 
 
 half-breed owners of those rich and inviting com- 
 munities. After the Mexican War and its easy 
 successes, this imperiahst ideal captured the im- 
 aginations of most of the leaders of the lower 
 South. The more the world demanded cotton, the 
 more the natural increase of the slaves enriched the 
 planters, the more glowing the picture of a future 
 cotton empire appeared. 
 
 Thus the trend of events in that great region 
 which extended from Texas to Baltimore and from 
 the Gulf and Atlantic coasts to the Alleghany 
 Mountains, even to St. Louis and Kansas City, 
 seemed to confirm the planter in his industrial 
 monopoly and to strengthen his hold upon his 
 slaves, upon his lands, and even upon the poorer 
 whites. The master of a mansion, a cotton plan- 
 tation, and a hundred slaves was undoubtedly the 
 social model of the lower South, and he was fast 
 becoming the arbiter of the fortunes of his section, 
 if not of the United States as a whole. Such men 
 and such groups seldom live long without develop- 
 ing a philosophy which is at once their apology and 
 their guide to life. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 THE SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY OF THE COTTON-PLANTER 
 
 The impassable barrier between master and slave 
 and the growing distance between the gentleman of 
 family and the poor white inevitably brought men 
 to the formulation of a doctrine of life pecuhar to 
 these conditions. But never in any country was it 
 more diflScult than it was in the ante-bellum South 
 for writers to publish or believers to avow a social 
 faith which contradicted the Declaration of In- 
 dependence; and the farther southwest one went 
 the more diflBcult, for democracy was too recent 
 a fact and the open profession of personal superi- 
 ority too offensive. 
 
 The discrediting of Jefferson did not begin 
 to take effect in the lower South till such great 
 Virginians as John Randolph and Chief Justice 
 Marshall had successfully ridiculed his teachings 
 as glittering fallacies. Four years after Jeffer- 
 son's death, the Virginia constitutional convention 
 
 43 
 
PHILOSOPHY OF THE COTTON-PLANTER 49 
 
 openly disavowed the equalitarian teachings which 
 had underlain the politics of the South since 1800; 
 and two years later, when the Nat Turner Insur- 
 rection was under discussion in the Virginia Legis- 
 lature, a young teacher at William and Mary Col- 
 lege appeared before the committee on abolition 
 and presented a new system of social science. 
 This man was Thomas R. Dew, a trained political 
 scientist, recently returned from the German uni- 
 versities where he had been taught that the in- 
 equality of men was fundamental to all social 
 organization. He argued so forcibly against 
 emancipation of the slaves that men began to say 
 aloud what they had long believed — that South- 
 ern society was already sharply stratified and that 
 men might as well avow it. 
 
 Dew did not at the beginning attack the older 
 ideals of America. To have done so would have 
 been to alienate men whom he must win. The 
 Jefferson myth was too strong, even in aristocratic 
 Virginia, for men to proclaim their own superi- 
 ority and keep straight faces. Consequently Dew 
 treated historically the mooted subject of negro 
 slavery. He showed that slavery had been the 
 condition of all ancient culture, that Christianity 
 approved servitude, and that the law of Moses 
 
50 THE COTTON KINGDOM 
 
 had both assumed and positively established slav- 
 ery. If Moses and Paul justified and preached 
 slavery among people of the same race, it was 
 incomparably easier to convince an increasingly 
 orthodox society like that of the South that it 
 could be no sin in white men to hold black men 
 in bondage. How much easier to justify the idea 
 of negro servitude to men who had inherited 
 their slaves from honored ancestors, when it was 
 made plain that the Bible taught that even white 
 servitude was right and proper! It was a time 
 when men, especially Southern men, were studying 
 their classics afresh. The ancient world became a 
 real world to the South in the period of 1850 to 
 1860. The new philosophy not only found its 
 justification in the writings of the greatest men 
 of antiquity ; it fitted the facts of Southern life. 
 
 Dew made it perfectly clear that slavery was as 
 profitable to Virginians as all knew it to be to 
 cotton-planters farther south. He insisted that 
 the sale of the surplus supply of slaves brought 
 almost as great a return each year as their greatest 
 crop, tobacco. Thus to the argument of history 
 was added that of economic profit. And here no 
 less a person than the late Governor of Virginia, 
 WilUam B. Giles, came to the aid of philosophy. 
 
PHILOSOPHY OF THE COTTON-PLANTER 51 
 
 Giles had proved from the figures of the custom- 
 houses of Virginia that the returns from negroes 
 shipped South every year were very large. 
 
 With the facts of history, the support of Christi- 
 anity, and the teaching of economics in his favor, 
 it was less difficult for Dew to attack the "fallacies " 
 of Jefferson and the great Declaration. Besides, 
 had not all the greater sons of the Old Dominion 
 recently declared that manhood suffrage, equal 
 representation, and equal rights were inadmissible 
 doctrines.'' Certainly Marshall, Madison, Ran- 
 dolph, Tazewell, and the rest had both argued and 
 voted against all these things. The public mood 
 was therefore favorable, and the new faith gained 
 a quick and ready hearing. 
 
 The new philosophy asserted that men were not 
 equal, but that some men were fit only for the 
 hard toil of the field while others were plainly de- 
 signed for the easier task of managing and direct- 
 ing the labor of others. There were no natural 
 rights; rights were prescriptive and they implied an 
 equivalent, a service rendered to society. A land- 
 owner might vote; he had a stake in society, and 
 he aided men by adding to the goods that men 
 must have. One who did not own land might or 
 might not vote, according as society directed. A 
 
52 THE COTTON KINGDOM 
 
 slave enjoyed the right of protection against vio- 
 lence, hunger, and extreme cold, and in exchange 
 for this protection he gave himself, his work, and 
 his children. 
 
 If society were organized on this basis, there 
 would be three classes, with well-defined rank and 
 standing: the highest or the guiding and teaching 
 group; the traders and free laborers and perhaps 
 small land-owners from whom the skilled labor 
 necessary to all groups was to be derived; and the 
 slaves or "mudsills," as they soon came to be called. 
 Professional men — lawyers, physicians, preachers, 
 and teachers — were expected to be recruited from 
 the small farmers and even from the wealthier class. 
 If every man remained in his place and performed 
 the task expected of him, there would be the great- 
 est economy of effort and the highest civilization 
 possible to man. Woman would be the noblest fig- 
 ure of all and she would cast over men the spell of 
 her influence; gentlemen would be chivalrous and 
 knightly, devoting their best thought to the State 
 but always lending a hand to the weak and the 
 humble as the first duty of the strong. 
 
 This new teaching might not have succeeded 
 so promptly if men had not already been living 
 for years upon such an understanding of things 
 
PHILOSOPHY OF THE COTTON-PLANTER 53 
 
 without being bold enough to formulate a theory. 
 Because Dew went one step farther and put into 
 writing the facts upon which men had acted, he 
 was hailed as a master. William and Mary Col- 
 lege made him its head, and students from the 
 lower South hastened to the old institution to sit 
 at the feet of the new Gamaliel. ' 
 
 The principle of all this teaching was stated thus 
 by President Dew: "The" exclusive owners of 
 property ever have been, ever will and perhaps 
 ever ought to be the virtual rulers of mankind. . . . 
 It is the order of nature and of God that the being 
 of superior faculties and knowledge, and therefore 
 of superior power, should control and dispose of 
 those who are inferior. It is as much in the ordey 
 of nature that men should enslave each other as 
 that other animals should prey upon each other." 
 But Dew probably did not intend to put the case 
 so harshly as it appears in the last sentence. 
 
 It remained for Chancellor William Harper of the 
 Supreme Court of South Carolina to advance the 
 doctrine to its extreme form. The South Carolinian 
 
 ' Dew's philosophy first appeared in Richmond in May, 1832, in 
 pamphlet form. But his ideas were reprinted in the newspapers in all 
 parts of the South and his pamphlet was reprinted many times before 
 1860. It is most available now in The Pro-Slavery Argument, Charles- 
 ton, 1852. 
 
54 THE COTTON KINGDOM 
 
 rejoiced in the "able statement" of the case 
 by the Virginian and he endeavored to elaborate 
 the new philosophy where it seemed necessary to 
 the upbuilding of a perfect state. Harper's work, 
 which first appeared in 1838 under the title of 
 A Memoir on Slavery, was less historical but more 
 to the point than that of Dew. The Bible and the 
 ' ancient philosophers were of course the great 
 witnesses. 
 
 Harper conceived of slavery as the natural order: 
 "To constitute a society a variety of offices must 
 be discharged, from those requiring the very 
 lowest degree of intellectual power to those re- 
 quiring the very highest. It should seem that the 
 endowments ought to be apportioned according to 
 the exigencies of the situation. And the first want 
 of society is leaders. The first care of a state which 
 regards its own- safety, prosperity, and honor 
 should be that when minds of extraordinary power 
 appear, to whatever department of knowledge, art, 
 or science their exertions may be directed, the 
 means should be provided of their most consum- 
 mate cultivation." But to others such careful 
 training could have no significance. "Odium has 
 been cast upon our legislation on account of 
 its forbidding the elements of education to be 
 
PHILOSOPHY OF THE COTTON-PLANTER 56 
 
 communicated to slaves. But, in truth, what in- 
 jury is done to them by this? He who works 
 during the day with his hands does not read in 
 the intervals of leisure for his amusement or the 
 improvement of his mind. If there were any 
 chance of their elevating their rank and condition 
 in society, it might be a matter of hardship that 
 they should be denied those rudiments of knowl- 
 edge which open the way to further attainments." 
 Not only does Harper hold that tie lowest class 
 in society is to be trained to only the hardest toil, 
 but he also believes that its members are necessarily 
 on a low moral plane: "A slave has no hope that 
 by a course of integrity, he can materially elevate 
 his condition in society, nor can his offense against 
 honesty materially depress it, or affect his means of 
 support or that of his family. Compared to the 
 freemen he has no character to establish or lose." 
 It is not different in the relations of the sexes and 
 for the same reason: "In northern communities 
 the unmarried woman who becomes a mother is an 
 outcast from society. She has given birth to a 
 human being who is commonly educated to a 
 course of vice, depravity, and crime. It is not 
 so with the female slave. She is not a less use- 
 ful member of society than before. She has not 
 
56 THE COTTON KINGDOM 
 
 impaired her means of support nor materially im- 
 paired her character or lowered her station; she 
 has done no great injury to herself or any other 
 human being. Her oflFspring is not a burden but 
 an acquisition to her owner. The want of chastity 
 among slaves hardly deserves a harsher name than 
 weakness." 
 
 The chasm between this lowest class of society 
 and the masters and leaders who are at the top is 
 so great that none can bridge it. There is, to be 
 sure, a free or intermediate class from which the 
 truly noble are recruited and from which is derived 
 the connecting link between the field hand and 
 the gentleman. Men of this group are to fill the 
 places of mechanics, merchants, engineers, physi- 
 cians, teachers, lawyers, preachers, and overseers. 
 They should be educated at the expense of society, 
 should have the right to vote and to bear arms, 
 and should be made to feel the pride of race and 
 color and to appreciate the benefits of a caste sys- 
 tem. And thus Chancellor Harper comes, like Presi- 
 dent Dew, to repudiate the doctrine of the great 
 Virginia statesman and philosopher: "Is it not 
 palpably nearer the truth to say that no man was 
 ever born free and that no two men were ever born 
 equal, than to say that all men are born free and 
 
PHILOSOPHY OF THE COTTON-PLANTER 57 
 
 equal? , . . Man is born to subjection. . . . 
 The proclivity of the natural man is to domineer 
 or to be subservient." It is through the evolution 
 of men in society that each man or class of men 
 comes to find the proper place and level, and 
 society then crystallizes and legalizes the resulting 
 differences. This is the very condition of the de- 
 velopment of civilization. Laws are made to pre- 
 vent outbreaks against this estabhshed order as 
 well as to render the different classes contented 
 and even ignorant — for "if there are sordid, 
 servile, and laborious oflBces to be performed, is it 
 not better that there should be sordid, servile, and 
 laborious beings to perform them?" 
 
 But there will inevitably be resentment and in- 
 surrection : foreigners will foment troubles, natives 
 will be restless, and slaves may rise, in spite of the 
 fact that slavery tends to decrease friction more 
 and more as population becomes denser and the 
 hope of liberation from a given state of society is 
 definitely abandoned. To meet all contingencies, 
 standing armies must be created and maintained. 
 In the South such a course would be easy because 
 the honor of defending one's country would be 
 allowed only to white men, slaves being possible 
 material only in dire necessity. In the South, 
 
58 THE COTTON KINGDOM 
 
 "like ancient Athens, it will be necessary that 
 every citizen should be a soldier. . . . And per- 
 haps a wise foresight should induce our state to 
 provide that it should have within itself such 
 military knowledge and skill as may be sufficient 
 to organize, discipline, and command armies, by 
 establishing a military academy or school of dis- 
 ciphne."' 
 
 It is hardly necessary to develop farther the 
 ideas of Dew and Harper. They prepared their 
 premises carefully and boldly. They did not speak 
 the language of the politician, but they spoke 
 rather as wise men giving their fellows those fun- 
 damental propositions from which practical leaders 
 might make what deductions exigencies required. 
 Certainly the South would no longer profess de- 
 votion to the notions of freedom and equality if 
 these teachings should find acceptance. 
 
 Acceptance, indeed, these teachings readily 
 found. In 1837 Calhoun, the greatest and sincer- 
 est of all Southern leaders, openly announced that 
 he held slavery to be a positive good and that 
 
 ' Harper's philosophy may be found in The Pro-Slavery Argument 
 already cited. I have not given page and line, because I have had to 
 make many extracts and condense them. The reader who would 
 understand this philosophy in its minor details as well as in outline 
 would do well to read the works of Dew and Harper. 
 
PHILOSOPHY OF THE COTTON-PLANTER 59 
 
 Southerners should no longer apologize for it: "I 
 hold slavery to be a good; . . . moreover, there 
 never has yet existed a wealthy and civilized society 
 in which one portion of the community did not in 
 point of fact live on the labor of the other." ' This 
 statement might have been taken at one time as a 
 peevish thrust on the part of Calhoun at the cap- 
 tains of industry who were getting the better of 
 him in national legislation. But in 1837 Calhoun, 
 like so many other Southerners of the old Jeffer- 
 sonian democracy, had changed his mind; he 
 meant what he said; he believed in the caste system 
 of which in the South slavery was the mainstay. 
 In his view nothing could be more unfounded and 
 false than the opinion that all men are born free 
 and equal ; inequality was indispensable to progress ; 
 government was not the result of compact, nor 
 was it safe to entrust the suffrage to all. ^ 
 
 These are the views to which the people of the 
 lower South were being converted. The adoption 
 of this point of view marks a revolution in South- 
 ern thought quite as remarkable as the revolution 
 which took place in German thought under the 
 
 ' Richard K. Oralis : Th Works of John C. Calhoun, 1863-1856, 
 vol. r., p. 630. 
 
 'Ibid., vol. I, pp. 8, 12, 46-68. 
 
60 THE COTTON KINGDOM 
 
 leadership of Bismarck during the second half of 
 the nineteenth century. In the lower South the 
 influence of Calhoun was very great; but even that 
 influence could not have availed had it not been 
 for the diflBcult and apparently insoluble problem 
 of negro slavery. After Calhoun became the advo- 
 cate of caste and inequality, it was not diflficult for 
 others of lesser note to follow his lead or for the 
 great majority of the planters to accept the new 
 faith. Still, if the lower South were to present a 
 solid front, all the professional men and the upper 
 middle class must also yield their belief and accept 
 as final the idea that society must be divided into 
 sharply defined ranks, and that some men must be 
 the burden bearers for the rest and labor all their 
 lives without the hope of improvement or more 
 compensation than their food and shelter. If we 
 examine the writings of some of the other spokes- 
 men of the South, both lower and upper, we shall 
 see how far this revolution of thought went. 
 
 In South Carolina nearly every leader, whether 
 in politics, religion, or education, upheld slav- 
 ery and endeavored to reply in positive terms 
 to all who condemned the system. Macaulay, 
 Dickens, Mrs. Trollope, and Harriet Martineau 
 were answered with the statement that modem 
 
PHILOSOPHY OF THE COTTON-PLANTER 61 
 
 industrialism was worse than slavery. James H. 
 Hammond, one of the moderate and very popular 
 followers of Calhoun, published a series of letters 
 in 1845 in which he attacked England and New 
 England for the cruelties of their industrial system. 
 As no reply was made to the heart-rending picture 
 which he drew, the lower South took great consola- 
 tion in the belief that their caste system was not as 
 heartless as that of their opponents. Southerners, 
 they said, did take care of the children of slaves; 
 they did employ physicians for their sick or aged 
 dependents; and they did maintain a sort of com- 
 radeship with their slaves which blunted the keen 
 edge of servitude. 
 
 From this point the advance was easy to the 
 position already taken by Dew that the negroes 
 were the happiest of mankind, because relieved of 
 all care for themselves and their offspring. Ham- 
 mond urged that "our patriarchal scheme awakens 
 the higher and finer feelings of our nature. It is 
 not wanting in its enthusiasm and its poetry." 
 William Gilmore Simms of South Carolina, author 
 of as many books as Scott himself, lent all the 
 weight of his name to the thesis that slaves were 
 the happiest of laborers. William L. Yancey of 
 Alabama made the Southern social system the 
 
62 THE COTTON KINGDOM 
 
 theme of his marvelous oratory. Henry S. Foote, 
 JeflFerson Davis, John Slidell, and every other pub- 
 lic man of the lower South became ardent advo- 
 cates of the newer faith. Before 1850 the older 
 Jeffersonian ideal was totally abandoned, and the 
 contrary ideal of the inequality of men had been 
 adopted. 
 
 To men whose interests were those of masters of 
 slaves and whose philosophy was the doctrine of 
 social caste and prescriptive rights, it was but 
 natural that Walter Scott's famous novels should 
 make appeal. One New York publisher said he 
 sent Scott's works South in carload lots. The Lay 
 of the Last Minstrel and the Lady of the Lake stirred 
 Southern men to think of themselves as proud 
 knights ready to do or die for some romantic ideal; . 
 and the long list of novels from Waverley to The 
 Fair Maid of Perth seemed to reflect anew the old 
 ideals of fine lords and fair ladies whom Southern- 
 ers now set themselves to imitate. Scott's gentle- 
 folk always talked and acted in lofty fashion; the 
 poor and the ill-placed were rough and brutal, 
 without finer feeling, and ready to accept the kicks 
 and cuffs of their betters; and the money -getter 
 was always the sharp and unlovely creature who 
 suggested the Yankee pedler or crafty financier. 
 
PHILOSOPHY OF THE COTTON-PLANTER 63 
 
 Before 1850 it was good form for Southern gentle- 
 men to place Sir Walter Scott's novels on their 
 Hbrary shelves and for all Southern boys and girls 
 to read these books as the great models of life and 
 good breeding. Few men ever had a greater in- 
 fluence over the cotton-planters than the beloved 
 Scottish bard and novelist. 
 
 But while Scott was enthroned in every library, the 
 sturdier Scotsman, Thomas Carlyle, also knocked 
 at the door of Southern intellect. Carlyle went 
 roughly to his point. "Would you turn out slaves, 
 like horses, to graze.'" Then why talk of abolition? 
 "Every man is created to work, some at menial 
 tasks, some at higher callings and others, as God- 
 given heroes, to lead mankind." In scores of books 
 and essays the grim old teacher laid out his doc- 
 trine of social subordination and class distinction. 
 That was all that Dew and Harper and Calhoun 
 and Hammond desired. The greatest reahst in 
 England had weighed their system and found it 
 just and humane. It is astonishing how greatly 
 Carlyle influenced the world. A few years later he 
 was one of the prophets in Prussia, and his Frederick 
 the Great, the first volumes of which appeared in 
 1858, made capital for the Hohenzollern as well 
 as for every other imperialist the world over. 
 
64 THE COTTON KINGDOM 
 
 In the South George Fitzhugh took up the idea 
 of strong-arm government, definitely acknowl- 
 edging his indebtedness to "^Harlyle, and presented 
 to the country a book which was designed to round 
 out all that had gone before. In Sociology for the 
 South^ he laid down a plan for his section of the 
 country which he expected to see adopted else- 
 where if it proved successful. After restating the 
 caste system of Dew and his successors, he attacked 
 Adam Smith with ridicule and relentless logic. 
 Society, he maintained, must be organized for 
 positive, not negative, purposes. Men must be 
 restrained, governed, subjected to discipline; and 
 states must take care that every man, woman, and 
 child shall have a vocation and useful employment 
 with due support. The idle must be compelled to 
 work — only people must not confuse with idleness 
 that leisurely thinking which is the work of phi- 
 losophers. In such a state, freedom of movement, 
 of trade, or of industry is not possible; social effi- 
 ciency and economic success in a world of reality 
 demand organization. 
 
 But organization connotes slavery for the igno- 
 rant and the poor. In Englahd, the duty of the 
 state is to subordinate the owners of the mills to 
 
 ■ Published in Richmond, 1854. 
 
PHILOSOPHY OF THE COTTON-PLANTER 65 
 
 the Government, and the Government should find 
 them employees. The workers should be made 
 slaves of the industrial lords and compelled to 
 labor. They should be forbidden freedom of 
 movement and should be attached to their masters, 
 who in turn must be compelled to give them sup- 
 port and kindly treatment. Children should be 
 reared at the expense of the industry. Strife and 
 poverty must disappear. The same program 
 should be adopted in New England and in the West. 
 Instead of the Federal Government giving away 
 lands or selling them in small tracts, great tracts 
 should be granted to responsible men, who should 
 be allowed to entail these at death upon their 
 oldest sons. The landless and the idle of the 
 Eastern States should be attached to these plan- 
 tations and become the tenants of their masters 
 for life. 
 
 "Slavery will everywhere be abolished or every- 
 where be reinstated " was the alternative presented 
 by Fitzhugh. He expected that slavery would be 
 everywhere reinstated and that all the wo|rld would 
 become like the South, except that the South would 
 have the happy advantage of making all white men 
 free and of leaving the drudgery to negro slaves 
 who were especially created for the purpose. With 
 
66 THE COTTON KINGDOM 
 
 such a system, Southerners would be the happiest 
 as well as the most favored people under Heaven. 
 In the South all white men would be educated at 
 public expense and the best of them would become 
 philosophers and litterateurs, like their prototypes 
 in ancient Athens. Women would become, where 
 they were not already so, the queens of earth. 
 There would be no Miss Martineaus, no Madame 
 de Stalls, but womanly women whom men would 
 adore, and knightly men to whom women would 
 cling like vines to sturdy oaks. To be a Southerner 
 would be a distinction. 
 
 With this ideal state duly propped and bolstered 
 with laws of primogeniture and entail, and pro- 
 tected against free trade and foolish ideas from 
 without, it would be impossible for other nations 
 to compete. White men would run away from 
 the North just as negroes ran away from the 
 South, in order to join the new regime and to 
 enjoy the freedom and blessings of the most in- 
 telligent and beneficent social order that the 
 world had ever known. 
 
 In this new civilization Christianity should be- 
 come the one and only religion. Slavery and Chris- 
 tianity were mutual supports and mutual guaran- 
 tees. Under their influence property would bear 
 
PHILOSOPHY OF THE COTTON-PLANTER 67 
 
 all the burdens of society and its owners would 
 receive all the honors. There would thus be no 
 poverty and little crime because the chief motive 
 to crime is poverty. Few men would ever become 
 insane because every man's task would be con- 
 genial and the free open-air life would be health- 
 ful. If this system were left alone, there would 
 be no commotions and no wars; and over and 
 above all God would preside, and order would rule 
 without a flaw or a slip. 
 
 While this book did not command the immediate 
 attention that similar books in modern Germany 
 have received, it was accepted by the newspapers 
 as pointing the way to the future. In the most 
 serious reviews it was treated as a great and pro- 
 found work. If criticism was offered, it was always 
 in the way of improvement and elaboration. An 
 enlarged if not improved edition was brought out 
 two years later under the title of Cannibals All; 
 or, Slaves without Masters. Fitzhugh became an 
 influential publicist, corresponded with Carlyle, 
 gave lectures in the East, and set forth his doc- 
 trines till the thunder of the guns at Fort Sumter 
 announced that the argument was closed. 
 
 This social philosophy, elaborated and con- 
 stantly reprinted in newspapers or pamphlets. 
 
68 THE COTTON KINGDOM 
 
 represented fairly what the articulate South was 
 ready to go to war for. There was, however, some 
 protest. The editor of the Southern Literary Mes- 
 senger insisted in the beginning that Dew's ideal 
 society was by no means ideal to him; it was not 
 until 1843 that he became a convert to the new 
 faith. In North Carolina slavery had never won 
 such complete ascendancy as it had in the lower 
 South; and there opposition to the accepted dogma 
 was strenuously voiced till hushed by law or by a 
 too powerful public opinion. In 1846 Daniel R. 
 Goodlow, in a pamphlet of real acumen, urged that 
 slavery was not a perfect institution. He insisted 
 that the investment of some billions of capital in 
 the ownership of labor was a doubtful speculation. 
 The land would be worth as much if the negroes 
 were free, and the capital invested in slaves might 
 better be put into improvements. 
 
 A less effective protest was voiced by Hinton R. 
 Helper, in 1857, in the Impending Crisis of the 
 South, a book which became a campaign document 
 in the North three years later. Helper endeavored 
 to show that the planters composed a far-reaching 
 oligarchy, if not conspiracy, against the poorer 
 farmers and the landless classes. His statistics 
 were well calculated to prove further that this 
 
PHILOSOPHY OF THE COTTON-PLANTER 69 
 
 conspiracy had been the sole cause of the economic 
 backwardness of the South. But Southerners did 
 not suffer his book to be read. A hapless agent 
 who endeavored to circulate it was quickly haled 
 to court. Neither Goodlow's argument nor Hel- 
 per's outcry had any appreciable effect in stemming 
 the tide of pro-slavery teaching. Not one man in a 
 hundred even heard of them. Nor was the moder- 
 ate reasoning of George M. Weston's The Progress 
 of Slavery in the United States (1857) effective. 
 Even if men in their reflective moments were in- 
 clined to agree with him, the aristocratic and feudal 
 evolution had gone too far. 
 
 During the twenty-five years which had elapsed 
 since Virginia had declined definitely the task of 
 abolishing slavery and since Dew had offered his 
 convincing argument, the cotton-planters as well 
 as the sugar and tobacco growers had definitely and 
 finally broken with the Jeffersonian ideal. Their 
 growing economic power and the attractiveness of 
 their labor system had confirmed them in their 
 view that government must needs represent prop- 
 erty and privilege and that democracy was a 
 failure. Since the planters were the articulate 
 element in society and the small farmers and land- 
 less groups were hardly in a position to assert any 
 
70 THE COTTON KINGDOM 
 
 contrary views, it was not difficult to make the 
 lower South socially solid. No newspaper of any 
 importance, no college or university professor, no 
 prominent preacher, and no politician of any party 
 offered effective resistance. In two or three in- 
 stances professors did go so far as to support mildly 
 anti-slavery views, but they were removed from 
 their positions. One eminent man in Charleston 
 stood alone and was left free, apparently because 
 any attempt to curb him might advertise his 
 moderate ideas. The mails were closed against 
 abolition books and newspapers as a matter of 
 course; and boycotts were urged against North- 
 ern periodicals if they printed articles that dis- 
 pleased the South. There was the most perfect 
 agreement ever known in Anglo-Saxon history. 
 Men thought the ideal social organization had 
 been found. Were not the planters prosperous, the 
 middle-class and landless groups contented, and 
 the slaves the happiest of living men? 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 LIFE AND LITERATURE IN THE LOWER SOUTH 
 
 The home of the cotton-planter was a modest 
 country house of ten or twelve rooms. It stood 
 upon an elevation along the roadside or upon a 
 river bluff, surrounded by half a dozen or more 
 negro cabins known as the ' ' quarters . ' ' There were 
 tall, spreading trees, graveled walks, shrubs, and, 
 in the grounds of the greater places, marble figures 
 of wild animals or replicas of antique statues. The 
 house itself was likely to be surrounded by long 
 porches which gave protection against the intense 
 heat of summer but which darkened the halls and 
 rooms of the mansion. These porches were often 
 as tall as the house itself and their roofs were up- 
 held by rows of huge white columns, which gave 
 even a second rate or "tumble-down" place a 
 grandeur that was supposed to impress the visitor 
 and proclaim the dignity of the master and the 
 size of his estate. 
 
 71 
 
72 THE COTTON KINGDOM 
 
 Inside the house there was a wide hall and an 
 ample stairway leading to another hall on the 
 second floor. From the hall on the first floor one 
 entered the parlors, the library, and the dining- 
 room; on the second floor were the living-rooms of 
 the family. Ceilings were high everywhere, and 
 windows tall and wide; but carpets were of plain 
 design, when there were carpets at all. On the 
 walls there were portraits of worshipful ancestors, 
 a steel engraving of George Washington, a battle 
 scene of the Revolution, and a painting of Calhoun 
 or Clay addressing the United States Senate. Fur- 
 niture was as a rule plain but somewhat mas- 
 sive. Of servants there were always plenty and to 
 spare, for the number of servants rather than the 
 elegance of the outfit advertised the wealth and 
 dignity of the family. 
 
 A half- score of sons and daughters, a tall, lank, 
 and rather weatherworn gentleman, and a slender, 
 soft-voiced, weary-looking mother composed the 
 family group, unless one counts the inevitable 
 guest or old-maiden cousin who, like the furniture 
 or the servants, always formed part of a planter's 
 household. Though it was not good form to labor 
 with one's own hands, yet both master and mistress 
 knew how to perform most of the work that was 
 
LIFE AND LITERATURE 73 
 
 daily done by the blacks. The younger mem- 
 bers of the family took pride in their immunity 
 from the work that is the lot of most men. Soft 
 hands and ignorance of the vocabulary of labor 
 and trade were considered especially becoming. 
 Nor was the toil of the fields or drudgery of the 
 house more attractive then and there than now 
 and here. The injunction of Holy Writ to "mul- 
 tiply and replenish the earth" was obeyed; but 
 the truth that "in the sweat of thy face shalt 
 thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground" 
 made little appeal, for was not the negro created 
 by God to do the work of the white man? His skin 
 was black and proof against the heat of summer; 
 he delighted in the streaming rays of torrid suns; 
 and he preferred to sleep at noonday with his face 
 to the sky. Negro women made beds, cleaned 
 houses, and cooked the meals of the planters, while 
 negro boys and girls served them at table in the 
 great dining-room. Horses were groomed and 
 harnessed, cows were fed and milked, and morning 
 fires were made by negro hands. If one wanted a 
 glass of water, a servant was ready to bring it fresh 
 from the well; if flies disturbed the guest, and flies 
 always disturbed everybody, there were boys to fan 
 them away and to keep the atmosphere in motion. 
 
74 THE COTTON KINGDOM 
 
 In return for personal service the negroes were 
 supplied with cabins — one for each family. These 
 cabins were built of logs, the crevices daubed with 
 clay, and the roofs made of clapboards or shingles. 
 There was one broad fireplace at which meals were 
 cooked and served and clothes were washed, and 
 around which the little negroes gathered when the 
 weather was cold or rainy. There were beds and 
 mats and quilts for sleeping accommodations. 
 Some slept on the beds, some on the floor with their 
 feet to the fireplace, and some in the attic. There 
 was no waste space in a negro cabin. 
 
 The slaves raised pigs and chickens, and had 
 gardens in which they grew sweet potatoes for 
 themselves and, in the upper South, tobacco plants 
 in the fence corners about the "quarters." Every 
 week the master allowed each grown person four 
 pounds of meat, a peck of meal, and a quart of 
 molasses, with something over for the little ones. 
 The rest the slave was expected to find for himself 
 — the Sunday chicken, the "greens" from the 
 garden, and the potatoes from the cache in which 
 they were stored away from the cold. The older 
 slaves were allowed to keep dogs and to hunt coons 
 and 'possums at night and, now and then, squirrels 
 and rabbits by day. The negro is even now the 
 
LIFE AND LITERATURE 75 
 
 inveterate enemy of the rabbit. Little negroes 
 played and romped in the "quarters, " in the barns, 
 and even in the great house; they climbed the 
 tallest trees, and they put their black faces out of 
 every window of the cabins when visitors were 
 around. Their clothing was like the annals of the 
 poor, short and simple, merely a shirt which 
 reached to the knees. Shoes and hats were useless 
 encumbrances for pickaninnies in winter as well as 
 in summer. Older negroes received a new suit of 
 clothes, two pairs of shoes, and a cheap hat each 
 year, and at Christmas time a little liquor, some 
 trinkets for the women, and a small sum of spend- 
 ing money. Masters and servants lived much to- 
 gether on the smaller plantations, and white and 
 black children played together whether on great 
 places or small. 
 
 It was a community life. Each member felt 
 closer to the others than is now generally supposed. 
 When the old master or the old mistress died, 
 there was genuine sorrow in the "quarters" and a 
 long train of black mourners followed the remains 
 to the grave, for the break-up of plantations was 
 as distressing to slaves as to their owners. When 
 slaves died, their remains, neatly dressed, were 
 laid away in plain coffins in the "God's acre" 
 
76 THE COTTON KINGDOM 
 
 of the plantation. The death of a slave was 
 lamented as much in the mansion as in the 
 " quarters," and every attention was given the sick. 
 Indeed the oversight of the health of the slaves, 
 always ignorant and sometimes reckless, was a 
 burden of life which the mistress seldom evaded. 
 Family physicians attended negroes as well as 
 masters; and on great estates there were chaplains 
 to bury the dead, to officiate in plantation chapels, 
 and to ask blessings at the planter's table. But 
 the white chaplain was not popular with the 
 negroes. They preferred to sit in the galleries or 
 annexes of the white churches or to worship under 
 the guidance of their own preachers where white 
 people did not intrude, and where they could, 
 under such auspices, indulge without restraint in 
 weird chants, bodily contortions, and loud shrieks. 
 If the master was niggardly in the matter of 
 dress for his slaves, he was also rather indifferent 
 about his own clothes. It had long been a mark of 
 distinction in a gentleman of Virginia to dress in 
 shabby or last year's suits; and what was good 
 form in the Old Dominion was good form in the 
 cotton country. Nor were the women fastidious. 
 Elegant silks and gay bonnets then, as always, 
 delighted their hearts, but the tyranny of seasons 
 
LIFE AND LITERATURE tt 
 
 and of fashions did not rule the plantations. In 
 Washington, however, where Southerners were 
 always on dress parade, at Saratoga, or at the 
 Virginia springs, planters' wives followed the Pa- 
 risian styles, wore costly jewels, and drove hand- 
 some equipages. There the absentee mistress of 
 even a small number of slaves was at her social 
 best, and her dinners, her salons, her balls were 
 "the rage." One thinks here of Mrs. Stephen A. 
 Douglas, Mrs. Jefferson Davis, and Mrs. William 
 Gwin, the wife of Senator Gwih of California. 
 
 In Charleston, Mobile, and New Orleans men of 
 business, lawyers who owned country estates, and 
 merchants whose names were known in New York 
 and Boston, were more careful to maintain the 
 fashion and dressed more like the Prince of Wales 
 than was the custom on the plantations. After 
 all, the democracy of Jefferson was waning, and in 
 these centers the women generally dressed, much 
 as they do today, to display the riches of their 
 husbands; they were living advertisements of the 
 family standing. To drive at six o'clock upon the 
 Battery, to dance at twelve o'clock at St. Cecilia's, 
 and to have a pew at St. Michael's were evidences 
 of success that none could have misunderstood. 
 
 Travel was a part of every Southern planter's 
 
78 THE COTTON KINGDOM 
 
 life. Before the day of railroads the family 
 carriage was an institution. Large, cumbersome, 
 swung high on suspension springs, it rocked and 
 rolled along the rough roads of the lower South 
 with all the dignity of a limousine and with much 
 more picturesqueness. It was trimmed with brass 
 and gold and usually had the family coat of arms 
 adorning the doors. There were light metal steps 
 on which the ladies mounted and which were 
 pulled in when the door closed, leaving the un- 
 initiated wondering how the precious freight was 
 loaded on or off. The horses were groomed and 
 harnessed in the best of style, and high upon the 
 box sat a majestic son of Africa, the happiest 
 product of the plantation system. Such an outfit 
 one might see any day upon a lonely country road 
 making its way for miles or hundreds of miles to 
 visit neighbors or kindred in distant States. 
 
 Sometimes these Southern gentlefolk were on 
 their way to New Orleans or Charleston to see the 
 races. In summer they were likely to be seeking 
 the way to Pass Christian for the Gulf bathing 
 beaches or else they wandered farther away to the 
 mountains of North Carolina, in order perchance 
 that the planter might take part in a caucus ol 
 South Carolina politicians. But wherever they 
 
LIFE AND LITERATURE 79 
 
 went they stayed weeks or months to get the worth 
 of their long journey. To travel all the way from 
 Alabama to Old Virginia was no small undertaking 
 even to the tough and wiry frames of our ante- 
 bellum planters and there was therefore much 
 necessary hospitality on the way. If one may 
 beheve some of the contemporary accounts, how- 
 ever, there was often a good deal of querying and 
 wagging of heads when the outriders, the drivers, 
 and the horses, not to mention the gentlemen and 
 ladies who clambered out of these overland arks, 
 all settled down at a distant cousin's for a month's 
 sojourn. 
 
 Still, all was not plantation routine, dress, and 
 travel. In the great house there was a library 
 which was likely to be the home of law books, of 
 histories, of English novels, and of handsomely 
 bound Greek and Latin classics. There were 
 quarterly reviews on the library tables; and a file 
 of the Charleston Mercury, the New Orleans 
 Picayune, or the Richmond Enquirer stood on the 
 lower shelves of the bookcases. The debates in 
 Congress were read everywhere, for Congress was 
 the arena in which great Southerners displayed 
 their talents and endeavored to thwart their rivals 
 
80 THE COTTON KINGDOM 
 
 and opponents from the North. The most sacred 
 of all public documents was the Constitution of the 
 United States, which many could repeat verbatim 
 from start to finish. But South Carolinians alone 
 felt the necessity and the duty of remembering 
 two constitutions at all times and upon all oc- 
 casions. 
 
 The Virginia Bill of Rights, the Virginia and 
 Kentucky Resolutions, and Madison's Report of 
 1799 were only a little less sacred to emigres of the 
 Old Dominion in the lower South. Of course, New 
 England periodicals gave place to the Southern 
 Review, published in the sacred Carolina city, to 
 De Bow's Review of New Orleans, and especially to 
 the Southern Literary Messenger, which always 
 brought with it something of the atmosphere of 
 Richmond and was hardly less dear to the South- 
 ern heart than Charleston itself. But while the 
 North American Review and the Knickerbocker 
 Magazine seldom gained a place on Southern 
 tables, Harper's Magazine and, just before the war, 
 Harper's Weekly found many readers in the South. 
 
 "While law and propaganda held large places in 
 the thought of the lower South, there was time 
 and interest left for the lighter literature which so 
 many men have regarded as a test of culture — 
 
LIFE AND LITERATURE 81 
 
 belles-lettres, as the people of 1850 were prone to say. 
 Walter Scott's romanticism and hero-worship 
 suited their taste and braced their social system, 
 as we have already seen, and he furnished matter 
 enough for the longest of the idle days of a lonely 
 cotton plantation. Marmion and Ivanhoe and the 
 Heart of Midlothian were common intellectual 
 property in all parts of the South. Yet Byron with 
 his reckless love of the lawless and, later, Thack- 
 eray with his quiet but efiFective irony won the 
 hearts of readers. In fact, every English writer of 
 standing made an appeal to the planters so long 
 as he did not attack their beloved institution of 
 slavery. The planters were consciously returning 
 to a former allegiance. It was the English, not the 
 budding New England, literature which won them, 
 although Charles Dickens with his tearful stories 
 was too much for Southern digestion; and on his 
 Southern tour in -1859 this great author fortunately 
 did not pass beyond Richmond. 
 
 If ladies and gentlemen of the cotton kingdom 
 liked to read the better English writers, they also 
 readily turned to the older classics. Doctor John- 
 son and Oliver Goldsmith and, above all, Shake- 
 speare were found upon every shelf and were read 
 and reread for their content as well as for their 
 
82 THE COTTON KINGDOM 
 
 form and style. The plays of Shakespeare were 
 presented in Charleston long before they found 
 a hearing in Boston and Philadelphia; and Rich- 
 mond, Mobile, New Orleans, and Memphis readily 
 furnished large audiences for the greater English 
 playwrights even before those cities became popu- 
 lous. Planters who had been educated at the 
 University of Virginia or who had traveled in 
 Europe took up their winter residence in the 
 nearest cities, in order to enjoy the art of the elder 
 Booth, who made his American debut in Peters- 
 burg in 1821, or to hear the Barber of Seville, given 
 in New Orleans every winter, or to sit in Charles- 
 ton for portraits by the painters De Veaux and 
 Eraser. Although New Orleans was the first city 
 in America to give serious attention to opera and 
 always maintained close ties with Paris, Southern- 
 ers did not develop their love for music, painting, 
 or sculpture beyond the level of the amateur. 
 
 Aside from portraits which they liked to have 
 made for their ancestral halls, some promising 
 efforts at sculpture, which made a beginning in 
 Richmond before 1860, and the mere pleasure of 
 hearing good music, the planter's taste for the fine 
 arts made little progress. His life did not lend 
 itself to that form of expression. To be sure. 
 
LIFE AND LITEBATURE 83 
 
 Gottschalk was born in New Orleans, and there 
 was an Academy of Design in Charleston ; but the 
 former never counted America his musical home, 
 and the Academy had only a fitful existence. 
 
 From Thomas Jefferson, who enjoyed his Homer 
 to the last year of his long and busy life, to the 
 Rev. Dr. Benjamin Palmer of New Orleans, plant- 
 ers of both the tobacco and the cotton-growing 
 regions held firmly to the old idea that a liberal 
 education could not possibly be based upon any 
 other foundation than the languages and litera- 
 tures of the ancients. Perhaps they received this 
 idea from their European ancestors ; or, like Goethe 
 in his old age, they may have rediscovered Rome 
 and Greece. Whatever the cause of their early 
 liking for the classics, the preachers of early Pres- 
 byterianism, missionaries trained in the methods 
 and the theology of Princeton, carried Latin and 
 Greek wherever they went. They prayed in Eng- 
 lish but kept their Greek grammars in their pockets, 
 and every aspirant for education or leadership in 
 the Southern backwoods was set to work on Latin 
 forms and Greek roots. In a hundred log "col- 
 leges" during the first thirty years of the nine- 
 teenth century. Southern youths labored over their 
 classics from sun to sun, like the slaves in the fields. 
 
84 THE COTTON KINGDOM 
 
 Calhoun, McDuffie, and scores of other well- 
 known leaders, were the product of these schools. 
 Both preachers and politicians made long quota- 
 tions from Virgil and Homer and Horace to prove 
 their education and to practise their learning. 
 Young men wrestled with pronunciation and old 
 men spent their spare hours in the shade of friend- 
 ly oaks mastering the thoughts of Plato and Aris- 
 totle in the original. At social gatherings and at 
 even graver meetings men wrangled about the 
 correct renderings of passages from their favorite 
 authors. 
 
 In such an atmosphere as this it is not surprising 
 that the colleges of the lower South long remained 
 essentially schools of Greek and Latin. Yet men 
 could not write popular books or political ha- 
 rangues in the languages of Homer and Cicero, even 
 though they did assign ancient names to thousands 
 of their political pamphlets. The challenge of 
 Irving and Cooper and Hawthorne was constantly 
 before them, and even the most loyal of the classi- 
 cists felt this new pull away from their toilsome 
 pages. Aside from the serious reviews already 
 mentioned and the excellent literary pages of the 
 better daily and weekly papers, Southerners felt 
 that they must produce fruits worthy of their 
 
LIFE AND LITERATURE 85 
 
 civilization if they would stand unabashed in the 
 presence of the rest of mankind. 
 
 The greatest and best of the cotton-planter poets 
 and novelists was William Gilmore Simms of 
 Charleston (1806-1870), who at the age of twenty 
 published his Lyrical and Other Poems. This 
 volume, however, fell flat from the press and found 
 no response from the severely classical gentle- 
 men of Charleston who measured everything by 
 the standard of "Mr. Pope" or "Mr. Dryden." 
 Simms tried again and yet again — a score of 
 times — till more than twenty volumes of verse 
 came from his pen. Though he imitated the vein 
 now of Scott, now of Byron, he somehow failed to 
 attract the planters. Then Simms tried the writing 
 of novels, and in 1834 he published Guy Rivers, 
 which yielded him a small bank account. The 
 next year he brought out two other works. The 
 Yemassee and the Partisan, each of which passed 
 rapidly through two or three editions and made 
 his name known in London better than in the lower 
 South. Although the planters felt the need of a 
 native literature and even organized clubs for its 
 encouragement, they did not read enough con- 
 temporary books to recognize the merit of one of 
 their own writers when he appeared. 
 
86 THE COTTON KINGDOM 
 
 Simms himself, though perhaps the only South- 
 erner in all ante-bellum history who could say so, 
 complained that the fact that he earned his living 
 by his pen prevented his recognition in the best 
 Carolina circles. It was a curious contradiction 
 in the planter life; but Simms continued his eflForts 
 to give the South a native literature until he was 
 the author of nearly a hundred volumes and until 
 he was recognized in both North and South as a 
 great writer. To be sure, his romances reminded 
 one of Cooper and even of Scott; still, the subjects 
 were Southern, and many of his characters were 
 original and charming and one or two were unsur- 
 passed. When the great war came he was living 
 in style at his country place, a great library around 
 him and guests always at his table. What more 
 could one ask? 
 
 Of less importance but distinctly a planter in 
 character was John Pendleton Kennedy (1795- 
 1870) whose Swallow Barn (1832) and Horseshoe 
 Robinson (1835) portrayed planter life and Caro- 
 lina ideals in ways that gave their author as much 
 recognition as could be afforded by men who were 
 very busy with their negroes and their pohtics. 
 Although the writings and the methods of Ken- 
 nedy are remarkably similar to those of Irving, 
 
LIFE AND LITERATURE 87 
 
 there was enough originality in these works to 
 entitle them to much more attention than they 
 now receive. The pictures of country life, of the 
 'squire of the county court, of the mistress of a 
 plantation, and of great neighborhood dinners are 
 dehghtful and bear more than a single reading. So 
 well was his talent recognized in England, we are 
 told, that Thackeray asked Kennedy to write the 
 fourth chapter of his famous Virginians and tra- 
 dition has it that the request was complied with. 
 
 Good though the work of Simms and Kennedy 
 was, the best of the planter South was found in its 
 poetry. Aside from minor lawyer-poets and the 
 miraculous My Life is Like the Summer, of Richard 
 Henry Wilde, the lower South produced two men of 
 genius — Timrod and Hayne, who were inspired 
 and trained by Simms in Charleston, although it 
 took the disasters of the Civil War to bring out 
 their greatness. 
 
 Troubled all his life by poverty, lonely beyond 
 the fate of most mortals, and stricken for many 
 years with tubereulosis, Henry Timrod (1829-1867) 
 hastened to his grave without having done half 
 his work. His Cotton Boll, The Lily Confidante, 
 and Vision of Poesy show the artist of more than 
 mere talent. But the times were out of joint and 
 
88 THE COTTON KINGDOM 
 
 when peace came he was exhausted. His equal 
 was never produced in the lower South. 
 
 Although his friend Paul Hamilton Hayne 
 (1830-1886) wrote more and had the satisfaction 
 of seeing his works more frequently in bound 
 volumes, he was hardly the equal of the author of 
 The Cotton Boll. Hayne published three volumes 
 before 1860, and he hved to bring out in Phila- 
 delphia and New York still other volumes after 
 the great struggle was over. Because in all these 
 works he speaks as a Southerner he ultimately won 
 from English critics the title "Laureate of the 
 South." But the great planter regime never quite 
 recognized him, nor were his royalties drawn from 
 their purses. Like Simms, he clung resolutely to 
 his section and defended its cause and ideals to his 
 dying hour. But he defended them in a lonely 
 cottage in Georgia where he spent the last twenty 
 years of his life earning his livelihood in the "sweat 
 of his brow," seeking still to give aid now and 
 then from his slender stores to his more unfortu- 
 nate friends, Timrod and Simms. 
 
 But Simms, Timrod, and Hayne were after all 
 only echoes of that greater world of literature of 
 which Scott, Byron, and Dickens were the mas- 
 ters, and they belonged by tradition to English 
 
LIFE AND LITERATURE 89 
 
 literature. There was a more original and there- 
 fore more important group of writers who lived in 
 the lower South and who finished their work before 
 the war began. The chief of these were the Rev. 
 Augustus Baldwin Longstreet (1790-1870), Wil- 
 liam Tappan Thompson (1812-1882), Johnson 
 Jones Hooper (1815-1863), and Joseph G. Baldwin 
 (1815-1864). In 1834 Longstreet pubHshed, in 
 sportive mood, his Georgia Scenes, in which he 
 portrayed the homely life and fun of the poorer 
 white people of the lower South. 
 
 Longstreet made the fisticuffs, the cock-fights, 
 and the horse-swappings of county court days the 
 subjects of his writing, and few have equaled him 
 in his chosen field. His neighbor and partner in 
 the management of a rural newspaper, William 
 Tappan Thompson, published in 1840 Major 
 Jones's Courtship, which continued the same kind 
 of work. This book won immediate success, and 
 its homely scenes the simpler folk in all parts of 
 the South still remember. Of less importance but 
 well worth reading is Johnson Hooper of Alabama. 
 Hooper made the rascally, trifling fellow who 
 swindled his neighbors or ran away from his family 
 his special favorite, and Simon Suggs is his best 
 creation. 
 
90 THE COTTON KINGDOM 
 
 Of a higher order was the work of Joseph G. 
 Baldwin, also of Alabama, who made Virginia his 
 especial field in a series of articles which he pub- 
 lished in the Southern Literary Messenger. That 
 Baldwin had read Irving is perfectly plain; but 
 his treatment of Virginia subjects and characters 
 is so original and mirth-provoking that few can 
 read his pages today without enjoyment. It was 
 a sort of second Knickerbocker's tales which he 
 finally gathered together and published under the 
 title of Flush Times in Alabama and Mississippi 
 (1853). It was not so much character-sketches as 
 humorous description which Baldwin presented. 
 
 In this group of writers one sees today the pred- 
 ecessors of Mark Twain — whose parents, in fact, 
 came from this very region. The grotesque and 
 the absurd are here the special veins of men who 
 seek not to teach men anything nor to show that 
 the South could produce a literature. What they 
 saw and heard in their daily intercourse with 
 common men they endeavored to reproduce in 
 book form. A half a century later Mark Twain 
 and Bret Harte, doubtless familiar with their 
 works and living among people essentially similar, 
 followed up their methods and won international 
 repute. 
 
LIFE AND LITERATURE 91 
 
 After all, the life of the plain people of the lower 
 South is more important than that which dis- 
 played itself in the great houses, at the races, or at 
 the resorts. This life was not altogether so crude 
 and raw as Longstreet depicted it, nor was it so 
 much out of sympathy with the planter ideal as 
 Frederick Law Olmsted represented in his Sea- 
 hoard Slave States (1856) and Journey in the Bach 
 Country (1860). 
 
 The farmers and the tenants, the piney-woods 
 people and the mountaineers were like farmers and 
 tenants elsewhere. The larger number of them 
 lived in fairly comfortable log or frame houses of 
 one or two rooms. There were few pretensions to 
 beauty of situation or elegance of outfit. The 
 house stood upon the roadside, by a fresh-flowing 
 spring, or among the great pine trees. The door 
 was so roughly made that it creaked on its hinges, 
 dragged across the floor, and had to be fastened 
 with a latch which was lifted from the outside by a 
 string put through a small hole. The wide fire- 
 place, here as in the negro cabin, was the center of 
 all family activity. By its side stood a great crane 
 which swung back and forth the large pots and 
 kettles for cooking the greens, bacon, and mush, 
 the staples of Southern middle-class fare. The 
 
92 THE COTTON KINGDOM 
 
 crane was the object df wonderment to small boys 
 who loved nothing better than to set it in motion 
 and hear its strange but comforting song as it 
 was pulled from over the crackling fire. In the 
 chimney-corner there were a grindstone, a scythe, 
 and a great bundle of broom straw tied against the 
 wall and kept out of the rain. In this living-room 
 the mother of the half score of farmer's children 
 did her work day in and day out, cooking, washing, 
 and ironing for the growing family. She was the 
 first to rise in the morning and the last to retire 
 at night. 
 
 If the family owned a negro family, a single cabin 
 was provided near the larger one, and there in 
 miniature the life of the master was re-lived from 
 day to day, except that the farmer's wife tended 
 the black children as well as her own, in order that 
 every one who could might work in the fields with 
 the stalwart farmer and his sons. The life of such 
 a master and such a slave was hard and monoto- 
 nous — the harder and the more monotonous in 
 proportion as the master was more or less "on the 
 make, " for the ambition of such a man was to be 
 the owner of a big plantation. ' 
 
 There was little in such a household that sug- 
 gested books and papers or politics and religion. 
 
LIFE AND LITERATURE 93 
 
 On the plain board table which stood in the center 
 of the best room there was a big family Bible with 
 possibly a copy of Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress by 
 its side. From the joists were suspended bags of 
 seed-corn, dried fruit, and great pods of red pepper; 
 there Was a great pine chest in the corner in which 
 the best quilts and home- woven counterpanes were 
 securely kept against the day when "company" 
 came; over the door hung the rifle and by its side 
 the powder horn which had done service at King's 
 Mountain or even in the border wars of Scotland 
 in behalf of Cameron or McDougal clans. 
 
 Outside the house was the kennel with always 
 two or three dogs which, added to the neighboring 
 hounds, readily made a pack for a chase after fox 
 or deer. The barns and stables were built of logs 
 and were none too large or comfortable for the 
 stock. Chickens, ducks, and pigs were always to 
 be found and there was constant noise, now of one, 
 now of the other, clucking, squawking, and squeal- 
 ing each according to its kind. The garden was 
 large and fertile. From it came cabbages, pota- 
 toes, beans, and roasting ears in abundance for 
 both whites and blacks; and there were flowers 
 along the borders, a pear tree in one corner, and 
 a great scuppernong arbor in another. If there 
 
94 THE COTTON KINGDOM 
 
 were no great cotton crops, there were enough 
 corn, potatoes, pork, and fowls to feed a numerous 
 family. 
 
 Another and a lower grade of society lived on the 
 waste lands and pine barrens and among the re- 
 mote mountains. Of this life Olmsted writes con 
 amore. It was less wholesome and less promising 
 than that which has just been described. Larger 
 families lived in small and dirty cabins where all 
 slept in one room. Beds were filthy and filled 
 with vermin and the floors were often the common 
 mother earth covered with trash or straw. These 
 people showed little ambition for the larger planta- 
 tion life and little hope of personal or family better- 
 ment. They were contented to hunt on the lands 
 of the planters, to fish for shad in the streams, 
 and even to steal from the herds of their richer 
 neighbors. Their dress was not unlike that of the 
 slaves. Not a solitary book adorned their houses, 
 nor were the morals of these illiterate whites higher 
 than those of slaves. Reading and writing were as 
 good as lost arts to them. The visitor or stranger 
 who happened to pause at their cabin doors was 
 stared at with curious and inquisitive eyes. To 
 such a family a five-dollar piece was a rare thing 
 indeed; but whisky was so common that rough 
 
LIFE AND LITERATURE 95 
 
 and fatal duels were fought on sight. There were 
 the inevitable gun and powder horn, the lean and 
 hungry hound, and a few chickens and ducks. 
 There was usually a single stable which housed an 
 aged horse, and there was certain to be a pig in a 
 filthy sty. 
 
 Among the farmers and tenants, the poor whites 
 and mountaineers, there was indifference toward 
 the great planters of the South but no real hostility 
 save in remote highland districts; and even the 
 hostihty of the mountaineers waned as improved 
 means of transportation brought them into touch 
 with the planters. Never did these highland folk, 
 however, assume a friendly or sympathetic attitude 
 toward the slave. The so-called "crackers," "red 
 necks," and "hill-billies" had not as yet come to 
 hate the negroes, for they little thought that these 
 would ever be freedmen; but the embers of hatred 
 smoldered, ready to be fanned into flame in later 
 years, after the South had been scourged by war 
 and transformed by an industrial revolution. 
 
 Altogether the people of the lower South were 
 not unlike those of other sections. The great 
 planters and landowners compared favorably with 
 the industrial and commercial princes of the East. 
 Their ideals and their culture were taken as the 
 
96 THE COTTON KINGDOM 
 
 standard of the cotton country; their houses, their 
 Hveries, their dress, and their manners were the 
 best of the time. Like wealthy men of all ages, 
 they cultivated the arts in an amateurish fashion; 
 they loved to sit to artists for their portraits, 
 and they liked to read good books or at any rate 
 put them upon the shelves of their libraries. It 
 was even a boast of the most enlightened of them 
 before 1860 that the planter was not only a reader 
 of books and a patron of authors, but that he was 
 himself a dabbler in belles-lettres. What, indeed, 
 might the cotton kingdom not become if left to 
 work out her own destiny? 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 RELIGION AND EDUCATION 
 
 Contrary to a common preconception, the people 
 of the lower Southern States were sincerely reli- 
 gious, although at the beginning of their develop- 
 ment as a peculiar section of the country, they had 
 little patience with what was called revealed re- 
 ligion. From the University of South Carolina, 
 where many of their teachers and models of pro- 
 priety were trained, there came the strong deistic 
 utterances of Dr, Thomas Cooper, famous on two 
 continents. Cooper was counted one of the great 
 spirits of his time. Young men from all the cotton re- 
 gion flocked to his institution, where they heard him 
 lecture on the Pentateuch after the critical manner 
 of recent years. He was perhaps the first teacher in 
 this country to break down the faith of men in the 
 literal inspiration of the Bible. South Carolinians 
 liked the scientific spirit which took nothing for 
 granted — at least that was their attitude in 1819. 
 
 7 97 
 
98 THE COTTON KINGDOM 
 
 Of greater importance was the example of 
 Thomas Jefferson, who had all his life been known 
 as a deist. Late in his career Jefferson founded the 
 University of Virginia with the intention that no 
 religious creed should get a hearing there. A 
 strong agnosticism prevailed for many years after 
 his death, until the growing religious conservatism 
 of the Virginians compelled the new University to 
 take to its bosom the representatives of the leading 
 churches as guides and monitors of its students. 
 From still another center the new country received 
 quite unorthodox, if not deistic, opinions. Tran- 
 sylvania University, "a seminary of true repub- 
 licanism," was located at Lexington, Kentucky. 
 Its president, Horace Holley, although a New 
 Englander, was practically a deist. Among his 
 four or five hundred students there were always 
 many young men from the cotton States prepar- 
 ing themselves to be lawyers, physicians, and 
 teachers.' 
 
 ' The Roman Catholics of New Orleans, whose easy-going methods 
 suited some twenty or thirty thousand merchants and planters, con- 
 tributed their mite in the direction of religious orthodoxy. In New 
 Orleans, Baton Rouge, and Mobile there was a nucleus of Catholicism 
 that might under better skies have won a controlling influence in 
 large districts of the cotton kingdom. It did not so fall out, however, 
 and the Catholics remained one of the minor denominations of the 
 planter civilization. 
 
RELIGION AND EDUCATION 99 
 
 It is still said in the South that, although there 
 may be other roads to the Celestial City, no gentle- 
 man would choose any but the Episcopalian way. 
 It may be doubted whether there were twenty 
 thousand Episcopalians in all the region from 
 Charleston to Galveston at the outbreak of the 
 Civil War, yet members of "the church" were 
 almost invariably found in the seats of the mighty, 
 of governors, congressmen, and magistrates. St. 
 IMichael's Church in Charleston was the West- 
 minster of the cotton country; and to be buried in 
 the sacred soil of that parish was almost as good 
 as to be alive in less favored provinces. In Savan- 
 nah, Montgomery, Mobile, and New Orleans, the 
 gentry belonged to the good old colonial church 
 whose clergy were not so pious themselves as to be 
 disagreeable father confessors. To own a hand- 
 somely bound prayer-book and to occupy the fam- 
 ily pew once a year was evidence enough of one's 
 reUgious regularity, even though one did hazard 
 great stakes in the Charleston races. No curate 
 thought less of his patron for his interest in this 
 sport. 
 
 The hard work of saving the souls of common 
 men was left to such leaders of other denominations 
 as the Presbyterian preachers who had for half a 
 
100 THE COTTON KINGDOM 
 
 century taught the up-country farmers the shorter 
 catechism and the Greek roots. Since the late 
 colonial days young and muscular Christian mis- 
 sionaries, nourished upon Calvin's Institutes and 
 Virgil's Mneid at the College of New Jersey, 
 poured into the Southern up-country. They 
 preached their stern and unbending doctrine on 
 the Sabbath, and on week-days they set scores of 
 young men to work upon the classics. From sun- 
 rise to sunset these earnest seekers after knowl- 
 edge pored over their Greek and Latin, convinced 
 that the salvation of their souls depended upon the 
 memorizing of thousands of heroic lines or upon 
 explaining to their masters the intricacies of 
 languages that had not been spoken by any con- 
 siderable number of people since the fall of Con- 
 stantinople. 
 
 Men and preachers trained in these schools were 
 not likely to endure very long the presence of 
 such philosophers as Thomas Cooper or to mani- 
 fest continued devotion to the inconsistencies of 
 such dilettante rationalists as Thomas Jefferson: 
 they must know the ground they stood upon. 
 Once they had won over the small farmers of the 
 hills in the two Carolinas and Georgia, these 
 teachers of a sterner faith were in a strategic 
 
RELIGION AND EDUCATION 101 
 
 position when small farmers became big cotton- 
 planters with scores of slaves about them. They 
 took command in these three States before 1840. 
 Presbyterians became governors and members of 
 Congress without waiting for the consent of their 
 religious seniors. The president of the University 
 of North Carolina was a Presbyterian divine, for 
 all the world like the good Dr. Witherspoon of 
 Princeton. In South Carohna President Cooper 
 was brought to trial for his "shameful atheism" 
 in 1834. He was found unfit for his high position 
 and promptly turned out to graze at eighty years 
 of age! John H. Thornwell, a student of Cooper's, 
 was one of the powers behind the movement and 
 not many years passed before he was himself the 
 president of the University. Not to be outdone 
 in the matter, Thornwell founded, in the very 
 shadow of the University, the Southern Presby- 
 terian Theological Seminary, where young scions 
 of old houses could thenceforth be instructed 
 aright in the vital doctrines of the great Genevan. 
 From Cooper and Jefferson to Thornwell and 
 Calvin was a long road to travel in two decades; 
 but the South Carolinians went the whole distance 
 without knowing that they had moved from ih^ 
 first position. What South Carolinians did Was 
 
102 THE COTTON KINGDOM 
 
 good form, and other Southerners were likely to 
 follow suit. Even the great Calhoun became in- 
 terested in Calvinism and manifested a genuine 
 concern in the growing religiosity of the planters. 
 But the Calvinist meat was too strong for babes. 
 While the Presbyterians put poor Cooper to rout, 
 gave the professors at the University of Virginia 
 anxious nights, and sent President Holley hasten- 
 ing away from Lexington, they did not hold the 
 more illiterate Southerners of the hills to their way 
 of thinking. A planter might be a good Presby- 
 terian; but a "cracker" or a ^'red neck" found 
 the Princeton faith too drastic. He grasped with 
 difficulty the doctrines of the divines. Presby- 
 terianism, moreover, grew more aristocratic as its 
 members became more wealthy and better edu- 
 cated. A denomination which furnished governors 
 and presidents of universities could not have its 
 preachers shedding tears in the pulpit and inter- 
 lining their hymns for ignorant congregations. 
 
 So the larger part of the work of saving souls 
 fell to Baptists and Methodists. From the days of 
 Daniel Marshall and his wife, half-illiterate men 
 had traversed every county of the South and had 
 preached in bush arbors to thousands of "dying 
 men and women," whom they called back to fullness 
 
RELIGION AND EDUCATION 103 
 
 of life. In the backwoods of South CaroHna, 
 Georgia, and the other cotton States these earnest, 
 God-fearing men preached and prayed, wept and 
 sang, till thousands of the neglected were made 
 conscious of their individual existence and of their 
 social importance. There were three or four 
 hundred thousand of these converts and recruits, 
 some from the planters of the coastal plains, more 
 frotn the farmers of the hills, but most from the 
 poor and remote settlements where people were 
 out of touch with the currents of the times. Before 
 1860 about a million of the people of the lower 
 South were connected with the churches, and of 
 these the vast majority were Baptists and Metho- 
 dists. 
 
 Meantime a great social transformation had 
 taken place in the lower South. In the beginning 
 nearly all these people had been opponents of 
 slavery and of all forms of privilege. But, as 
 farmers became planters and landless men became 
 farmers and owners of their "labor, " opposition to 
 slavery and privilege almost disappeared. Even 
 the masses of poorer people and church members 
 became defenders of the existing regime. While the 
 Catholics and the Episcopalians had been content 
 to let civil affairs take their own course and had 
 
104 THE COTTON KINGDOM 
 
 promptly adjusted themselves to the social strati- 
 fications which they saw about them, the other 
 denominations had at first protested and then had 
 gone into the highways and the hedges after the 
 inarticulate masses of men, only to find in the end 
 that both they and their converts became, like 
 their older religious brethren, conservatives and 
 owners of slaves. 
 
 The Methodist and Baptist denominations had 
 wrought a similar work in the North. Their mis- 
 sionaries carried the Gospel to the East and to the 
 rising West. Jesse Lee, Peter Cartwright, Jona- 
 than Going, and their kind preached and wept 
 and sang in New England, the Middle States, and 
 the Northwest until the common people were 
 won. Cartwright said that the power of the Devil 
 was fairly overcome in Illinois and Indiana before 
 1860. Literally millions of small farmers and men 
 without property joined the new churches. As 
 time went on most of these men became well- 
 dressed, prosperous citizens, conscious of their 
 worth. In the absence of the institution of slavery 
 in their midst, they kept to the early idea that the 
 holding of men in bondage was a sin, but they were 
 not disposed to attack the South because of its 
 slavery. 
 
RELIGION AND EDUCATION 105 
 
 In 1843 Orange Scott, a very able preacher of 
 New England, stirred the consciences of his Metho- 
 dist followers on the subject of slavery in much 
 the same way that Garrison was stirring the minds 
 of deists and agnostics. But the leaders of the de- 
 nomination refused to be stirred. Scott then with- 
 drew from the church and carried with him fifteen 
 thousand earnest followers. The menace was so 
 great that in 1844, when the national Methodist 
 conference met in New York, although there were 
 other things to be done, the one thing that all men 
 thought about was the healing of the schism . This, 
 however, could not be done unless the Southern 
 Methodists, who composed at least half the church, 
 yielded to the demand that they give up slavery. 
 The test turned on the case of Bishop Andrew of 
 Georgia, whose wife owned slaves. The discipline 
 of the denomination had declared from the be- 
 ginning that no preacher should own slaves. 
 Andrew was a bishop who must minister to the 
 churches even in New England. He must either 
 give up his wife's slaves or give up the work to 
 which he had been ordained and in which he was 
 a master spirit. It was a hard alternative. The 
 Southern Methodists chose to defend and maintain 
 slavery and to make Andrew's case their own; 
 
106 THE COTTON KINGDOM 
 
 the Northern Methodists took the view of Orange 
 Scott and Wilham Lloyd Garrison. Both parties 
 were friendly but in deadly earnest. They sepa- 
 rated. They could not do otherwise, for the 
 people of the cotton States would have banned 
 forever any preacher who attacked slavery, and 
 the Methodists of New England, at any rate, 
 would have refused to countenance a clergyman 
 who endorsed slavery. The Methodist Church 
 South was therefore organized in 1846, with 
 Joshua Soule of Ohio as its leading bishop. 
 
 From the date of the separation to the outbreak 
 of the Civil War the Methodist Church increased 
 as it had never increased before. The membership 
 doubled in fifteen years. Preachers like McTyeire 
 and Capers and McSparran became as well known 
 to the lower South as leading governors and con- 
 gressmen. McTyeire published a little handbook' 
 which taught what the true relations of masters 
 and slaves should be. Dr. Wilham A. Smith of 
 Virginia, who was very influential in the cotton 
 States, argued in a book which was widely dis- 
 cussed that slavery was divinely estabhshed and 
 that it was the duty of all good men to defend it. 
 
 " H. N. McTyeire: Duties of Masters and Servants (Premium Essays 
 of the Southern Baptist Publication Society, Charleston, 1851). 
 
RELIGION AND EDUCATION 107 
 
 Preachers owned slaves; planters guided the polity 
 of the church; and the Bible became the arsenal 
 from which the best pro-slavery weapons were 
 drawn. And as all men had now accepted the total 
 and absolute inspirationof the Bible, the thrusts of 
 these weapons were not easy to parry. 
 
 What happened to the Methodists happened 
 likewise to the national Baptist organization. 
 When in 1844 the Baptist Foreign Mission Board, 
 sitting in Boston, refused to send a slaveholder as 
 a missionary. Dr. Basil Manly, a leading Baptist 
 preacher who was also president of the University 
 of Alabama, made protest, carried the matter to 
 the Baptist state convention, and procured the 
 adoption of resolutions condemning the rule of the 
 Foreign Mission Board and refusing further co- 
 operation. The next year representatives of the 
 Southern Baptists assembled in August and or- 
 ganized the Southern Baptist Convention. The 
 best and ablest preachers of the denomination were 
 present and guided the deliberations of the as- 
 sembly. Manly, Richard Fuller, A. M. Poindexter, 
 and the rest assumed the role at once of religious 
 statesmen. In a short while they published at 
 denominational expense prize essays on the sub- 
 ject of the relations of Christian masters to their 
 
108 THE COTTON KINGDOM 
 
 slaves. The institutions of the South became the 
 institutions of the church. Sermons and denomi- 
 national influences became increasingly pro-slav- 
 ery. The membership of the Baptist Church 
 increased a hundred per cent during the next 
 fifteen years. Clergymen were entirely at one with 
 their planter deacons who, like their Methodist 
 friends, governed the polity of the church. 
 
 Although the Presbyterians avoided a break in 
 their national organization before 1861, it was not 
 because the same influences were not at work. 
 The clergy of the lower South quietly assumed 
 control of the national assemblies. Dr. Thorn- 
 well, who became the real leader of American Pres- 
 byterians, was president of the University of South 
 Carolina for a time, then president of the Southern 
 Presbyterian Theological Seminary at Columbia, 
 and all the while editor of the Southern Presby- 
 terian Review, which was for many years one of 
 the most influential periodicals in the American 
 religious world. Thornwell was close to Calhoun 
 before the death of that statesman; he was the idol 
 of young Presbyterian preachers all over the South, 
 and the envy of those of other denominations; 
 and there have been very few pulpit orators in 
 this country who equaled him. Next to Thornwell 
 
RELIGION AND EDUCATION 109 
 
 stood another remarkable figure. Dr. Benjamin 
 M. Palmer, like Thornwell a South Carolinian, the 
 idolized pastor of the largest church in New Or- 
 leans. The attitude of most Southern preachers 
 without distinction of denominations may be seen 
 in the following quotation from Palmer's Thanks- 
 giving sermon in 1860: 
 
 The providential trust [of the Southern people] is to 
 conserve and perpetuate the institution of domestic 
 slavery as now existing. . . . With this institution 
 assigned to our keeping we reply to all who oppose us 
 that we hold the trust from God and we are prepared to 
 stand or fall as God may appoint. . . . [This attitude 
 embraces] the circle of our relations, touches the four 
 cardinal points of our duty to ourselves, to our slaves, 
 to the world, and to Almighty God. It establishes the 
 nature and solemnity of our present trust, to preserve 
 and transmit our existing system of domestic servitude 
 with the right, unchallenged by man, to go and root 
 itself wherever Providence and nature may carry it. 
 This trust we will discharge in the face of the worst 
 possible peril. . . . Should the madness of the hour 
 appeal to the arbitration of the sword, we will not shrink 
 even from the baptism of fire. If modern crusaders stand 
 in serried ranks upon some plain of Esdraelon, there shall 
 we be in defense of our trust. Not till the last man has 
 fallen behind the last rampart, shall it drop from our 
 hands ; and then only in surrender to the God who gave it. ' 
 
 ' Thomas Gary Johnson: The Life and Letters of Benjamin Morgan 
 Palmer, Richmond, Virginia, 1906, vol. i, pp. 210, 213. 
 
110 THE COTTON KINGDOM 
 
 This expression of one of the ablest and purest of 
 Southern preachers met with wide-spread if not 
 universal acceptance. Such unity and such com- 
 plete religious organization as the lower South now 
 presented gave every assurance of success to the 
 program of religious education which Thornwell, 
 Manly, and leading Methodists everywhere ad- 
 vocated. The Presbyterians had the greater theo- 
 logical schools and they exercised the greatest in- 
 fluence upon the collegiate teaching of the South. 
 But the Baptists had important institutions in 
 North Carolina, as well as Furman University in 
 South Carolina, Mercer University in Georgia, and 
 Howard College in Alabama. They began in re- 
 markable fashion to build a theological school at 
 Greenville, South Carolina, which should oflFer as 
 full and thorough courses in divinity as were to be 
 found anywhere else in the country. They raised 
 a hundred thousand dollars for their initial endow- 
 ment fund in 1857 and another hundred thousand 
 was subscribed in the next two years. Of this 
 movement the leader was James P. Boyce, brother 
 of the radical secessionist member of Congress, and 
 himself one of the richest men in the South. The 
 Methodists sent their sons to Randolph-Macon in 
 Virginia to learn wisdom and theology from 
 
RELIGION AND EDUCATION 111 
 
 William A. Smith, an acknowledged pro-slavery 
 leader. But another school of the prophets was 
 opened at Emory, Georgia, a little while before 
 the war began. Presbyterians, Methodists, and 
 Baptists had finally come to one opinion about the 
 higher education of their clergy ; they were in direct 
 control of more than half of the colleges of their 
 section; and their spirit prevailed in all the state 
 institutions. 
 
 It is not difficult to understand the tendency and 
 purpose of education in a community led and 
 guided by sincere and able religious teachers of the 
 mold of Palmer and Manly. If they sought to 
 give every young clergyman a collegiate and even 
 theological training, they were not less interested 
 in pressing upon all the necessity of higher educa- 
 tion for the laity. The result was that in the 
 decade between 1850 and 1860 practically every 
 college and university in the South doubled its 
 attendance.' The University of Virginia had 
 
 ' Twice as many young men per thousand of the population were 
 in colleges in the lower South or in some of the Eastern institutions as 
 were sent from similar groups in other parts of the country. Eleven 
 thousand students were enrolled in the colleges of the cotton States, 
 while in Massachusetts, with half as many white people as were found 
 in all the cotton States, there were only 1733 college students. Illinois, 
 with a population of 1,712,000 or more than half as many white people 
 had three thousand young men in her colleges. The income of all the 
 
112 THE COTTON KINGDOM 
 
 nearly a thousand students, young men from every 
 cotton State with their servants and horses and 
 hounds, as well as with their Greek and Latin 
 texts. At the Universities of South Carolina, 
 Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana 
 there was not only growth in numbers but improve- 
 ment in the quality of the students and in the 
 character of the courses offered. At the Univer- 
 sity of South Carolina Francis Lieber gave the best 
 work in political science that was found in the 
 country, and at the same time Joseph Le Conte 
 was feeling his way to a theory of the origin of 
 species which in 1859 made Charles Darwin the 
 foremost of scientists. At the University of New 
 Orleans Joseph C. Nott was giving instruction in 
 ethnology which found expression in many scienti- 
 fic writings and which applied the principles of the 
 so-called law of the survival of the fittest; nor was 
 the work of J. D. B. De Bow as a teacher of com- 
 mercial subjects behind the best of his time. The 
 
 higher institutions of the lower South in 1860 was $708,000, which 
 represented an increase of more than a hundred per cent over the 
 figures for 1850. The six New England States, with the best public 
 school system in the world outside of Germany and with an accumu- 
 lated wealth far in excess of that of the cotton region, spent only 
 $368,469 per year in collegiate education, and their population of 
 3,235,000 sent only 3748 young men to college. {U. S. Census 1860: 
 Mortality and Miscellaneous Statistics, p. 505.) 
 
RELIGION AND EDUCATION 113 
 
 medical colleges of Charleston, Mobile, and New 
 Orleans were already preventing yoHng Southern- 
 ers from going to the University of Pennsylvania 
 in such numbers as formerly. 
 
 The promise of the lower South in learning and 
 science was so great that the ablest teachers of the 
 time were not loath to settle there. Robert Dale 
 Owen, one of the foremost geologists of the North, 
 was sorely disappointed when he failed to obtain a 
 chair in the University of Alabama in 1847. And 
 the elder Agassiz hardly knew whether to accept a 
 position at Harvard or to remain a professor in the 
 Medical College of Charleston, where he did some 
 of his greatest work. Audubon did the better part 
 of his famous Birds of America in the neighborhood 
 of New Orleans, while his next great book. Quad- 
 rupeds of America, was in large measure the result 
 of work he did with John Bachman of Charleston. 
 Joseph Le Conte tells of a conversation he had with 
 Langdon Cheves in the summer of 1858 in which 
 the latter outlined the theory of the survival of the 
 fittest as a principle that scientific men ought to 
 work out. 
 
 Even if in some respects the standards of South- 
 ern colleges in 1860 can be criticized, it remains 
 true that they had made greater progress than 
 
114 THE COTTON KINGDOM 
 
 similar institutions in other parts of the country. 
 Gentlemen had become conscious of their social 
 and political responsibilities. They were the fa- 
 vored cUss; they must govern, and they prepared 
 to do so by educating their sons as they had not 
 been accustomed to do before the new Southern 
 social philosophy was adopted or before the issue 
 between North and South was so clearly and 
 sharply formulated. 
 
 Nor was the improvement of the common schools 
 less significant. The greatest social theorists of 
 the St nth. Harper and his followers, believed and 
 taught that every white man should have an op- 
 portunity of higher education and that talent 
 wherever found should be subsidized by the State. 
 In response to this teaching the reforms of Horace 
 Mann in New England and of Thaddeus Stevens 
 in Pennsylvania were being applied by William 
 H. RufFner in Virginia, which always influenced 
 the lower South; by Calvin S. Wiley in North 
 Carolina; and by the famous William L. Yancey 
 and President Manly of the State University in 
 Alabama. In South Carolina and in Mississippi 
 the same spirit was at work, one of the chief 
 reformers being the redoubtable John H. Thorn- 
 well, whose writings on the subject of popular 
 
RELIGION AND EDUCATION 115 
 
 education are not the least creditable of his nu- 
 merous activities. ' 
 
 In the matter of illiteracy the planter civiliza- 
 tion was in worse plight than any other section. 
 In a population of 2,500,000 white people there 
 were 175,000 illiterates, somewhat more than were 
 found in States like Indiana and Illinois, although 
 the difference is so small that one would not do well 
 to insist upon the comparison. In the lower South 
 distances were so great and population so sparse 
 that the masses could not be easily reached by 
 education. The schools were of recent origin, and 
 books and newspapers went mainly to the planta- 
 tion houses along the main currents of intercourse, 
 the rivers, railroads, and greater highways. 
 
 But if illiteracy had not been overcome — and 
 under post-bellum conditions it has taken half a 
 century to make much progress — there was little 
 
 ' Although the States were not so liberal in their grants to lower 
 schools as to colleges and universities, yet there were 425,600 children 
 in the schools of the cotton States in 1860. This showed that one 
 child in every seven of the white population in the lower South was in 
 school, at least for a short term. In the remainder of the country the 
 ratio was one to five or five and a half. In the cotton States $2,432,000 
 was expended each year upon the common schools and $1,383,000 in 
 the maintenance of academies and private schools. Comparison with 
 Eastern conditions or with those of the Northwest shows once again 
 that the planters were not far behind in actual performance and that 
 they were in the lead in the ratio of progress. 
 
116 THE COTTON KINGDOM 
 
 crime and lunacy. In many counties jails stood 
 open; and in all the counties and towns the reports 
 showed an astonishingly small percentage of delin- 
 quents. The open spaces of the country gave men 
 free room. The criminally disposed were not in so 
 large a proportion as in other parts of the country; 
 nor did many break down under the conditions of 
 life and find their way into the hospitals for the 
 insane. The planters claimed much credit for this 
 favorable showing, though in truth it was rather 
 their outdoor life than any social arrangements 
 that reduced the numbers of these unfortunate 
 classes. 
 
 Did no kindly man rise to ask something for the 
 unfortunate slave? The effect of the separation of 
 the Methodist and Baptist churches in 1844 and 
 1845 stirred the preachers to give the slaves a part 
 of the Gospel at least. From 1845 to the outbreak 
 of the war, men like Bishop Weightman of South 
 Carolina devoted their best efforts to lifting the 
 negro from his slough of religious ignorance and 
 superstition. Churches were built on the larger 
 plantations; more room was prepared in the older 
 church buildings for the accommodation of negro 
 congregations; and every church had its gallery 
 for the slaves. But in spite of all the efforts of the 
 
RELIGION AND EDUCATION 117 
 
 preachers to induce in them a quiet and reverential 
 demeanor, the black worshipers would cry aloud 
 and sometimes chant mournful songs during the 
 services. 
 
 Sermons for negroes were not preached from such 
 texts as "The truth shall make you free, " but from 
 such more appropriate themes as "Servants, be 
 obedient to them that are your masters" and "In 
 the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou 
 return unto the ground." Negroes were not al- 
 lowed to hold religious meetings without the pres- 
 ence of some white man. They might be taught 
 to read the Bible, the Prayer Book, and the hym- 
 nals of Methodists and Baptists, but more learn- 
 ing was not thought good for them. The reason 
 for this point of view requires no explanation 
 here. If the negro did not relish having to wor- 
 ship frequently in the white man's church, he 
 at least did realize that his master was becoming 
 more thoughtful of his human interests. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 THE PLANTER IN POLITICS 
 
 The political basis of the plantation system was 
 the county court, and the county court of the 
 South came from the banks of the James and 
 the York rivers. In old Virginia a county court 
 was composed of a group of justices of the peace 
 meeting once a month to try petty cases of law. 
 These justices were the grandees of their respec- 
 tive neighborhoods. They were vestrymen in 
 the established church, owners of plantations, and 
 lords of manors. Their wives were the ladies of 
 the land and their daughters set the hearts of young 
 blades aflame when they appeared in church. 
 They were men of good common sense, familiar 
 with the codes of Virginia and to a less degree 
 acquainted with the precedents of English law 
 courts. Everybody looked up to them; and 
 they made themselves responsible in considerable 
 measure for the good behavior of the countryside. 
 
 118 
 
THE PLANTER IN POLITICS 119 
 
 What they thought was right was hkely to become 
 law. 
 
 Now when these bewigged and bepowdered 
 gentlemen took their seats on the county bench, 
 the wheels of justice in the old commonwealth of 
 Virginia began to revolve. But aside from the 
 ordinary business of courts, they sat in adminis- 
 trative sessions to appoint sheriffs and road over- 
 seers and to order the building of bridges and 
 schoolhouses. At informal meetings they deter- 
 mined which of their number ought to stand for 
 election to the next assembly, passed upon the 
 conduct of returning members of Congress, and as 
 time went on learned to denounce the conduct of 
 rascally Yankees. The government of Virginia 
 during the first half of the nineteenth century 
 rested securely upon the shoulders of the county 
 justices of the peace. 
 
 In fact, these justices inherited their social posi- 
 tion from honorable English ancestors who had 
 sworn by the name of the King; or, if they were 
 seK-made men, they were duly recognized by the 
 planter gentry as worthy of a place among them. 
 The county bench was the source of many good 
 things. Vacancies in the court were filled by the 
 surviving judges; and all was done with such 
 
120 THE COTTON KINGDOM 
 
 regard to precedent and after such deliberation 
 that county courts seldom ran amuck. Through all 
 the storms of the Revolution and the trials of the 
 Jeffersonian period, these local organizations func- 
 tioned smoothly and never for a moment lost their 
 hold either upon the public or upon the course of 
 events. 
 
 This was the model upon which South Carolina 
 remade her judicial system when at the end of the 
 Revolution she took into political partnersffip her 
 great and growing up-country. The county courts 
 of Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi were but 
 images of Virginia institutions planted upon a 
 distant soil. Florida and Louisiana readjusted 
 their French and Spanish procedure to fit the 
 general model, though retaining the Napoleonic 
 code. Texas took her system from Missouri, 
 which in turn had taken hers from Virginia. 
 
 The justice of the peace was an institution of the 
 lower South quite as much as of Virginia herself. 
 To know this gentleman of the old school, this 
 humane and good-natured autocrat, mildly proud 
 of himself and keenly resentful of any criticism of 
 his Latin or of his law, is to know the political life 
 of the South as well as of the cotton kingdom, 
 because every justice of the peace, save on the 
 
THE PLANTER IN POLITICS 121 
 
 distant frontier, was a slaveholder or likely soon 
 to become such, a conservative in politics and re- 
 ligion, and a member or prospective member of the 
 Legislature. 
 
 The political power of the cotton kingdom there- 
 fore was firmly lodged in the hands of successful 
 business men. There was never in America a more 
 perfect oligarchy of business men than that which 
 ruled in the time of Jefferson Davis and Alexander 
 Stephens. Laws were made by the owners of 
 plantations; the higher courts were established 
 by their decrees; governors of States were of their 
 choosing; and members of Congress were selected 
 and maintained in office in accordance with their 
 wishes. And, as we have already seen, they were 
 the ruling members of all the churches. Truly 
 nothing of importance could happen in the lower 
 South without their consent. This fact gave to 
 the South its unity of political purpose and that 
 moderation of social change which men of wealth 
 always prefer. Security of property, loyalty to 
 church, and safety in education were the guaran- 
 tees of the system. 
 
 Still, there were party differences. The older 
 Federalist groups along the coast of Carolina and 
 Georgia had slowly merged into the Jeffersonian 
 
122 THE COTTON KINGDOM 
 
 party after it had become "safe and sane." Jack- 
 son disrupted that party and brought into power a 
 mass of Western farmers and land-hungry tenants. 
 At once the Federahst areas and the big black 
 counties along all the rivers in the lower South 
 formed a party of opposition. Though Henry Clay 
 became the sponsor of this party, national im- 
 potence was its role, for no great aggressive party 
 is likely to grow out of conservative beginnings. 
 The Jackson "rough necks" became the sober 
 Democrats of Polk's Administration and conserva- 
 tive reactionaries in the Administrations of Pierce 
 and Buchanan. The larger planters and justices 
 of the older counties everywhere tended to follow 
 Clay, while the smaller planters, the rising business 
 men, liked the rougher Jackson way. Besides, 
 Jackson could carry the West, and the votes of the 
 West were necessary to any aggressive national 
 policy. But these differences were the differences 
 of older and younger groups, not the differences of 
 social irreconcilables. Consequently, though each 
 party twitted the other on occasion with being 
 disloyal to slavery, in any great crisis they were 
 almost certain to unite, for, whatever happened, 
 the planters felt that they must control the cotton 
 kingdom. 
 
THE PLANTER IN POLITICS 123 
 
 If the planters controlled the lower South, they 
 were likely to control the border States; and if they 
 held these two sections together in national legisla- 
 tion, they were more than likely to guide the policy 
 of the United States as a whole, for a compact 
 minority with great wealth behind it and with 
 leisure to devote to public affairs is almost certain 
 to govern any country. That is, a population of 
 two and a half millions in the lower South, with 
 only a tenth of them directly connected with slav- 
 ery, would guide a nation of twenty millions, nine- 
 tenths of whom were either outspoken or silent 
 opponents of slavery and all it connoted. 
 
 Under these circumstances the leaders of the 
 lower South undertook about 1840 to widen the 
 area of slavery, that is, expand the cotton kingdom. 
 John C. Calhoun, who controlled a large following 
 in both political parties in the eastern end of the 
 lower South, was an ardent advocate of expansion. 
 The young Senator from Mississippi, Robert 
 Walker, a leader of the Jackson wing of the planters 
 on the Mississippi and a most adroit politician, 
 was even more ardently in favor of annexations. 
 After some years of maneuvering the two men ef- 
 fected a working alliance of the cotton men of the 
 South and the farmers of the West; and in the 
 
124 THE COTTON KINGDOM 
 
 Democratic convention of 1844 they committed the 
 Democratic party of the country to their ambitious 
 poHcy. They defeated Henry Clay at the time • 
 when he had set his heart on the presidency and 
 elected James K. Polk, who completed the annexa- 
 tion of Texas, declared war on Mexico, and took 
 possession of New Mexico, California, and Oregon, 
 in spite of the opposition of John Quincy Adams, 
 Daniel Webster, Martin Van Buren, and Clay 
 himself. 
 
 The success of the movement gave the planters 
 such confidence in themselves and such prestige 
 before the country that they felt themselves in- 
 vincible. Southern and Western volunteers offered 
 themselves with such enthusiasm and fought over 
 the Mexican hills and mountains with such bril- 
 liancy that Southern members of Congress declared 
 that the whole North American continent should 
 be seized and held. Western Democrats like Sena- 
 tor Douglas of Illinois shared this vision of a con- 
 tinental republic. If JeflFerson Davis, just enter- 
 ing political life from the Southwest, was set upon 
 making an American lake of the Gulf of Mexico, 
 Lewis Cass, speaking for the Northwest, was 
 equally covetous of Canada. 
 
 The imposing position of the planters in the 
 
THE PLANTER IN POLITICS 125 
 
 national life stirred the aged Adams to propose the 
 secession of the Northern States and caused New 
 England men of more sober cast of mind to con- 
 template that last desperate move of the defeated 
 party. But in the very hour of victory Polk and 
 his Southern supporters denied to the Northwest 
 the improvements which they asked for their rivers 
 and harbors and at the same time refused some of 
 their leaders appointments which were thought to 
 be their due. In August, 1846, Jacob Brinkerhoff 
 of Ohio and David Wilmot of western Pennsyl- 
 vania started in the Democratic ranks a revolt of 
 which the defeated and sore Van Buren made 
 utmost use. Anti-slavery men balked at the ac- 
 quisition of territory from Mexico unless it should 
 first be declared free soil; and planter interests 
 suffered many setbacks in the House of Represen- 
 tatives. 
 
 In the succeeding presidential election Van 
 Buren broke from the ranks of his party, set himself 
 up as an anti-slavery candidate for the presidency, 
 and defeated Cass, the candidate of the Democratic 
 party. As for the Whig party, it had only to prof- 
 it by these dissensions. It nominated and elected 
 General Zachary Taylor, who, though himself a 
 Southerner, was not committed to the designs of the 
 
126 THE COTTON KINGDOM 
 
 planters. Although the party convention had not 
 framed a platform, many Whig leaders throughout 
 the campaign had declared that the area of slavery 
 must not be extended through the aid or conniv- 
 ance of the national legislature. The Taylor Ad- 
 ministration therefore was not disposed to allow 
 the planters to reap the fruits of their success. 
 
 Balked in their plans, the spokesmen of Missis- 
 sippi, duly prompted by Calhoun, gathered in a 
 mass meeting at Jackson, their state capital, early 
 in December, 1849. They called upon the people 
 of Mississippi and of the other planter States to 
 arouse themselves and defend their property and 
 their institutions. Later the Legislature of Missis- 
 sippi elected delegates to a Southern convention 
 to be held at Nashville, Tennessee, in June, 1850. 
 All the other Southern States responded with more 
 or less enthusiasm. If Congress refused to allow 
 slavery to be carried into California or New Mexico, 
 then — according to the threat often heard — the 
 cotton States would secede. 
 
 Scenting the danger beforehand. Clay returned 
 once again to the Senate. He alone of the Whig 
 nationalists had an important following among the 
 planters of the lower South. Half the delegates to 
 the Nashville convention proved to be his followers; 
 
THE PLANTER IN POLITICS 127 
 
 and in States like Mississippi and Louisiana there 
 were Unionist Democrats who were not ready to 
 break up the country merely if slavery were refused 
 protection in California. Realizing his strength, 
 Clay arrived betimes at the capital and set his 
 friends to work. His reasonableness, his refusal 
 to have relations with the President, his dislike of 
 Seward, and his hatred of Weed, carried Demo- 
 crats and slave-owners like Thomas Ritchie, the 
 famous editor, and Henry S. Foote, an ally of Cal- 
 houn, into his party. The compromise measures 
 of 1850 under the masterful management of Clay 
 melted away the stern resolution of the Nashville 
 convention before it gathered.' The secession 
 movement proved abortive. The planters ac- 
 quiesced in the measures of Congress, and Calhoun 
 died, broken-hearted at the failure of his program. 
 At this juncture the Whigs played into the hands 
 of their opponents. Under the guidance of Seward, 
 the Whig party refused to accept whole-heartedly 
 the work of Clay, the compromise which had been 
 forced upon them, and nominated for President in 
 1852 a neutral candidate. General Winfield Scott, 
 
 ' For an account of these compromise measures of 1850, see Chap- 
 ter VII of The Anti-Slavery Crusade by Jesse Macy (in The Chronicles 
 of America). 
 
128 THE COTTON KINGDOM 
 
 on a platform of doubt. Seizing the oppor- 
 tunity with renewed hope, the planters "hand- 
 picked" Frankhn Pierce, accepted the work of 
 Clay without qualification, and won the electoral 
 vote of every State but four in the following 
 November. The planters were now in a position 
 to regain every point which they had lost in the 
 compromise. 
 
 President Pierce sent Christopher Gadsden, 
 president of a South Carolina railroad, to Mexico 
 to purchase another strip of Mexican territory on 
 which a great southern Pacific railroad was to be 
 built. And he sent Pierre Soule, a most ardent 
 Louisiana imperialist, to Spain to purchase Cuba 
 at any cost. There was reason to believe he would 
 come back successful. At any rate every American 
 diplomat in Europe was apparently counseled to 
 lend assistance. If Soule was successful, two other 
 slave States would be promptly admitted. The 
 outlook was so bright that the Secretary of State, 
 William L. Marcy, became a candidate for the 
 Democratic nomination of 1856 on a platform of 
 Southern expansion. 
 
 The planters renewed their hopes, and well they 
 might. A majority of the House of Representa- 
 tives was Democratic; the Senate was overwhelm- 
 
THE PLANTER IN POLITICS 129 
 
 ingly Democratic; the President and Cabinet were 
 in full sympathy with the Southern Democratic 
 leaders; and seven of the nine justices of the 
 Supreme Court were either owners of plantations 
 or pro-slavery in attitude. The chairmen of all 
 the great committees of Congress were owners of 
 slaves and ready to initiate legislation in the in- 
 terest of the lower South. Why should not the 
 planters, experts in government, direct the policy 
 of the United States.? 
 
 Facts indicated that in the cotton country the 
 planters did set themselves this task. Their eco- 
 nomic interests urged them on; their social phi- 
 losophy and their religion gave them conscious 
 unity of purpose. Political unity, the condition of 
 immediate success, was within sight. From the 
 time when, in 1852, Alexander Stephens and Robert 
 Toombs deserted the Whig ranks for those of the 
 Democratic party, the political solidarity of the 
 planters was more definitely assured than it had 
 ever been under the bipartizan regime. Upon the 
 death of Clay most of the followers of that brilliant 
 politician prepared to join the ranks of the De- 
 mocracy. With the exception of some sporadic re- 
 sistance from Native Americans, or Know-Noth- 
 ings, in 1854-56, the party of Davis and Slidell and 
 
130 THE COTTON KINGDOM 
 
 Toombs and Stephens governed the South, and 
 the whole country as well, until 1860. Only a few 
 lonely spirits such as Andrew Johnson and John 
 Bell, both of Tennessee, and the famous Sam 
 Houston of Texas, distinguished themselves in 
 Congress by voting against the dominant South- 
 erners. 
 
 But this unity depended upon an avowed 
 Unionist policy, not upon the dis-Union program 
 as put forward at Nashville in 1850. Not even 
 Davis himself desired separate Southern action 
 after 1852. The planter politicians now sought 
 allies in the East and the Northwest. Asa Bigler, 
 the boss of Pennsylvania, Tammany Hall and 
 John A. Dix of New York, Toucy of Connecticut, 
 and Caleb Cushing of Massachusetts — these were 
 already enlisted, while the aged Van Buren and 
 his son, "Prince" John, made haste to return to 
 their former allegiance now that Cass had been 
 duly punished. From the Northwest, Senators 
 Allen of Ohio, Cass of Michigan, Jesse Bright of 
 Indiana, Douglas of Illinois, and Dodge of Iowa 
 answered the call of the lower South. Scores of 
 lesser lights followed in the orbit of these larger 
 luminaries. Nothing succeeds like success; and 
 at that time the planters were imquestionably 
 
THE PLANTER IN POLITICS 131 
 
 successful in adding to their political following 
 both in Washington and in their state capitals. 
 
 Still, the guarantee of a long lease of power at the 
 national capital required a complete unity of pur- 
 pose at home. And that solidarity was made the 
 objective of a campaign of publicity which became 
 intensive in 1853 and which closed only with the 
 echoes of the big guns at Charleston in 1861. Lead- 
 ing governors, great planters, merchants, and edi- 
 tors assembled from year to year in commercial 
 conventions at Charleston, Savannah, Montgom- 
 ery, and Vicksburg to deliberate upon the inter- 
 ests and ideals of the lower South and of the border 
 States as well. The conservation of cotton soils, 
 the efficiency of labor units, the growing impor- 
 tance of manufactures in the South, the importa- 
 tion of slaves from Africa, free schools for all 
 whites, religious instruction for the negroes, rail- 
 roads to the Pacific, and steamship lines to Europe 
 were the staple subjects of discussion. 
 
 Of the items in the program two require more 
 particular attention here. The more important 
 one was the building of a railroad from some point 
 on the lower Mississippi to San Francisco. If this 
 road were built at national expense and by liberal 
 land grants, as Davis proposed, a tier of slave States 
 
182 THE COTTON KINGDOM 
 
 would inevitably be set up all along the line, and 
 California itself would be drawn into the lower 
 Southern group. If the planter life and ideal were 
 thus spread across the continent, the commercial 
 interests of the Middle West and even of the 
 Missouri valley must seek outlets through South- 
 ern ports. For the new railroads which would be 
 built through wide regions of prairie and forest 
 would thus open new areas to development. The 
 Mobile and Ohio, the Louisville and Nashville, 
 and the Illinois Central systems were already under 
 way. If Memphis and New Orleans became ter- 
 minals of the proposed Pacific system, then they, 
 with Vicksburg and St. Louis, would become the 
 cities of the future. 
 
 When Gadsden returned from Mexico with the 
 assurance that enough territory could be acquired 
 to make a Southern Pacific route feasible, the 
 whole influence of the Administration directed by 
 the able Secretary of War was brought to bear 
 upon the undertaking. But Douglas foresaw the' 
 consequences of the Davis plan and hastened to 
 defeat it by promoting a Central Pacific Railroad 
 with Chicago as its eastern terminus. His Kansas- 
 Nebraska bill and the consequent anti-slavery agi- 
 tation of 1854 defeated the immediate ambitions 
 
THE PLANTER IN POLITICS 133 
 
 of the cotton-planters; and from that date to his 
 death the lower South hated and distrusted and 
 feared Douglas.' 
 
 Of equal importance to the lower South was the 
 problem of population and immigration. Southern 
 conventions discussed the matter long and ably. 
 The annual increase of population in the North 
 due to immigration from Europe was nearly half a 
 million. If this increase continued, no amount of 
 solidarity and cooperation of leaders in the cotton 
 kingdom could save that section from relative 
 decline. At the same time, to invite a large inflow 
 of Germans, Irish, and English laborers would 
 endanger the planter control. Nor was it likely 
 that foreign workers would readily settle in the 
 South. There was little free land left, and slaves 
 were sold at prices that made the ambition of poor 
 men to become planters seem fantastic. Far- 
 seeing planters, as we have noted, urged the diver- 
 sion of capital to manufacturing so as to attract 
 foreign labor and to create home markets for 
 Southern products. But this industrial transition 
 could not be made in a day. 
 
 ' The history of the Kansas-Nebraska bill is recounted, with a 
 difference of emphasis, in Chapter X of The Anti-Slavery Crusade and 
 in Chapter II of Abraham Lincoln and the Union (in The Chronicles of 
 America). 
 
134 THE COTTON KINGDOM 
 
 South Carolinians took up the problem of rela- 
 tive decline in population as early as 1855 and rec- 
 ommended the repeal of the laws of 1807 and 1819 
 which forbade the foreign slave trade. It was as- 
 sumed that the laboring population of the lower 
 South was to consist of negro slaves and must be 
 increased by new importations from Africa. The 
 reopening of the slave-trade, to be sure, would once 
 have caused protest and apprehension. But the 
 teachings of Dew and Harper, the attitude of the 
 churches, and the attacks of the abolitionists, had 
 dissipated all doubts and fears. The prosperity of 
 the cotton States now required large numbers of 
 slaves from Africa. Upon this black and stolid 
 human foundation would the Carolinians build 
 and expand their empire, which was to embrace 
 Cuba, eastern Mexico, and California. 
 
 In the Southern convention of 1858 William L. 
 Yancey appeared as the champion of the new 
 policy. As he and his friends conceived it, the 
 importation of hundreds of thousands of blacks 
 from Africa would not only offset Northern impor- 
 tations of labor from Europe, but, by reducing the 
 price of slaves and increasing the profits of masters, 
 it would give poor men a better chance to share 
 in the "blessings" of slavery and thus widen the 
 
THE PLANTER IN POLITICS 135 
 
 foundations of Southern influence, and it would 
 increase the total population and thus increase 
 the representation of the planters in Congress. 
 From every point of view this importation of 
 slaves would add new advantages to those already 
 possessed by the lower South. The grea^t obstacle 
 would be the opposition on the part of the North 
 to the repeal of the laws against the foreign slave- 
 trade. A minor obstacle was the reluctance of 
 border States like Virginia to run the risk of losing 
 their profits from the domestic slave-trade. If 
 their slaves were not sold in the lower South, they 
 would multiply on worn-out lands and become 
 such a burden that emancipation might become 
 necessary. But this objection was not considered 
 to be a real one. Virginians would find in a stable 
 and masterful cotton kingdom that which would 
 coimterbalance this disadvantage. 
 
 The objections which Congress would interpose 
 were evaded by recommending to the States that 
 they enact apprenticeship laws somewhat like 
 those of colonial times and not unlike those of 
 Illinois and Indiana in 1858. Under such laws 
 black apprentices could be imported in large num- 
 bers and the Federal courts could not intervene. 
 For nearly fifty years Southern and Northern 
 
136 THE COTTON KINGDOM 
 
 slave-traders had brought blacks from Africa and 
 had sold sometimes as many as ten thousand a 
 year, and yet no one had ever been effectively 
 punished. Moreover, if slavery was a blessing — 
 as men now believed it to be — what wrong could 
 there be in selling slaves? 
 
 Before the debate was closed at the next South- 
 ern convention, Louisiana, Alabama, and Georgia 
 enacted laws under which numbers of negro appren- 
 tices from Africa found their way to the plantations. 
 If these experiments proved successful, larger num- 
 bers would be imported. Of course diflBculties 
 might arise in the transfer of such apprentices, but 
 since the benighted African would know nothing 
 of the laws or of the distinctions between appren- 
 tices and slaves, there would be little diflBculty in 
 disposing of all as slaves. Free blacks could live 
 in the lower South only by common consent, for 
 the laws forbidding their presence were drastic, 
 and they could easily be reduced to the same 
 status as all other negroes. 
 
 Closely akin to this evasion of Federal law was 
 the persistent Southern filibustering against Cuba 
 and Central America. Soule returned from Spain 
 unsuccessful, and the brutal statement of the 
 American attitude toward Cuba in the famous 
 
THE PLANTER IN POLITICS 137 
 
 Ostend manifesto brought reproach to President 
 Pierce and his advisers. But even before this set- 
 back Narciso Lopez had led two or three expedi- 
 tions against the coveted island. On one occasion 
 as many as six hundred Americans had been landed 
 and led against the Spanish authorities. A gover- 
 nor of Mississippi lent assistance in 1851 so openly 
 that he was cited to appear before a grand jury in 
 New Orleans; and a nephew of Senator John J. 
 Crittenden was killed in Cuba in the same year 
 fighting under the banner of Lopez. Public men 
 and newspapers in every Southern city commended 
 these movements. The greatest of all these free 
 lance war-makers was William Walker of Tennes- 
 see, who attacked first Mexico and then Nicara- 
 gua, proclaiming himself a deliverer wherever he 
 went. Twice he was arrested by the authorities 
 of the United States, but each time Southern Sena- 
 tors defended him and his doings. 
 
 These incursions into Cuba were plainly intended 
 tQ carry planter institutions to less fortunate 
 countries, and the best thought of the South ap- 
 proved the purpose. Why should there not be an 
 expanding cotton, rice, and sugar kingdom just 
 as there was a growing industrial empire in the 
 East and North? 
 
138 THE COTTON KINGDOM 
 
 The presidential election of 1856 was of primary 
 importance.,. The mistakes of Pierce had made 
 Douglas the foremost candidate of the Democrats, 
 and the rising tide of opposition led by Seward gave 
 evidence that the planters might soon be defeated 
 in national politics and reduced to the necessity of 
 secession if they intended to pursue their program 
 unhindered. Yancey and Slidell and the other able 
 leaders of the lower South attended the Demo- 
 cratic convention which met at Cincinnati in June, 
 1856. By careful management they prevented 
 Douglas, their chief aversion, from winning the 
 nomination, though his popularity at the North 
 was very great, and they finally set up as their 
 candidate James Buchanan, who had never 
 "spoken ill of the South." This victory had not 
 been won, however, without yielding to Douglas 
 and the West the privilege of writing the party 
 platform. It was but a restatement of the idea 
 that the settlers in any new Territory should 
 determine for themselves whether they would have 
 slavery or not. It was the application to Terri- 
 tories of the principle of popular sovereignty which 
 both then and later was acceptable to the up- 
 country element in the South. Only the great 
 planter group understood and opposed it, and 
 
THE PLANTER IN POLITICS 139 
 
 above all opposed Douglas, who was always talking 
 about the plain people and local self-government. 
 
 Few campaigns in American history have ever 
 been more hotly contested than that of 1856. 
 There was frequent talk in responsible circles of 
 the cotton kingdom that secession would surely 
 follow the election of Fremont, the candidate of 
 Seward and the new Republican party in the North. 
 In Pennsylvania alone something like a million 
 dollars was spent by the two leading parties — a 
 huge sum for that time. But the planters won. 
 They surrounded the President-elect and made 
 perfectly sure that no dangerous men should get 
 into the Cabinet. The men who had directed the 
 policy of Pierce now directed that of Buchanan; 
 and Davis, recently transferred to the Senate, 
 John Shdell of Louisiana, and Jesse' Bright of In- 
 diana were the powers behind the throne. The 
 planters still had the majority of the Senate and 
 the Supreme Court, though the House was dead- 
 locked. It would be the duty of the President to 
 get the country out of the tangle in Kansas, for, if 
 he succeeded, the young llepublican party, which 
 was composed of the most heterogeneous elements, 
 would probably go to pieces. 
 
 Buchanan endeavored earnestly to solve the 
 
140 THE COTTON KINGDOM 
 
 Kansas problem. In spite of some opposition from 
 his Southern advisers, he appointed Robert Walker 
 Governor of the distracted Territory. Walker 
 promptly reported that the only way out of the 
 difficulty was to let the people decide the question 
 of slavery for themselves without let or hindrance. 
 That was what Douglas had said all along. But 
 such a policy would make Kansas a free State and 
 the lower South could not surrender so easily. 
 Happily for the Southern leaders, the Supreme 
 Court in the spring of 1857 was of the opinion that 
 an owner of slaves had the legal right to carry his 
 human property into any Territory and keep it 
 regardless of all local opposition. Under the far- 
 reaching Dred Scott decision, it would seem to 
 be the duty of the country as a whole, under the 
 Constitution, to guarantee the rights of property 
 in slaves in all national domains. 
 
 If this decision was in harmony with the spirit 
 of the Constitution, and it certainly seemed to be, 
 the popular notion that the people of each Terri- 
 tory might forbid slavery was utterly untenable. 
 Consequently when Walker urged the President to 
 leave the problem in Kansas to the vote of a hostile 
 local population, the planters with one voice de- 
 nounced the idea. They pressed about the pUant 
 
THE PLANTER IN POLITICS 141 
 
 Buchanan, they carried the war into Congress, 
 and they stirred the lower South to resistance. 
 All the debates about the importation of slaves 
 from Africa, the futile efforts still going forward at 
 Madrid for the purchase of Cuba, the filibustering 
 in Nicaragua, and the efforts to procure another 
 part of Mexican territory, paled into insignificance 
 before the crucial question whether "a mob" in 
 Kansas should be allowed to deprive Southerners 
 of rights of property in defiance of the Federal 
 Supreme Court. 
 
 While Buchanan wavered, Douglas issued a 
 declaration of war upon the President and an- 
 nounced that he would carry the matter before 
 the people of the Northwest for decision. Every 
 Southern Senator and almost every Southern 
 leader deprecated such a move and denounced the 
 man who made it. But Douglas found support in 
 the North. Republican leaders, sore pressed for a 
 popular champion of their cause, talked of making 
 him their candidate for 1860. The planters won 
 the President to their side; and the choice between 
 the two points of view went first to the people of 
 Ilhnois and later to the people of the whole coun- 
 try. In the contest in Illinois, there arose the pro- 
 phetic figure of Abraham Lincoln, the very embodi- 
 
142 THE COTTON KINGDOM 
 
 ment of American democracy, declaring for simple 
 majority rule. The decisions of the Supreme 
 Court must yield to popular votes; laws and even 
 constitutions must be remade to suit the wishes of 
 simple majorities. If the Court refused, then the 
 Court must be reconstituted ; if laws gave more to 
 slaveholders than the people wished, then laws 
 must be repealed. Lincoln's position was that of 
 one who appeals to the referendum and recall 
 today, a far cry indeed from that which had led to 
 the formation of the Union. If Lincoln had his 
 way, the United States would become a democracy. 
 While Douglas won a reelection to the Senate 
 on the issue as he pressed it, there was in reality 
 little difference between him and Lincoln from the 
 viewpoint of the lower South. What did it matter 
 to the owner of slaves whether all the people of the 
 North voted down his rights under the Constitu- 
 tion or whether the same thing were done by a 
 majority in a single Territory? The whole point to 
 him was that no majority anywhere could deprive 
 him of rights guaranteed by the supreme law of 
 the land. Upon this issue, almost every planter, 
 whether of the cotton or of the tobacco States, 
 took his stand. Yancey threatened revolution. 
 The South Carolina leaders, following Robert 
 
THE PLANTER IN POLITICS 143 
 
 Barnwell Rhett, a life-long advocate of secession, 
 began to "set their house in order," expecting to 
 leave the Union in 1860. Every prominent mem- 
 ber of Congress from the South veered round to 
 the position of Jefferson Davis, who had said 
 mournfully that the cotton States might have to 
 leave the Union, although he refused to counsel 
 such a course. Newspapers and teachers and 
 preachers of all the churches in the lower South 
 declared that the submission of the rights of the 
 planters to plebiscites was revolutionary and sub- 
 versive of all law and order. They prophesied 
 that the business men of the North would one day 
 rue the choice they were about to make. But it 
 was not the business men of the North who were 
 getting nervous or unruly — it was the democracy 
 of the North. 
 
 The rulers of the cotton kingdom prepared for 
 the struggle of 1860 while the war of North and 
 South went sadly on in Kansas. Congress re- 
 mained deadlocked: the Senate favored the South; 
 the House, the North. Everything depended up- 
 on the outcome of the party conventions and the 
 election of 1860. The Democrats met at Charles- 
 ton. Douglas prepared long beforehand to win a 
 majority of the delegates to that body. He would 
 
144 THE COTTON KINGDOM 
 
 have the convention declare in favor of popular sov- 
 ereignty as the preceding convention had done with 
 the aid of Southern votes; and then he would have 
 the convention nominate him to the presidency. 
 If he succeeded in both these moves, he would 
 almost certainly be the successor to Buchanan. 
 
 To Davis and his planter followers such an out- 
 come would be only a little less fatal than the elec- 
 tion of a "black Republican." The cotton States 
 could never submit to a President who juggled with 
 the rights of property. They must first of all 
 defeat Douglas. If they succeeded in this they 
 might nominate a safer man and endeavor to defeat 
 the Republicans in the succeeding general election. 
 In other words, the planters had reached the point 
 when they would deliberately sacrifice in the 
 Northwest their allies of long standing rather 
 than yield an inch in the matter of their rights 
 in the Territories. Having vanquished Douglas, 
 they would then meet Seward or Lincoln with 
 the hope of further success. 
 
 When the Charleston convention met in April, 
 1860, a battle royal began between Douglas Demo- 
 crats and the reactionary members of the party 
 who accepted the leadership of Jefferson Davis. 
 Neither faction would yield. When this became 
 
THE PLANTER IN POLITICS 145 
 
 clear, Yancey, the greatest orator of the South 
 since Patrick Henry, made one of the famous un- 
 reported speeches of history. He reasoned with the 
 Northern delegates, he stirred the emotions of the 
 crowded galleries, and he raised the enthusiasm of 
 his planter followers to the highest pitch. When 
 he finished, bade farewell to the convention, and 
 took his leave, the members from all the lower 
 Southern States followed him. The first great bolt 
 in American history had taken place. Buchanan 
 and Davis, still in Washington, approved; John 
 Shdell, August Belmont, and the Tammany Hall 
 representatives lent Yancey assistance and money; 
 and the reactionary elements of the party in the 
 North applauded. 
 
 The great planter machine had reached its acme 
 of influence and power; and all the cotton coun- 
 try submitted to its dictation. In fact, all the ar- 
 ticulate elements of the lower South were repre- 
 sented in it. This organization now moved toward 
 the nomination of a candidate of its own. The 
 planters met again in Richmond and nominated 
 for President John C. Breckinridge, a moderate 
 Kentucky politician. The Douglas men reas- 
 sembled in Baltimore and nominated their hero. 
 To the surprise of most Southern public men, the 
 
146 THE COTTON KINGDOM 
 
 Republicans made Lincoln their standard bearer. 
 Still other candidates were put forward by the so- 
 called Constitutional Union party. 
 
 Lincoln was elected. The cotton States pre- 
 pared to leave the Union. Their unique culture, 
 their still powerful position in national politics, 
 and their remarkable prosperity were all staked 
 upon the event. They would form a State in which 
 the laboring class should be the property of the 
 capitalist; they would perfect a society in which 
 every man should have a place and every man 
 should keep his place. In the lower South there 
 were to be slaves, farmers, and gentlemen. There 
 would be no poverty; nor would there be any 
 serious disagreement on the fundamentals of soci- 
 ety, for sermons, speeches, books, and teaching 
 in the colleges were all to defend the existing 
 order and to look towards its perfecting. Society 
 in the lower South was to be the realization un- 
 hindered of the social philosophy which began with 
 the repudiation of the Declaration of Independence 
 and ended with the explicit recognition of social 
 inequality. There was then no doubt of final 
 success, and there was little if any serious protest 
 against the ideals that were to be realized. 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 Bbown, William G., The Lower South in American 
 History, 1902. Valuable for its portrayal of 
 leaders and methods. 
 
 Claiborne, J. F. H., The Life and Correspondence of 
 John A. Quitman, 2 vols. 1860. Letters and ideals 
 of a Northern man turned great planter. 
 
 FoRTiEE, Alcee, The History of Louisiana, 4 vols. 
 1904. The work of an ardent Louisianian and 
 Southerner; but good. 
 
 Gabrison, George P., Texas: A Contest of Civilizations, 
 1903, in the American Commonwealth series. 
 
 Hamilton, Peter J., The Colonization of the South, 
 Philadelphia, 1904, vol. iii in The History of North 
 America. 
 
 Jervey, Theodore D., Robert Young Hayne and his 
 Times, 1909. Contains excellent material on 
 South Carolina in the period of transition from 
 strong Federalism to ardent particularism. 
 
 Phillips, Ulrich B., The Plantation and Frontier, Cleve- 
 land, 1910, two volumes of the Documentary History 
 of American Industrial Society. Contains much 
 original material on the history of cotton farming. 
 147 
 
148 BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 
 
 Smedes, Susan D., Memorials of a Southern Planter, 
 New York, 1890. Valuable for planter ideals, but 
 rather roseate. 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 De Bow, J. D. B., The Industrial Resources of the 
 Southern and Western States, 3 vols. 1852-53. 
 Exceedingly valuable for social and economic 
 life. 
 
 Hammond, Matthew B., The Cotton Industry, New 
 York, 1897. Excellent treatment, but not ex- 
 haustive. 
 
 Kettel, T. p., Southern Wealth and Northern Profits, 
 New York, 1860. To be used with discrimina- 
 tion. 
 
 Olmsted, Frederick Law, A Journey in the Seaboard 
 Slave States, New York, 1856. Same author: A 
 Journey in the Back Country, New York, 1860. 
 These well-known books are very valuable; but it 
 must not be forgotten that they were written by an 
 observer hostile to slavery. 
 
 Phillips, Ulrich B., Transportation in the Eastern 
 Cotton Belt, New York, 1908. The only work on 
 the subject. Valuable. 
 
 Rhodes, James Ford, History of the United States from 
 the Compromise of 1850, 7 vols. 1893-1906. One of 
 the greatest works on American history. Reliable 
 at almost every point. The tone is perhaps too 
 patriotic. 
 
 South, The, in the Building of the Nation, Richmond, 
 1909. Vols, v and vi on the economic life of the 
 South are good but of uneven value. 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 149 
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 Cobb, Thomas R. R., Inquiry into the Law of Negro 
 Slavery, Philadelphia, 1858. A Southern statement 
 of the laws by which slavery was maintained. 
 
 Dew, Thomas R., Review of the Debates in the Virginia 
 Legislature of 1832. Published in The Pro-Slavery 
 Argument, Charleston, 1852. Ablest of all the 
 works treating slavery from historical and social 
 points of view. 
 
 Elliott, E. N., Cotton is King and Pro-Slavery Argu- 
 ments, Augusta, 1860. A collection of the pro- 
 slavery writings. 
 
 FiTZHUGH, George, Sociology for the South, Richmond, 
 1854. An important book, but weakened by its 
 repetitions. Contains many suggestions for the 
 modern sociologist. 
 
 Houston, David F., A Critical Study of Nullification 
 in South Carolina, New York, 1896. Contains 
 significant statements of influential leaders on 
 the subject of social subordination. 
 
 NoTT, JosiAH C, Types of Mankind, Philadelphia, 
 1854. A sort of forerunner of Darwin's ideas about 
 species and races. Its fault from the Southern 
 point of view was that it treated the Biblical 
 authority with scant courtesy. 
 
 Rhodes, James Ford, History of the United States, vol. 
 I, chapter iv. This chapter treats the facts of 
 slavery with great fairness but without recogni- 
 tion of the philosophical basis of the pro-slavery 
 contention. 
 
 Weston, George M., The Progress of Slavery in 
 the United States, Washington, 1857. A warning 
 
150 BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 
 
 that the extreme pro-slavery philosophy had over- 
 reached itself and that the decline of slavery might 
 be an economic benefit. 
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 Baldwin, Joseph G., The Flush Times in Alabama and 
 Mississippi, New York, 1853. Recent reprint by 
 Americus Book Company, Augusta, Georgia. 
 
 Hayne, Paul Hamilton, Poems of, illustrated edition, 
 Boston, 1882. 
 
 LoNGSTEEET, AUGUSTUS B., Georgia Scenes, Augusta, 
 1840. 
 
 MiMS, Edwin, Sidney Lanier, Boston, 1905, in Ameri- 
 can Men of Letters series. A valuable work, par- 
 ticularly good in its interpretation of planter life. 
 
 South, The, in the Building of the Nation, Richmond, 
 1909, vol. VIII, on Southern fiction is edited by 
 Edwin Mims. A work of uneven merit, but very 
 useful. 
 
 Timrod, Henry, Poems of, memorial edition, Boston, 
 1899. An interesting and sympathetic introduc- 
 tion adds great value to the work. 
 
 Thompson, William Tappan, Major Jones's Courtship, 
 Philadelphia, 1840. 
 
 Trent, William P., William Gilmore Simms, Boston, 
 1892, in American Men of Letters series. One of 
 the best books of its class in American biography. 
 
 Trent, William P., Southern Writers, New York, 1905. 
 For the classics and the intellectual life as mani- 
 fested in the schools and colleges. The South in 
 the Building of the Nation, vol. vii, is especially 
 important. The novels of Simms and Kennedy 
 ma,y still be found in the second-hand bookstores. 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 151 
 
 The best of these are perhaps Guy Rivers by Simms 
 , and Swallow Bam by Kennedy. 
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 Alexander, Gross, The History of the Methodist Epis- 
 copal Church, South, New York, 1894, vol. xi of 
 The American Church History series. 
 
 Broadus, John Albert, Memoir of James Petigru 
 Boyce, New York, 1893. Valuable for the history 
 of Baptist educational work. 
 
 Green, Edwin L., A History of the University of South 
 Carolina, Columbia, 1916. A full account of the 
 subject with much biographical material. 
 
 Hatcher, William E., The Life of J. B. Jeter, Balti- 
 more, 1887. Excellent, with many data on the 
 social life of the South. 
 
 Johnson, Thomas Cary, The Life and Letters of Ben- 
 jamin Morgan Palmer, Richmond, 1906. Impor- 
 tant for the history of the lower South. 
 
 Johnson, Thomas Cart, History of the Southern Pres- 
 byterian Church, New York, 1900. 
 
 Matlack, Lucius C, The Life of Orange Scott, New 
 York, 1847. A rare book on* an interesting sub- 
 ject. 
 
 Meriwether, Colyer, The History of Higher Educa- 
 tion in South Carolina, Washington, 1889. A valu- 
 able Government document. Similar histories of 
 education in the South were published by the 
 Government about the same time. Edited by 
 Herbert B. Adams. 
 
 McTyeire, H. N., The Duties of Masters and Servants, 
 Charleston, 1851. Unique and valuable. 
 
152 BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 
 
 RiLET, B. F., A History of the Baptists in the South- 
 ern States East of the Mississippi, Philadelphia, 
 1898. 
 
 Robertson, Archibald T., The Life and Letters of John 
 Albert Broadus, Philadelphia, 1909. A contribu- 
 tion to educational history. 
 
 Smith, George G., The Life and Letters of James Osgood 
 Andrew, Nashville, 1883. Valuable for the history 
 of the split in the Methodist Church. 
 
 United States Census of 1860. Mortality and Miscel- 
 laneous Statistics. 
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 Brown, William Garrott, The Lower South in Ameri- 
 can History, New York, 1902. Contains an espe- 
 cially good essay on Yancey. 
 
 Butler, Pierce, Judah P. Benjamin, in American 
 Crisis Biographies, Philadelphia, 1907. 
 
 Claiborne, J. F. H., Mississippi as a Province, Terri- 
 tory, and State, Jackson, 1880. Political parties 
 and campaigns. 
 
 Clay, Thomas Hart, Henry Clay, in American Crisis 
 Biographies, Philadelphia, 1910. 
 
 Coleman, Mrs. Chapman, The Life of John J. Critten- 
 den loiih Selections from his Correspondence and 
 Speeches, 2 vols. Philadelphia, 1871. 
 
 Davis, Reuben, Recollections of Mississippi and 
 Mississippians, Boston, 1891. 
 
 DoDD, William E., Jefferson Davis, in American Crisis 
 Biographies, Philadelphia, 1907. 
 
 DuBose, J. W., The Life and Times of William 
 Lowndes Yancey, Birmingham, 1892. 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 153 
 
 FooTE, Henbt S., Casket of Reminiscences, Wash- 
 ington, 1874. To be taken with considerable 
 allowance for personal bias. 
 
 Heaeon, Cleo, Mississippi and the Compromise of 1850. 
 Publications of the Mississippi Historical Society, 
 1914. 
 
 Hodgson, Joseph, The Cradle of the Confederacy, 
 Mobile, 1876. 
 
 Ingle, Edward, Southern Sidelights, Baltimore, 1896. 
 
 Jame.son, J. F., The Correspondence of John C. Calhoun, 
 Washington, 1899. Report of the American His- 
 torical Association. 
 
 Johnson, Allen, Stephen A. Douglas, New York, 1908. 
 
 Johnston and Browne, Life of Alexander H. Stephens, 
 Philadelphia, 1878. 
 
 Pebry, B. F., Reminiscences of Public Men, Philadel- 
 phia, 1883. 
 
 Phillips, U. B., The Correspondence of Toomhs, Stephens, 
 and Cobb, Washington, 1913. Report of the 
 American Historical Association. 
 
 Phtor, Mrs. Roger A., Reminiscences of Peace and 
 War, New York, 1904. 
 
 Russell, William H., My Diary, North and South, 
 London, 1862. 
 
INDEX 
 
 Adams, J. Q., opposes Mexican 
 War, 124; proposes secession 
 of Northern States, 125 
 
 Agassiz, L. J. R., 113 
 
 Aiken family, 25 
 
 Alabama, 110, 120; economic re- 
 sources of, 2, 3; see also Mobile, 
 Montgomery 
 
 Alabama, University of, 112, 
 113, 114 
 
 Allen, William, Senator from 
 Ohio, on side of the South, 130 
 
 Andrew, Bishop, of Georgia, test 
 slavery case, 105 
 
 Apprentices, Negro, 136 
 
 Art in South, 82 
 
 Audubon, J. J., Birds of America, 
 113;Quadrupedsof America, lis 
 
 Bachman, John, 113 
 
 Baldwin, J. G., 89, 90; Fliish 
 Times in Alabama and Missis- 
 sippi, 90 
 
 Baptist Church, in South, 20, 
 102; in North, 104; attitude 
 toward slavery, 107-08; theo- 
 logical schools, 110 
 
 Baton Rouge, 98 (note) 
 
 Bell, John, 130 
 
 Belmont, August, 145 
 
 Bigler, Asa, 130 
 
 Books owned by planters, 62-63, 
 79-82 
 
 Boston, 40, 41; imports and ex- 
 ports, 28 
 
 Boyce, J. P., 110 
 
 Breckenridge, J. C, 146 
 
 Bright, Jesse, Senator from In- 
 
 diana, on side of South, 130; 
 
 directs policy of Buchanan, 139 
 Brinkerhoff, Jacob, 125 
 Brown, J. E., 31 
 Buchanan, James, 122; candidate 
 
 for President, 138; elected, 139; 
 
 and the Kansas problem, 139- 
 
 141; approves Yancey, 145 
 Byron, George Gordon Noel, 
 
 Lord, appeal to South, 81 
 
 Calhoun J. C, 84, 108; opinion 
 of slavery, 58-60; advocate of 
 expansion, 123; prompts mass 
 meeting in Jackson, Miss., 126; 
 failure and death, 127 
 
 California, Polk takes possession 
 of, 124; question of slavery in, 
 126, 127, 132 
 
 Calvinism, 100-02 
 
 Capers, William, Methodist 
 preacher, 106 
 
 Carlyle, Thomas, doctrine of 
 class distinction, 63; influence 
 in Prussia, 63 
 
 Carriage travel, 77-79 
 
 Cart Wright, Peter, 104 
 
 Cass, Lewis, on expansion, 124; 
 defeated for presidency, 126; 
 on side of South, 130 
 
 Catholic Church in South, Ro- 
 man, 13-14, 98 (note) 
 
 Central America, South plans 
 conquest of, 46; filibustering 
 against, 136 
 
 Central Pacific Railroad, 132 
 
 Charleston, 2, 10-11, 16, 18, 36, 
 40, 70, 82, 85. 99, 113, 131; 
 
 165 
 
156 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Ch arleston — Continued 
 convention of Democrats, 143- 
 145 
 
 Charleston and Augusta Railway, 
 36 
 
 Charleston Mercury, 79 
 
 Chestnut, James, 41 
 
 Cheves, Langdon, 113 
 
 Clapp, Dr., in New Orleans, 19 
 
 Classics, devotion of South to, 
 83-84 
 
 Clay, Henry, sponsor of Demo- 
 cratic party, 122; defeated for 
 presidency, 124; in Senate, 
 126; Compromise of 1850, 127; 
 death, 129 
 
 Clothes, of slaves, 75; of South- 
 ern gentlemen, 76; of Southern 
 ladies, 76-77 
 
 Cobb, Howell, 25 
 
 Compromise of 1850, 127 
 
 Cooper, Dr. Thomas, 97, 100, 
 101 
 
 Cotton, rise in price (1845-50), 
 25; annual crops (1850-60), 26 
 
 Cotton belt, extent, 1; rainfall, 
 2; rivers, 2-3; soil, 3; clearing 
 of land, 4—5; Indians driven 
 out of, 6-7; labor problem, 7; 
 slavery, 7-9; immigration, 8- 
 9; need of better cultivation, 
 43; see also South, Lower, and 
 names of States 
 
 Cotton-planters, drive out In- 
 dians, 6-7; recruited from 
 older South, 8-10, 32; rise of 
 great, 24-47; social philoso- 
 phy, 48-70; homes, 71-72; 
 families, 72-73; home life, 73; 
 slaves, 73-76; dress, 76-77; 
 travel, 77-79; books and 
 magazines, 79—80; culture, 95— 
 96; in politics, 118 et seg.; 
 bibliography, 148 
 
 Court, County, 118-20 
 
 Crittenden, J. J., his nephew 
 killed in Cuba, 137 
 
 Cuba, South plans conquest of, 
 46; effort to purchase, 128, 136, 
 
 141; filibustering against, 136, 
 137 
 Cushing, Caleb, 130 
 
 Darwin, Charles, 112 
 
 Davis, Jefferson, 121, 129; 
 adopts idea of class distinc- 
 tion, 62; on expansion, 124; 
 for unity, 130; directs policy 
 of Buchanan, 139; on seces- 
 sion, 143; against Douglas, 
 144; approves Yancey, 145 
 
 Davis, Mrs. Jefferson, 41, 77 
 
 Davis, Joseph, 25 
 
 Davis, Reuben, 22 
 
 De Bow, J. D. B., Industrial 
 Resources of the Southern and 
 Western States, quoted, 44; at 
 University of New Orleans, 112 
 
 De Bow's Review, 80 
 
 Democratic party, 124, 138; 
 growth in the South, 122; de- 
 feat of, 125; success of, 127, 
 129-30; convention at Charles- 
 ton, 143-45 
 
 Dew, T. R., social philosophy of, 
 49-51, 58; made head of Wil- 
 liam and Mary College, 53; 
 quoted, 53 
 
 Dickens, Charles, condemns 
 slavery, 60; has no appeal for 
 South, 81 
 
 Dix, J. A., 130 
 
 Dodge, Senator from Iowa, on 
 side of South, 130 
 
 Douglas, S. A., married to a 
 Southerner, 41; attitude on 
 expansion, 124; on side of 
 South, 130; promotes Central 
 Pacific Railroad, 132; Kansas- 
 Nebraska bill, 132-33; Demo- 
 cratic candidate for President 
 (1856), 138; defeated for nom- 
 ination, 138; writes party 
 platform, 138; and popular 
 sovereignty, 140, 141-42; re- 
 elected to Senate, 142; at 
 Democratic convention in 
 Charleston, 143-44; nominated 
 
INDEX 
 
 157 
 
 Douglas, S- A. — Continited 
 for presidency at Baltimore, 
 145 
 
 Douglas, Mrs. S. A., 41, 77 
 
 Education in South, religious 
 tendencies in, 97-98; theo- 
 logical schools and denomina- 
 tional colleges, 110-11; col- 
 leges and universities, 111-14; 
 common schools, 114-15, 131; 
 illiteracy, 115; religious educa- 
 tion for slaves, 116-17, 131; 
 no secular education for slaves, 
 117; bibliography, 151-52 
 
 Episcopal Church in South, 14- 
 15, 99 
 
 Expansion, South's desire for, 
 11-12, 46-47, 123-24, 128, 
 136-37 
 
 Farmers of South, 91-95 
 
 Finance, bank deposits in South, 
 28-29; financial situation, 29- 
 80; see also Tariff 
 
 Fitzhugh, George, Sociology for 
 the Sovth, 64-67; Cannibals All; 
 OT Slaves imthout Masters, 67 
 
 Florida, 120 
 
 Foote, H. S., 62, 127 
 
 Fremont, J. C, Republican can- 
 didate for President (1856), 
 139 
 
 French in South, 13, 17-18 
 
 Fuller, Richard, 107 
 
 Furman University, 110 
 
 Gadsden, Christopher, mission to 
 Mexico, 128, 132 
 
 Gaines, General, 19 
 
 Garrison, W. L., 105, 106 
 
 Georgia, 6, 100, 103, 110, 111, 
 120; economic resources, 2, 3; 
 see also Savannah 
 
 Georgia, University of, 112 
 
 Germans in South, 23 
 
 Giles, W. B., Governor of Vir- 
 ginia, 50-51 
 
 Going, Jonathan, 104 
 
 Goldsmith, Oliver, appeal to 
 
 South, 81 
 Goodlow, D. R., 68 
 Gottschalk, L. M., 83 
 
 Hairston family, 25 
 
 Hammond, J. H., 61 
 
 Harper, Chancellor of the Su- 
 preme Court of South Carolina, 
 elaborates Dew's philosophy, 
 53-58; A Memoir on Slavery, 
 54; on education, 114 
 
 Harper's Magazine, 80 
 
 Harper's Weekly, 80 
 
 Hayne, P H., inspired by Simms, 
 87 ; compared with Timrod, 88 ; 
 "Laureate of the South," 88; 
 echo of English literature, 88- 
 89 
 
 Helper, H. R., Impending Crisis 
 of the South, 68-69 
 
 Holley, Horace, 98, 102 
 
 Homes, of whites in South, 71- 
 72, 91-95; of slaves, 74 
 
 Hooper, J. J., Simon Suggs, 89 
 
 Houston, Sam, 130 
 
 Howard College, 110 
 
 Huguenots in South Carolina, 17 
 
 Humorists of the South, 89-90 
 
 Illinois, an anti-slavery State, 7- 
 
 8; Lincoln-Douglas contest in, 
 
 141-42 
 Illiteracy in South, 115 
 Immigration, 133 
 Indiana, an anti-slavery State, 
 
 7-8 
 Indians in South, 5-6; driven 
 
 out by planters, 6-7 
 
 Jackson, Andrew, 122; fails to 
 protect Indians in South, 6; 
 elected by South and West, 12; 
 uncertainty as to tariff, 12 
 
 Jefferson, Thomas, his home sold 
 in 1829, 9; ideals discredited 
 in South, 48-49, 51, 56, 100; 
 devotion to classics, 83; a deist, 
 98; founds University of Vir- 
 ginia, 98 
 
158 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Johnson, Andrew, 31, 130 
 Johnson, Dr. Samuel, appeal to 
 
 South, 81 
 Judicial system of South, 118-21 
 
 Kansas, question of slavery in, 
 
 139-41, 143 
 Kansas-Nebraska bill, 132-33 
 Kennedy, J. P., 86-87; Swallow 
 
 Bam, 86; Horseshoe Robinson, 
 
 86 
 Kentucky, 37, 40 
 Knickerbocker Magazine, 80 
 
 Labor, slave, 7, 45, 73, 134, 146; 
 problem of foreign, 133; negro 
 apprentices, 136 
 
 Le Conte, Joseph, 112, 113 
 
 Lee, Jesse, 104 
 
 Libraries of planters, 62-63, 79- 
 82 
 
 Lieber, Francis, 112 
 
 Lincoln, Abraham, on slavery 
 problem, 27; Lincoln-Douglas 
 contest in Illinois, 141-42; 
 elected President, 146 
 
 Literature of South, 85-90 
 
 Longstreet, Rev. A. B., 89, 91; 
 Georgia Scenes, 89 
 
 Lopez, Narciso, leads expedition 
 against Cuba, 137 
 
 Louisiana, 120; economic re- 
 sources, 2; see also New Or- 
 leans 
 
 Louisiana, University of, 112 
 
 Macaulay, Lord, condemns slav- 
 ery, 60 
 McSparran, Methodist preacher, 
 
 106 
 McTyeire, H. N.. 106; Duties of 
 
 Masters and Servants, 106 
 
 (note) 
 Macy, Jesse, The Anti-Slavery 
 
 Crusade, cited, 127 (note), 
 
 133 (note) 
 Madison, James, poverty of, 9; 
 
 on class distinction, 51 
 Manly, Dr. Basil, President of 
 
 University of Alabama, 107, 
 111, 114 
 
 Mann, Horace, influences educa- 
 tion in the South, 114 
 
 Manufacturing in South, 44-46, 
 131 
 
 Marcy. W. L., Secretary of State, 
 128 
 
 Marshall, Daniel, 102 
 
 Marshall, John, Chief Justice, 
 48, 61 
 
 Martineau, Harriet, 66; con- 
 demns slavery, 60 
 
 Maryland, 7, 42 
 
 Mercer University, 110 
 
 Methodist Church, in South, 
 20, 102-04, 105-06, 110, 111; 
 in North, 104; separates on 
 subject of slavery, 105-06 
 
 Methodist Church South, 106 
 
 Mexican War, 12, 47, 124 
 
 Mexico, 125; plans for conquest 
 of, 46-47; Gadsden sent to, 128, 
 132; attacked by Walker, 137 
 
 Mississippi, 120, 137; economic 
 resources, 2, 3; railroads, 36; 
 mass meeting at Jackson 
 (1849), 126 
 
 Mississippi, University of, 112 
 
 Mobile, 11, 36, 37, 98 (note), 99, 
 113 
 
 Montgomery, 99, 131 
 
 Mountaineers of South, 34-35 
 
 Music in South, 82-83 
 
 Nashville (Tenn.), Southern con- 
 vention at, 126, 130 
 
 Negroes, free, 18, 136; see also 
 Slavery 
 
 New Jersey, College of (Prince- 
 ton), 100, 101 
 
 New Mexico, Polk takes posses- 
 sion of, 124; question of 
 slavery in, 126 
 
 New Oi'leans, 36, 37, 98 (note), 
 99, 113; French in, 13, 17- 
 18; other nationalities in, 18; 
 tone in 1850, 19; changes, 19; 
 financial situation in, 28 
 
INDEX 
 
 159 
 
 New Orleans Picayune, 79; 
 quoted, 26 (note) 
 
 New Orleans, University of, 112 
 
 New York, 41; imports and ex- 
 ports, 27-28; bank deposits in, 
 28; influence of cotton on, 43 
 
 Nicaragua, filibustering in, 137, 
 141 
 
 North, cotton planters buy goods 
 in, 28; Methodists and Bap- 
 tists in, 104 
 
 North American Review, 80 
 
 North Carolina, 19, 37, 39, 42, 
 100, 101, 110; economic re- 
 sources, 2; slavery in, 68 
 
 Nott, J. C, 112 
 
 Olmsted, F. L., A Journey in the 
 Seaboard Slave States, cited, 
 30, 91; Journey Through the 
 Back Country, cited, 91; de- 
 scribes life of poor whites, 94 
 
 Oregon, Polk takes possession of, 
 124 
 
 Ostend manifesto, 136-37 
 
 Owen, R. D., 113 
 
 Palmer, Dr. B. M., 83, 111; 
 quoted, 109 
 
 Parties, see Political parties 
 
 Pennsylvania, 139 
 
 Philadelphia, 40; imports and ex- 
 ports, 28; bank deposits in, 
 28-29 
 
 Philosophy, Social, of planters, 
 48-70, 146 
 
 Pierce, Franklin, 122, 128, 138, 
 139 
 
 Plantations, life on, 71 et seq.; 
 planters' homes, 71-72; fami- 
 lies, .72-73; slaves on, 73-76 
 
 Planters, see Cotton-planters 
 
 Poets of South, 85-88 
 
 Poindexter, A. M., 107 
 
 Political parties in South, 121- 
 122, 123-24 
 
 Politics in South, 11-13, 118 
 et seq.; bibliography, 152-53 
 
 Polk, J. K., 122, 124, 125 
 
 Poor whites, 31-34; 94-95 
 Population of South, in 1850, 10; 
 
 relative decline in, 133-34 
 Prentiss, Sergeant, 10 (note), 22 
 Presbyterian Church, in South, 
 
 20, 99-102, 111; South in con- 
 trol of, 108; theological schools, 
 110 
 
 Press, Freedom of, subject of 
 abolition prohibited, 70 
 
 Quitman, J. A., 10 (note) 
 
 Raih-oads in South, 36-37, 131- 
 
 132 
 Rainfall in cotton belt, 2, 43 
 Randolph, John, poverty of, 9; 
 
 discredits Jefferson's ideals, 
 
 48,51 
 Randolph-Macon College, 110 
 Religion in South, 13-15, 19, 20- 
 
 21, 97-111; bibliography, 151- 
 152; see also names of denomi- 
 nations 
 
 Rhett, R. B., 142-43 
 
 Richmond Enquirer, 79 
 
 Ritchie, Thomas, 127 
 
 Rivers of cotton belt, 2-3 
 
 Roads in South, 35 
 
 Roman Catholics in South, 13- 
 
 . 14, 98 (note) 
 
 Ruffin, Edmund, 43 
 
 Ruffner, W. H., 114 
 
 Runnels, H. G., 30 (note) 
 
 Savannah, 36, 99, 131 
 
 Scott, Dred, decision, 140 
 
 Scott, Orange, 105 
 
 Scott, Sir Walter, appeal to 
 South, 62-63, 81 
 
 Scott, General Winfield, nomi- 
 nated for President, 127-28 
 
 Secession, 126, 127, 139, 142-43, 
 146 
 
 Seward, W. H., Whig leader, 
 127; connected with new Re- 
 publican party, 139 
 
 Shakespeare, William, appeal 
 in South, 81-82 
 
160 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Simms, W. G., attitude on 
 slavery, 61; Lyrical and Other 
 Poems, 85; as a poet, 85; as a 
 novelist, 85; Guy Rivers, 85; 
 The Yemassee, 85; Partisan, 
 85; typically Southern, 86; 
 echo of English literature, 88- 
 89 
 
 Slavery, problem in older South, 
 7-8; number of slaves, 7, 10; 
 emigration of owners, 8-9; 
 increase in value of slaves, 9, 
 26-27; slave population of 
 lower South (1850), 10; ne- 
 groes as slave owners, 18; 
 slaves the index of wealth, 25; 
 evil increased by prosperity, 
 26; slaves bound to planter 
 system, 33; slaves employed 
 in cotton mills, 45; Dew 
 argues for, 49-51; rights of 
 slaves, 52; The Pro-Slavery 
 Argument, 53 (note), 58 (note); 
 Harper argues for, 53-58; Cal- 
 houn on, 58-60; compared to 
 English industrialism, 61; 
 Fitzhugh's Sociology, 64-67; 
 Goodlow on, 68; Helper, Im- 
 pending Crisis of the South, 
 68-69; duties of slaves, 73; 
 care of slaves, 74-76; attitude 
 of churches on, 102-11; reli- 
 gious education for slaves, 
 116-17; issue in 1850, 126; im- 
 portation of slaves, 131, 134- 
 136; popular sovereignty in 
 territories as regards, 138; 
 Dred Scott decision, 140; in 
 Kansas, 140-4.1, 143; bibli- 
 ography, 149-50 
 
 Slave-trade, 39-40, 131, 134-36 
 
 Slidell, John, 129; attitude to- 
 ward slavery, 62; attends De- 
 mocratic convention at Cincin- 
 nati, 138; directs policy of Bu- 
 chanan, 139; approves Yancey, 
 145 
 
 Smith, Adam, ideas attacked by 
 Fitzhugh, 64 
 
 Smith, Dr. W. A., of Virginia, 
 106, 110-11 
 
 Soil of cotton belt, 3 
 
 Soule, Joshua, 106 
 
 Soule, Pierre, sent to Spain, 128; 
 mission not successful, 136 
 
 South Carolina, 12, 39, 100, 103, 
 110, 120; economic resources, 
 2; aristocracy in, 16-17; Hu- 
 guenots in, 17; upholds slavery, 
 60-61; religious attitude in, 
 101-02; recommends repeal of 
 foreign slave laws, 134; see also 
 Charleston 
 
 South Carolina, University of, 
 97, 112 
 
 South, Lower, population in 
 1850, 10; exports, 10; wealth, 
 11, 24 et seq.; political control 
 by, 11-13, 118 rf seq.; churches, 
 13-15; morals, 13-16, 20-22; 
 racial elements in, 16-20, 22- 
 23; religion, 20-21, 97 et 
 seq.; economic potentiality, 22; 
 small farmer in, 30, 91-94; 
 "crackers" and poor whites, 
 31-34, 94-95; factors bind- 
 ing to older South, 37-40; 
 economic and social connec- 
 tion with North, 40, 41-42; 
 deterioration of cotton lands, 
 43; remedy for evil, 43-44; 
 manufacturing, 44-46; planta- 
 tion life, 71-79; literature and 
 art, 79 et seq.; bibliography, 
 147-53; see also Slavery 
 
 Southern Literary Messenger, 68, 
 80 
 
 Southern Pacific Railroad, 131- 
 132 
 
 Southern Presbyterian Review, 
 108 
 
 Southern Presbyterian Theologi- 
 cal Seminary, 101 
 
 Southern Review, 80 
 
 Stephens, A. H., 121, 129 
 
 Stephenson, N. W., Abraham 
 Lincoln and the Union, cited, 
 133 (note) 
 
INDEX 
 
 161 
 
 Stevens, Thaddeus, influences 
 education in South, 114 
 
 Tammany Hall, ally of South, 
 130, 145 
 
 Tariff, South Carolina and nulli- 
 fication, 12; compromise, of 
 1833, 12; protective policy, 
 46 (note) 
 
 Taylor, Zachary, 125, 126 
 
 Tazewell, L. W., 51 
 
 Tennessee, 19, 40, 126 
 
 Texas, 120; campaign for annex- 
 ation of, 11; Revolution of 
 1836, 11-12; annexation of. 12, 
 124 
 
 Thackeray, W. M., appeal to 
 South, 81; Kennedy collabo- 
 rates with, 87 ■ 
 
 Theater in South, 82 
 
 Thompson, W. T., Major Jones's 
 Courtship, 89 
 
 Thornwell, J. H., 101, 108, 114- 
 115 
 
 Timrod, Henry, 87-88; Cotton 
 Boll, 87; The Lily Confidante, 
 87; Vision of Poesy, 87; echo 
 of English literature, 88-89 
 
 Tobacco, 7; value of crops (1850), 
 37; (1860), 37; shipping of, 38 
 
 Toombs, Robert, 129 . 
 
 Toucy, of Connecticut, 130 
 
 Transportation, navigable rivers 
 in cotton belt, 2-3; roads, 35; 
 railroads, 36-37, 131-32; the 
 family carriage, 78 
 
 Transylvania University, 98 
 
 Trollope, Mrs., condemns slav- 
 ery, 60 
 
 Turner, Nat, Rebellion, 49 
 
 Van Buren, "Prince" John, 130 
 
 Van Buren, Martin, opposes 
 
 Mexican War, 124; anti- 
 
 slavery candidate for presi- 
 dency, 125; returns to South- 
 ern allegiance, 130 
 
 Vicksburg, 131 
 
 Virginia, 7, 9, 19, 37, 39, 42, 
 110, 114; judicial system, 118- 
 121 
 
 Virginia, University of, 98, 111- 
 112 
 
 Walker, Robert, favors annexa- 
 tion, 123; made Governor of 
 Kansas, 140 
 
 Walker, William, 137 
 
 Wealth, concentration of, 24-25 
 
 Webster, Daniel, opposes Mexi- 
 can War, 124 
 
 Weightman, Bishop, of South 
 Carolina, 116 
 
 Weston, G. M., The Progress of 
 Slavery in the United States, 
 69 
 
 Whig party, 125-26, 127 
 
 \^'hisky, manufacture in South, 
 38 
 
 Wilde, R. H., My Life is Like the 
 Summer, 87 
 
 Wiley, C. S., 114 
 
 William and Mary College, 53 
 
 Wilmot, David, 125 
 
 Wise, Henry, 41 
 
 Women in social philosophy of 
 South, 52 
 
 Writers, 85-90 
 
 Yancey, W. L., 114; and South- 
 ern social system, 61-62; 
 favors importation of slaves, 
 134; attends Democratic con- 
 vention at Cincinnati, 138; on 
 issue of popular sovereignty. 
 142; at Charleston convention, 
 145