It is a mistake—a not uncommon mistake—to suppose that the ante-bellum South was poor. It was rich—considerably richer than the North, in proportion to its population. In 1860 the South had much more than its share of the assessed wealth of the nation. The total value of property in the Union was $12,000,000,000, and of this the Southern States, with only one-third of the country’s population (and less than one-fourth of the country’s white population), had $5,000,000,000, or more than forty per cent.
But in the agricultural South wealth was far more unevenly distributed than in the manufacturing and commercial North. In the latter great fortunes were made, but were almost sure to be distributed among several heirs, or lost in the fluctuations of trade, while the prevalence of the industrial and inventive spirit opened the path of advancement to those born at the bottom of the ladder. In the former, large landed properties were handed down from father to son, and tended to grow larger by accretion, as is the rule with great estates. The small land owner could not compete with them. The peasant, whose only calling was the tilling of the soil, had little prospect of bettering his condition.
“The Southern planter,” says a member[2] of one of the old landed families, who is now well known as the self-appointed manager of New York society, “was a born aristocrat. He had literally as much power in his little sphere as any old feudal lord. His slaves were the creatures of his caprice and pleasure. The work of their hands supported him, gave him his position and influence. I have lived on a plantation with twelve hundred slaves, all devotedly attached to their master, evidencing as much loyalty and fealty as an Englishman to his sovereign, and taking great pride in their master and mistress.”
The planter’s life was one of patriarchal magnificence. His entertainments, according to the same authority, “would be appreciated in the old Faubourg at Paris;” his wines were old and abundant; his songs were the ballads of his historical prototype, the mediæval baron of England:
“Lord Thomas, he was a bold forester,
The keeper of the King’s deer;
Lady Eleanor was a fine woman,
Lord Thomas he loved her dear.”
Political power within its own commonwealths was of course practically monopolized by this land-owning caste. Of power in national politics it wielded a tremendous share. It had taken advantage of that feature of the Federal Constitution which, when it was first framed, Patrick Henry attacked when he prophesied that “an aristocracy of the rich and well born would spring up and trample upon the masses.” Outnumbered in the House of Representatives, it had firmly intrenched itself in the United States Senate.
In that body, up to the time just before the war, when it was no longer possible to create a new Southern State to offset each Northern State, it held half the seats and votes—a position that gave it complete control of all Presidential nominations to office. Through its possession of this unassailable veto power on appointments, it had come to pass that, as Mr. Blaine observes in his “Twenty Years of Congress,” “the Courts of the United States, both Supreme and District, throughout the Union, were filled with men acceptable to the South. Cabinets were constituted in the same way. Representatives of the government in foreign countries were necessarily taken from the class approved by the same power. Mr. Webster, speaking in his most conservative tone in the famous speech of March 7, 1850, declared that from the formation of the Union to that hour the South had monopolized three-fourths of the places of honor and emolument under the Federal Government. It was an accepted fact that the class interest of slavery, by holding a tie in the Senate, could defeat any measure or any nomination to which its leaders might be opposed; and, thus banded together by an absolutely cohesive political force, they could and did dictate terms.”