The Cotton Kingdom, volume 2 (of 2)

by Frederick Law Olmsted

Having conceded to the South certain elements of advantage in this respect, for a single class, it still remains to inquire where is the greatest weight of advantage for this class, and for all classes of our citizens. In attempting to make such a general comparison, I shall begin at the bottom of the social ladder, and return to the class who can in a great degree choose how they will be occupied.

In the North at the Revolution we scarcely had a distinct class corresponding to the lowest white class of Virginia, as described by Jefferson, our labourers being less ignorant and coarse in their habits, and associating much more familiarly with their betters. We have now a class more nearly corresponding to it furnished by the European peasant immigration. It is, however, a transient class, somewhat seldom including two generations, and, on an average, I trust, not one. It is therefore practically not an additional class, but, overlooking the aged and diseased, a supplement to our lowest normal class. Out of twenty Irish emigrants, landing in New York, perfectly destitute, of whose history I have been intimately cognizant, only two, both of whom were over fifty years of age, have lived out five years here without beginning to acquire wealth and becoming superior in their ambition and habits to the lowest order, which I believe to include a majority of the whites in the plantation districts of the South.[64] Our lowest class, therefore, has a higher standard than the lowest class of the Slave States. This, I understand, is made very evident where the two come together at the West, as in southern Illinois. The very poorest and lowest New England women who go there are frequently offended by the inconsiderate rudeness and coarseness of the women immigrating from the South, and shocked by their “shiftless,” comfortless, vagrant habits, so much so that families have often removed, after having been once established, to escape being bored and annoyed by their Southern-born neighbours.

Referring to the lowest class, North and South, as the fourth, I class as third, the lowest rank in society, North or South, in which regard is had by its members to the quality of their associates from other than moral motives, or the prejudices of locality, race, sectarianism, and politics. In other words, that in which there is a distinct social selectiveness and pride. I think that everywhere in the Free States men of this class would almost universally feel their position damaged—be a little ashamed—if obliged to confess that they did not take a newspaper, or were unable to read it with a clear understanding of the intelligence it was intended to communicate. Allusions to the main facts of American history, to any clause of the Bible, to the provisions of the Constitution, and the more important laws, State and National, would be understood in most cases by those whom I refer to as the third class in Northern society. In few families of this class would you fail to find some volumes of the English poets, or some works of great novelists or renowned travellers. Nothing like this would you find, however, in a grade of society distinctly superior to the lowest at the South.

The ratio of the number of the citizens who cannot read at all to the whole, appears, by the census returns, to be only three times larger at the South than at the North. I believe it to be much greater at the South than these returns indicate.[65] The comparative education of the third class “North” and of the third class “South,” however, cannot be at all judged from these statistics, supposing them correct. Those who can read and who do not read, or whose reading is confined within extremely narrow limits, are a much larger number at the South than at the North, owing to the much poorer supply of books and newspapers which commerce can afford to put within the reach of the former. The census returns two million newspapers, for instance, printed annually in Virginia, one hundred and fifteen million in New York. There is a post-office to every fourteen square miles in New York, one to forty-seven square miles in Virginia; over five hundred publishers and booksellers in New York, but forty in Virginia. Thirty thousand volumes in public libraries in Virginia, eight hundred thousand in New York. The area occupied by the population of Virginia being much the largest, it may be inferred that with the disposition and the ability to read anything in particular, the Virginian of the third class will have to travel more than thirty times as far as the New Yorker to procure it. The same proposition will hold good in regard to most other means of cultivation, and the third class of the South generally has seemed to me to be as much more narrow-minded, rude, coarse, “dangerous,” and miserable, than the third class of the Free States, as the most sanguine friend of popular education could anticipate from these facts.

The great difference in character between the third class of the South and that of the North, as indicated by their respective manners, is found in the much less curiosity and ready intelligent interest in matters which have not an immediate personal bearing in that of the South. Apathetic carelessness rather than simple indifference, or reckless incivility as to your comfort, is what makes the low Southerner a disagreeable companion. It is his impertinent shrewdness which makes you wish to keep the Yankee at a distance. The first seems without object, spiritless; the latter keen to better himself, if with nothing else, with information which he can draw from you, and by gaining your good opinion.

The next or second class would include, both North and South, those with whose habits and character I am most familiar, and of whom I can speak with the best right to confidence. It would include in New England and New York the better educated farmers—these owning, I should say, half the agricultural land—the permanently established manufacturers and merchants of moderate capital; most of the shopkeepers and the better-educated master mechanics and artisan foremen; most of the preachers, physicians, and lawyers (some ranking higher). It would correspond most nearly to what in England would be called the lower-middle class, but any higher grade being very ill-defined, existing distinctly but in few localities, and rarely recognized as existing at all, it is in a great measure free from the peculiar vulgarity of its English parallel.

The number of those at the South who correspond in education and refinement of manners and habits to the average of this class of the North, it will be evident, from a similar mode of reasoning to that before employed, must be very much smaller relatively, either to the territory or the whole white population of their respective regions.

In the comparison commonly made by Southern writers between the condition of the people of a sparsely-settled country and another, it is usually assumed that the advantages of the latter are confined exclusively to towns, and to large and crowded towns. By contrasting the evils which concentrate in such towns with the favourable circumstances of localities where at least wood, water, and air are abundant, and corn enough to support life can usually be got by any one with a little occasional labour, an argument of some force to ignorant people is easily presented. The advantages possessed by a people living in moderately well-occupied rural districts, who are even more free from the evils of great towns than their own people, are entirely overlooked by most Southern writers. Such is the condition, however, of more white people in the Free States than the whole white population of the Slave States. A majority of our farmers’ daughters can walk from their dwellings to schools of a quality such as at the South can be maintained not twice in five hundred square miles. These schools are practically a part of their homes. Probably, in more than half the families of the South, the children of which are instructed to the least degree which would be considered “respectable,” among this second class of the North, private governesses are obliged to be employed, or the children must be for many years at boarding-schools. We all know that the young women who go to the South, to meet the demand thus occasioned for home education, are not generally, though they may be in cases, our own most esteemed and successful instructresses; and we also know from their report that their skill and labour has necessarily to be long chiefly employed in laying those simple foundation habits of instructability, which our Northern children acquire imperceptibly from association with those of the neighbourhood slightly in advance of them. Churches and the various sub-organizations centreing in them, in which class distinctions are much lost sight of, to the great advantage of the manners of the lower classes, and little chance of injury to the higher; libraries; literary societies; lecture arrangements; dramatic and musical, art and scientific entertainments, and also highly educated professional men, with whom, for various purposes, many persons are brought often in contact, are correspondingly more frequent at the North, correspondingly more accessible; in other words, the advantages to be derived from them are cheaper, and so more influential on the manners of the people at large.

The common opinion has been that the Southerners or planters of the class now under consideration, are more social, more generous, more heartily kind and genial than Northerners. According to my experience, the reverse of all this is true, as a general rule. Families live so isolatedly at the South, that any social contact, out of the family, is of course much more eventful and stimulating than it is ordinarily at the North, and this accounts for the common opinion. I could not but think, however, that most persons at the South looked to the voluntary good offices and conversation of others, both within and without their families, for their enjoyment of the world, much less than most at the North. It may be that when in towns they attach a greater value to, and are more careful to make use of the opportunities for social gathering afforded by towns, than are Northerners. In towns they attach more consequence to forms, are more scrupulous in matters of etiquette, more lavish in expenditure for dress, and for certain other things which are the signs of luxury rather than luxury itself, such as plate and fancy brands of wines. They make less show of fine art and less pretence of artistic judgment; more of respect and regard for their associates, and of indifference or superiority to all others.

As to manner or deportment simply, with the same impulse and intention, that of the Southerner will habitually, under ordinary circumstances, be best, more true, more composed, more dignified. I have said that the second class at the North is without the pervading vulgarity of the class to which it most nearly corresponds in England, the reason being that those which constitute it seldom wish or attempt to appear to belong to a superior class, not clearly recognizing a superior class. Individuals, however, very generally have a strong desire to be thought better informed, more ingenious, more witty, as well as more successful in their enterprises than they are, and this stamps them with a peculiar quality of manners vulgarly called “smartness,” the absence of which makes Southern men and women generally much more agreeable companions than Northerners of the same degree of education and accomplishments in other respects. Not but that snobs abound; of these it will be more convenient to speak under the next division, however.