In that region, where cotton was king, and tobacco, sugar, and rice were powerful allies, a unique civilization had grown up. The plantation was the model, and the patriarchal master of slaves the ideal character which the ambitious poor imitated everywhere. The elegant life of the colonial plantation houses, which adorned the banks of the winding rivers of the old South in the days of the Revolution, had gradually moved westward and southwestward until the larger tobacco area of the Piedmont region extended from Petersburg, Virginia, to Greensboro, North Carolina, and from the falls of the rivers to the slopes of the Blue Ridge. Instead of running away from their slaves, as John Randolph had feared Southern gentlemen would be compelled to do, the tobacco planters found their business increasingly prosperous as the great cotton area south of them opened larger markets for their crops and higher prices for their surplus negroes. Even the wheat-growers of Virginia and Maryland became again prosperous when the great canals and the improved turnpikes reached the valley of Virginia and opened still wider areas of rich lands to the Richmond and Baltimore markets. The plantation form of life penetrated the high lands of Virginia almost to the Tennessee border, and slavery was fastening its hold upon the up-country people who had formerly been hostile.
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But the vast cotton region, embracing the better part of middle and eastern North Carolina and the accessible lands of the lower South to Eastern Texas, and extending over most of the Mississippi Valley to St. Louis, was the heart of the South, which supported the Polk Administration and waged the war upon Mexico soon to begin. In this fine country, men of ability made fortunes in a few years and learned to imitate the life of the old southern manor houses. Forests were cleared away in winter by the sturdy hands of slaves, and new fields were opened to cotton culture each spring to supply the places of those that had been rapidly worn down by unscientific methods of agriculture. The cabins which made the homes of well-to-do men in the Jeffersonian epoch gave way to substantial frame houses with massive columns and wide verandas, with great hallways and broad banquet-rooms, which so much delighted the heart of the planter of Calhoun's day. In a warm climate like that of the cotton region the object of the builder was always to attain cool recesses and retired gardens, where the social life of the time displayed itself.
The houses were built on hilltops covered with primeval oaks, which cast a dense shade over all. Sometimes stone or brick walls protected the premises against the outer world, and wide entrances, guarded on either side by sculptured lions or tigers, gave a dignity and a splendor which reminded one of the estates of English noblemen. In the rear of these pretentious and sometimes beautiful houses were the rows of negro cabins, with their little gardens for the raising of vegetables and the ranges for chickens, as dear to the palates of negro slaves as to those of visiting clergymen. The barns and carriage houses completed the outfit. Where hundreds of bales of cotton and thousands of barrels of corn were grown annually, there would be driving or saddle horses for the master's family and many Kentucky mules for the work of the fields; and a plantation took on the appearance of a busy colony in a new country. Sixty to a hundred negroes were regarded as the best labor unit for profitable agriculture. Of these there would be a few house servants trained in all the intricacies of patriarchal hospitality and courtesy. The carriage driver and keeper of the stables, sometimes clad in the extra dignity of a special livery and a tall silk hat, a tyrant to all the little negroes, but an obsequious flatterer to those who were welcome at the master's house, was perhaps the most envied man of the estate. To see this matchless son of Africa mounted on the high seat of an old-fashioned English carriage, as he drove his prancing horses to the front door of the “great house” and asked if all were ready for church, was to get a glimpse of the old South itself. The boasted freedom of “poor white trash” or of “impudent free issue negroes” had no attractions to him who enjoyed these high prerogatives.
The master who was responsible for the multitudinous life of the plantation, arbiter of the fortunes, sometimes, of a thousand men, was usually conscious of his power and, when “times were good,” kind to his dependents. He liked to see his negroes fat and happy, for a “likely slave” was as good as money in the bank. Accustomed to the exercise of authority, he was apt to be a member of the county court, the actual governing agency of the old South, and as such he was always “squire.” From the county court he went to the state legislature, where he and his fellow planters made the laws of these sovereign States of the old régime. From local magistrate to chief executive the Southern community was governed by the owners of slaves, and the great men whom they chose to speak for the South in Congress or to advise the President and his Cabinet or to sit upon the benches of the federal courts were invariably masters of plantations, trained from early youth to the exercise of authority and accustomed to receive the homage of their neighbors. It was a mighty social and economic organization which had grown up in and spread over the richer lands of South and West, as far as the borders of Mexico and the valleys of the Ohio and Missouri. The wheat and tobacco growers, the rice and sugar planters were allied to the more powerful cotton lords, and, though there were party differences, all spoke the same voice in the national life. Of the five or six millions of southern white people in 1845 only seven or eight thousand were great plantation masters, though some three hundred thousand were either owners of slaves or members of the privileged families—a larger proportion than usual for a favored class, but still a small number when compared to the total population of the country which was, from 1845 to 1860, controlled by them.