As was natural, the professional classes of the South, the lawyers, clergymen, physicians, and teachers, were in close alliance with the planters, their callings and their incomes being directly dependent on them. A successful professional man soon became a master and usually retired to a country seat. If a poor but capable young man gave promise of power and leadership he was soon accepted by his dominant neighbors and became a son-in-law of a privileged family; if a preacher rose to fame doubting or even condemning the institutions of the South, he was apt to find a way to change his views and to become a part of the system before he reached his mature years. The articulate South was, therefore, in economic and social life a unit in 1845, and this unit was the strongest group in the country as a whole. Its demand for expansion towards the southwest was based upon the common desire, the common law of growth, and this growth was the only means of winning new votes in Congress and in the electoral college. It was the same motive which actuated the farmers of the Northwest and the commercial leaders of New England when they demanded of the Federal Government the seizure of Oregon or the protection of ships upon the ocean.
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If the planter and dominant element of the South urged Polk and Walker onward in their course and gave power to Calhoun, the greater masses of non-slaveholding Southerners were hardly less enthusiastic. The earlier jealousy and fear of the planters had everywhere weakened as the new lands of the South and West gave opportunity to the more ambitious to rise in the social and economic scale. The sons of small farmers and landless men in the old South had built the cotton kingdom of the lower South, and were now drawing aristocratic Virginia and the Carolinas into a close union with the new region. The widening of the area of slavery was equivalent to the opening of a social safety valve to the older and stratifying life of the South. Young men who had been hostile to slavery at home became friendly allies in a new environment. Thus the small farmers became enthusiastic supporters of the great machine of which slavery was the base.
Not only so, the growers of corn and wheat in the remote hills and mountains of the South, the men who distilled their grain into strong drink, those who raised pigs or cotton a hundred or two hundred miles west of the tobacco and cotton belts, could always find a market in the plantation towns where calicos, “store-clothes,” and trinkets could be had for themselves and families. The long trains of quaint, covered tobacco wagons which wound their way over rough roads from the mountains to the black belt carried whiskey or other up-country products to the plantations; the droves of mules, cattle, or hogs which poured into the Carolinas and the Gulf region from East Tennessee and Kentucky were bonds of attraction between the planters and the non-slaveholding elements too powerful to be ignored. And as time passed the legislatures under planter control built better highways and projected railways into the richer sections of the interior, which invariably made allies of these new economic communities, and gradually slavery followed in the wake of the new channels of communication.
The most helpless of the Southern groups were the poorer farmers, who lived on the semi-sterile lands which the planters refused to occupy or in the pine barrens of the eastern Carolinas, and the landless class which hung on to the skirts of slavery. Unambitious, ignorant, and improvident, frequently the “ne'er-do-wells” of the old families, ignored by the wealthy and spurned by the slaves, who gave them the name of “poor white trash,” their lot was hard, indeed. They earned a few dollars a year at odd jobs, raised a few hogs or at most a bale or two of cotton, and lived in cabins little better than those occupied by the negroes. Their children were numerous, without educational advantages, and accustomed to the poor and meager cultural life of an outcast class. Their outlook was no better than that of their parents. Barefoot, half-clad, yet alert and agile, hating negroes and fearing the masters, these “Anglo-Saxons” offered the problem of the South. Unaccustomed to independent voting, they did not endanger the existing order, and even when they were aroused to a sense of their position, their ignorance and dependence and prejudices prevented them from organizing in self-defense. They usually followed their economic superiors, and learned to denounce the tariff, internal improvements, and “scheming Yankees” as roundly as did their wealthy neighbors.
Still, life in the South was in the open; the joys and the sports of the people were those of healthy rural communities. The well-to-do and even the poorer classes lived on horseback, bet on the races, and participated in the rough-and-tumble games of the court days. The wealthy did not refuse all relations with “the people” on such occasions. The planter knew and called familiarly by name every man in his part of the county, and the magistrates who made up the courts of the people exercised a kindly patriarchal authority over their “inferiors,” the dependent whites. There were few occupants of jails or penitentiaries; poorhouses were often tenantless, and asylums for the insane were not numerous or crowded. Beggars and tramps were unknown. Judged by the facts of life the system of slavery and large proprietors was not so bad as it appeared; and as the South came into full self-consciousness, say with the inauguration of Polk and Dallas, the problems of adjustment of the different economic groups, of providing better educational facilities for the poorer classes, and of meeting certain religious and social requirements of the slaves themselves, were fully recognized by the masters, and beginnings of improvement in all these matters were already making.