so-called reforms it looked
askance.

In two respects the South had an advantage. Its social system was
aristocratic; above the slaves came the non-slave-holding whites,
including a great mass of the ignorant and degraded; but at the summit
the slave-holding class had a social life in many ways attractive and
delightful. The slave-holders, all told, numbered some 350,000. The
controlling element consisted of the large planters, with the affiliated
members of the liberal professions. Plantation life at its best had a
great deal of beauty and charm. A degree of improvidence and
"shiftlessness," by Northern standards, was not inconsistent with free
hospitality, a generous outdoor life, an old-time culture with an
atmosphere of leisure and courtesy, superior in its way to what the busy
and bustling North could show. The charming and chivalrous "Colonel
Carter of Cartersville" had many a prototype in real life. A higher type
was sometimes bred in Southern society; it was not without some reason
that Virginians claimed that the mold which produced Washington was not
broken when it could yield a Robert Lee. There was a somber side;
plantation life was often a rank soil for passions of tyranny and
license. But its better fruitage added an element to the composite
American type which could not and cannot be spared.

The other advantage the South possessed was the devotion of its
strongest men to political life. The loss of commerce and literature was
the gain of politics. The typical Southern leader was apt to be both a
planter and a lawyer, with a strong and active interest in public
affairs. Political oratory was a favorite resource in the
sparsely-settled districts. The personal force which in the North was
scattered among twenty fields was here centered mainly in one. This
feature of Southern society worked together with the fact that the
section had in slavery a common interest and bond. That interest of the
entire section, led by its ablest men, came naturally to be the dominant
factor in American public life. When it could not rule through its own
men, it found agents in subservient Northern politicians. And so it came
about that in the early '50s the South, while outstripped altogether in
population, wealth, industrial and intellectual achievement, was yet in
substantial control of the governmental power. In the North, by the very
magnitude of the commercial and industrial development the moral
sentiment in public affa