uthern
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.

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.

[Illustration: Wheat Areas in 1840]

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 al