mic 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.

In nothing was this more evident than in Southern religious life. The
South which followed Jefferson was largely indifferent to religious
dogmas of all kinds. Most of the greater leaders had been deists rather
than Christians; nor had they suffered for these opinions at the hands
of the people. Calhoun's Unitarianism had in no way retarded his
political career. But before 1830 a change was taking place. The stout
Presbyterianism of the up-country forced the retirement of one of the
professors of the University of Virginia, in its earlier years, and it
compelled the resignation of President Cooper of the University of South
Carolina, in 1836, because of his denial of the inspiration of the
Pentateuch. The Presbyterians had grown powerful and wealthy; they
asserted their influence in Virginia and South Carolina, and they were
already recognized as leaders in North Carolina, Tennessee, and
Kentucky. What this denomination did was applauded by the more numerous
Baptists and Methodists, whose membership was as yet too poor to command
t