The westward movement split the plantation elite into two distinct groups: the traditional aristocrats of the Old South, whose families had gained their wealth from tobacco and rice, and the upstart capitalist-inclined planters of the cotton states.

The Traditional Southern Gentry The Old South gentry dominated the Tidewater region of the Chesapeake and the low country of South Carolina and Georgia. During the eighteenth century, these planters built impressive mansions and adopted the manners and values of the English landed gentry. Their aristocratic-oriented culture survived the Revolution of 1776 and soon took on a republican glaze. Classical republican theory, which had long identified political tyranny as the major threat to liberty, had its roots in the societies of Greece and Rome, where slavery was part of the natural order of society. That variety of republicanism appealed to wealthy southerners, who feared federal government interference with their slave property. On the state level, planters worried about populist politicians who would mobilize poorer whites, and so they demanded that authority rest in the hands of incorruptible men of “virtue.”

Indeed, affluent planters cast themselves as a republican aristocracy. “The planters here are essentially what the nobility are in other countries,” declared James Henry Hammond of South Carolina. “They stand at the head of society & politics … [and form] an aristocracy of talents, of virtue, of generosity and courage.” Wealthy planters criticized the democratic polity and middle-class society that was developing in the Northeast and Midwest. “Inequality is the fundamental law of the universe,” declared one planter. Others condemned professional politicians as “a set of demagogues” and questioned the legitimacy of universal suffrage. “Times are sadly different now to what they were when I was a boy,” lamented David Gavin, a prosperous South Carolinian. Then, the “Sovereign people, alias mob” had little influence; now they vied for power with the elite. “[How can] I rejoice for a freedom,” Gavin thundered, “which allows every bankrupt, swindler, thief, and scoundrel, traitor and seller of his vote to be placed on an equality with myself?”

To maintain their privileged identity, aristocratic planters married their sons and daughters to one another and expected them to follow in their footsteps — the men working as planters, merchants, lawyers, newspaper editors, and ministers and the women hosting plantation balls and church bazaars. To confirm their social preeminence, they lived extravagantly and entertained graciously. James Henry Hammond built a Greek Revival mansion with a center hall 53 feet by 20 feet, its floor embellished with stylish Belgian tiles and expensive Brussels carpets. “Once a year, like a great feudal landlord,” Hammond’s neighbor recounted, “[he] gave a fete or grand dinner to all the country people.”

Rice planters remained at the apex of the plantation aristocracy. In 1860, the fifteen proprietors of the vast plantations in All Saints Parish in South Carolina owned 4,383 slaves — nearly 300 apiece — who annually grew and processed 14 million pounds of rice. As inexpensive Asian rice entered the world market in the 1820s and cut their profits, the Carolina rice aristocrats sold some slaves and worked the others harder, sustaining their luxurious lifestyle. The “hospitality and elegance” of Charleston and Savannah impressed savvy English traveler John Silk Buckingham. Buckingham likewise found “polished” families among long-established French Catholic planters in New Orleans and along the Mississippi River: There, the “sugar and cotton planters live in splendid edifices, and enjoy all the luxury that wealth can impart” (America Compared).

In tobacco-growing regions, the lives of the planter aristocracy followed a different trajectory, in part because slave ownership was widely diffused. In the 1770s, about 60 percent of white families in the Chesapeake region owned at least one African American. As wealthy tobacco planters moved their estates and slaves to the Cotton South, middling whites (who owned between five and twenty slaves) came to dominate the Chesapeake economy. The descendants of the old tobacco aristocracy remained influential, but increasingly as slave-owning grain farmers, lawyers, merchants, industrialists, and politicians. They hired out surplus slaves, sold them south, or allowed them to purchase their freedom.

The Ideology and Reality of “Benevolence” The planter aristocracy flourished around the periphery of the South’s booming Cotton Belt — in Virginia, South Carolina, and Louisiana — but it took the lead in defending slavery. Ignoring the Jeffersonian response to slavery as a “misfortune” or a “necessary evil,” southern apologists in the 1830s argued that the institution was a “positive good” because it subsidized an elegant lifestyle for a white elite and provided tutelage for genetically inferior Africans. “As a race, the African is inferior to the white man,” declared Alexander Stephens, the future vice president of the Confederacy. “Subordination to the white man, is his normal condition.” Apologists depicted planters and their wives as aristocratic models of “disinterested benevolence,” who provided food and housing for their workers and cared for them in old age. One wealthy Georgian declared, “Plantation government should be eminently patriarchal. …The pater-familias, or head of the family, should, in one sense, be the father of the whole concern, negroes and all.”

Those planters who embraced Christian stewardship tried to shape the religious lives of their chattel. They built churches on their plantations, welcomed evangelical preachers, and required their slaves to attend services. A few encouraged African Americans with spiritual “gifts” to serve as exhorters and deacons. Most of these planters acted from sincere Christian belief, but they also hoped to counter abolitionist criticism and to use religious teachings to control their workers.

Indeed, slavery’s defenders increasingly used religious justifications for human bondage. Protestant ministers in the South pointed out that the Hebrews, God’s chosen people, had owned slaves and that Jesus Christ had never condemned slavery. As James Henry Hammond told a British abolitionist in 1845: “What God ordains and Christ sanctifies should surely command the respect and toleration of man.” However, many aristocratic defenders of slavery were absentee owners or delegated authority to overseers, and they rarely glimpsed the day-to-day brutality of their regime of forced labor. “I was at the plantation last Saturday and the crop was in fine order,” an absentee’s son wrote to his father, “but the negroes are most brutally scarred & several have run off.”

Cotton Entrepreneurs There was much less hypocrisy and far less elegance among the entrepreneurial planters of the Cotton South. “The glare of expensive luxury vanishes” in the black soil regions of Alabama and Mississippi, John Silk Buckingham remarked as he traveled through the Cotton South. Frederick Law Olmsted — the future architect of New York’s Central Park, who during the mid-1850s traveled through the South for the New York Times — found that the plantations in Mississippi mostly had “but small and mean residences.” Aristocratic paternalism vanished as well. A Mississippi planter put it plainly: “Everything has to give way to large crops of cotton, land has to be cultivated wet or dry, negroes [must] work, hot or cold.”

Angry at being sold south and pressed to hard labor, many slaves grew “mean” and stubborn. Those who would not labor were subject to the lash. “Whiped all the hoe hands,” Alabama planter James Torbert wrote matter-of-factly in his journal. Overseers pushed workers hard because their salaries often depended on the amount of cotton they were able “to make for the market.” A Mississippi slave recalled, “When I wuz so tired I cu’dnt hardly stan’, I had to spin my cut of cotton befor’ I cu’d go to sleep. We had to card, spin, an’ reel at nite.”

Cotton was a demanding crop because of its long growing season. Slaves plowed the land in March; dropped seeds into the ground in early April; and, once the plants began to grow, continually chopped away the surrounding grasses. In between these tasks, they planted the corn and peas that would provide food for them and the plantation’s hogs and chickens. When the cotton bolls ripened in late August, the long four-month picking season began. Slaves in the Cotton South, concluded Olmsted, worked “much harder and more unremittingly” than those in the tobacco regions. Moreover, fewer of them acquired craft skills than in tobacco, sugar, and rice areas, where slave coopers and engineers made casks, processed sugar, and built irrigation systems.

To increase output, profit-seeking cotton planters began during the 1820s to use a rigorous gang-labor system. Previously, many planters had supervised their workers sporadically or assigned them specific tasks to complete at their own pace. Now masters with twenty or more slaves organized disciplined teams, or “gangs,” supervised by black drivers and white overseers. They instructed the supervisors to work the gangs at a steady pace, clearing and plowing land or hoeing and picking cotton. A traveler in Mississippi described two gangs returning from work:

First came, led by an old driver carrying a whip, forty of the largest and strongest women I ever saw together; they were all in a simple uniform dress of a bluish check stuff, the skirts reaching little below the knee. …They carried themselves loftily, each having a hoe over the shoulder, and walking with a free, powerful swing.

Next marched the plow hands with their mules, “the cavalry, thirty strong, mostly men, but a few of them women.” Finally, “a lean and vigilant white overseer, on a brisk pony, brought up the rear.”

The gang-labor system enhanced profits by increasing productivity. Because slaves in gangs finished tasks in thirty-five minutes that took a white yeoman planter an hour to complete, gang labor became ever more prevalent. In one Georgia county, the percentage of blacks working in gangs doubled between 1830 and 1850. As the price of raw cotton surged after 1846, the wealth of the planter class skyrocketed. And no wonder: nearly 2 million enslaved African Americans now labored on the plantations of the Cotton South and annually produced 4 million bales of the valuable fiber.