Seven per cent of the total population of the South in 1860 owned nearly 3 million of the 3,953,696 slaves. There was nearly as great a concentration of ownership in the best agricultural land. This meant that in a country predominantly agricultural, the ownership of labor, land and capital was extraordinarily concentrated. Such peculiar organization of industry would have to be carefully reconciled with the new industrial and political democracy of the nineteenth century if it were to survive.

Of the five million whites who owned no slaves some were united in interest with the slave owners. These were overseers, drivers and dealers in slaves. Others were hirers of white and black labor, and still others were merchants and professional men, forming a petty bourgeois class, and climbing up to the planter class or falling down from it. The mass of the poor whites, as we have shown, were economic outcasts.

The South was too ignorant to know that their only chance to establish such economic dictatorship and place themselves in a key economic position was through a national economy, in a large nation where a home market would absorb a large proportion of the production, and where agriculture, led by men of vision, could demand a fair share of profit from industry.

When, therefore, the planters surrendered this chance and went to war with the machine to establish agricultural independence, they lost because of their internal weakness. Their whole labor class, black and white, went into economic revolt. The breach could only have been healed by making the same concessions to labor that France, England, Germany and the North had made. There was no time for such change in the midst of war. Northern industry must, therefore, after the war, make the adjustment with labor which Southern agriculture refused to make. But the loss which agriculture sustained through the stubbornness of the planters led to the degradation of agriculture throughout the modern world.

Now they are universally acknowledged. May we not, therefore, look with confidence to the ultimate universal acknowledgment of the truths upon which our system rests. It is the first government ever instituted upon principles of strict conformity to nature, and the ordination of Providence, in furnishing the materials of human society. Many governments have been founded upon the principle of certain classes; but the classes thus enslaved, were of the same race, and in violation of the laws of nature. Our system commits no such violation of nature’s laws. The Negro, by nature, or by the curse against Canaan, is fitted for that condition which he occupies in our system. The architect, in the construction of buildings, lays the foundation with the proper materials, the granite; then comes the brick or the marble. The substratum of our society is made of the material fitted by nature for it, and by experience we know that it is best, not only for the superior, but for the inferior race that it should be so. It is, indeed, in conformity with the ordinance of the Creator. It is not for us to inquire into the wisdom of His ordinances, or to question them. For His own purposes He has made one race to differ from another, as He has had “one star to differ from another star in glory.”

The Southern argument had strong backing in the commercial North. Lawyer O’Conner of New York expressed amid applause that calm reasoned estimate of the Negro in 1859, which pervaded the North:

Now, Gentlemen, nature itself has assigned his condition of servitude to the Negro. He has the strength and is fit to work; but nature, which gave him this strength, denied him both the intelligence to rule and the will to work. Both are denied to him. And the same nature which denied him the will to work, gave him a master, who should enforce this will, and make a useful servant of him in a climate to which he is well adapted for his own benefit and that of the master who rules him. I assert that it is no injustice to leave the Negro in the position into which nature placed him; to put a master over him; and he is not robbed of any right, if he is compelled to labor in return for this, and to supply a just compensation for his master in return for the labor and the talents devoted to ruling him and to making him useful to himself and to society.

This whole system and plan of development failed, and failed of its own weakness. Unending effort has gone into painting the claims of the Old South, its idyllic beauty and social charm. But the truth is inexorable. With all its fine men and sacrificing women, its hospitable homes and graceful manners, the South turned the most beautiful section of the nation into a center of poverty and suffering, of drinking, gambling and brawling; an abode of ignorance among black and white more abysmal than in any modern land; and a system of industry so humanly unjust and economically inefficient that if it had not committed suicide in civil war, it would have disintegrated of its own weight.