THE OLD SOUTH AND THE NEW 47 



years. The peculiar social life of the Southern States, as a body, 

 in consequence of its being coincident with the very existence of 

 these States, had permeated with its spirit the genius of the 

 Southern people from generation to generation, until it had 

 become the most powerful of all the influences in molding their 

 character and destiny. This social life rested primarily on the 

 system of large plantations. In the early part of the history 

 of the older Southern communities Virginia and Maryland, for 

 instance when the plantation system, as it existed before the 

 war, was founded, this system derived its strength, not from 

 slavery, but from indentured white service, which, however, 

 was not unlike slavery in spirit and influence, 'but as time went 

 on, its principal support became the institution of slavery itself. 

 As the number of Negroes increased, which they did very rapidly 

 after the beginning of the seventeenth century both by natural 

 addition and importation, the individual plantation grew larger 

 and larger in order to create room for the employment of super- 

 abundant labor. Not even the opening up of new territory could 

 carry off the surplus slaves. The tendency toward the engross- 

 ment of the soil in a few hands was just as remarkable in Vir- 

 ginia, the oldest of the Southern States, as it was in Texas and 

 Mississippi among the youngest, and it was just as strong in 

 1861, when the war began, as it was two hundred years earlier. 



What did this engrossment of land through so many genera- 

 tions mean from a social point of view? It meant that from 

 1624, when the plantation system became firmly established in 

 Colonial Virginia, down to 1861, when it prevailed in the most 

 extreme form from one end of the South to the other, there 

 existed a class in every Southern community, whose social pre- 

 eminence rested as distinctly upon vast landed possessions as the 

 like preeminence of the English aristocracy. The South 

 illustrated anew a fact that had been strikingly illustrated in 

 the history of England: namely that there is something in the 

 ownership of the soil, confined to a comparatively small number, 

 that gives peculiar social distinction to the class possessing it. 

 The social prestige of great landed property was rendered the 

 more impressive in the Southern States by the large retinues of 

 slaves; there was, for that reason, a more baronial importance 

 about such an estate than about the like estate of the English 



