Some historians have described the Old South as a ‘seigneurial’ society that was part of a broader civilisation of classically-inspired, agrarian-based cultures. This civilisation was quite distinct in numerous important ways from the sort of society that emerged in New England and the Mid-Atlantic region. One of the ways in which Southern society was unique was the nature of its ruling class.
Italian professor Raimondo Luraghi on page 32 of his book The Rise and Fall of the Plantation South describes the Southern ruling class:
Wade Hampton (prior to the US conquest of the South he was possibly the wealthiest man in the United States) is an example of the sort of elite produced by the Old South
In the South, Renaissance “gentlemen” believed in a strong individuality and defied adverse fortune by personal virtue. Habitual seigneurs of large land-holdings, without any strong religious discipline, they were fond of good reading, leisure, hunting, and horsemanship.
The professor describes the society which these Southern gentleman ruled as ‘a hierarchic society founded upon land seigneurie, as in Europe’ prior to the political rise of the bourgeois. In contrast, Luraghi notes that New England was ‘a land of thrifty merchants, shipmasters, and bankers, inspired by the idea of a divine mission.’ It is logical that the sort of elites who emerged to lead each of these societies would have been quite different from one another – and, in fact, they were.
The United States’ military conquest of the South in 1860s and the subsequent military occupation (‘Reconstruction’) and lengthy period of crushing poverty inflicted disorder upon the region and created an environment where the class which had long led the South was largely replaced by outsiders and those who emerged from a new bourgeois order. The continuity that was central to Southern civilisation was disrupted and the continued existence of the South as a distinct culture was put in jeopardy. Southern writer and professor Herman Clarence Nixon‘s article ‘Whither Southern Economy?’ (which appeared in the 1930 Southern manifesto I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition) summarises some some of the reasons for the fall of the old aristocracy in the South. He also mentions some of the consequences of the ‘New South’ order, which led to the imposition of a new economic system, media and understanding of work and leisure. Southern resources were grabbed up by Northern industrial and financial elites, who used the power of government to reinforce their economic control. The South was left unprotected without its old, leading class:
In disrupting and disorganizing the economic life of the South, the Civil War [sic] jolted from power and status the most articulate agrarian group known to American history, leaving no effective check to an industrial dominance in national [sic] public policy, particularly in tariff matters. It partially terminated and partially modified the distinctive plantation system, making Southern agricultural diversification and industrial recovery difficult for lack of physical goods and capital. It forced a dependence in the South on the one-crop system, temporarily reinforced by unusually high prices for cotton. It terminated slavery without removing negro labor. It brought to the South an appreciation of the common man and the dignity of labor with an accompanying loss in the appreciation of the uses of leisure. It created a Southern vacuum for an economic invasion, with the region becoming a suppliant for outside aid and yielding much control of its economic destiny. It destroyed real estate values, not only with serious damage to pre-war owners, but with the consequential jungle of speculation, promotion, and “booms” as values moved upward again with many ups and downs. It tended to throw the Southern perspective towards a bourgeois materialism, to shift the embodiment of ideals from the country gentleman to the captain of industry or finance. With a mixture of justification, and perhaps, exaggeration, a spokesman of the ancien regime complained in De Bow’s Review, November, 1866, that Southern railroads, factories, and debts were owned by interests in the North and East and that an elegant Southern aristocracy had been displaced by a new “Northeastern moneyed aristocracy.” The worked, he said, had never seen “an aristocracy half so powerful, half so corrupt, so unprincipled, and rapacious, nor one-tenth so vulgar and so ignorant, as the moneyed aristocracy of the Northeast.” In more ways than one was there truth in the provincial epigram, “The bottom rail is on the top now, mister.”
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