planter's family
centered in the homestead even if they were occasionally interrupted by
trips to distant cities or abroad. Carpentry, bricklaying, and
blacksmithing were usually done by slaves skilled in simple handicrafts.
Supplies were bought wholesale. In this way there was little place in
plantation economy for villages and towns with their stores and
mechanics.

The abolition of slavery altered this. Small farms spread out where
plantations had once stood. The skilled freedmen turned to agriculture
rather than to handicrafts; white men of a business or mechanical bent
found an opportunity to serve the needs of their communities. So local
merchants and mechanics became an important element in the social
system. In the county seats, once dominated by the planters, business
and professional men assumed the leadership.

Another vital outcome of this revolution was the transference of a large
part of planting enterprise to business. Mr. Bruce, a Southern historian
of fine scholarship, has summed up this process in a single telling
paragraph: "The higher planting class that under the old system gave so
much distinction to rural life has, so far as it has survived at all,
been concentrated in the cities. The families that in the time of
slavery would have been found only in the country are now found, with a
few exceptions, in the towns. The transplantation has been practically
universal. The talent, the energy, the ambition that formerly sought
expression in the management of great estates and the control of hosts
of slaves, now seek a field of action in trade, in manufacturing
enterprises, or in the general enterprises of development. This was for
the ruling class of the South the natural outcome of the great economic
revolution that followed the war."

As in all other parts of the world, the mechanical revolution was
attended by the growth of a population of industrial workers dependent
not upon the soil but upon wages for their livelihood. When Jefferson
Davis was inaugurated President of the Southern Confederacy, there were
approximately only one hundred thousand persons employed in Southern
manufactures as against more than a million in Northern mills. Fifty
years later, Georgia and Alabama alone had more than one hundred and
fifty thousand wage-earners. Necessarily this meant also a material
increase in urban population, although the wide dispersion of cotton
spinning among small centers prevented the congestion