cy which, neglecting all reform, strove at
all costs to perpetuate the system and extend it to wider regions, was as
criminal a policy as ever lay at the door of any statesmen. And this, in
fact, became the policy of the South.

"The South" meant, for political purposes, the owners of land and slaves
in the greater part of the States in which slavery was lawful. The poor
whites never acquired the political importance of the working classes in
the North, and count for little in the story. Some of the more northerly
slave States partook in a greater degree of the conditions and ideas of
the North and were doubtfully to be reckoned with the South. Moreover,
there is a tract of mountainous country, lying between the Atlantic
sea-board and the basin of the Mississippi and extending southwards to
the borders of Georgia and Alabama, of which the very vigorous and
independent inhabitants were and are in many ways a people apart, often
cherishing to this day family feuds which are prosecuted in the true
spirit of the Icelandic Sagas.

The South, excluding these districts, was predominantly Democratic in
politics, and its leaders owed some allegiance to the tradition of
Radicals like Jefferson. But it was none the less proud of its
aristocracy and of the permeating influence of aristocratic manners and
traditions. A very large number of Southerners felt themselves to be
ladies and gentlemen, and felt further that there were few or none like
them among the "Yankee" traders of the North. A claim of that sort is
likely to be aggressively made by those who have least title to make it,
and, as strife between North and South grew hotter, the gentility of the
latter infected with additional vulgarity the political controversy of
private life and even of Congress. But, as observant Northerners were
quite aware, these pretensions had a foundation of fact. An Englishman,
then or now, in chance meetings with Americans of either section, would
at once be aware of something indefinable in their bearing to which he
was a stranger; but in the case of the Southerner the strangeness would
often have a positive charm, such as may be found also among people of
the Old World under southern latitudes and relatively primitive
conditions. Newly-gotten and ill-carried wealth was in those days (Mr.
Olmsted, of New York State, assures us) as offensive in the more recently
developed and more prosperous parts of the South as in New York City
itse