irstons of Virginia and the Aikens of South Carolina
were counted as the peers of the Astors of New York. But a Southern man
worth $4,000,000 or $5,000,000 would not receive an annual income of
more than $100,000 unless he happened to be in the midst of a new cotton
region. Still the hold of the planters on the state and county
governments of the South was, as we have seen in a former chapter, even
more secure than it had been in 1830, and Southern public opinion was
almost always the opinion of the planters. Yet there was great
uneasiness in the South as to the future, and public officials, railway
magnates, and newspaper men gathered in annual conventions to devise
ways and means of increasing the power of the South and of competing
with the East in the race for economic supremacy.

[Illustration: The Cotton Belt of 1860]

[Illustration: Tobacco Areas in 1860]

These conventions discussed scientific agriculture, the proper size of a
plantation, and the duties of "Christian masters to their servants";
they outlined plans for connecting Southern ports with the Northwest,
for opening a direct trade with Europe, and for annexing territory which
might increase the area of the staple producing States. They supported
Narciso Lopez and John A. Quitman in their filibustering expeditions
against Cuba, and they heralded William Walker, who sought to make
Nicaragua an American slave State in 1854-59, as a statesman and "man of
destiny." The reopening of the African slave trade was the subject of
long and earnest debate, and Southern delegations in Congress were urged
to exert themselves to secure a repeal of the law against the slave
trade in order that the South might have some means of increasing its
laboring population to counterbalance the advantages which the East and
Northwest derived from immigration. A paramount purpose of these
gatherings was to solidify the South and to harmonize the interests of
the border States with those of the lower South. In the background of
all this, and especially after the struggle over the Kansas-Nebraska
Bill in 1854, there was the ever-recurring probability of secession from
the Union.

What added to the anxieties of Southern leaders was the extraordinary
growth and expansion of the Northwest. In 1830 it had been the East that
most feared the development of the Mississippi Valley; now it was the
South that took pains to hedge and limit the opportunities of the newer
States. And there wa