nd--courage, frankness, generosity,
ability in affairs, a sense of responsibility, the consciousness
of caste. The mode of life which the planters enjoyed and which the
inferior whites regarded as a social paradise was a life of complete
deliverance from toil, of disinterested participation in local
government, of absolute personal freedom--a life in which the mechanical
action of law was less important than the more human compulsion of
social opinion, and in which private differences were settled under the
code of honor.

This Southern life was carried on in the most appropriate environment.
On a landed estate, often larger than many of Europe's baronies, stood
the great house of the planter, usually a graceful example of colonial
architecture, surrounded by stately gardens. This mansion was the center
of a boundless hospitality; guests were always coming and going; the
hostess and her daughters were the very symbols of kindliness and ease.
To think of such houses was to think of innumerable joyous days;
of gentlemen galloping across country after the hounds; of coaches
lumbering along avenues of noble oaks, bringing handsome women to visit
the mansion; of great feastings; of nights of music and dancing; above
all, of the great festival of Christmas, celebrated much as had been the
custom in "Merrie England" centuries before.

Below the surface of this bright world lay the enslaved black race. In
the minds of many Southerners--it was always a secret burden from which
they saw no means of freeing themselves. To emancipate the slaves, and
thereby to create a population of free blacks, was generally considered,
from the white point of view, an impossible solution of the problem.
The Southerners usually believed that the African could be tamed only
in small groups and when constantly surrounded by white influence, as in
the case of house servants. Though a few great capitalists had taken
up the idea that the deliberate exploitation of the blacks was the high
prerogative of the whites, the general sentiment of the Southern people
was more truly expressed by Toombs when he said: "The question is not
whether we could be more prosperous and happy with these three and a
half million slaves in Africa, and their places filled with an equal
number of hardy, intelligent, and enterprising citizens of the superior
race; but it is simply whether, while we have them among us, we would be
most prosperous with them in freedom or in bond