Page:Southern Life in Southern Literature.djvu/409

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WILLIAM PETERFIELD TRENT
391

invention of the cotton gin made it worth the South Carolinian's while to bide at home, and opened up to immigration and settlement the states bordering on the Gulf. As in the case of all new countries, the inflowing population was extremely mixed, but the man who had most slaves could clear his land and start his cotton soonest; and so throughout the lower tier of south-western states aristocracy triumphed, on the whole, over democracy, being somewhat aided by the presence of French and Spanish populations at Mobile and New Orleans. But in the midst of all this movement and confusion the tidewater Virginians and South Carolinians stood for political and social ideals before which the rest of the South and the Southwest bowed until the advent of Jackson and his frontier Democrats to power. The Virginian fell before the storm, but the South Carolinian bent and rose again. Slavery, not Tennessee democracy, represented the aspirations of the Southern people during the three momentous decades before the Civil War, and slavery's banner Calhoun and his South Carolinians were obviously best fitted to bear. So it has come about that the early prestige of Virginia and the later prestige of South Carolina have invested the "low country" inhabitants of those states—for it is "low country" ideals that have prevailed—with an importance in the eyes of their fellow Southerners and of the rest of the world that is only just beginning to be shaken by the progress of commonwealths that have learned better how to utilize their material resources. But what now can one say of these two types of Southerners?

In the first place, they are nearer to the type of Englishmen that originally settled in the two colonies than might be expected, when the lapse of time is considered. They are distinctly less American in their habits of thought and action than are Georgians or Tennesseeans, New Yorkers, or Iowans. In the cities one naturally finds all sorts and conditions of people, but