Page 298 - American Stories, A History of the United States

Conclusion: Worlds in Conflict
If slaves lived in a distinct world of their own, so did planters, less affluent whites, 11.1
and free blacks. The Old South was a divided society. The observations of northern
traveler Frederick Law Olmsted in the 1850s bear this out. On a great plantation, he
watched the slaves stop working when the overseer turned away; on a small farm, 11.2
he saw a slave and his owner working in the fields together. Olmsted heard non-
slaveholding whites damn the planters as “cotton snobs” but also call blacks “niggars”
and express fear of interracial marriages if slaves were freed. He received hospitality 11.3
from poor whites living in crowded one-room cabins and from wealthy planters in
pillared mansions; life in the backcountry was radically different from that in the
plantation belts.
The South was a kaleidoscope of groups divided by class, race, culture, and geog-
raphy. What held it together and provided some unity were a booming plantation
economy and a web of customary relationships and loyalties that could obscure the
underlying cleavages and antagonisms. The fractured and fragile nature of this society
would soon become apparent under the pressures of civil war.

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