History books tell us that the United States in 1860 was divided into three parts: South, Northeast, and West. The South had in turn three subregions: the border states, the southeast, and the “Old Southwest”; the Northeast included New England and what had been the Middle Colonies. The Far West had hardly entered into American economic history, except as a land of mining excitements. A new and arid Southwest lay beyond Texas. A new Northwest on the Pacific was replacing the “old Northwest.” The latter had hardly become “old”; its settlement and culture patterns were still vigorously penetrating across into Kansas and Iowa heading into the Great Plains. In each of these three sections – South, Northeast, and Northwest – the population had developed a characteristic social organization and with it a chracteristic culture, which the subregions exemplified with minor variations.

At a century's distance, and with the record of the War in retrospect, the South appears indeed as a nation, a monolith whose economy, politics, society and morality were dominated by the class of slave-owning planters. Slave owners with their families made up less than one-third of the South's white population and less than one-fifth of the entire population, including slaves. The “planters” with ten or more slaves, whose holdings accounted for three-quarters of the slaves and at least three-quarters of the cotton grown, numbered only about 100,000 individuals out of a southern population of about four million slaves and 7,200,000 free persons.