Slave Capitalism

.. These Southerners saw themselves as engaged in a struggle for the future of the world. The slave system represented the natural way of things, they believed, not because it was a holdover they wished to preserve, but because it was the endpoint of social evolution, the condition of universality toward which all societies aspired.

.. Abolitionism and wage labor were the unhealthy symptoms of Northern society’s unnatural form. The Southern intellectuals saw the North rather as a later American elite saw the Soviet Union—a twisted version of modernity, progress gone down the wrong path. The problem for the South was not that they were dominated by Northern capitalists but that their own capitalist ambitions had come under the thumb of that Frankenstein’s monster of the North, free society.