ABSTRACT
The pronounced drift of southern thought, in the years immediately preceding the Civil War, towards the ideal of the Greek democracy, has been too carelessly forgotten. The inadequacy of southern thought was identical with that of northern: blinded by sectional economic interests, they saw only half the truth. The Greek ideal, in short, met the double need of southern economics and southern prejudices, and made its appeal even to the frontier spirit of equalitarianism. The major premise of the new southern philosophy was identical with that of northern capitalism, namely, that every civilization rests on labor exploitation. Apologists recognized both systems as capitalistic, established in labor exploitation; but they proved to their own satisfaction that the southern was far humaner, more truly social. Southern apologists had been moving slowly towards the conception of a Greek democracy under the leadership of Calhoun, but now under the sharp prod of Abolitionism they turned militant.
