The industrial organization of southern society before the Civil War presents certain distinctive features. The early settlement of the southern colonies was almost entirely rural. The land was held in large tracts of several hundred acres and cultivated by slave labor. The economic effects of slave labor are apparent. It compelled the South to remain an agricultural section, and at the same time carry on its agriculture at the expense of a great waste of resources.

The plantation was the industrial unit. Ordinarily all of the various things necessary for the family and slaves of the planter, aside from a few imported luxuries, were produced on the plantation. Not only were the raw materials for clothing-wool, leather, and cotton-produced, but these raw products were worked up into the completed form for consumption on the same plantation. The food products-grain, corn, meat, and vegetables were also supplied by home labor. Thus to a large extent the plantation was a small community, in some ways comparable to the English feudal estate-a community in which the labor of the members of the group supplied the wants of the group. As a result of this "domestic system of production," the circle of the market for southern products before 1860-barring rice, sugar, tobacco, and cotton was limited.

Outside the slave-owning class was a large population known as the "poor whites." Unwilling to work beside colored slave labor, they lived by cultivating waste land or by charity. "They belonged neither to the ruling class nor to the slave class."1

The towns and cities assumed comparatively slight importance. The South had little export trade of manufactured articles. Its cotton went to England and New England cotton-mills. It had not reached the point of working up its raw products for commercial purposes. Hence as a distinctively manufacturing center the city was quite unknown, and with the majority of the population engaged in agriculture the town exerted no dominant influence. The sentiments that characterized the rural population permeated the towns and formed public opinion in the South.

1

It is due to this original structure of southern society that 1 WOODROW WILSON, Division and Union, p. 128.

education developed along a line entirely different from that in the northern states. The planter, highly individualistic, with his other wants largely or wholly supplied within the circle of the plantation, employed a private tutor or governess for the early education of his children. For their further training the same class frequently sent its sons, and sometimes its daughters, to Europe or the higher institutions of the South or North.

The less wealthy families were forced to adopt a method less expensive. They originated a private neighborhood arrangement. As many pupils as could be conveniently brought within reach of a central point were provided with a school building, and a teacher—frequently some wandering pedagogue, often of little power, but again sometimes a scholar-was put in charge. These "old field schools" were wholly neighborhood affairs. They were also the only place, aside from the state universities, where the people came in direct contact with the educational problem and "had their hands on education," since the academies and colleges were almost wholly of a denominational character.

Outside the "field school" was still a comparatively large school population unprovided for-"the children of the poor." These were to be cared for by the state. It is evident that the theory upon which the South at this period worked was that all people above the "indigent class" would school their own children. This left to the state the schooling of the "poor" and a part of the support of the university. The idea of a "poor school" for poor children prevailed in all the states of the South except North Carolina.. North Carolina had a development wholly peculiar to herself and possessed something approaching a common-school system at the opening of the Civil War.2

The "poor schools" were, as a whole, most inefficient agents. Dr. Orr says that this "so-called system had no system in it," that it was "full of defects," and that it was "lacking in a hundred of the elements that make up an efficient public-school system." 8

Owing to the organization of southern society, the originA. D. MAYO, Report of Commissioner of Education, 1900, Vol. I, p. 448. Educational Needs of the South, p. 7.

ating and developing of a common-school system, outside some of the larger cities, was impossible at that time. The sharp division of society into separate economic classes worked against the educating of the children of all people together and produced a distinct form of class education. This system of education, it is evident, gave to the young of the wealthy the best schooling the times afforded, while it condemned the larger part of the population to a condition of practical illiteracy.

It has frequently been stated that the system of schooling in the South was due to the fact that the English ideas of education—that is to say, the aversion to public schools—had been transplanted to the South, and that it was these ideas that worked against the early establishment of the American common school in which the central point is "that the whole people educate all children." It must be borne in mind, however, that something more fundamental than ideas was transplanted. The primary

fact is that there was the possibility for the growth in the South of an organization of industrial society in many respects closely resembling that of England a century and a half ago; hence the similarity in the educational institution. Those of the same blood and descent settled likewise in New England, but the great landed estate was there an impossibility; the town became the unit in society, and the common school took form sooner. Efforts to further the growth of education were not turned mainly in the direction of elementary schools. In fact, almost all of the southern states began by first founding a university. This was a logical outcome of the existing social organization. They started at the top and worked down in education, so that Dr. Charles Dabney's characterization of the school system of the South today is true of its early years:

Our present educational system, as far as we have any at all, is a column with a beautifully carved capitol upon its top which is altogether too large for the base and shaft.*

Numerous colleges, academies, and seminaries were established; but necessarily the mass of the population was excluded from both these secondary and higher institutions, owing to lack of funds. CHARLES W. DABNEY, Report of Department of Interior, p. 513.