Oakes provides ample evidence in the Chapter "Mater Class Pluralism" for the existence of a democratic and pluralistic tradition in the antebellum South. In Oakes' account, the antebellum South was suffused with the same republican acquisitiveness as the North. In Oakes words:

The dominant slaveholding culture grew out of the colonial experience in America and embraced the diversity of southern society. It took form in the rapidly expanding slave economy of the antebellum period and so produced a world view that equated upward mobility with westward migration. For unlike plantation life, physical movement, upward mobility, and social fluidity shaped the destinies of the vast majority of American slaveholders. (p. 68)

That is to say, the Southern man sought to accumulate capital in the form of human beings. The road to becoming a planter was open to men of talent and drive in the South just as the road to becoming a merchant-capitalist was open in the North. Martin van Buren's call for planters and plain republicans to face west makes sense. The North and the South had a great deal in common, save the peculiar institution. Both were bourgeois societies according to Oakes.

19th. c. U.S., antebellum South, southern history, slavery, race, class, capitalism, hegemony