I There have been two conscious or unconscious social orders in the United States, where another great crisis is now forcing men to re-examine the philosophies of their predecessors. The first of these began with the Stuart Restoration and ended in 1865; the second emerged slowly between 1823 and 1861, took definite economic form in 1865, and reached the acme of its power, if not its end, in 1929. There are many serious thinkers in the American intellectual realm today who feel that a third social order is slowly emerging, that democracy is going to be tried at last on a national scale. Hence it may not be out of order to describe and assess the first phase of the old Plantation life which began when the Clarendon Code was applied to England, assumed a more dogmatic and arbitrary character soon after a clever New Englander showed the South Carolinians how to make a thousand bales of cotton grom where one had grown before, and came to its tragic end when Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox. Enclosures to letter to the President from Assistant Secretary R. Walton Moore. |