main end was to catch fish," cried a Marblehead sailor when the preacher laid on too hard. As if in defiance, the grandest old families of Boston and Salem decorated their mansions with graven models of the sacred cod and appeared unashamed in the columns of the newspapers as dealers in rum, salt, rope, pitch, grindstones, and fishing tackle. Although bluebloods of ancient lineage might turn up their noses, although the higher strata that pressed about the royal governor might resent the intrusion of "new people," the salt-water merchants managed the politics of New England legislatures with little interference from farmers and mechanics and servants.
Below the Potomac the upper class had another economic foundation―the landed estate kept intact from generation to generation as in England by the rule of entail or primogeniture or both. Cherishing the conventional emotions associated with the soil, Southern planters arrogated to themselves all social prestige, scorning mercantile arts and persons engaged in trade, except, perhaps, in Charleston where occasionally a landed family augmented its fortune by a happy jointure with the master of a counting house.
Like lords and squires in the mother country, slave-owning barons took the lead in politics as they did in social affairs. At elections held in the open air in county towns, they easily cowed all but the bravest freeholding farmers and named their own men for public offices. If a schism among them threatened their dominion, they united again with a swiftness that took the breath of the opposition. Yeomanry from the hinterland often came to the provincial capitals to tilt and charge but all in vain; the landed gentry of the plain could not be unhorsed. Resorting to private tutors or to Oxford and Cambridge for their learning, such as the times yielded, they staved off the growth of popular education in the South and the restive democracy connected with it.
Secure in their economic and political power, the planters of Virginia soon assumed the style of the Cavalier. And
