Planters had once constituted the richest class in America, wrote Dennis Hart Mahan, a New York–born, Virginia-raised professor at West Point in a November 1860 letter to a friend. “But when commerce, manufacturers, the mechanic arts disturbed this condition of things, and amassed wealth that could pretend to more lavish luxury than planting, then came in, I fear, this demon of unrest which has been the utmost sole disturber of the land for years past.”
