Defenders of slavery contrasted the bondsman’s comfortable lot with the misery of wage slaves so often that they began to believe it. Beware of the “endeavor to imitate . . . Northern civilization” with its “filthy, crowded, licentious factories,” warned a planter in 1854. “Let the North enjoy their hireling labor with all its . . . pauperism, rowdyism, mob-ism and anti-rentism,” said the collector of customs in Charleston. “We do not want it. We are satisfied with our slave labor. . . . We like old things—old wine, old books, old friends, old and fixed relations between employer and
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