The planters faced this fact with mingled resolution and resignation.  The sluggishness of the bulk of their slaves they took as a racial trait to be conquered by discipline, even though their ineptitude was not to be eradicated; the talents and vigor of their exceptional negroes and mulattoes, on the other hand, they sought to foster by special training and rewards.  But the prevalence of slavery which aided them in the one policy hampered them in the other, for it made the rewards arbitrary instead of automatic and it restricted the scope of the laborers’ employments and of their ambitions as well.  The device of hiring slaves to themselves, which had an invigorating effect here and there in the towns, could find little application in the country; and the paternalism of the planters could provide no fully effective substitute.  Hence the achievements of the exceptional workmen were limited by the status of slavery as surely as the progress of the generality was restricted by the fact of their being negroes.

A further influence of the plantation system was to hamper the growth of towns.  This worked in several ways.  As for manufactures, the chronic demand of the planters for means with which to enlarge their scales of operations absorbed most of the capital which might otherwise have been available for factory promotion.  A few cotton mills were built in the Piedmont where water power was abundant, and a few small ironworks and other industries; but the supremacy of agriculture was nowhere challenged.  As for commerce, the planters plied the bulk of their trade with distant wholesale dealers, patronizing the local shopkeepers only for petty articles or in emergencies when transport could not be awaited; and the slaves for their part, while willing enough to buy of any merchant within reach, rarely had either money or credit.

Towns grew, of course, at points on the seaboard where harbors were good, and where rivers or railways brought commerce from the interior.  Others rose where the fall line marked the heads of river navigation, and on the occasional bluffs of the Mississippi, and finally a few more at railroad junctions.  All of these together numbered barely three score, some of which counted their population by hundreds rather than by thousands; and in the wide intervals between there was nothing but farms, plantations and thinly scattered villages.  In the Piedmont, country towns of fairly respectable dimensions rose here and there, though many a Southern county-seat could boast little more than a court house and a hitching rack.  Even as regards the seaports, the currents of trade were too thin and divergent to permit of large urban concentration, for the Appalachian water-shed shut off the Atlantic ports from the commerce of the central basin; and even the ambitious construction of railroads to the northwest, fostered by the seaboard cities, merely enabled the Piedmont planters to get their provisions overland, and barely affected the volume of the seaboard trade.  New Orleans alone had a location promising commercial greatness; but her prospects were heavily diminished by the building of the far away Erie Canal and the Northern trunk line railroads which diverted the bulk of Northwestern trade from the Gulf outlet.