As conditions were, the slaveholding South could have realized a metropolitan life only through absentee proprietorships.  In the Roman latifundia, which overspread central and southern Italy after the Hannibalic war, absenteeism was a chronic feature and a curse.  The overseers there were commonly not helpers in the proprietors’ daily routine, but sole managers charged with a paramount duty of procuring the greatest possible revenues and transmitting them to meet the urban expenditures of their patrician employers.  The owners, having no more personal touch with their great gangs of slaves than modern stockholders have with the operatives in their mills, exploited them accordingly.  Where humanity and profits were incompatible, business considerations were likely to prevail.  Illustrations of the policy may be drawn from Cato the Elder’s treatise on agriculture.  Heavy work by day, he reasoned, would not only increase the crops but would cause deep slumber by night, valuable as a safeguard against conspiracy; discord was to be sown instead of harmony among the slaves, for the same purpose of hindering plots; capital sentences when imposed by law were to be administered in the presence of the whole corps for the sake of their terrorizing effect; while rations for the able-bodied were not to exceed a fixed rate, those for the sick were to be still more frugally stinted; and the old and sick slaves were to be sold along with other superfluities.[11] Now, Cato was a moralist of wide repute, a stoic it is true, but even so a man who had a strong sense of duty.  If such were his maxims, the oppressions inflicted by his fellow proprietors and their slave drivers must have been stringent indeed.

[Footnote 11:  A.H.J.  Greenidge, History of Rome during the later Republic and the early Principate (New York, 1905), I, 64-85; M. Porcius Cato, De Agri Cultura, Keil ed. (Leipsig, 1882).]

The heartlessness of the Roman latifundiarii was the product partly of their absenteeism, partly of the cheapness of their slaves which were poured into the markets by conquests and raids in all quarters of the Mediterranean world, and partly of the lack of difference between masters and slaves in racial traits.  In the ante-bellum South all these conditions were reversed:  the planters were commonly resident; the slaves were costly; and the slaves were negroes, who for the most part were by racial quality submissive rather than defiant, light-hearted instead of gloomy, amiable and ingratiating instead of sullen, and whose very defects invited paternalism rather than repression.  Many a city slave in Rome was the boon companion of his master, sharing his intellectual pleasures and his revels, while most of those on the latifundia were driven cattle.  It was hard to maintain a middle adjustment for them.  In the South, on the other hand, the medium course was the obvious thing.  The bulk of the slaves, because they were negroes, because they were costly, and because they were in personal touch, were pupils and working wards, while the planters were teachers and guardians as well as masters and owners.  There was plenty of coercion in the South; but in comparison with the harshness of the Roman system the American regime was essentially mild.