Nor is it surprising that it is only since the Civil War that the urban development of the South has begun to be of importance even to close students of the past and present of the section. From the time of the earliest settlements to the present day agriculture has been the dominant industry. Virginia tobacco, Carolina indigo and rice, far Southern and Southwestern cotton--these staples have meant more to the South than manufacturing or commerce. She developed seaports, which gradually lost their relative standing among the ports of the country and administrative and distributing centers; but there was no crowding of operatives into manufacturing towns, no haste on the part of country-bred youths to leave their native fields for the shops and warehouses and offices of the city. The gentleman’s son looked forward in most cases to being a planter; the small farmer’s son grew up in an environment that did not stimulate ambition. Cotton was king, and his court was bound to be a rural one. It is not to be supposed, however, that during the period from 1820 to 1860, which witnessed the amazing growth of manufacturing and commercial centers in the North and East and the still more wonderful rural and urban development of the West, the South was entirely content with the spread of her cotton-fields and oblivious to the stagnation or the slow growth of her towns. Her country-gentleman class was doubtless content with this state of affairs, and her politicians actually boasted of it, being put on the defensive in all respects on account of the attacks made upon slavery; but the leading inhabitants of the towns regretted the backwardness of their section and devised various schemes for remedying it, while the merchant class openly complained of the fact that young men were taught to look down upon every pursuit other than planting. This is but to say that the people of the South were not so different at bottom from their hopeful, energetic fellow citizens of other sections as has sometimes been imagined. They were Americans tied down to one occupation and rendered unprogressive by the hampering influences of a belated institution.