I believe that future history will give him credit only for having a little hastened forward the inevitable. Another abolition misstatement ought to be corrected. Sumner fulminated against what he called the oligarchs of slavery. And it was common at the north to speak of southern aristocracy and southern aristocratic institutions. Of course the slaves had no political privileges, no more than they had in Athens, which has always been deemed the most genuine republic ever known. There was in the old south no oligarch, or anything like him, unless you choose to call such a man as Calhoun an oligarch, whose influence over his State was entirely from the good opinion and unexampled confidence of the free citizens of all classes, which he had won. There was no aristocracy, except such a natural one as can be found in every one of our States, as is illustrated by the Adamses in Massachusetts, the Lees in Virginia, and the Cobbs in Georgia. In those days property was much more equally distributed than now; and it was easy for the energetic and saving poor young man, of the humblest origin, to make his way up. In all my day there was universal suffrage, and it was political death to propose any modification. I explained nearly thirty years ago how southern conditions prevented the development of anything like the beneficent New England town-meeting system.[39] But for all of that the entire spirit of southern society was democratic in the extreme, far more so than it is now with the nominating machinery everywhere in the south except South Carolina, controlled by corporation oligarchs. When the root-and-branch abolitionist inveighed against oligarchy and aristocracy, and aristocratic institutions in the south, he was just as mistaken as he was in denouncing what he asserted to be the guilt in morals of slaveholding.