Thus, socially considered, a very broad line of demarcation separated the State into two distinct sections; and in many respects in manners, in habits, even in speech, the people of the two differed widely one from the other. Along the coast lay the great rice-plantations, containing thousands of acres and worked by hundreds of slaves; their proprietors constituting the landed aristocracy of the State. In the interior, the plantations were smaller, there were fewer slaves, and their owners were “farmers” rather than “planters,” devoting themselves to the cultivation of a variety of crops instead of confining their efforts to the exclusive production of a single staple. Thus in a very important particular South Carolina differed from both Virginia and Georgia—the two members of the State-sisterhood which in many respects she most closely resembled: for in Georgia the sea-board bore so small a proportion to the interior that the influence of the coast-dwellers could not be a very appreciable factor in the general equation. And in Virginia, a difference of climate produced a corresponding difference in the mode of life of the country gentry—Virginia planters for the most part making their homes on their plantations the year round, whereas Carolina planters were compelled by considerations of health to abandon their plantations during the summer months. Though some went no farther than to settlements among the pine woods or along the seashore near at hand, the great majority either spent their summers in Charleston—the center of South Carolina refinement and cultivation—or traveled abroad into the great outside world, thereby rubbing off their rusticity and keeping themselves in touch with passing events and current interests. Necessarily, the combined advantages of wealth, education and travel produced in the coast-folk a polish of manner and a breadth of mind not possessed by the dwellers of the interior of the State who, year in and year out, vegetated contentedly on their native soil. The difference between the denizens of the two sections was inevitable. The trouble was that, instead of regarding their superior advantages as entailing upon them corresponding duties towards their less favored neighbors, the people of the sea-board arrogated to themselves the position of critics, and looked down with scarcely veiled condescension and contempt upon their rustic brethren of the interior; by whom, it is unnecessary to say, this attitude was deeply resented.