For this reason, or for more occult reasons, there is a disposition in the South to hold to local traditional views of the history of the United States as a whole and of the South in particular. For instance, most North Carolinians seem addicted to the belief that Mecklenburg County drew up certain drastic resolutions of Independence, May 20, 1775; and the man who is not convinced of it had better live somewhere else than in North Carolina. In like manner many Southerners suppose it to be an established fact that the aristocracy in the South were descended from English Cavaliers, and the leaders in New England from the Puritans. Yet there is little evidence of permanent Cavalier influence in any Southern colony. The most recent historian of early Virginia, Bruce, says: "The principal figures in the history of Virginia in the seventeenth century were men of the stamp of Samuel Mathews, George Menefie, Robert Beverley, Adam Thoroughgood, Ralph Wormeley, William Fitzhugh, Edmund Scarborough, and William Byrd." Are these names more heraldic than those of John Winthrop and John Endicott and Thomas Dudley? Aside from the titled governors who did not remain in the colonies, Lord Fairfax possessed the only Virginia title, and he may be balanced by Sir William Phipps, the Yankee knight. George Washington's ancestors are known to have been respectable English squires, but where are the Cavalier forefathers of Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefferson, John C. Calhoun and Jefferson Davis? The bone and sinew of the Colonial South, as of the North, was made up of the English middle class, yeomen and shopkeepers; and in both sections the descendants of those men chiefly came to eminence. Another of the unfortified beliefs which have wide currency in the South is that under slavery the South was a prosperous, happy, and glorious community. Robert Toombs, of Georgia, in a lecture delivered in Boston in 1856, said of the slave states: "In surveying the whole civilized world, the eye rests not on a single spot where all classes of society are so well content with their social system, or have greater reason to be so, than in the slaveholding States of this Union.... They may safely challenge the admiration of the civilized world." Later books of reminiscence carry you back to the delightful days when "the old black mahogany table, like a mirror, was covered with Madeira decanters standing in silver casters, and at each plate was a glass finger bowl with four pipe-stem glasses on their sides just touching the water"; when "woman's conquests were made by the charms and graces given them by nature rather than by art of women modistes and men milliners ... and the men prided themselves, above all things, on being gentlemen. This gave tone to society."