Not all recent works point in the direction of such modernity (for example, see the dissent within _The Old South’s Modern Worlds_, a collection Rockman cites). But more significantly, leading Southerners would not have recognized the society Rockman described. Prominent leaders in the deep South, like John C. Calhoun and William Lowndes Yancey were proud their society was less focused on money-making than the North.

And outspoken reformers like Thomas Dew, James DeBow, and Edmund Ruffin, who were also Southern nationalists, accepted that the South had to defend its labor system despite all its inefficiencies. Noted Ruffin: “I would not hesitate a moment to prefer the entire existing social, domestic and industrial conditions of these slaveholding states, with all the now existing evils of indolence and waste, and generally exhausting tillage and declining fertility, to the entire conditions of any other country on the face of the globe.”

Books like _A Deplorable Scarcity_ by Fred Bateman and Thomas Weiss make clear that planters shunned profitable investments because the prestige that came from holding numerous slaves was more important than profit maximization.