The citizens of the cotton States, as a whole, are poor. They work little, and that little, badly; they earn little, they sell little; they buy little, and they have little, very little, of the common comforts and consolations of civilized life. Their destitution is not material only; it is intellectual and it is moral […] They were neither generous nor hospitable and their talk was not that of evenly courageous men.
— Frederick Law Olmstead, The Cotton Kingdom
