In a valuable case study of one large planter, Drew Gilpin Faust has shown how James Henry Hammond was equally determined to transform his plantation into a profitable Enterprise and to protect himself as a beneficent master who would guide the development of those he regarded as backward people entrusted to his care by God. Oakes claims that, between the revolutionary era and the Civil War, whatever paternalist tradition existed in the South was overtaken and overwhelmed by the rising capitalist values of an expanding slave-owning Society of men on the make. Slavery became the basis of an increasingly paternalist social order - particularly after the ending of the external slave trade in 1808. Genovese argues that the early spread of European capitalism called forth a new system of slavery in the New World which in time proved incompatible went the consolidation of the capitalist World Order. Slave owners then assumed the mantle of the landed aristocracy in Europe by resisting the advance of the very capitalist system which had spawned them. The Old South was actually engaged in a process of rationalizing slavery, not only in an economic sense, but also in emotional and psychological terms. it would not be easy to demonstrate that it promoted the economic well-being of the non-slave-owning sections of the community - and the nonslaveholders were the large majority of the population. Slave ownership D provide a kind of escalator by which people might arise in southern Society, and Oaks has stressed that extent of upward (and presumably downward) mobility in Southern society and the frequency which individuals in and out of ownership of one or twoAlone but also other factors, such as the climate and the lack of adequate local markets, which hindered any movement toward diversification. Slavery did limit crop choices by enabling and encouraging Farmers to respond to World demand for cotton, by removing incentives to overcome the problems involved in growing other crops, and by helping to create an essentially rural economy and restricting the local market. The combined forces of cotton and slavery kept not only Southern agriculture but the whole Southern economy on the straight and narrow path which led to rejection of other choices and consequent retardation.  The very success (and the profits) of plantation slavery and cotton cultivation removed any incentive to switch from agriculture to Industrial and Urban Development. In towns they could be replaced by white immigrant workers; on the plantations they were irreplaceable. In contrast, the South enjoyed the ephemeral advantage of being the dominant supplier of cotton to the World Market, a position which offered limited term enjoyment of profit not necessarily linked to real efficiency, but not the long-term prospect of sustained growth.  In slavery the near-paradox of an economic institution competitively effective under certain conditions, but essentially regressive in its influence on the socio-economic evolution of the section where it prevailed.  While the South expanded along one line, the North was branching out in many new directions.