Plantation aristocrat

In the New World, especially in the southern United States, Brazil and Hispanic America with substantial Mestizo and Indio populations, the institution of large semi-feudal semi-commercial estates created, from the 16th century to contemporary era, a class of wealthy, often hereditary land owners who dominate the lives of their subordinate classes and politics of vast areas.

Before the American Civil War, the aristocracy maintained its superior position intellectually as well as financially. Most debates over slavery had to do with the constitutionality of the extension of slavery rather than its morality. The debates took the form of arguments over the powers of Congress rather than the merits of slavery. Strong states rights gave advantage to the aristocracy. The result was the so-called "Free Soil Movement." Free-soilers believed that slavery was dangerous because of what it did to whites. The "peculiar institution" ensured that elites controlled most of the land, property, and capital in the South. The Southern United States was, by this definition, undemocratic. In order to fight the "slave power conspiracy," the nation's democratic ideals had to be spread to the new territories and the South. The aristocracy actively prevented the spread of democratic principles by maintaining restrictions on eligibility to vote and discouraging the establishment of public schooling in the South.

Through the American Civil War, northern United States industrial interests represented by Abraham Lincoln successfully subjugated secessionist tendencies and the political base of the Dixie plantation aristocrats who once organized a confederacy in opposition to the North. A class of wealthy landowners continued to exist after the war, with their power curtailed and chief source of economic dominance---American plantation Black slavery abolished. Their resentment toward the American state is still expressed through strong emotional attachment to conservative political orientations and nostalgia toward the Confederate States of America.