Du Bois had noted: "[T]here is evidence that the necessities of their economic organization were continually changing and deteriorating their morale and pushing forward ruder, noisier, less cultivated elements than characterized the Southern gentleman of earlier days. Certainly, the cursing, brawling, whoring gamblers who largely represented the South in the late fifties, evidenced the inevitable deterioration that overtakes men when their desire for income and extravagance overwhelms their respect for human beings" (p. 43). James Roark, matching the desperation of the antebellum secessionist planter ideologues with the sentiments of such as Mary Ann Whittle, a plantation mistress ("we have an enemy in our bosoms who will shoot us in our beds"), and the Mississippian William Kirkland (who declared he had rather "'be exterminated' than be forced to live in the same society 'with the slaves if freed'"), concluded: "Mixing reality with fantasy, planters feared that John Bull, Billy Yank, Johnny Poor White, and Nat Turner were all lurking in the shadows. That vision knotted the stomachs of more than just the cowardly."

Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making o…, loc. 1921