The South of the United States, from early 1800s through turbulent growth amid the Jackson and Polk regimes, up to and including the 1860s, can be simplistically described as a racio-regional police state run by a small number of oligarchic plantation and business owners in each of these states. Lower classes--enslaved blacks and poor whites-were kept subservient and largely dependent on cotton, the eventual main economic driver during that century and much of the next. I stated in my previous column that the particular system of controlling people and money over this entire time and region can also be labeled ...