The usa differs historically from many countries in Western Europe in that it never had a single national model-setting class that succeeded in monopolis-ing the moulding of manners and habitus. America never had a nobility, but it had in effect several competing aristocracies. Among these, Massachusetts, with a passing footnote to Quaker Philadelphia, still looms too large in Euro-peans' perception of what shaped American social character. In New England, certainly, there took shape something like the German Bildungsbürgertum, an elite of educated professionals and merchants. To them, and to the pressures of commercial and professional life, can be attributed to a certain extent the egalitarian strain in American habitus, not showing open disdain towards their fellow citizens, even if they were inwardly con?dent of their superior education, understanding and feeling. Visiting the usa in the 1830s, not long after Tocqueville, Harriet Martineau (1837: iii, 10) commented upon the great cautiousness that was entrenched early and deeply in Northern people; she described as ‘fear of opinion' something very similar to what Elias (2006 [1969]) termed the habitual ‘checking of behaviour' in anticipation of what others would think. She thought she could distinguish Northern from South-ern members of Congress simply by the way they walked:
'It is in Washington that varieties of manners are conspicuous. There the Southerners appear at most advantage, and the New Englanders to the least; the ease and frank courtesy of the gentry of the South (with an occasional touch of arrogance, however), contrasting with the cautious, somewhat gauche, and too deferential air of the members from the North. One fancies one can tell a New England member in the open air by his deprecatory walk. He seems to bear in mind perpetually that he cannot ?ght a duel, while other people can' (Martineau 1969 [1838]: i, 145).
Which brings us to the other great rival aristocracy, that of the slave-owning South. From Independence to the Civil War, Southerners held the lion's share of political power in the Union.
4 The reference to duelling among them is highly signi?cant. As Norbert Elias argued, in nineteenth-century Germany the quality of Satisfaktionsfähigkeit - being judged worthy to give satisfaction in a duel - became a principal criterion for membership of the German upper class (Elias 1996: 44-119). And although the greatest plantation owners may have been more conscious of looking towards their counterparts in England or France, the more appropriate comparison is between them and the Prussian Junkers (Bowman 1993). One similarity is that they both provided a large part of the of?cer corps of the national army. At home, they both ruled autocrati-cally over a Privatrechtstaat - they had the right to adjudicate and enforce their judgements on their own estates, with little or no interference by agencies of the government. State authorities did not intervene in relations between white masters and blacks, whether during slavery in the antebellum period or during the long decades of the Jim Crow laws and lynching between the end of Reconstruction and the interwar period. Nor did they intervene in what is now called 'black on black' violence.