In addition to a common preference for a less hurried and direct approach to business and commerce, given their “inherited paternalism,” who better than the descendants of the South’s old slaveholding class to commiserate with their kindred spirits south of the border about the intricacies of sweating peons and Jamaican labor without breaking a sweat yourself?

With all due respect to Helen Bullitt Lowry, suggestions that the South is what some have called “America’s Latin America” are older than the republic itself. In 1765 London philanthropist Dr. John Fothergill drew sharp distinctions between the thrifty and industrious residents of the northern colonies, who lived “like our lower English farmers,” and the southern colonists, with their inclinations toward “Idleness and Extravagance,” who had more in common with the “West Indians” than with their neighbors to the north.