Unnamed Traders and Ship-Owners

In his conversation with Cass about human, and specifically Southern history in Go Down, Moses, Ike generalizes about the kinds of men who, according to him, were responsible for the Civil War. This entry refers to the group he calls "the narrow fringe of traders and ship-owners still looking backward across the Atlantic and attached to the [American] continent only by their-counting houses" (273). He means the business men who made money from the slave and cotton trade with Africa and Europe.