The most startling and observable difference on the ground to Northerners and Southerners alike was the difference slavery made in population density. In the North the average population per square mile was 32 persons. Ninety-five percent of Southern counties had a lower density of white residents than the Northern average. In Franklin County the population density was 55 persons per square mile, while Augusta held just 28 persons per square mile (22 white residents per square mile). When the Reverend Abraham Essick came south from his home in Pennsylvania in 1860 to minister in the Valley of Virginia, he noted the difference the border made whenever he traveled back home. "During my visit to Pennsylvania I was deeply impressed by the contrast between the general appearance of the country and this. Naturally they are similar, both lying in the same valley, and presenting many of the same characteristics. But in Virginia the farms are large and the population sparse. The differences in cultivation, productiveness, and the general indications of thrift, are immensely in favor of Pennsylvania. It is usual to account for this on the grounds of Slavery." (Diary of the Reverend Abraham Essick, June 6, 1857)

Historians have suggested that such a thorough and persistent difference might account for other sectional differences in economy, social structure, or understanding of political power. For many contemporaries the difference between North and South was observable and real, visible on the ground in the ways buildings looked, were arranged or cared for, in the ways crops were planted, tended, or harvested, in the ways roads and towns intersected and developed. Northern travelers looked at the relative sparseness of people on the land in the South and viewed it as a lack of progress and energy. The Northerners saw scattered schoolhouses and churches, isolated villages and empty roads. White Southerners, however, thought they lived in places more beautiful and more humane than the crowded rural districts of the North. They argued that their farms, plantations, and towns were just as productive as those of the North, that white people in the South were actually better off than those in the North.

Augusta's and Franklin's churches, schools, newspapers, and political parties were clearly variants of the same kinds of institutions. People in both communities drew on the same cultural traditions, found the same topics, trends, and fads fascinating, adopted the same fashions, and read the same books. They eagerly employed the same new technologies. White women found similar opportunities above and below the Mason-Dixon Line. Free black people faced similarly restricted economic opportunities in both places. While both counties had some immigrants, the population of each was heavily native-born. White residents in both places often treated African Americans with disregard and contempt.

Yet slavery had insinuated itself into every facet of life in Augusta. Slavery touched every corner of Augusta, reaching into its mountains, valleys, and hollows. The institution was found at every elevation, on every soil type. The newspapers were filled with the business of slavery, and business adapted itself to the opportunities and constraints of bondage. (See Map: Residences with Slavery)

White slaveholders and enslaved people in Augusta engaged in a series of daily performances from mundane greetings to fully costumed plays. For the enslaved such acts were full of tension and double meaning, but for whites these nuances seemed to have been either lost or ignored. Augusta plantations even held winter performances of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Alansa Rounds Sterrett organized one such "social" and had the Sterrett's oldest slave, "grey headed Uncle Kit Matthews," play Uncle Tom. Sterrett, a Northerner who moved to Augusta in the late 1850s, was swept up in the beautiful and charming life of wealthy Southern society. Like others who attended nearby schools, such as the Virginia Female Institute, and whose fathers and mothers owned plantations and held slaves, she witnessed any number of "novel scenes" in which enslaved people performed for whites. For example, Sterrett described in her memoir a "darkey wedding," as "comical, mirthful, and hilarious affairs to black and white alike." Augusta residents, black and white, went through elaborate rituals of deference and command, in which whites managed to keep underlying tensions offstage. Again and again, these scenes were played out in the homes and plantations that dotted the Augusta landscape. (See Memoir of Alansa Rounds Sterrett)