 Consequently, although far from their early colonial magnificence, the planter families and what remained of the small yeoman class and small boat owners continued their generally tranquil and slightly prosperous lives into the ante-bellum period, supported by a small but well developed arts and crafts town class, small but prosperous merchant family firms, and a larger but almost poor white supervisory and working class which lived in the town, as well as the larger black slave and free black population living in the countryside.Furthermore, although no longer the all powerful aristocratic class they had held, unlike in the North, the Southern states, including the Tidewater regions such as the Bermuda Hundreds, continued to retain social and political status in their communities, thereby retaining power in the state of Virginia and the country as a whole.Indeed, at the time of the Civil War, planter classes such as in Bermuda and their cadet branches elsewhere throughout the south, provided upwards of sixty-five percent of the country's leading strategists, military commanders, and political leaders.