If by planters you mean "Plantation owners", then it is planters. Plantation owners were at the top of the South's social hierarchy because they possessed large plots of land, yielding much income from the that land, and with the income came political power.
An example can be the Missouri Compromise. According to it, a line was made and it was decided which countries could have slaves and which not. Now, it was considered to be a relatively good compromise because it helped the Union stay together, but watching it from the modern times it was most certainly not a good compromise because any compromise that establishes slavery anywhere is definitely not a good one.
The New General Catalogue of Nebulae and Clusters of Stars (abbreviated as NGC) is a catalogue of deep-sky objects compiled by John Louis Emil Dreyer in 1888.
The Enlightenment, also known as the Age of Reason, was an intellectual and cultural movement in the eighteenth century that emphasized reason over superstition and science over blind faith. Empiricism promotes the idea that knowledge comes from experience and observation of the world.
