Page 286 - American Stories, A History of the United States

White Society in the Antebellum South
11.1

11.2 What divided and united white southern society?
11.2
T hose who know the Old South only from novels, films, and television are likely 11.3

to imagine a land filled with majestic plantations. Pillared mansions behind
oak-lined carriageways are portrayed as scenes of aristocratic splendor, where
courtly gentlemen and elegant ladies, attended by hordes of uniformed black
servants, lived in refined luxury. Such images suggest that the typical white southerner
was an aristocrat whose family owned many slaves.
The great houses existed—many of them can still be seen in Virginia, the low coun-
try of South Carolina, and the lower Mississippi Valley—and some wealthy slavehold-
ers’ lifestyle was as aristocratic as any ever seen in the United States. But census returns
indicate that this was the world of only a tiny percentage of slaveowners and of the
total white population. In 1860, only one-quarter of all white southerners belonged to
slave-owning families. Even in the Cotton Belt, only about 40 percent of whites were
slaveholders on the eve of the Civil War. Planters were the minority of a minority, just
4 percent of the total white population of the South in 1860. Large planters who could
build great houses and entertain lavishly, those who owned at least 50 slaves, comprised
less than 1 percent of all whites.
Most southern whites, three-fourths of the white population, were non-slaveholding
yeoman farmers or artisans. Yet even those who owned no slaves depended on slavery,
whether economically, because they hired slaves, or psychologically, because having a
degraded class of blacks below them made them feel better about their own place in
society. However, the class divisions between slaveholders and non-slaveholders did con-
tribute to the political rifts that became increasingly apparent on the eve of the Civil War.

Read the Document The Blessings of Slavery (1857)

ESCAPING SLAVERY Henry “box” brown emerges from the crate in which he escaped from slavery in
Richmond, Virginia, to freedom in Philadelphia.
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