The largest group of slave-owning families held between one and four slaves, and those families accounted for almost half the slaveholding in the entire South. This meant, for one thing, that Southern slavery was, in most cases, an affair of small-scale farming, in which white farmers extracted the help of a slave or two to plow up and harvest holdings of less than a hundred acres. It also meant that, beyond the actual slaveholders themselves, there existed a large population of nonslaveholding whites, and without their cooperation, slavery could never have survived. Apart from a tiny population of urban professionals, the nonslaveholding white population of the South was the very model of the yeoman republican farmer that the Jeffersonians had assumed to be the salt of the earth in the early years of the Republic. At the same time, they had been shunted into the least desirable lands by the greater purchasing power of cotton, and there they clung to the old model of self-sufficient corn-and-livestock agriculture. These white yeoman farmers had every reason to resent the economic success of the planters, the loss of yeoman independence, and the way the planters turned their cotton profits into political dominance throughout the South. “In what else besides Negroes were these rich men better off then when they called themselves poor?” asked Frederick Law Olmsted, the noted American journalist and architect, and that was precisely the question surly slaveless farmers wanted to ask. 67
At some point, an economically and politically alienated population of white yeomen with a curiosity on such subjects might easily decide that its mutual interests lay in directions other than those of the great planters, and thus become an engine for abolition or (in the most hideous scenario) a refuge for slave runaways and rebellion. Southern planters fantasized about Northern plots “to array one class of our citizens against the other, limit the defense of slavery to those pecuniarily interested, and thereby eradicate it.” It thus became vital to the peace of the planters’ minds that the frustrations of the “crackers,” “sandhillers,” or “poor white trash” be diminished or placated at all costs. This involved, first and foremost, keeping the bogeyman of race ever before the nonslaveholders’ eyes, for whatever hatreds the poor whites nursed against the planters, they nursed still greater ones against blacks.
Even if slavery was wrong, its wrongs were cancelled out for nonslaveholders by the more monstrous specter of racial equality. Abolish slavery, and white farmers would find that blacks were now their legal equals and economic and social competitors. “You very soon make them all tenants and reduce their wages for daily labor to the smallest pittance that will sustain life,” prophesied Georgia governor Joseph E. Brown, and that would eventually force poor whites and blacks “to go to church as equals; enter the Courts of Justice as equals, sue and be sued as equals, sit on juries together as equals, have the right to give evidence in court as equals, stand side by side in our military corps as equals, enter each others’ houses in social intercourse as equals; and very soon their children must marry together as equals. …” Southern elites such as Brown felt certain that when nonslaveholding whites realized the full racial consequences of abolition, they would become slavery’s strongest supporters. “The strongest pro-slavery men in these States are those who do not own one dollar of slave property,” insisted a Louisville newspaper, “They are sturdy yeomen who cultivate the soil, tend their own crops; but if need be, would stand to their section till the last one of them fell.”68
Ensuring the loyalty of nonslaveholding whites involved a measure of social humiliation on the part of the “intelligent proud, courteous slave barons” who found themselves forced at every election to solicit the votes of “ignorant, slovenly, poor white trash in the country” with “frequent treats that disgrace our elections” and to advocate as a social ideal not aristocracy but white man’s democracy—a kind of equality in which all the members of a superior race are more equal, socially and politically, to each other than to any members of an inferior race. By arguing that slavery was a benefit to slaveholders and nonslaveholders alike, the slave owners could weld the loyalty of the nonslaveholding white to their standard forever. “The existence of a race among us—inferior by nature to ourselves, in a state of servitude—necessarily adds to the tone of manliness and character of the superior race,” argued Alabama governor John A. Winston.69
What was more, assigning menial work to black slaves assured poor whites that they would never have to worry about being reduced to the same level of drudgery. Explained James Henry Hammond in 1858, “In all social systems there must be a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life,” a class that “constitutes the very mud-sill of society and political government.” White Southerners had found that “mud-sill” in black slaves, who performed the “duties” no white man would stoop to. With that class beneath them, all Southern whites could feel that they were members of a ruling class. “African slavery,” announced another slaveholder, James P. Holcombe, “reconciles the antagonism of classes that has elsewhere reduced the highest statesmanship to the verge of despair, and becomes the great Peace-maker of our society.” Compared to the black slave, every white was an “aristocrat,” and not just the thousand-bale planters. Of course, arguing thusly forced slavery’s apologists to sing a different tune than the one that assured the world that slavery existed to bestow happiness on the slave. Alongside the happiest-people-on-the-face-ofthe-earth argument, planters had to offer a parallel argument for slavery based on the vilest form of racism and calculated to enlist the racist sympathies and fears of nonslaveholders. “The privilege of belonging to the superior race and of being free was a bond that tied
