How did nonslaveholding southern whites work and live?

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Figure false: Gathering Corn in Virginia
Figure false: In this romanticized agricultural scene, painter Felix O. C. Darley depicts members of a white farm family gathering its harvest by hand. In reality, growing corn was hard work. The artist, however, is less concerned with realism than with extolling rural family labor as virtuous and noble. Darley surrounds the southern yeomen with an aura of republican independence, dignity, and freedom. Warner Collection of Gulf States Paper Corporation.

yeomen

image Farmers who owned and worked their own small plots of land. Yeomen living within the plantation belt were more dependent on planters than were yeomen in the upcountry, where small farmers dominated.

KEY FACTORS

  • – More than six million of the South’s eight million whites owned no slaves.
  • – Approximately three out of four nonslaveholding southern whites were small farmers who owned their own land (yeomen).
  • – In the southern upcountry, slaves and plantations were rare.

MOST WHITES IN THE South did not own slaves, not even one. In 1860, more than six million of the South’s eight million whites lived in slaveless households. Some nonslaveholding whites lived in cities and worked as artisans, mechanics, and traders. Others lived in the country and worked as storekeepers, parsons, and schoolteachers. But most “plain folk” were small farmers. Perhaps three out of four were yeomen, small farmers who owned their own land. As in the North, farm ownership provided a family with an economic foundation, social respectability, and political standing. Unlike their northern counterparts, however, southern yeomen lived in a region whose economy and society were increasingly dominated by unfree labor.

In an important sense, the South had more than one white yeomanry. The huge southern landscape provided space enough for two yeoman societies, separated roughly along geographic lines. Yeomen throughout the South had much in common, but the life of a small farm family in the cotton belt (the flatlands that spread from South Carolina to Texas) differed from the life of a family in the upcountry (the area of hills and mountains). And some rural slaveless whites were not yeomen; they owned no land at all and were sometimes desperately poor.