Whether Whig or Democrat, southern officeholders were likely to be slave owners. By 1860, the percentage of slave owners in state legislatures ranged from 41 percent in Missouri to nearly 86 percent in North Carolina. Legislators not only tended to own slaves; they also often owned large numbers. The percentage of planters (individuals with twenty or more slaves) in southern legislatures in 1860 ranged from 5.3 percent in Missouri to 55.4 percent in South Carolina. Even in North Carolina, where only 3 percent of the state’s white families belonged to the planter class, more than 36 percent of state legislators were planters. Almost everywhere nonslaveholders were in the majority, but plain folk did not throw the planters out of office.

Upper-class dominance of southern politics reflected the elite’s success in persuading the yeoman majority that what was good for slaveholders was also good for plain folk. In reality, the South had, on the whole, done well by common white men. Most had farms of their own. They participated as equals in a democratic political system. They enjoyed an elevated social status, above all blacks and in theory equal to all other whites. They commanded patriarchal authority over their households. And as long as slavery existed, they could dream of joining the planter class. Slaveless white men found much to celebrate in the slave South.

Most slaveholders took pains to win the plain folk’s trust and to nurture their respect. One nonslaveholder told his wealthy neighbor that he had a bright political future because he never thought himself “too good to sit down & talk to a poor man.” Mary Boykin Chesnut complained about the fawning attention her husband, a U.S. senator from South Carolina, showed to poor men, including one who had “mud sticking up through his toes.” Smart candidates found ways to convince wary plain folk of their democratic convictions and egalitarian sentiments, whether they were genuine or not. Walter L. Steele, who ran for a seat in the North Carolina legislature in 1846, detested campaigning for votes, but he learned, he said, to speak with a “candied tongue.”

In addition to politics, slaveholders defended slavery in other ways. In the 1830s, Southerners decided that slavery was too important to debate. “So interwoven is [slavery] with our interest, our manners, our climate and our very being,” one man declared in 1833, “that no change can ever possibly be effected without a civil commotion from which the heart of a patriot must turn with horror.” Powerful whites dismissed slavery’s critics from college faculties, drove them from pulpits, and hounded them from political life. Sometimes antislavery Southerners fell victim to vigilantes and mob violence. One could defend slavery; one could even delicately suggest mild reforms. But no Southerner could any longer safely call slavery evil or advocate its destruction.

In the South, therefore, the rise of the common man occurred alongside the continuing, even growing, power of the planter class. Rather than pitting slaveholders against nonslaveholders, elections remained an effective means of binding the region’s whites together. Elections affirmed the sovereignty of white men, whether planter or plain folk, and the subordination of African Americans. Those twin themes played well among white women as well. Though unable to vote, white women supported equality for whites and slavery for blacks. In the antebellum South, the politics of slavery helped knit together all of white society.

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