By the mid-nineteenth century, all southern white men—planters and plain folk—and no southern black men, even those who were free, could vote. But even after the South’s politics became democratic for white males, political power remained unevenly distributed. The nonslaveholding white majority wielded less political power than their numbers indicated. The slaveholding white minority wielded more. With a well-developed sense of class interest, slaveholders engaged in party politics, campaigns, and officeholding, and as a result they received significant benefits from state governments. Nonslaveholding whites were concerned mainly with preserving their liberties and keeping their taxes low. They asked government for little of an economic nature, and they received little.

Slaveholders sometimes worried about nonslaveholders’ loyalty to slavery, but most whites accepted the planters’ argument that the existing social order served all Southerners’ interests. Slavery rewarded every white man—no matter how poor—with membership in the South’s white ruling race. It also provided the means by which nonslaveholders might someday advance into the ranks of the planters. White men in the South argued furiously about many things, but they agreed that they should take land from Indians, promote agriculture, uphold white supremacy and masculine privilege, and defend slavery from its enemies.