Plain Folk of the Old South
Encyclopedia
The Plain Folk of the Old South refers to the middling class of white farmers in the Southern United States
Southern United States
The Southern United States—commonly referred to as the American South, Dixie, or simply the South—constitutes a large distinctive area in the southeastern and south-central United States...

 before the Civil War, located between the rich planters and the poor whites. At the time they were often called "yeomen". They owned land and had no slaves or only a few. Most of them were Scotch-Irish American and English American
English American
English Americans are citizens or residents of the United States whose ancestry originates wholly or partly in England....

 or a mixture thereof. Historians have devoted extensive research to their study, but they tend to be neglected in the popular literature, which focuses more on the rich plantation owners and the slaves.

Plain Folk of the Old South is the title of a 1949 book by Vanderbilt University
Vanderbilt University
Vanderbilt University is a private research university located in Nashville, Tennessee, United States. Founded in 1873, the university is named for shipping and rail magnate "Commodore" Cornelius Vanderbilt, who provided Vanderbilt its initial $1 million endowment despite having never been to the...

 historian Frank Lawrence Owsley
Frank Lawrence Owsley
Frank Lawrence Owsley was an American historian who taught at Vanderbilt University for most of his career, where he specialized in southern history and was a member of the Southern Agrarians.-Life and career:...

, one of the Southern Agrarians
Southern Agrarians
The Southern Agrarians were a group of twelve American writers, poets, essayists, and novelists, all with roots in the Southern United States, who joined together to write a pro-Southern agrarian manifesto, a...

. In it he used statistical data to analyze the make-up of southern society, contending that yeoman farmers made up a larger middle class than was generally thought.

Historical perspectives

Historians have long debated the social, economic and political roles of southern classes. Terms used by scholars for the non-elite class include "common people", "yeomen" and "Crackers
Georgia cracker
Georgia Cracker refers to the original American pioneer settlers of the Province of Georgia , and their descendants. It is different from the pejorative term for southern whites...

". In the colonial and antebellum years, subsistence farmers tended to settle in the backcountry and uplands. They generally did not raise commodity crops and owned few or no slaves. In the years before the American Revolution, Scots-Irish and English from the northern counties predominated in the settlement of this part of the South. Jeffersonian
Jeffersonian democracy
Jeffersonian Democracy, so named after its leading advocate Thomas Jefferson, is a term used to describe one of two dominant political outlooks and movements in the United States from the 1790s to the 1820s. The term was commonly used to refer to the Democratic-Republican Party which Jefferson...

 and Jacksonian Democrats
Jacksonian democracy
Jacksonian democracy is the political movement toward greater democracy for the common man typified by American politician Andrew Jackson and his supporters. Jackson's policies followed the era of Jeffersonian democracy which dominated the previous political era. The Democratic-Republican Party of...

 favored the term "yeoman" for the independent but land-owning farmer. It emphasized an independent political spirit and economic self-reliance.

Views of Olmsted, Dodd and Phillips

Northerners such as Frederick Law Olmsted
Frederick Law Olmsted
Frederick Law Olmsted was an American journalist, social critic, public administrator, and landscape designer. He is popularly considered to be the father of American landscape architecture, although many scholars have bestowed that title upon Andrew Jackson Downing...

, who traveled in and wrote about the 1850s South, through the early-twentieth-century historians such as William E. Dodd and Ulrich B. Phillips, assessed common southerners as minor players in antebellum social, economic and political life of the South.

Twentieth century romantic portrayals of the antebellum South, especially Margaret Mitchell
Margaret Mitchell
Margaret Munnerlyn Mitchell was an American author and journalist. Mitchell won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1937 for her epic American Civil War era novel, Gone with the Wind, which was the only novel by Mitchell published during her lifetime.-Family:Margaret Mitchell was born in Atlanta,...

's novel Gone with the Wind (1937) and the 1939 film adaptation, mostly ignored the yeomen. The nostalgic view of the South emphasized the elite planter class of wealth and refinement, controlling large plantations and numerous slaves. Novelist Erskine Caldwell
Erskine Caldwell
Erskine Preston Caldwell was an American author. His writings about poverty, racism and social problems in his native South like the novels Tobacco Road and God's Little Acre won him critical acclaim, but they also made him controversial among fellow Southerners of the time who felt he was...

's Tobacco Road
Tobacco Road (novel)
Tobacco Road is a 1932 novel by Erskine Caldwell about Georgia sharecroppers. It was dramatized for Broadway by Jack Kirkland in 1933, and ran for a then-astounding eight years . A 1941 film version, deliberately played mainly for laughs, was directed by John Ford, and the storyline was...

portrayed the degraded condition of whites dwelling beyond the great plantations.

Frank Lawrence Owsley

The major challenge to the view of planter dominance came from historian Frank Lawrence Owsley
Frank Lawrence Owsley
Frank Lawrence Owsley was an American historian who taught at Vanderbilt University for most of his career, where he specialized in southern history and was a member of the Southern Agrarians.-Life and career:...

 in Plain Folk of the Old South (1949). His work ignited a long historiographical debate. Owsley started with the work of Daniel R. Hundley, who in 1860 had defined the southern middle class as "farmers, planters, traders, storekeepers, artisans, mechanics, a few manufacturers, a goodly number of country school teachers, and a host of half-fledged country lawyers, doctors, parsons, and the like". To find these people, Owsley turned to the name-by-name files on the manuscript federal census. Using their own newly invented codes, the Owsleys created databases from the manuscript federal census returns, tax and trial records, and local government documents and wills. They gathered data on all southerners. Historian Vernon Burton described Owsley's Plain Folk of the Old South, as "one of the most influential works on southern history ever written".

Plain Folk argued that southern society was not dominated by planter aristocrats, but that yeoman farmers played a significant role in it. The religion, language, and culture of these common people created a democratic "plain folk" society. Critics say Owsley overemphasized the size of the southern landholding middle class, while excluding the large class of poor whites who owned neither land nor slaves. Owsley believed that shared economic interests united southern farmers; critics suggest the vast difference in economic classes between the elite and subsistence farmers meant they did not have the same values or outlook.

Recent scholarship

In his study of Edgefield County, South Carolina
South Carolina
South Carolina is a state in the Deep South of the United States that borders Georgia to the south, North Carolina to the north, and the Atlantic Ocean to the east. Originally part of the Province of Carolina, the Province of South Carolina was one of the 13 colonies that declared independence...

, Orville Vernon Burton classified white society into the poor, the yeoman middle class, and the elite. A clear line demarcated the elite, but according to Burton, the line between poor and yeoman was less distinct. Stephanie McCurry argues that yeomen were clearly distinguished from poor whites by their ownership of land (real property). Yeomen were "self-working farmers", distinct from the elite because they physically labored on their land alongside any slaves they owned. Planters with numerous slaves had work that was essentially managerial, and often they supervised an overseer rather than the slaves themselves.

Wetherington (2005) argues the plain folk (of Georgia) supported secession to defend their families, homes, and notions of white liberty. During the war, the established patriarchy continued to control the home front and kept it functioning, even though growing numbers of plain folk joined the new wartime poor. Wetherington suggests that their localism and racism dovetailed with a republican ideology founded on Jeffersonian notions of an "economically independent yeomanry sharing common interests". Plain folk during the war raised subsistence crops and vegetables, and relied on a free and open range to hunt hogs. Before the war they became more active in the cotton and slave markets, but plain folk remained unwilling to jeopardize their self-sufficiency and the stability of their neighborhoods for the economic interests of planters. The soldiers had their own reasons for fighting. First and foremost, they sought to protect hearth and home from Yankee threats. White supremacy and masculinity depended on slavery, which Lincoln's Republicans threatened. Plain-folk concepts of masculinity explain why so many men enlisted: they wanted to be worthy of the privileges of men, including the affections of female patriots. By March 1862, the piny woods region of Georgia had a 60 percent enlistment rate, comparable to that found in planter areas.

As the war dragged on, hardship became a way of life. Wetherington reports that enough men remained home to preserve the paternalistic social order, yet there were too few to prevent mounting deprivation. Wartime shortages increased the economic divide between planters and yeoman farmers; nevertheless, some planters took seriously their paternalistic obligations by selling their corn to plain folks at the official Confederate rate "out of a spirit of patriotism". Wetherington's argument weakens other scholars' suggestions that class conflict led to Confederate defeat. More damaging to Confederate nationalism was the localism that grew as areas had to fend for themselves as Sherman
William Tecumseh Sherman
William Tecumseh Sherman was an American soldier, businessman, educator and author. He served as a General in the Union Army during the American Civil War , for which he received recognition for his outstanding command of military strategy as well as criticism for the harshness of the "scorched...

's forces came nearer.

During Reconstruction, plain folk viewed freedmen as the greatest affront and humiliating symbol of Yankee victory, but some became Republicans (they were called "scalawags"). Most, however, were conservatives who politically opposed the carpetbagger
Carpetbagger
Carpetbaggers was a pejorative term Southerners gave to Northerners who moved to the South during the Reconstruction era, between 1865 and 1877....

s, Freedmen and scalawags who comprised the Republican Party.

See also

  • Culture of the Southern United States
    Culture of the Southern United States
    The Culture of the Southern United States, or Southern Culture, is a subculture of the United States that is perhaps America's most distinct, in the minds both of its residents and of those in other parts of the country...

  • Jeffersonian democracy
    Jeffersonian democracy
    Jeffersonian Democracy, so named after its leading advocate Thomas Jefferson, is a term used to describe one of two dominant political outlooks and movements in the United States from the 1790s to the 1820s. The term was commonly used to refer to the Democratic-Republican Party which Jefferson...

  • The National Grange of the Order of Patrons of Husbandry, a farmers organization founded in 1867 and still in operation
  • Sharecropping
    Sharecropping
    Sharecropping is a system of agriculture in which a landowner allows a tenant to use the land in return for a share of the crop produced on the land . This should not be confused with a crop fixed rent contract, in which a landowner allows a tenant to use the land in return for a fixed amount of...

    , where the farmer does not own the land
  • Yeoman
    Yeoman
    Yeoman refers chiefly to a free man owning his own farm, especially from the Elizabethan era to the 17th century. Work requiring a great deal of effort or labor, such as would be done by a yeoman farmer, came to be described as "yeoman's work"...

    , the independent farmer
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