Plain Folk of the Old South

The Plain Folk of the Old South, often called yeomen, were the middling white United States Southerners of the 19th century who owned few slaves or none.

Historical perspectives

Historians have long debated the social, economic and political roles. Terms used by scholars include "common people", "yeomen" and "Crackers." The term favored in Jeffersonian Democracy and Jacksonian Democracy was "yeoman", which emphasized an independent political spirit and economic self-reliance.

Views of Olmsted, Dodd and Phillips

From the travel accounts of Frederick Law Olmsted in the 1850s through the early-twentieth-century interpretations of historians William E. Dodd and Ulrich B. Phillips, common southerners were portrayed as minor players in the antebellum period.

Romantic portrayals, especially Margaret Mitchell's "Gone with the Wind" (1937) and its 1939 film, ignored them. Novelist Erskine Caldwell's "Tobacco Road" portrayed the degraded condition of whites dwelling beyond the great plantations.

Frank Lawrence Owsley

The major challenge came from historian Frank Lawrence Owsley in "Plain Folk of the Old South" (1949). It ignited a long historiographical debate. Owsley started with the writings 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. Owsley's "Plain Folk of the Old South," says Vernon Burton, is, "one of the most influential works on southern history ever written." Using their own newly invented codes, the Owsleys created data bases from the manuscript federal census returns, tax and trial records, and local government documents and wills.

"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 landless and slaveless white southerners. [Hyde (2005)] Owsley assumed that shared economic interests united southern farmers without considering the vast difference inherent in the planters' commercial agriculture versus the yeomen's subsistence life style.

Recent scholarship: Orville Vernon Burton and others

In his study of Edgefield County, South Carolina, 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 never very distinct. Stephanie McCurry argues, 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 worked their land themselves alongside any slaves they owned. Ownership of large numbers of slaves made the work of planters completely managerial.

Wetherington (2005) argues the plain folk (of Georgia) supported secession to defend their families, homes, and notions ofwhite 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" (p. 12). 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 explains why so many men enlisted: they wanted to be worthy of the privileges of men, including the affectionsof female patriots. (p. 145). By March 1862, the piney woods region 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." (p. 171). 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's forces came nearer. During Reconstruction, plain folk viewed freedmen as the greatest affront and humiliating symbol of Yankee victory, so they turned their hatred against Carpetbaggers and refused to tolerate Scalawags.

References

* Stephen V. Ash, "Poor Whites in the Occupied South, 1861-1865," "Journal of Southern History," 57 (February 1991), in JSTOR;
* Bruce Jr., Dickson D. "And They All Sang Hallelujah: Plain Folk Camp Meeting Religion, 1800-1845" (1974)
* Orville Vernon Burton, "In My Father's House Are Many Mansions: Family and Community in Edgefield, South Carolina" (1985)
* Campbell, Randolph B. "Planters and Plain Folks: The Social Structure of the Antebellum South," in John B. Boles and Evelyn Thomas Nolen, eds., "Interpreting Southern History"(1987), 48-77;
* Carey, Anthony Gene. "Frank L. Owsley's Plain Folk of the Old South after Fifty Years," in Glenn Feldman, ed., "Reading Southern History: Essays on Interpreters and Interpretations" (2001)
* Cash, Wilbur J. "The Mind of the South" (1941),
* Flynt, J. Wayne "Dixie's Forgotten People: The South's Poor Whites" (1979). deals with 20th century.
* Cecil-Fronsman, Bill. "Common Whites: Class and Culture in Antebellum North Carolina" (1992)
* Steven Hahn, "The Roots of Southern Populism: Yeoman Farmers and the Transformation of the Georgia Upcountry, 1850-1890" (1983)
* J. William Harris, "Plain Folk and Gentry in a Slave Society: White Liberty and Black Slavery in Augusta's Hinterlands" (1985)
* Hyde Jr., Samuel C. "Plain Folk Reconsidered: Historiographical Ambiguity in Search of Definition." "Journal of Southern History." 71#4 (2005) pp 803+.
* Hyde Jr., Samuel C. "Plain Folk Yeomanry in the Antebellum South," in Boles, ed., "Companion to the American South," 139-55.
* Hyde Jr., Samuel C. ed., "Plain Folk of the South Revisited" (1997).
* * Hyde Jr., Samuel C. "Plain Folk Reconsidered: Historiographical Ambiguity in Search of Definition" "Journal of Southern History" (Nov 2005) vol 71#4
* Hundley, Daniel R. "Social Relations in Our Southern States" (1860; reprint 1979)
* Linden, Fabian. "Economic Democracy in the Slave South: An Appraisal of Some Recent Views," "Journal of Negro History", 31 (April 1946), 140-89 in JSTOR; emphasizes statistical inequality
* Lowe, Richard G. and Randolph B. Campbell, "Planters and Plain Folk: Agriculture in Antebellum Texas" (1987)
* Osthaus, Carl R. "The Work Ethic of the Plain Folk: Labor and Religion in the Old South." "Journal of Southern History" (2004) v. 70#4, 745-82.
* McCurry, Stephanie. "Masters of Small Worlds: Yeoman Households, Gender Relations, and the Political Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Low Country" (1995),
* Grady McWhiney. "In Cracker Culture: Celtic Ways in the Old South" (1988)
* Morgan, Edmund S. "American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia" (1975).
*Newby, I. A. "Plain Folk in the New South: Social Change and Cultural Persistence, 1880-1915" (1989). concentrates on the poorest whites
* Otto, John Solomon. "The Migration of the Southern Plain Folk: An Interdisciplinary Synthesis," "Journal of Southern History," 51 (May 1985), 183-200. in JSTOR
* Owsley, Frank Lawrence. "Plain Folk of the Old South" (1949), the classic study
* Owsley, Frank Lawrence. with Harriet C. Owsley, "The Economic Basis of Society in the Late Ante-Bellum South," "Journal of Southern History" 6 (Feb. 1940): 24-25, in JSTOR
* [http://www.mises.org/journals/jls/3_1/3_1_3.pdf Stromberg, Joseph R., "The War for Southern Independence: A Radical Libertarian Perspective," "Journal of Libertarian Studies" (1979)]
* Wetherington, Mark V. "Plain Folk's Fight: The Civil War and Reconstruction in Piney Woods Georgia." University of North Carolina Press, 2005. ISBN 978-0-8078-2963-9.
* Woodward, C. Vann. "Tom Watson: Agrarian Rebel" (New York, 1938). on Georgia leader 1890-1920
* Wright, Gavin. "'Economic Democracy' and the Concentration of Agricultural Wealth in the Cotton South, 1850-1860," "Agricultural History", 44 (January 1970), 63-93 in JSTOR, a statistical critique of Owsley