History Buffs: why did all southerns support slavery?

Question:Given the fact that three-fourths of southern whites did not own slaves, Why did virtually all of them support slavery as an institution?

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker: Given the fact that three-fourths of southern whites did not own slaves, Why did virtually all of them support slavery as an institution?

The reason that most Southern Whites supported slavery in the prewar south is really one of class and not race. No matter how dirt poor or uneducated a white man was, even the day laborers who worked side by side with slaves in the fields, a white man was still better than a black man. Its called the Southern Aristocracy. Southern society was divided into many different classes. There were the rich land owners, the merchant class, the small farmers, the lower classes, and then the slaves. When the Civil War started many of the poor whites enlisted to protect that social class system. They saw the Abolitionists as a threat to their daily life and their right to live as they saw fit.

Read Eric Foner's works for a more detailed answer.

The southern economy depended on the slaves doing the works for them.

Not all of them did support slavery. The anti-slavery movement was present in the south as well as the north (I'm not sure how strong it was though.)

If you're asking this on the basis that the Civil War was fought about the slaves. This is not true. The emancipation proclomation didn't come in until later in the war. The origanal reason for the Civil War was States Rights.

That was how they made money, even if they didn't actually own a slave, they still were able to make profits from the products that were produced by slaves.

It's like how the owner of your local Sunoco supports gasoline powered cars even though he doesn't actually own an oil well.

My southern family (six main lines) were Unionist in Kentucky, Virginia, Tennessee and Mississippi. They held no slaves and had little contact with coastal slave plantations. There were more Unionist strongholds in the south that organizations like the League of the South care to acknowledge. Your assertion of the support of slavery is without merit and is not historically accurate.

Economic domination as was found in the institution of slavery was in turn applied to the control of the white underclass as well. Dominion by any name is slavery.

Check the link below.

They didn't. However, for whatever reason, there were no shortage of volunteers to go try to prevent the hated Yankees from imposing their overall governmental and ethical philosophy on the southerners.

Your premise is a false one. Not all "southerners" supported slavery. In fact there were many that detested it, mostly on religious grounds. Just as there were slave owners in the northern states. The dispute that started the Civil war was the question of States Rights.

Many of those that thought slavery was wrong, also did not wish to have the federal government dictate what any state could do.

Slaves were needed to work the fields at the plantations. It was cheap labor and the over head was low.Made the owner rich. It was also accepted because money talks. You can not fight big money.

The notion that the Civil War was not about slavery, but rather state's rights is absurd. The southern states wanted to protect the right to own slaves and perpetuate the institution. The Fugitive Slave Act was an absolute assault on state's rights; perhaps we should argue that the North invaded the South in order to destroy the tyrannous slave power that manipulated the federal government into shackling their state's rights.
In any event, many non-slave holders in the South benefited from slavery. Plantation owners regularly rented the services of their slaves and many non-slave holding whites were employed in the business of slavery in one form or another, including involvement in slave patrols. As was pointed out earlier, the prospect of abolition threatened to disrupt the social strata in a way unthinkable to most.

I would say "most" rather than "all" would be more accurate. Southern women in particular seem to have sometimes favoured abolition. In 'Aermica's women' Gail Collins writes:

"In all my life I have only met one or two womenfolk who were not abolitonists in their hearts - and hot ones, too" an overseer told Mary Chenut, a wealthy Carolinian. Although only a handful of Southern women ever spoke out publicly against slavery, there were a number of instances in which women surrpetitiously helped their own family slaves to escpae. A new Orleans slave, whoo was being sold to Georgian traders, was freed from his handcuffs by his young mistress, who pointed out the North Star to him and told him to follow it. When a Maryland plantation owner died and the slaves were scheduled for sale to pay his debts, the dead man's granddaughter visited the slave quarters and helped them to get away. In mIssissippi, a fugitive slave who sought refuge with his former owner was warned by the man's wife that her husband was planning to turn him in. She gave him money and directions that led him to the north. There is also some evidence that women who owned slaves were more likely to regard them as human beings. They emancipated favored slaves in their wills more frequently than men did and seemed more sensitive to the breaking up of slave families. When they wrote to relatives who had relocated on the frontier, women often inquired by name about the slaves who had been taken west with the settlers, something their husbands and sons almost never did. Some white women developed deep and lasting friendships with female slaves, most often the nurse who had been the family "mammy" (Susan Davis Hutchinson reported paying a condolence call on a friend upon the death of a slave "who had been more of a mother than a servant to her").

But in general, women seemed to dislike slavery mainly because they found it so difficult to handle the slaves. "I sometimes think I wold not care if they all did go, they are so much trouble to me" wrote one Southern housewife in a typical outburst. Sarah Gayle, the wife of an Alabama governor, berated herself for losing her temper with the slaves and wrote in her journal "I would be willing to spend the rest of my life at the North, where I never should see the face of another *****." Just as Northern women complained about the difficultly of getting good servants, the Southern women complained bitterly about their slaves. Absent the incentive of wages, slaves were motivated mainly by the fear of punishment, and although some white women did whip their servants, most did not really have the power to instill physical fear.

Southern women constantly popinted out that unlike Northern women, they were responsible for housing and clothing their servants and tending them when they were sick. They frequently described themselves as the real slaves. Caroline Merrick, who admitted that much of the comfort of her life was due to her servants, nonetheless felt the "common idea of tyranny and ill-usage of slaves was often reversed" and claimed to have been "subject at times to exactions and dictations of the black people...which now seem almost too extraordinary to relate." Southern women fel they had to to go to a great deal of troubel to look after slaves, who did not go to a great deal of trouble for them. But their claims that they wanted to see an end to the system were mostly imaginary, as demonstrated by how miserable they were when the slaves actually left. The housewives did not want to do the work themselves - they simply wanted the people who did it for them to work harder.

if Southern women ever really hated slavery, it was because they feared it was sexually corrupting their men. "Slavery degrades the white man more than the ***** and oh exerts a most deleterious effect upon our children" wrote Getrude thomas of Georgia, who suspected that both her father and husband had black mistresses. Catherine Hammond, who remained loyal to her philandering husband during a scandal involving his conduct with his nieces - her dead sister's children, did leave him in 1850 because he refused to give up his slave mistress. In an indication of what a Southern male who had been taught to dominate could be like, Hammond blamed the rupture on the "utter want of refinement and tone" in his wife's family.

"God forgive us, but ours is a monstrous system" wrote Mary Chesnut. Like many of her fellow Southerners, she disliked the institution yet wanted the service. But on the subject of sex, her intense feeling was uncomlicated. The most famous remark in her diaries was that every Southern lady "tells you who is the father of all the mulatto children in everyboyd's household, but those in her own she seems to think drop from the clouds, or pretends so to think."'