Plain Folk of the Old South

Plain Folk of the Old South is a 1949 book by Vanderbilt University historian Frank Lawrence Owsley, one of the Southern Agrarians. In it he used statistical data to analyze the makeup of Southern society, contending that yeoman farmers made up a larger middle class than was generally thought.

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" and "yeomen." At a lower status level are the poor whites known disparagingly, in some areas of the South, as "Crackers."

In the colonial and antebellum years, subsistence farmers tended to settle in the back country and uplands. They generally did not raise commodity crops and owned few or no slaves. Jeffersonian and Jacksonian Democrats favored the term "yeoman" for a land-owning farmer. It emphasized an independent political spirit and economic self-reliance.

Northerners such as Frederick Law Olmsted, who traveled in and wrote about the 1850s South, through the early 20th-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, such as Margaret Mitchell's novel Gone with the Wind (1936) 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.

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