Reinterpreting the Plain Folk: Nonslaveholding Whites of the Antebellum South

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This research will result in a book entitled Reinterpreting the Plain Folk: No slaveholding Whites of the Antebellum South to be published with the University Press of Florida. It is based upon extensive archival evidence as well as relevant scholarship of the past two decades and will provide a comprehensive analysis of nonslaveho!ding whites, in all their diversity, on the eve of the Civil War. The quality and quantity of scholarship on American slavery in the last 30 years has transformed our understanding of the society of the antebellum South and slavery books continue to appear at an astonishing rate. By contrast, books on southern nonslaveholders, the over Whelming numerical majority, remain few and far between. Since the 1980s, a number of significant studies have greatly increased our appreciation of certain aspects of the nonslaveholding experience. However, recent literature has oveJWhelmingly taken a local and particularistic approach thereby exacerbating the problem of successfully placing lower class whites within the framework of society in the Old South. Thus we know a great deal about ordinary whites in some states, Mississippi and Georgia for example, and about certain groups of nonslaveholders, like artisans, but we have no overall assessment considering nonslaveholders as a whole.There remains great difficulty in defining and conceptualising the heterogeneous mixture of farmers, tenants, herders, artisans, and labourers, existing in a variety of geographical locations, who have variously been described as crackers, poor whites, yeomen, and plain folk. This book will fill that gap by presenting the first general monograph on nonslaveholding whites since Frank Owsley's Plain Folk of the South (1949). Concentrating on the period between 1850 and 1865, the primary aim of this research is to blend together the best scholarship with archival sources to write a single, authoritative, account about southern nonslaveholders and their relations with slaves and planters on the eve of the American Civil War.