In David Hackett Fischer's Albion's Seed, about the four distinct waves of British colonization of North America and their distinct regional cultures, he makes the case that the white farmers who settled the southern Appalachians, Kentucky, and Tennessee didn't see themselves as being in the same line of work as the export-oriented plantation owners: white tenant farmers grew food for local consumption, white plantation owners and their black slaves grew tobacco, and ultimately cotton, for export.

He also lays out the case that the wealth gap between the plantation owners and the tenant farmers has long been culturally managed. The Scottish/Irish immigrants who made up the bulk of the tenant farmers took it for granted that no other social order was possible, that feudalism of some kind was inevitable, that as far as they knew all of humanity always had and always would live in a world where a tiny minority of wealthy government officials owned everything and everybody else had to pay them rent. The only thing that would drive them to rebel against those politician/landlords was disrespect.

Racial politics served this system well. Lowland south plantation owners could buy up and own whole states, charging white farmers such high rents that they lived little better than slaves, but by treating the tenant farmers as "white people," as better than "black people," they reassured them that they were being treated as equals.