In a review, Ken Burns Civil War series. I love it and have watched it numerous times over the years. My question is, in the 26 years since it's release, have any of the facts presented been subsequently disproven or fallen under heavy scrutiny?, /u/Georgy_K_Zhukov wrote,
Sharret sees one driving factor to most-likely be the market, a view that ties in with the reconciliation narrative mentioned earlier by Lundberg. Simply put, to have broad appeal, Burns couldn't just say "that the Confederacy was a retrograde, white-supremacist nation that, far from extolling individual rights, was extremely totalitarian even to white."
I guess from the quoting and italics that that's Christopher Sharret's statement.
To what extent could the US South before the Civil War be called "totalitarian"? I think a definition like "strives to regulate every aspect of public and private life wherever feasible" is entirely inaccurate.
Further, to what extent did those states oppress white people? I have a vague memory that at least some did have some strong restrictions: punishing advocacy of abolition with death, censorship of the mail, forbidding white people to teach slaves, forbidding manumission, forbidding interracial marriage. (So they were vehemently saying that slave owners had full control over their "property", but then telling them what they were not allowed to do with their property.) Do I remember right? Were there more restrictions?
I asked a similar question to AskHistorians and received some good replies here
Based on that, I read "Cotton Kingdom" and would recommend you read it as it is a great book that observed southern culture.
In summary, your assumptions of how things were are pretty accurate. My opinion is that if you were a slave, you'd see the Southern Governments as totalitarian. If you were a wealthy plantation owner who actively believed in slavery, you lived in a wonderful democracy. If you were an average Southerner, you were a poor white, that meant you had no land, no right to vote, no slaves of your own, little education, horrible wages, and a pretty poor existence. Nobody was actively bossing you around in a "totalitarian" manner but you would have been unable to change society or pick yourself up into a better situation. You'd live a poor subsistence lifestyle. If you didn't believe in slavery and spoke out against it, you'd do so at your own peril. Certainly men were run out of town for that. I don't know how many were murdered for such speech but people knew to only whisper such ideas in public places.