So when speaking about Southern society in the Antebellum period, what is important to understand is that the South was not simply a society in which people owned slaves, but rather it was a slave society. I hope that the difference is appreciable, but to make it clear, what I mean to say is that slavery permeated it at every level, from the richest of plantation owners with hundreds of slaves working their fields, to the lowliest backwoods 'cracker' barely scraping sustenance from their small patch of dirt. I'm incredibly fond of this quote from Bertram Wyatt-Brown in describing what a slave society means, as it also will be of the utmost importance in the next point:
Policing one's own ethical sphere was the natural complement of the patriarchal order. When Southerners spoke of liberty, they generally meant the birthright to self-determination of one's place in society, not the freedom to defy sacred conventions, challenge longheld assumptions, or propose another scheme of moral or political order. If someone, especially a slave, spoke or acted in a way that invaded that territory or challenged that right, the white man so confronted had the inalienable right to meet the lie and punish the opponent. Without such a concept of white liberty, slavery would have scarcely lasted a moment. There was little paradox or irony in this juxtaposition from the cultural perspective. Power, liberty, and honor were all based upon community sanction, law, and traditional hierarchy as described in the opening section.
The point is, the slave was a foil, of sorts, something which any whiteman could hold himself up against, and in fact, in many ways it was the non-slave owning whites who felt invested in the system. Not only was "slave owner" something to which a poor whiteman could aspire to, but the slaves provided him with someone who, no matter how low he might sink, he still could look down upon. The thought of a blackman outranking him would be an abhorrent thought to a poor white man. One very interesting aspect which Wyatt-Brown talks about in "Southern Honor" is the slave patrols, which would generally be made up of lowerclass whites, and led by slightly better off Yeoman farmers, and often found themselves in conflict with slaveowners, especially those who were seen as too lenient and lacking in discipline. The men of the slave patrol had a vested interest in ensuring the blacks remained the lowest rung of society, and they felt threatened by masters who, to quote one incident "upheld his negroes in their rascality" - in this case didn't whip one of his slaves enough for a perceived transgression.
The fear of a post-slavery society was a terrifying prospect, and one which was played upon heavily in the bid to 'sell' secession. The best example of this comes from the Southern Commissioners, men who were sent by the earliest states to secede to other slave states then 'on the fence' in an effort to sway them. In their speeches and correspondence, they make apple reference to the basest of fears of what free blacks, unfettered from the institution of slavery by Northern abolitionists, will unleash. They don't only speak to the possibility of black persons negatively affecting the labor market at the expense of poor whites, or of the 'negroes' elevating themselves above whitemen, "the slaveholder and nonslaveholder sharing the same fate; all be degraded to a position of equality with free negroes", a prospect that was bad enough, but speak of whitemen being murdered in their sleep, "wives and daughters [subjected] to pollution and violation to gratify the lusts of half-civilized Africans", and in the end, an "eternal war of races, desolating the land with blood, and utterly wasting and destroying all the resources of the countr".
So the point is that slavery, and the desire to protect it, was far more than simply about the economic interests of the planter class with their plantations, or the small farmer who could best afford one or two. The very structure of Southern society was in too many ways focused around slavery, and what it meant to be free, to be white, to be a man, were all set up in explicit opposition to the enslaved blacks. To be sure, we can find an unending parade of Southerners, both slaveowner (roughly 1/3 of Southern soldiers came from slaveowning families) and nonslaveowner (roughly 2/3 of Southern soldiers came from nonslaveowning families) alike, who echo the sentiments of one Kentuckian in his desire to emulate Washington in "bursting the bonds of tyranny" or a Texan enlisted man who wrote home that "Liberty and freedom in this western world [...] so we dissolved our alliance with this oppressive foe and are now enlisted in 'The Holy Cause of Liberty and Independence' again" . If I had the time or inclination I could find thousands of those, as we have no shortage of letters and diaries preserved from this period, but we must return to Wyatt-Brown above in understanding what Liberty meant to a Southerner. To them Liberty was a very different concept than what it is to us today. Liberty was part of slave society, and defined by slave society. They were going to war in the name of Liberty, but that Liberty was not only the Liberty to own slaves, which many of them could only aspire to, but to define oneself in opposition to a slave, which was available to every white man.
To be sure, not all necessarily expressed themselves in such 'high-falutin' terms - and we can find our fair share of grumblings that "this is a Rich mans Woar But the poor man has to doo the fiting". In his study of letters and diaries, James M. McPherson notes that it patriotic and ideological sentiments were more common with soldiers from slaveowning families, or from states with high slave populations (he notes the most interesting difference being "82 percent from South Carolina avowed patriotic convictions, compared with 47 percent from North Carolina"), as well as a similar split with soldiers who joined in the first year, and those later on, but but even those who saw their need to fight as a more basic defense of home and family from Yankee aggression were fighting for a way of life which they saw as threatened, and one which would be irreparably changed with abolition.
"Apostles of Disunion" by Charles Dew
"Southern Honor" by Bertram Wyatt-Brown
"What They Fought For, 1861-1865" by James McPherson
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