I have not read that book however I can share some interesting information on this topic.

First of all, slavery made some American plantation owners amongst the wealthiest people on the planet. Measured in slaves assets only. some owned hundreds or even thousands of slaves valued at roughly $1,500 each. A typical American labourer at the time only made roughly $200 to $500 per year. Before the civil war started, there were roughly 4 million slaves in America. So, that property in man, ignoring the cash value of the crops they produced was of enormous value to the men who owned them.

However, slavery had a depressive effect on the white Southerners who did not own slaves. A couple years before the war, a Southerner wrote a book backed with a lot of economic data that blasted the institution of slavery and its effect of condemning the non slave owning whites into poverty and ignorance. In the book The Impending Crises of the South by Hinton Helper went into extensive comparisons of States in the North versus States in the South and properties in the north versus properties in the South. He produced hundreds of examples of the strength and benefits of free labor in the north and contrasted it to the impoverishment of the South. As an example, northern farmland was worth double and even three times that of southern farmland. The value of Northern hay was worth more than the value of southern cotton. Northern per capita GDP was roughly double that of the Southern states.

Helper basically called on the poor whites of the South to revolt against the plantation class. His book was banned in the south and some southern men who were caught owning the book were hung. So, the revolutionary idea didn’t spread.