Edit: my apologies that was clearly meant to say “pre-war.” Apple has been a little aggressive with text corrections lately!

It seems to me that from a labor economics point of view a lot of white southerners probably had a hard time “competing” with slave labor and might have been opposed to the practice, but at the same time I’d be more or less unsurprised to hear that poor whites in south bought the racial superiority message to a point where they never really opposed slavery.