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Plain Folk of the Old South. By Frank L. Owsley. (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1949.)

Historians of the Old South had traditionally described the class structure of the society as one divided between the rich and poor. Frank L. Owsley changed this trend by asserting that the dichotomous world of elite planter and disenfranchised farmer did not exist. Plain Folk of the Old South, published in 1949, describes a South with a multilayered society with social mobility at all levels and provides an in-depth investigation on the foundations of this society as well as its characteristics. Overall, this book is somewhat dated but still an interesting read for historiographical purpose

Owsley begins by outlining the previous historical descriptions of the South to explain how the elite planter vs. poor farmer paradigm first developed. Earlier works relied heavily upon the writings of traveler’s passing through the antebellum South. He argues that there were simply a number of cultural misunderstandings that led these writers to assume that the planters were a minority elite controlling a vast majority of very poor farmers. The first of which, Owsley argues, is the traveler’s own mindset. Many were northerners traveling through the South and were seeing what they wanted to see. If these northerners wanted to see a society divided along rigid class lines, then they would. Furthermore, their unfamiliarity with the region also contributes to their inaccurate accounts.

The largest single area which Owsley focuses on is the misinterpretation of the antebellum Southern economy. The travelers often saw the expansive plantations juxtaposed to small lots of land held by squatters in the backwoods and assumed poverty on the part of the latter. The author, however, points out that the economy was often in a state of transition in the decades prior to the Civil War. Settlers coming east often developed a pastoral economy first and after a foothold was established, an agricultural system. In the backwoods, the traveler’s would have vastly underestimated the wealth of some of these southerners because they likely would not have seen their herds due to the terrain and assumed that the meager cultivated gardens and plots were their only source of income. Moreover, unless they stayed in the region for a significant amount of time, the traveler’s would not have a concept that this economy even existed. Although pastoralism was fading from the Old South, it still was a somewhat viable way of life for many southerners and they certainly were not as poor as the accounts say.

The rest of the monograph describes how the majority of Southerners lived, their folkways and their role in society as a whole. Southerners generally had a strong sense of community and solidarity and activities in these communities kept rural society bound together with some degree of social cohesion. Although this book is by no means a complete description of Southern customs, it is an interesting first step in that direction. He concludes with a discussion of the yeoman southerner’s role in society. He argues that rather than abject poverty and ignorance, the ordinary southerners had opportunities to get an education and succeed. They fulfilled a place as the burgeoning middle class of the antebellum South.

Owsley’s Plain Folk of the Old South has assuredly been revised but still stands as a groundbreaking work in describing the world of ordinary Southerners. There are a great number of gaps in this study including a discussion of slavery which is only dealt with passingly by saying that many southerners besides the large planter’s owned slaves. His discussions of the folkways of the Old South seem plausible at times and a little far-fetched at others. Finally, what makes the book interesting in hindsight is the methodology Owsley used to write the book. Essentially, he was using the methods of the New Social History a decade before that field really took hold. Overall, this is a well-written book that opened new doors for further investigation.

Michael Green

Frank Lawrence Owsley. Plain Folk of the Old South. Baton Rogue, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1949.

The Old South is often portrayed as a three-tiered society, consisting of an elite upper class of wealthy planters, lower class poor whites, and slaves. This inaccurate depiction owes more to the biased writings of anti-slavery crusaders, Margaret Mitchell’s novel Gone with the Wind, and various other Hollywood movies than actual history as Frank Lawrence Owsley’s classic treatise, Plain Folk of the Old South, proves. Owsley contends that in actuality there existed a significant but forgotten white middle class in the antebellum South. According to Owsley, “the core of the social structure was a massive body of plain folk who were neither rich nor very poor. These were employed in numerous occupations; but the majority secured their food, clothing, and shelter from some rural pursuit, chiefly farming and livestock grazing” (8). The majority of middle class whites owned their own land, and Owsley’s conclusions relating to the rural South’s extensive reliance on livestock grazing and corn production would be later be echoed in Sam Bowers Hilliard’s famous study Hog Meat and Hoecake, which analyzed the antebellum Southern food economy and diet.

As Owsley’s notes, only one in three Southern families owned slaves, and the majority of those owned less than ten slaves. The remaining population of nonslaveholders occasionally hired additional slave labor from their neighbors during harvests, but most relied on their own efforts and were far from the stereotypical image of lazy “white trash.” Owsley’s opening chapter examines the settlement of the South, which occurred largely on isothermic patterns, with the Upper South drawing most of its population from the states of Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina while the Lower South gained a larger proportion of immigrants from South Carolina and Georgia. Owsley demonstrates conclusively that these settlers were not driven from the best lands by large planters, but instead chose to acquire land most similar to that which they were familiar with and knew best how to exploit. The Ozarks, for example, were settled by small farmers from the Appalachian Mountains. These settlers migrated in large family groups and communities, preceded by a small party of young men, rather than as the idealized individual lone pioneer. Owsley’s second chapter studies Southern folk traditions, such as religious revivals, community aid to those in need, corn shucking parties, and logrollings. Owsley observes that “The rural environment of the Old South where the whole family worked together, hunted together, went to church and parties together, and expected to be buried together and to come to judgment together on the Last Day, helps explain the closely knit family group” (95).

For his detailed analysis, Owsley relied on “church records, wills, administration of estates, county-court minutes, marriage licenses, inventory of estates, trial records, mortgage books, deed books, country tax books and the manuscript returns of the Federal censuses” (6). Owsley also studied county histories, biographies and memoirs, and newspaper accounts to illustrate the lives of the plain folk, who rarely left firsthand accounts of their lives.

The two concluding chapters of the book examine the role of the plain folk in society and include a statistical analysis of sample counties in Southern states to demonstrate the nature of land ownership in relation to soil quality and slave population. The most interesting of Owsley conclusion’s states that the plain folk of the South were more prepared to endure the hardships of the Civil War and Reconstruction than upper class planters due to their lifelong experience with manual labor and self-reliance, and he argues that “It is not too much to say that the plain folk thus rescued the South from complete and perhaps, final ruin with little or no aid or sympathy from any sources whatsoever outside the borders of their own section” (138). Plain Folk of the Old South, although somewhat dated in its terminology and presentation, is an excellent resource and remains a useful study for scholars of the twenty-first century.

Plain Folk of the Old South. By Frank L. Owsley. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. 1949.

Frank Owsley refutes the assumption that the South was comprised only of planters, slaves, and poor whites and examines the place of the middle class in Southern society. Members of that group included the “plain folk” who embraced the traditions of self-respect, independence, and love of freedom held by their agrarian European ancestors. These men and women did not see manual labor as degrading, but as an honorable means of existence. Owsley uses church records, tax lists, census reports, wills, mortgage and tax books, estate inventories, biographies, and a host of other material to document his claim that the agricultural population was simply divided between slaveholders and non-slaveholders. Rather, the sources “reveal the existence of a great complexity” of elements that were used to categorize members of all socio-economic classes.

Owsley suggests that most settlers selected land that was peculiarly reminiscent of the environment of their youth. Apart from enjoying the familiarity of climate and soil, settlers hoped to continue to grow the same crops, fruits, and vegetables. The stress with moving one’s family to a new location was somewhat lessened by the assumption that similar geographical features would require the same knowledge, farming implements, and skills that had previously been mastered. The psychological aspects of relocation were also diminished when communities decided to migrate together, whether en masse, or in stages. The movement of extended families, and even whole congregations, thus ensured that “newer states and territories were often transplanted organisms rather than synthetic bodies” (pg. 63).

This pattern of settlement and migration greatly impacted the social and economic structure of both the Old and the New South. Herders were forced to move a number of times in order to escape the expanding population. As regions became more crowded, the opportunities for free grazing diminished and settlers were forced to cultivate poor soil without much knowledge of agriculture.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the book deals with the development of a unique “folk” culture. The Great Migration to the West after the War of 1812 “diluted the remnants of the old aristocracy” and allowed yeoman principles to form the basis of a new society. Most importantly, the common national heritage of the vast percentage of settlers allowed a collective value system to emerge relatively unopposed. The appearance, manners, customs, and speech shared by most of the plain folk marked them as distinct from the rest of the nation and strengthened their sense of kinship.

Indeed, the family played an extremely important role in these communities. Families lived, worked, socialized, and prayed together, and elder members were respected for their wisdom and experience. This class admired the success of their planter neighbors, but the ambition of most plain folk centered on securing enough land sufficient for the needs of their dependents.

One of the most charming elements of the book involves a discussion of courting and wedding rituals amongst families in Tennessee, Georgia, Mississippi, and Alabama. It is by examining these rites of passage that the reader begins to gain a more intimate understanding of the rich sense of community and belief-systems held by a people largely overlooked by historians. Owsley’s work is peppered with tables and maps. While these documents add to the scholarly nature of the text, its true value is to be found in the lively anecdotes that bring the plain folk to life for the contemporary reader.

In Frank Lawrence Owsley’s Plain Folk of the Old South, the author disputes the idea that the society of the antebellum South was divided into three classes: planters, poor whites, and slaves. Owsley maintains that Southern society had a great deal more complexity than merely three classes. Additionally, Owsley remarks that the middle class played a significant role within Southern society. Although the letters, diaries, and account books of the less wealthy have long since disappeared from the historical scene, Owsley bases his study upon the church records, county records, and the Federal Census returns of the antebellum era.

In the opening chapter, Owsley discusses the complexities of the slaveholders and nonslaveholders in the antebellum era. For example, Owsley maintains that among the slaveholders there existed the great planters who possessed a thousand acres of land and owned hundreds of slaves. Large farmers who possessed three to four hundred acres of land and owned five to ten slaves also existed with the slaveholding community in the South. Among the nonslaveholders there existed large farmers who possessed between two hundred and a thousand acres of land and employed hired labor to cultivate the land. Another group that existed within the nonslaveholding community were know as the “one horse farmers” (7). Owsley classifies these farmers as individuals who owned less than one hundred acres of land. These examples offered by Owsley illustrate that a majority of the social structure in the Old South was neither rich nor poor.

Another interesting aspect of Owsley’s work deals with the patterns that emerged from the migration and settlement of the agricultural population in the Southern frontier. Owsley remarks that nostalgia played a prominent role in the migration patterns of the South. Owsley states that farmers and planters migrated into regions similar to the country in which they had recently lived. Thus, the farmers found themselves moving in a westerly direction along isothermal lines. For example, the tobacco and cotton farmers of the lower South settled in the lower Southern territories. Although farmers felt at ease with their new surroundings, Owsley states that the new lands in which these individuals had settled upon may not have had as fertile soil as their previous holdings.

Owsley devotes another portion of his book to a discussion about the Southern folkways. The author maintains that the kinship ties that most Southerners possessed resembled that of the Highland Scots of earlier times. The rural environment of the South helped contribute to this characteristic because the families worked and hunted together in order to survive the frontier conditions.

Religion also played a vital role within the Southern society. Owsley maintains that the rural church represented a central fixture within the Southern community. This was a place in which rich and poor gathered to hear sermons on how to lead a righteous lifestyle. It was also a place in which men and women gathered to mingle and discuss current events. While the church helped unite the community in a religious sense, the social aspects of church attendance brought the Southern society even closer together.

Owsley concludes his work with a statistical analysis of land and slaveholdings in various counties in the upper and lower South. The author remarks that the bulk of the slaveholders in the lower South owned between one and ten slaves. This same group of individuals also owned between 100 to 400 acres of land. Furthermore, these sample counties indicate that the majority of the slaveholders and nonslaveholders in the upper and lower South were farmers falling into the same economic groups.

I would recommend using Owsley’s work for an undergraduate history course about the Old South because not only does the book dispute the notion that the majority of the South was comprised of merely rich planters and poor whites, it also offers readers a wonderful account of the customs and traditions associated with Southern society. Additionally, the way in which Owsley includes personal letters and accounts of Southerners throughout the book adds to the work’s accessibility.

Plain Folk of the Old South. By Frank L. Owsley. (Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press, 1949. Pp. 235).

Traditionally historians have divided the population of the Old South into three classes--planters, poor whites, and slaves. Frank Owsley contends that the antebellum South was a complex society and contained a large, overlooked middle-class. The planters kept diaries, ledgers, and wrote letters that document their presence. The middle-class left few such records. Therefore, Owsley uses the 1850 and 1860 censuses to investigate the presence and extent of the middle-class in Greene County, Alabama, in middle Tennessee, in Mississippi and in the Georgia Pine Belt. Both these censuses recorded average net worth, acres of land owned--improved and unimproved, type and amounts of crops raised, and on a separate schedule, the number of slaves owned. Tax rolls, wills, and deeds supplemented these data.

The first author to perpetuate the three-class view of southern society was Frederick Olmstead. Olmstead, in his two books on travels in the pre-Civil War South used denigrated class-based propaganda to enhance his arguments against slavery and to exaggerate the ill affect of slavery on Southern society. Ullrich Phillips picked up this theme by British travelers and later introduced it in his history of the South. In the 1930s, the Vanderbilt agrarians countered these contentions. Adhering to Frederick Jackson Turner's theory of the evolution of the frontier, Owsley found that herdsmen and Celtic immigrants settled primarily in the South where society progressed from herdsmen, small landowners, to a planters' culture. Grady McWhinney and Jordan continue this reasoning in their more recent analyses of the development of the South.

By 'Plain Folks' Owsley refers to the small landowners and yeoman farmers that made up the bulk of the Southern population. The urban professional classes and merchants are included but are not the focus of his investigation. The large landowners, slaveholders, and professionals that dominated the upper classes of southern society evolved from small freeholders. These large landowners increased their holding by buying and clearing marginal, usually swampy, land near their original holdings using their large force of slaves during the 'off season'. The poor whites were primarily tenant farmers who had not been shifted off the best land by the rich plantation owners but rather were usually young couples who had not yet accumulated enough capital to acquire their own land.

The immigration, herding, and development of the Southern public lands comprise the first portion of the book. Small groups of kinsmen would send friends and relatives into newly opened public lands to find a suitable spot to which they would immigrate in successive ways forming a new closely-knit settlement. The first wave were usually young landless sons who, under the guidance of a family elder, chose land as similar as possible to that they already farmed, planted a crop, and prepared living quarters. The elders returned to the families and moved with them to the new area. Once the habitation became comfortable, older family members and more timid neighbors who had remained behind sold their holding and joined their children and grandchildren in the growing community. Succeeding generations found that their children could not find land nearby on which to establish their families and the process repeated itself.

Subsequent chapters dwell on the Southern folkways. Owsley contends that by this time the South had established a distinct set of values and culture different from the eastern seaboard states. Foods (corn and pork based), speech patterns (a slow drawl probably not acquired from the Negro slaves), close knit families, intense religious experiences, and education (Southerners were more literate than their Northern counterparts) composed several elements of this evolving and distinct culture.

Finally, the author spends the last third of the book delving into the extent of slave holdings in the South. The slave holding population constituted approximately one-third of the white population of the South. Over sixty percent of these owned ten or fewer slaves. Seventy five percent of the Southern population owned farms. Many of the remaining thirty percent lived in urban areas and owned homes, shops, but few slaves.

The farmers in the cotton belts were much more likely to own slaves that the herdsmen in the Pine Barrens. Less than ten percent of the population owned more than five hundred acres or owned more than fifty slaves. He extrapolates from these data that the large landowners were not displacing the small farmers from the best cotton lands.

Owsley was one of the leaders of the Southern agrarian movement known as Vanderbilt Ten who, in I'll Take My Stand, espoused a different view of Southern history. After World War II, he was the Southern History professor at the University of Alabama. His is one of the first books to use statistical extrapolations from census reports to reach historical conclusions and inspired the use of census tables as sources for historical research in other areas throughout the United States.