out 70 per cent of the non-slaveholders owned the land which they farmed. The bulk of slave holders were small farmers and not oligarchs. While taken together they owned more slaves and more land than the big planters, taken individually the majority of slaveholders owned from one to four slaves and less than three hundred acres of land. The non-slaveholders, 70 percent of whom, as we have noted, were landowners, were not far removed economically from the small slaveholders to whom we have just referred. While the majority of slaveholders owned from one to three hundred acres of land, 80 per cent of the landowning non-slaveholders owned from one to two hundred acres of land and 20 per cent owned from two hundred to a thousand. Let me repeat: the basic fact disclosed in an analysis of the economic structure of the South, based upon the unpublished census reports and tax books, is that the overwhelming majority of white families in the South, slaveholders and non-slaveholders, unlike the industrial population of the East, owned the means of production. In other words, the average southerner like the average westerner possessed economic independence; and the only kind of influence that could be exercised over his political franchise by the slave oligarchy was a strictly persuasive kind. The South then, like the Northwest, not only held strongly to the democratic ideology but also had a sound economic foundation for a free government. If the destruction of democratic government by the South and its preservation by the North were not the causes of the Civil War, what then were the causes? The surface answer to this question is that in 1861 the southern people desired and attempted to establish their independence and thereby to disrupt the old Union; and that the North took up arms to prevent the South from establishing this independence and to preserve the Union. Looking immediately behind this attempt of the South to establish a separate go...
