Plain Folk of the Old South

Plain Folk of the Old South is a 1949 book by American Vanderbilt University historian Frank Lawrence Owsley, one of the Southern Agrarians. In it he used statistical data to analyze the makeup of Southern United States of America society, contending that yeoman farmers made up a larger middle class than was generally thought.

Historical perspectives

Historians have long debated the social, economic, and political roles of Southern classes. Terms used by scholars for the self-sufficient farmers at the middle economic level include "common people" and "yeomen." At the lowest level were the struggling poor whites, known disparagingly in some areas of the South as "Crackers."

In the colonial and antebellum years, subsistence farmers tended to settle in the back country and uplands. They generally did not raise commodity crops and owned few or no slaves. Jeffersonian and Jacksonian Democrats favored the term "yeoman" for a land-owning farmer. It emphasized an independent political spirit and economic self-reliance.

Views of Olmsted, Dodd, and Phillips

Northerners such as Frederick Law Olmsted, who traveled in and wrote about the 1850s South, through the early 20th-century historians such as William E. Dodd and Ulrich B. Phillips, assessed common southerners as minor players in the antebellum social, economic, and political life of the South.

Twentieth-century romantic portrayals of the antebellum South, such as Margaret Mitchell's novel Gone with the Wind (1936) and the 1939 film adaptation, mostly ignored the yeomen. The nostalgic view of the South emphasized the elite planter class of wealth and refinement, controlling large plantations and numerous slaves.