re: Who thinks that the south benefited by secession?

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Nothing god damn worse than a yankee who thinks he knows something

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Yankees have always been good at sticking their damn noses into other peoples business and telling you why you are wrong and why they are right. Frick em.

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The vast majority of southern whites did not own slaves. In fact, very few slave owners owned more than a few. This means that nearly all the wealth of the south was owned by a few families. I stand by my assertion that most southern whites were barefoot, illiterate oppressed people who were little economically better than modern day Ethiopians.

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Poor White - They first emerged as a social caste in the Antebellum South, consisting of white, agrarian, economically disadvantaged laborers or squatters often possessing neither land nor slaves.

Poor white - is deeply rooted in the institution of slavery.

Rather than provide wealth as it had for the Southern elite, in stark contrast, slavery considerably hindered progress of whites who did not own slaves by exerting a crowding-out effect eliminating free labor in the region. This effect, compounded by the area's widespread lack of public education and its general practice of endogamy, prevented low-income and low-wealth free laborers from moving to the middle class.

During the American Civil War the Poor White comprised a majority of the combatants in the Confederate Army; afterwards, many labored as poor sharecroppers.

Southern politicians of the day motivated conflict between the Poor White and African Americans as a form of Political Opportunism.

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What a crock of shite.
The southern economy generated enormous wealth and was critical to the economic growth of the entire United States. Well over half of the richest 1 percent of Americans in 1860 lived in the South.

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This .

And in Mississippi/Louisiana are the states(among other Southern states) where the richest Americans resided in 1860 (The South).


Revisionists always come with the misleading 6% of
southerners owned slaves when in fact in Mississippi alone according to 1860 census & slave schedules 49% of Mississippi households owned slaves.

The number of slaves owned vary,but the the number of slaveholding households is indisputable fact. Other secessionist States like S.C., .Georgia, Florida, Alabama ,Louisiana,etc. also had high slave owning percentages.

Your class conscience history of the South and Antebellum America is incorrect. Because of its agrarian nature there was an incredible amount of "mobility" as there were no set classes. Wealthy families could collapse quite quickly due to crop failures, disease and a variety of misfortune. Conversely many of the rich on the eve of the Civil War had come from rather humble beginnings. The nature of farming in the north was rather similar in terms of risk with the exception of the fabulous wealth created by cotton, ironically many of the wealthiest planters were Northerners who came south. Boston's and New York's middle class wealth and prosperity was a result of cotton just as much as New Orleans.

New England did have one of the best lower level education systems in the country for cultural reasons and literacy was certainly higher, but education was not as bad as many make it out to be in the South. There were high levels of literacy in most of the Southern units, as seen by the plethora of diaries and letters historians use as well as newspaper readership, it is estimated around 70 to 80% of Southern whites were literate.

The War was a tragedy, not because people were suckered by elites, but because many elites and the populace in general were short sighted in not understanding the full ramifications of the results.

From what I can tell, you quoted from a wikipedia article called "Poor Whites".

I'm not disputing that rates of literacy were higher in New England then in Appalachia, the Coastal South, the Mountain South or West. But the majority of native born white Americans by 1860 and actually before 1776 (over 50%) of all these regions were literate. My source is Albion's Seed: Four Folkways in America by David H. Fischer.

What you will find is that the same patterns of literacy and attitudes toward education followed the same regional pattern as the areas of the British Isles from where specific groups came- The economics of slavery had very little to do with these differences.

You should also dig into the biographies of some of the "Planter Class or elites" If you were to look at the origins of the two Senators from Louisiana and Mississippi on the eve of the Civil War for example you will find none of them came from wealthy planter backgrounds. John Slidell was a born to a merchant in New York, Judah P Benjamin was Jewish and his mother ran a fruit stand in Charleston, Jeff Davis's family had some moderate wealth but his grandparents were humble, Albert G. Brown (father of Ole Miss) was born poor