Exactly. The vast majority of South Carolinians did not own slaves even though SC and GA held the most slaves of all slave states, and at some times in the past there were more slaves in SC than there were whites. The ones who DID own slaves benefited greatly financially from the institution, and they kept their slave money to themselves. This was no Robin Hood economy we're talking about. The poor white southerner would struggle to gain paying manual labor jobs in the South, because there were already black slaves doing the work for free.
Did this help generate the hatred and rabid racism that this country still deals with today, that other European nations who practiced slavery long before we were a nation, do not come even close to the radar in matching? Possibly - it's a very interesting question to me.
Those other nations mostly and largely instituted practices of slavery as a military strategy as any other, for they did so during the age of national conquests, where they invaded other lands and took the wealth and resources those peoples held. So they enslaved the young men and fighters who would resist them, and the spiritual leaders who would provoke them. Rome so conquered Spain and Portugal, who took up the cultures and practices of the Romans, and we got our practice from the Portuguese.
But the United States invaded no lands. We conquered no peoples. We just paid for our slaves, who previously held no hostilities towards the USA, and mostly didn't even know we existed. Of all nations of peoples who practices slavery, the United States was a different breed of animal set apart. We didn't care about the wealth of other nations. We wanted slaves out of greed for our own wealth. And it directly spit in the face of what the Founding Fathers wanted for our new Nation, and what they demanded from the British:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
People talk about that part of the Declaration of Independence a lot, for obvious reasons. The next part is also interesting for me:
That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
State Governments are governments too. So, the Southern States - led by South Carolina - pointed to this concept as the engine behind their seccession from the Union, but truly the same argument could just as strongly be made that IT WAS THE SOUTH THAT VIOLATED THE CONTRACT, by endeavoring to hold human beings as slaves, denying them their basic unalienable rights endowed upon them by their Creator. Something that the British NEVER tried to do to the colonialists.
Is this a main reason for all the hypocrisy and blasphemy of religion, God, and Humanity, and denial of the basic simple truths that what we forced on African slaves for centuries, we would suffer no such intrusions on ourselves for even a day. Hypocrisies we're still desperately straining to fabricate even today, 160 years after the fact? Another interesting question.
But yes, the vast majority of Southerners were poor white folk who held no slaves for themselves. The elite Southern Class made sure of that, in order to control and manipulate them. After all, the poor white southerner were nothing but Mudsills, lower class foundations that were put on Earth to prop up the entitled upper class plantation owners. And it was that upper class that dictated the government - they were the ones who were educated at higher-learning institutions, they were the ones who owned the major companies and industries, they were the ones who graduated to high political office in the states, ensuring that it would be THEM who legislated the laws, and maintained THEIR - not OUR - way of southern life.
And the TRUE "Southern Heritage", was the elitism plantation class that held all the power and authority in the southern states, and who expected to keep it that way for as long as possible.
The South had nothing to do with the Declaration of Independence, nothing to do with the US Constitution, nothing to do with notions of equality of voice, ownership, and authority within this nation of people. It was entirely about the Haves having all, and the Have-Nots having only what the Haves gave them. Today we call it the "Good Ole Boy System".
So the poor white southerners went to war with the North, because the elite leaders of the South told them to. To preserve the heritage of the Southern Way of Life, of which only the elite upper class benefited from. The same class that wouldn't have a damned thing to do with those poor, white Southerners.
And they are still fighting for those plantation owners, even today. A good number of them have posted in this thread.....