The antebellum South was largely governed by plantation owners who had most of their wealth in crops and slaves. They were the only ones who had access to quality education, and they had the leisure time to devote to politics.

Directly under them was a small middle class of smaller farmers who might have employed a few slaves during busy agricultural seasons. A small group of professionals also inhabited this social strata, but they were not as common as they would be in Northern cities.

The South also had a large population of poor whites who had little hope of ever owning their own land, let alone climbing into the upper social strata. The poor whites looked down on the slaves as people who took potential jobs from them. Many of these poor whites would go on to become infantry for the Confederate army, where they would die for a social and political system that did not serve their best economic interests.

Plantation owners would not devote land to industrial interests or infrastructure developments, thus keeping industrial investment out of the region until after the Civil War. This also ensured that the poor whites would remain poor and not compete with the planter class for land.

Southern historians have attempted to gloss over slavery as a positive for both the plantation owner and the slave. They depict this world as peaceful since everyone "had their place" and did not aspire to move upward socially. In this world, the planters did the thinking and leading, and the poor whites and black slaves were happy to serve them either through the votes of poor whites or the backbreaking labor of the slaves. This view has been referred to as part of the myth of the "Lost Cause" by current historians who are working on bringing change to the historiography of the antebellum and postwar South.