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Nosterrex: "Only about 5% of whites owned slaves in the South. The other 95% never owned a slave."

The claim that "only about 5% of whites owned slaves in the South," is true, in a sense, but also a canard.

According to the 1860 census, there were about 8 million whites in slave owning states. Of those, 385,000 owned slaves -- or about 5%. But these were all relatively wealthy heads-of-households, meaning they also had large families.
If the average immediate family size was, say, six (a wife and four children), now we see that about 30% of southern whites lived in the homes of slave holding families.

And consider a typical young white farming family in the Deep South. If they did not themselves own slaves, their parents did, and the young family would too -- as soon as they could afford them. So they were in no sense "anti-slave."

And that is just "average" for the entire South, where the slave population ranged from well over 50% in Deep South states like South Carolina and Mississippi, to about 25% in Upper South states like Virginia and Tennessee, to barely 10% in Border States like Maryland and Missouri.

So, while the average of slave-owning white families may have been 30% overall, the range was from well over 50% in the Deep South to under 10% in Border States.

Indeed, in states like (western) Virginia, (eastern) Tennessee and (western) North Carolina, many counties of the state had relatively few slave owning households and so refused to seceed, or resisted secession. Some of these also supplied soldiers for the Union army.

Since I did not live in the Antebellum South, I cannot be certain about the views on slavery within various Southern communities. It would be safe to conclude that the general population was not anti-slavery. Since most did not own slaves, and most were poor, white, dirt farmers, especially in places such as Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi, slavery was not their main concern. I would not be surprised that a Southern family with a section of land or more would own a slave or two. If my ancestors were indicative of families in the deep South, white farmers had large families, and the children provided the labor. It was cheap labor. Slavery was a dying economic system. The mechanization of farm equipment would have ended slavery on its own. I could see someone making the argument that they had the right to own a slave, which was supported by the US Supreme Court, even if they personally believed that it was morally wrong or economically foolish. The typical Confederate soldier was not fighting for slavery, but to maintain their Southern culture, which is far more than the issue of slavery.