"The work of slaves was primarily agricultural. It is estimated that in 1850 only 400,000 slaves lived in towns and cities, whereas approximately 2.8 million worked on farms and plantations. Nor does the large slave population mean that the majority of southern whites owned slaves. In 1860 there were only 384,884 slave owners, out of a total white population of 8 million. Fully three-fourths of the white people of the South had neither slaves nor an immediate economic interest in the maintenance of slavery or the plantation system. Most slaveholders in 1860 were small farmers with five slaves or less. Fully 338,000 owners, or 88 percent of all masters of slaves in 1860, held less than twenty slaves. However, most slaves tended to be on farm units with larger holdings. This concentration of wealth in slaves in the hands of a small percentage of white southerners meant that more than 50 percent of all slaves lived on plantations with holdings in excess of twenty slaves, and at least 25 percent of slaves lived on plantations with holdings in excess of fifty in 1860."
"This concentration of slaves in the hands of the relatively few inevitably resulted in the bulk of staple crops being produced on the large plantations, the owners of which also dominated the political and economic thinking of the entire South. The tremendous labor productivity of the large plantations provided the slave-owning gentry with wealth and influence out of proportion to their number. In 1860 the southern states produced 5,387,000 bales of cotton. Of that total, more than 3.5 million bales were produced in just four states – Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, and Georgia. It is no accident that these same states were also at the top of the list in the number of large slaveholders. Of the states with individual holdings of more than twenty slaves, Mississippi led (just as it did in the productivity of cotton), followed by Alabama, Louisiana, and Georgia. The great majority of agricultural slaves grew cotton, while the remainder grew such staple crops as tobacco, rice, and sugarcane. The cotton farm or plantation was, therefore, the typical locale of the slave."
[Franklin & Higginbotham, "From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans." McGraw-Hill, 2011, p.140]
No matter how you squeeze the numbers, only a small percentage in the South benefitted from slavery, according to both Franklin and Fleming.
So, why did the Southerners hate the Yankees? The same reason they despise the Yankees of today: Yankees are, as a rule, sanctimonious busybodies (my wife and I excepted :)
I didn't understand the significance of the term "Damn Yankees" until my wife and I retired to the South. It was then I learned that, to a Southerner, a "Yankee comes to visit; a Damn Yankee stays."
Mr. Kalamata
Let me translate what you just wrote into truth- don’t be fooled by facts, listen to my deranged ravings about the real reason the southern slavocracy rebelled against the duly elected government of America. Because I hate America and believe our country, and the world, would have been better off if America was broken in Two and a nation explicitly founded on slavery came into existence in 1860.
“I didn’t understand the significance of the term “Damn Yankees” until my wife and I retired to the South. It was then I learned that, to a Southerner, a “Yankee comes to visit; a Damn Yankee stays.””
That reminds me of a question that a man back home asked: How are northerners and southerners alike?
“They both want to be southerners.”