cr: This was certainly true for all of the states in the deep south.
The large slaveowners may not have been all that strong for secession. From the January 12, 1861 Harper's Weekly, page 23:
The following letter, from a large landholder and planter in Mississippi, is published in the Herald [NY]:
_______ Co. Mississippi, Dec. 25, 1860
I have been through several counties in this State, and some of the northern counties in Alabama, and I have no hesitation in saying that the men of property in both States are unanimously opposed to the secession movement. It is got up and engineered by the politicians and the poor whites; the slaveholders are compelled to fall in with it for fear of having their property confiscated.
The large slaveholders wanted to preserve their property. The poor whites didn't own many slaves. Perhaps the poor whites feared competition from the blacks if the slaves were freed or perhaps they just needed to think they were superior to somebody (like some posters who denegrate the South).
capitan, you were away from these threads for a month. Were you suspended, taking a breather, or off on a trip?
None of the above. I am in the process of establishing an LLC.
In some areas, for instance, central Louisiana, that may have well been the case. However, the general relationship applies: those states with the highest percentage of slaves as a function of total population were the first to purport to secede.
In The Impending Crisis: 1848-1861, Professor David Potter observed that,
"In short, the South became increasingly a closed society, distrustful of 'isms' from outside and unsympathetic toward dissenters. Such were the pervasive consequences giving top priority to the maintenance of a system of racial subordination. By 1860, southern society had arrived at the full development of a plantation-oriented, slave-holding system with conservative values, hierarchical relation ships, and authoritarian controls. No society is complete, of course, without an ethos appropriate to its social arrangements, and the south had developed one, beginning with the conviction of the superior virtues of rural life. At one level, this embodied a Jeffersonian agrarianism which regarded landowning cultivators of the soil as the best kind of citizens, because their ownership and their production for use gave them self-sufficency and independence, uncorrupted by commercial avarice - and also because their labor had dignity and diversity suitable to well-rounded men. But at another level, the commitment to rural values had led to glorification of plantation life, in which even slavery was idealized by the argument that the dependence of the slave developed in the master a sense of responsibility for the welfare of his slaves and in the slaves a sense of loyalty and attachment to the master. This relationship, southerners argued, was far better than the impersonal, dehumanized irresponsibility of 'wage slavery,' which treated labor as a commodity."
Pg 456-457
I would also not make too much of a single letter, which may or may not express the majority opinion of slave owners.
If the letter is correct, then the political leadership did the South a great disservice by its reckless disregard for both the slave ownder and poor white laborer.
Yet, someone had to put those politicans into power.