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"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 denigrate the South)."

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

Persons considering your source would do well to consider:

1. That while Potter is a pre-PC historian untouched by the politically-driven South-bashing revisionism, the work cited was actually completed posthumously, in 1976 (Potter having died five or six years earlier), by Donald Fehrenbacher, another of your West Coast liberal, South-bashing historians.

2. Potter's book, completed by Fehrenbacher, was praised as a manual reference by James McPherson in the introduction to his own polemic, Battle Cry of Freedom -- a suspicious endorsement if ever there was one.