USA HISTORY

Detailed explanation-1: -The Southern class structure had four basic social classes: the wealthy plantation slave owners, non-slave-owning yeoman farmers, poor whites, and slaves.

Detailed explanation-2: -The wealthy elite was at the top of the Old South hierarchy. Small-scale farmers, known as yeomen, were considered the “middle class” at the time. Below yeomen were the poor white men. Slavery allowed for even the poorest of free white men to not be at the bottom of the social hierarchy.

Detailed explanation-3: -Yeoman farmers stood at the center of antebellum southern society, belonging to the ranks neither of elite planters nor of the poor and landless; most important, from the perspective of the farmers themselves, they were free and independent, unlike slaves.

Detailed explanation-4: -An individual who owned a plantation was known as a planter. Historians of the antebellum South have generally defined “planter” most precisely as a person owning property (real estate) and 20 or more slaves.

Detailed explanation-5: -At the top of southern white society stood the planter elite, which comprised two groups. In the Upper South, an aristocratic gentry, generation upon generation of whom had grown up with slavery, held a privileged place. In the Deep South, an elite group of slaveholders gained new wealth from cotton.