West from Appomattox: The Reconstruction of America after the Civil War

by Heather Cox Richardson

But this ideology also rendered Americans unable to recognize systematic inequalities in American society. Anyone who embraced the mainstream vision came to believe he or she was on the road to a middle-class life, no matter what the reality of his or her position actually was. When things went wrong, individuals had no one but themselves to blame for failure, even if its causes lay outside their control. A man unemployed during a recession or a woman beaten by her husband could find little sympathy in the middle-class worldview. More strikingly, though, this mindset deliberately repressed anyone who called for government action to level the American economic, social, or political playing field.

About one-quarter of all southern white families owned slaves, but almost all southern whites bought into the ideology of slavery. Slavery fed the psychological and economic needs of poor whites as it supported the social, economic, and political power of planters.