In his book The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South, historian Kenneth M. Stampp contends that white Southerners who did not own slaves still actively supported the institution as “a means of controlling the social and economic competition of Negroes, concrete evidence of membership in a superior caste, a chance perhaps to rise into the planter class.” Or as historian Charles Dew said, “If you are white in the antebellum South, there is a floor below which you cannot go. You have a whole population of four million people whom you consider, and your society considers,
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