“It was the development of increased agitation on the part of non-slaveholding whites prior to the Civil War for the realization of the American creed that played a major part in provoking the desperation that led the slaveholders to take up arms.” (p.41)
Upon the flimsiest scraps of evidence, the theory is elaborated that it was the withholding of democracy from non-slaveholding whites that pushed the South to the Civil War.
“In terms of practice, as concerns the mass of the white people of the South, this anti-democratic philosophy was everywhere implemented. The property qualifications for voting and office-holding, the weighing of the legislature to favor slaveholding against non-slaveholding counties, the inequitable taxation system falling most heavily on mechanics’ tools and least heavily on slaves, the whole system of economic, social and educational preferment for the possessors of slaves, and the organized, energetic, and partially successful struggles carried on against this system by the non-slaveholding whites form – outside of the response of the Negroes to enslavement – the actual content of the South’s internal history for the generation preceding the Civil War.”
