What were the percentages of support for slavery in the Antebellum South among the white population?

Hey, I had been reading multiple books on American slavery recently (Fredrick Douglas, Solomon Northup and Booker T Washinton's autobiographies, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and Uncle Tom's Cabin). While it seems clear to me that the vast majority of the white population of the south was generally fine with the institution at its height, I was wondering how 'deep' the support was.

Specifically, imagine the following types of beliefs about slavery:

1) "Slavery is good and desirable for our country to have. I will die to protect it."

2) "Slavery is bad but it's a neccessary evil."

3) "I don't care about slavery, but it's no business of some Yankee telling us not to do it."

4) "Slavery is wrong and must be stopped."

Of the white southern population at the time, what would the division of support have been like with the above beliefs? Ie 20%-40%-30%-10%? Or something like that?
 
Consider the number of Confederate soldiers who literally signed up to die for slavery. ....
Mind you.
1.5) slavery is the natural order of things, and I'll Lynch any n****r who gets uppity
Probably is, oh about 80%
 
You could probably actually further divide anti-slavery sentiment into the legitimate philosophical abolitionists (such as they existed in the South) and those who resented the institution primarily as an extension of their resentment toward the planter class. The latter position was popular in much of Appalachia, as they felt that plantation owners unfairly dominated Southern politics.
 
A decent benchmark would be the population of counties who voted against secession compared with the ones that didn't.

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Ummm... Lots of people North and South were Unionists without supporting Blacks' rights. Now, admittedly a lot of the Unionist areas on that map were filled with small farmers who owned few, if any, slaves and weren't nearly as invested emotionally and financially in slavery as the areas with big plantations.
But that doesn't necessarily map to abolitionism.
 
Ummm... Lots of people North and South were Unionists without supporting Blacks' rights. Now, admittedly a lot of the Unionist areas on that map were filled with small farmers who owned few, if any, slaves and weren't nearly as invested emotionally and financially is slavery as the area with big plantations.
But that doesn't necessarily map to abolitionism.
Most poor whites opposed abolition, as the newly freed slaves would now be competing for the same jobs.
 
Define "The South". There were no abolitionists or even emancipationists in the Deep South. The few people who felt that way left the South, e.g. the Grimké sisters.

But there were more than a few in the Border States. E.g. Cassius Clay of Kentucky. And for numbers, there was a large number of anti-slavery German immgrants in Saint Louis, Missouri; enough to elect Republican Frank Blair to the US House in 1858.

Virginia was a "Southern State", but the "panhandle" between Pennsylvania and Ohio was "northern" in almost every respect.

IMO, 95% to 99% of self-identified "Southern" whites supported slavery. There was an element of white small farmers who disliked the slavery system because they despised blacks and resented the wealthy slaveholders. But there was essentially no one who wanted to "free the slaves". Poor whites in particular saw slavery as what kept them up and the blacks down.

The case of Hinton Helper is interesting. Helper was a scion of a South Carolina slaveowning family. He became very hostile to slavery because he thought it damaged the economy of the South. He expounded this thesis at length in an 1857 book, The Impending Crisis. which attacked slaveowning as destructive to the interests of the whites of the South and suggested that slaveowners atone by hanging themselves. (He also hated blacks.) Republicans were amused by these sentiments from a Southerner. They circulated a pamphlet version of the book in the 1858 election, with the endorsements of numerous leading Republicans. When Congress met in 1859, enraged Southerner Representatives blocked the election as Speaker of any Republican endorser, causing a two-month delay.
 
Hey, I had been reading multiple books on American slavery recently (Fredrick Douglas, Solomon Northup and Booker T Washinton's autobiographies, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and Uncle Tom's Cabin). While it seems clear to me that the vast majority of the white population of the south was generally fine with the institution at its height, I was wondering how 'deep' the support was.

Specifically, imagine the following types of beliefs about slavery:

1) "Slavery is good and desirable for our country to have. I will die to protect it."

2) "Slavery is bad but it's a neccessary evil."

3) "I don't care about slavery, but it's no business of some Yankee telling us not to do it."

4) "Slavery is wrong and must be stopped."

Of the white southern population at the time, what would the division of support have been like with the above beliefs? Ie 20%-40%-30%-10%? Or something like that?

Abolitionists who felt "Slavery is wrong and must be stopped" couldn't even get 10% of the vote in New England. They probably made up less than 5% of the population of the free states. In the slave states that stayed in the Union, abolitionists would have been less than 1% of the white population, and virtually non-existent in the states that formed the Confederacy.

At least 99% of the white population of the slaveholding states would have felt that slavery was "good and desirable" or "a necessary evil" and the Confederacy paid huge cost in lives and money supporting those beliefs. The split between "good and desirable" or "a necessary evil" was probably about 25%/75% in border Union states, 50%/50% in the border Confederate states, and 75%/25% in the Deep South.
 
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