He is notorious for his essay "The Irrepressible Conflict" (1930) in which he lamented the economic loss of slavery for the defeated Confederacy and of the "half savage blacks" that had been freed.
He is also known for his study of Confederate diplomacy based on the idea of "King Cotton" and especially his quantitative social history of the middling "plain people" of the Old South.
[citation needed] As an active member of the Southern Agrarians group based in Nashville, Owsley contributed "The Irrepressible Conflict" to the manifesto I'll Take My Stand (1930).
In "Scottsboro, the Third Crusade: The Sequel to Abolition and Reconstruction" (the American Review [1933]: 257–85), he criticized northern race reformers as the "grandchildren of abolitionists and reconstructionists."
Serving as president of the Southern Historical Association in 1940, Owsley castigated the North for assuming its people and thinking represented the entire nation, and for violating what he called "the comity of section".
According to Owsley, the position of the South vis-à-vis the North was created not by slavery, the dominance of cotton and agriculture, or states' rights, but by the two regions' misunderstanding of each other.
The book depicts a complex social structure in the South, one featuring a large middle class of yeoman farmers and not just wealthy planters and poor whites.
Further, they suggested Owsley's theory assumed that too much commonality in shared economic interests united Southern farmers, and asserted that he did not fully assess the vast difference between the planters' commercial agriculture and the yeoman's subsistence farming.
In the summer of 1956, Owsley embarked on a journey to Europe, on a Fulbright Scholarship, to research in British and French archives, a task which he did not live to complete.