Plain Folk of the Old South is a 1949 book by American Vanderbilt University historian Frank Lawrence Owsley, one of the Southern Agrarians.
In it he used statistical data to analyze the makeup of Southern United States of America society, contending that yeoman farmers made up a larger middle class than was generally thought.
The nostalgic view of the South emphasized the elite planter class of wealth and refinement, controlling large plantations and numerous slaves.
Using their own newly invented codes, the Owsleys created databases from the manuscript federal census returns, tax and trial records, and local government documents and wills.
[7] Plain Folk argued that southern society was not dominated by planter aristocrats, but that yeoman farmers played a significant role in it.
[2] In his study of Edgefield County, South Carolina, Orville Vernon Burton classified white society into the poor, the yeoman middle class, and the elite.
During the war, the established patriarchy continued to control the home front and kept it functioning, even though growing numbers of plain folk joined the new wartime poor.
Wetherington suggests that their localism and racism dovetailed with a republican ideology founded on Jeffersonian notions of an "economically independent yeomanry sharing common interests".
Before the war, they became more active in the cotton and slave markets, but plain folk remained unwilling to jeopardize their self-sufficiency and the stability of their neighborhoods for the economic interests of planters.