One of the main things slaveowners used to maintain slavery was racism. There was a belief in Western society (not just the South) that people of African descent were incapable of independent thought. Many slaveowners took on a paternalistic attitude towards their slaves—they actually thought that they were doing the slaves a favor by keeping them in servitude. There was also a fear in white society that freed slaves would become violent and would cause a race war. This is what happened in Haiti in 1793 and the South always lived with the possibility of slave insurrection. The rich in the South maintained their power base by instilling property requirements to vote that many poor whites could not afford. The rich plantation owners also encouraged the poor whites to hate the slaves because the slaves were taking jobs that could go to the poor whites. While racism was prevalent in both the North and South, in the South it was used to create social stratification which kept the top five percent in control of society. This would ultimately lead to the lack of investment and innovation that would kill the Confederacy and ultimately end slavery. The rest of the population could not rise up because in many rural districts the rich slaveowners were the only ones who had the leisure time to focus on the issues of the day. These rich slaveowners were also often the only ones with access to education—public education would not become widespread in the South until Reconstruction.
In the North there was more social mobility due to the availability of cheap land to the West and a greater emphasis on industry. However, the North also had people that were typically downtrodden. Most of the early American settlers were Protestants, and they were afraid of the sudden influx of Catholic Irish and Germans in the period before the Civil War. By spreading rumors about what Catholics would do to American society, the power brokers in Northern business and politics managed to keep unwanted foreigners out of well-paying American trades. Many Irish were turned down for work because of their heritage. This anti-immigrant sentiment in the North also led to the formation of a political party, called the Know-Nothings. While the party was short-lived, xenophobia is still an unfortunate part of America today.
Is there any comparison you can make to the power brokers in the North at the time?
Why didn't the rest of the population use their numbers to impose a system more beneficial to the majority?
The system you are referring to is the institution of slavery (before 1865). At the height of slavery, only about 5% of white southern families owned slaves. To perpetrate this system, the southern plantation owners co-opted poorer whites into supporting the system of slavery.
This cooperation goes back to Bacon's Rebellion of 1676, in which poor whites and former indentured servants revolted against the white elite. As a response, according to historians such as Edmund S. Morgan (author of American Slavery, American Freedom), the white elite instituted an increasingly harsh and inflexible color line that kept African-Americans enslaved and that gave poor whites a superior position to slaves in the social hierarchy. The elite also supported the movement of white settlers onto Native American lands; the restriction of white westward movement had been one of the causes of Bacon's Rebellion, and the southern states (and the federal government) supported encroachment on Native American lands into the 19th century with the policy of Indian Removal. If poorer whites were allowed to expand, they were pacified and less likely to revolt against the elite. Therefore, the color line was a tool that the white southern elite used to hold power before the Civil War.
Fear was another tool the southern white elite used to maintain their power and a reason why 95% of the population did not revolt against the system. Escaped slaves were generally shot, and slaves were beaten and treated cruelly to prevent their solidarity and to break their will. Families were routinely broken up, and most slaves, as documented in Frederick Douglass's autobiography, were prevented from learning skills, such as reading, that would allow them the means and the will to escape.
In the north, power brokers often used a religious or ethnic line to co-opt other whites into cooperating with them. For example, northern factory owners increasingly turned toward employing Catholic people from Ireland to work in their factories. The northern elite often stoked feelings of nativism, the belief that American-born Protestants from Northern Europe were superior to foreign-born Catholics and later (in the late 1800s) to Jews, Slavs, Italians, and other people from Southern and Eastern Europe. This system co-opted poorer whites into supporting the status quo.
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