In the 1800s, Rich Southern Whites Were Convincing Poor Non-Slave Owning Whites to Defend Slavery...

[Warpy]

1. It's a little simpler than that for the average white southerner of modest means

He was doing OK but going nowhere since all the best land had been grabbed by rich guys from England who claimed acreage in the name of wives, children, and all indentured servants. Yes, the rich guy got the acreage. The indentured servant got nothing.

Non slaveholding white guys, often descendants of those same indentured servants, got the less productive land that was left over, if they got much of anything, at all. They had little hope of getting rich farming cotton or tobacco. What did appeal to them was an appeal to the strong sense of "hunh, nobody gonna push me around" that is so prevalent in the culture there.

Lofty thoughts of a reproduced English country society in a never-never land governed by the Articles of Confederation might have appealed to the wealthy and educated (although not, apparently, in history) but ordinary men fought so that a bunch of Yankees wouldn't be telling them what to do and how to do it. That created the sense of solidarity with the rich plantation slave owners.