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LOW PERCENTAGES OF SLAVES and slaveholders have created the impression that slavery was relatively unobtrusive in the upcountry South and that many, perhaps most, mountain whites had little involvement with the peculiar institution. Indeed, the significance of slaveholding by those of modest means merited virtually no serious consideration in Frank Owsley's and his students' examinations of the upcountry yeomanry. More recent studies by Grady McWhiney and Forrest McDonald portray southern yeomen in general as itinerant herders little interested in the stability of a settled life and the acquisition of property, including slave property.'
A study of two Arkansas counties, Pope and Johnson, suggests something very different when it comes to the upcountry. Slavery there provided a means for the wealthy to maintain and enhance their place in society. For ordinary yeomen and even landless whites, slave ownership provided the triple benefits of gaining valuable labor, emulating the slaveholding elite, and investing in property almost sure to rise rapidly in value. Furthermore, many upcountry whites, while never owning slaves, may have participated in the institution by renting or borrowing them. Some holders, in fact, probably owned slaves principally for the purpose of renting them. Simply put, slavery was an important fact of life for the people of Johnson and Pope Counties, as it probably was for most residents of the Arkansas upcountry.
Pope and Johnson are contiguous counties located along the Arkansas River in the state's northwest quadrant. The availability of rich bottomland did render these counties somewhat more disposed to large-scale farming than other parts of the Arkansas upcountry. Yet in their ways of life, county residents more closely resembled Arkansans residing farther north and east than they did southern Arkansans, whose origins and circumstances were more similar to those of inhabitants of the Deep South.
The differences between upcountry and lowland Arkansas were the same as those that divided the upper from the lower South generally. The upcountry possessed a much larger middle class of farmers and an upper class whose members, while better off economically than their neighbors, were not so much better off that they constituted a virtual aristocracy-as was the case in the lowlands. The economic differences between the upcountry and southern Arkansas have been examined by scholars such as S....