I don’t think that is a fair assumption…
There was a movement amoung those same Gentry to help in the Underground Railroad (yes some of them even owned their own slaves, while helping others)…
Not to mention the Gentry of the South was in the minority
A gentry class always is. But they can sometimes get the general public to follow their lead, for better or for worse.
I’ve found, more often than not, that the ‘lower classes’ tend to revolt against the gentry, as opposed to ‘following’ them…
Now, that does not mean, that I believe the average farm hand/small farm owner, was against slavery… but i’m not convineced that the average Factory worker, was either
They certainly were a numerical minority, but in terms of influence, every member of the Confederate cabinet owned slaves, with the exception of Judah Benjamin, who had sold his 140 slaves and his plantation in 1850, as did, I believe, every member of the 1860 Senate from a state that would go on to secede, with, again, the exception of Benjamin.
But neither were they in any way interested in secession from the U.S., until the aristos made an issue of it.
Please note that the 1850’s map was chosen and colored in such a way as to maximize the correlation with the 2004 map. The map is dated to the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, at which time Minnesota, Oregon, and Washington were “free territories” but Kansas, Nebraska, Utah, and New Mexico were territories in which slavery was legal.
The latter three of these territories never had more than a microscopic number of slaves (as in, less than 50 in total), and Kansas had a bare handful–maybe a couple hundred. To suggest any causal relationship between the nominal, momentary legality of slavery in these territories and voting patterns in 2004 is prima facie absurd.
However, the tan (1854) vs. red (2004) coloration highlights this chance correlation.