A better analogy would be to the lower, mostly independent rungs of a feudal society like the English yeoman. Antebellum, the general attitude in the South was that even the poorest person was entitled to live his life as he saw fit on his land, and should be regarded as equal to a rich plantation owner with employees and slaves. There was generally no bureaucracy that could force a poor person to lose his land, make his children leave home for school, incur expenses, etc. Social customs somewhat enforced neighborly behavior in place of regulation. This is how slaveholding could persist; rights depended on having just a bit of land.
That is why the Reconstruction of the South was so painful; it was essentially a social and political revolution by top-down administration to add bureaucracy and consolidate the economy into larger farms and industrial owners/laborers.
> .. but by implication non-landowners were second class citizens, and nonwhite people were unpersons?
Yes, but remember that half of the adult population everywhere was a second-class citizen simply because of their gender. The idea that some people don't deserve as many rights as others isn't an aberration we can lay at the feet of the plantation owners.
Although IIRC they can be thought of as the end of a long tradition of mob justice being the system, or at least a large part of the system for keeping order. And directed against (supposed) criminals of all colors.
> the poorest person was entitled to live his life as he saw fit on his land, and should be regarded as equal to a rich plantation owner with employees and slaves
I think this describes neither medieval Europe nor the antebellum US South. Certainly in Europe, a king needed no 'bureaucracy' to take anything he wanted from anyone at any time. Lords could largely do the same with impunity, since they had the power to do so and were largely immune from prosecution due to the heavily politicized courts prior to the rise of heavy industry in 1700, after which non-lord authorities like commercial barons arose, and demanded better legal representation.
IMHO, the US south never really lost that same feudal sensibility, that titled folk deserve greater power / immunity than commoners and the demi-people below that. Before modern telecommunications which enabled enforcement of federal law, that mindset allowed ad hoc laws like Jim Crow to displace formal legal codes in the courts and enabled the segregationist inequality that persisted until the 1960's. I believe that even today that value system lives on in hearts and minds, even if the courts are shaped by it much less.
Thank you, and I somewhat agree with those qualifications. The main point is that the Southern culture tried to embody and enshrine something akin to yeoman’s mindset and rights (if glorified given the limitations in reality) and the Northeast, while descended from founders who admired some of those principles, differed culturally enough to mostly abandon it.
That is why the Reconstruction of the South was so painful; it was essentially a social and political revolution by top-down administration to add bureaucracy and consolidate the economy into larger farms and industrial owners/laborers.