The Plain Folk of the Old South, often called yeomen, were the middling white United States Southerners of the 19th century who owned few slaves or none.

Historical perspectives
From the travel accounts of Frederick Law Olmsted in the 1850s through the early-twentieth-century interpretations of historians William E. Dodd and Ulrich B. Phillips common southerners were portrayed as minor players in the antebellum period.
Romantic portrayals, especially Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind (1937) and its 1939 film ignored them. Novelist Erskine Caldwell's Tobacco Road, portrayed the degraded condition of whites dwelling beyond the great plantations.