Most white men in the antebellum South could BEST be described as A) plantation owners. B) seafaring traders. C) merchants or shopkeepers. D) nonslaveholding family farmers.

The right answer is D) nonslaveholding family farmers.

The planter group, making up less than 4 percent of the white men in the South, held more than half the slaves and produced most of the cotton, tobacco, and hemp and all of the sugar and rice. The number of slaveholders was only 383,637 out of a total white population of 8 million. But assuming that each family numbered five people than whites with some proprietary interest in slavery constituted 1.9 million, or roughly a fourth of the South's white population. While the preponderance of southern whites belonged to the small farmer class, they tended to defer to the large planters and to share their white supremacist views.

Answer: D