Critics suggested Owsley was a reactionary defender of the Confederacy who was attempting to rewrite the past to preserve white Southern culture, and that he overemphasized the size of the Southern landholding middle class, while excluding the large class of poor white southerners who owned neither land nor slaves. Further, they suggested Owsley's theory assumed too much commonality in shared economic interests united Southern farmers, and asserted that he did not fully assess the vast difference between the planters' commercial agriculture and the yeoman's subsistence farming.