Owsley's work "Plain Folk of the Old South" (1949) was an answer to liberal historians' emphasis on the dominance of the planter class' social and political control of the South. He regarded the future of American civilization as dependent on the survival of southern regionalism and agrarian values. Owsley's "Plain Folk" instead depicts a complex social structure in the South, one featuring a large middle class of yeoman farmers and not just wealthy planters and poor whites. He argues that the South was devoted to republican values generally and was not locked into race and slavery. Owsley believed the Civil War's causes were rooted in both North and South.