The preceding examination of agricultural patterns during the late antebellum period demonstrates the dangers of facile assumptions regarding southern heterogeneity. Although Tennessee's “grand divisions” admittedly differed in several striking respects – most notably in reliance on slavery, prevalence of large plantations, and dependence on cotton – any generalization stressing such differences would be apt to mislead in not one but two ways. It would likely exaggerate inter sectional diversity – minimizing similarities across the state in typical scale of operations and frequency of self-sufficiency, for instance – while glossing over important intrasectional differences – for example, the gross income disparities that separated market and subsistence-oriented farmers within all three sections.

Patterns of farm operations, however, are not the only yardstick of diversity among farm populations. Scholars who compare Black Belt and Upcountry areas frequently maintain that differences in the extent of plantation slavery also contributed to fundamental dissimilarities in socioeconomic structure. Their argument rests on two reasonable but largely unproven propositions with regard to the South as a whole: first, that slavery promoted a greater concentration of wealth than would have obtained otherwise, and second, that it restricted opportunities among non-slaveholding whites for economic advancement. By extension, local areas predominantly characterized by small farms and white labor should have exhibited more egalitarian distributions of wealth and higher levels of economic opportunity than did plantation districts.

Unfortunately, works that compare the social and economic structure of different areas within the South are virtually nonexistent.