how though? I mean I have a hard time seeing Nashville being a slave hotspot.
Well, it was. The City of Nashville
even purchased 24 slaves for $12,000 in 1846.
To answer OP, slaveholding Whites in the South were planter aristocracy. They were social elites who ruled the region's cultural and civic institutions: universities, military colleges, theatres, etc. Their agrarian culture was imitative of the slow, genteel pace of English estate life, which of course put them at odds with increasingly industrious and Germanic Yankees. Describing this dynamic as "conservative" or "liberal" in a contemporary culture war sense is really missing the point.
