Evaluate the following statement: "in the thirty years before the civil war, the majority of white southerners believed that slavery was, at best, a "necessary evil."

The idea behind the statement was that people in the south didn't like slavery much but they thought that it had to be done. For many of them it was true because they had large areas of land that were covered in crops, and the economy was thriving because the people who worked on that land were slaves. If it hadn't been for free work force, the economy would've failed for them and they'd lose everything. They believed that slavery therefore had to exist because someone has to keep the world spinning according to what they believed was right.