White Trash

by Nancy Isenberg

  Female rioters were, in this way, the equivalent of male deserters. They shattered the illusion of Confederate unity and shared sacrifice. In 1863, in the wake of the Richmond riot, Vanity Fair exposed the persistence of deep class divisions among the southern population. The pro-Union magazine published a provocative image with the article, “Pity the Poor Rebels.” It described how poor men were arbitrarily rounded up as conscripts, while the desperately poor “white trash” of the Confederacy scratched the words “WE ARE STARVING” over the “dead wall” that separated the North and South. The featured illustration had an unusual caricature of Jefferson Davis, reminiscent of Jonathan Swift’s antihero in Gulliver’s Travels. Here the Confederate president, in a dress and bonnet, is tied down by southern Lilliputians—tiny slaves. Either way, he is unmanned by greedy planters or female rioters. His wrists are chained, his dress unraveling—a sure sign that the Confederacy has had its mask of gentility removed.38

  Wealthy women of the South often displayed indifference to the starving poor. When a group of deserters and poor mountain women ransacked a Tennessee resort in 1863, Virginia French, one of the guests, described the “slatternly, rough, barefooted women” who raced to and fro, “eager as famished wolves for prey.” Both shocked and amused, she wrote, “Two women went into a regular fist fight & kept it up for an hour—clawing & clutching each other because one had more than the other!” She found it equally bizarre when another woman stole Latin theology and French books. When asked directly, the thief justified her booty as the act of a good mother: “She had some children who were just beginning to read & . . . she wanted to encourage em!” An illiterate woman thus assigned value to the literary treasures she had taken. This might have aroused some sympathy, but for French the scene was simply more evidence of “Democracy—Jacobinism—and Radicalism” in its rudest form. The women were “famished” and had “tallow” faces, the men were “gaunt” and “ill-looking,” but the southern planter’s wife remained unmoved. White trash soiled all they touched, and deserved contempt, not pity.39

  Class insularity prevailed among Richmond’s elite women too. By early 1865, First Lady Varina Davis had become “unpopular with the ladies belonging to the old families,” a clerk close to her husband confided to his diary. Those of “high birth” had decided to shun her and talked behind her back, remarking on her father’s supposed low-class origins. There were stories widely circulated of government officials and their wives dining on delicacies while the people starved.40

  In contemplating the demise of the Confederacy, other writers expressed more dramatic concerns. Class reorganization would reduce honored mothers to the station of “cooks for Yankee matrons,” convert beloved wives into washerwomen for “Yankee butchers and libertines,” and transform devoted sisters into chambermaids for “Yankee harlots.” No matter how the situation was sized up, the fact that poor rural women had already lost everything scarcely mattered, because their suffering counted little compared to the unsullied women of the ruling class.41

  • • •

  A different kind of symbolism hovered over Abraham Lincoln, who in unflattering descriptions was crowned the president of the mudsills. Though he was born in Kentucky, not far from Jefferson Davis’s birthplace, Honest Abe’s backcountry roots became fodder for his enemies. The one thing that separated Lincoln and Davis was class origin. Southern newspapers described Davis as one “born to command.” He was a West Pointer, a man of letters and polite manners. Lincoln, by contrast, was a rude bumpkin, the “Illinois ape,” and a “drunken sot.” Lincoln’s supposed virtue, his honesty (or honest parents), was code for a suspect class background. In 1862, a close ally, Union general David Hunter, told Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase that Lincoln was born a “poor white in a slave state.” He judged Lincoln too solicitous of slaveholders in the border states, “anxious for approval, especially of those he was accustomed to look up to.” His Kentucky home made him white trash, and his chosen residence in Illinois made him a prairie mudsill. Confederates had an easy time equating midwesterners with dirt farmers; to one Virginia artilleryman, they were all “scoundrels, this scum, spawned in prairie mud.”42

  The mudslinging battle, however, ended up working in favor of the Federal side. Republicans and Union officers wore the mudsill label as a badge of pride, and made it a rallying cry for northern democracy. This strategy began even before Lincoln was elected. At a large rally in New York City, Iowa’s lieutenant governor gave an impassioned speech in which he praised the “rail splitter” as the best farmer for the job—a man willing to protect the “mudsill and mechanic.” And he joked that every Republican in his state had “made up their minds to cultivate mudsill ideas.”43

  The New York publication Vanity Fair used satire to turn the tables on Confederate class taunts. Their writers not only deflated the southerner’s gallant self-image, but also had a field day defending his “groveling” foe with “lobby ears”—the mudsill. (“Lob” was another word for a rustic knave.) Imitating southern speechifiers and hack journalists, the magazine described Lincoln as the chief magistrate of the “Greasy Mechanics and Mudsills of the barbarian North.”

  In Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper (1863), Lincoln, as caricatured, is literally a mudsill—stuck in the mud and unable to reach Jefferson Davis in Richmond.

  Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, February 21, 1863

  Jefferson Davis’s stilted oratory was equally subject to Vanity Fair’s withering satire. In a mock proclamation given after the First Battle of Bull Run, Davis issues an edict saying that his army would leave Washington in the dust, hang the “besotted idiot” Lincoln from the nearest tree, and topple New York City, turning the Seventh Regiment into body servants for Confederate officers. In his grandiose vision of easy victory, this parody of Davis declared that “mudsill soldiers” would offer little resistance, for “they will fly before us like sheep.” Southerners’ hyperbolic pronouncements were turned on their head; though begun as an insult aimed at plebian northerners, the mudsill designation proved most useful in ridiculing Confederate hubris. By 1863, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper had embraced the mudsill moniker, publishing a caricature of Lincoln up to his waist in mud, unable to reach the “bad bird” Davis in his Richmond nest.44

  When General James Garfield, the future president, returned from the front in November 1863, he gave a speech at a meeting in Baltimore in defense of his fighting mudsills. He lauded the loyal men of Tennessee and Georgia who came out of “caves and rocks” to support the Union forces. The Confederacy was built, Garfield insisted, on a false idea, “not of a common government, but a government of gentlemen, of men of money, men of brains, who hold slaves.” It was a government resembling that of the aristocratic Old World. His audience of commoners roared when he called the two top Confederate generals “Count Bragg” and “My Lord Beauregard.” Roused by this reaction, Garfield addressed the friendly crowd as “you mudsills,” for they were benefactors of a government and society that promised class mobility and a genuine respect for the workingman. For Garfield, and for many others, the mudsills were the backbone of the Union. They were those “who rejoice that God has given you strong hands and stout hearts—who were not born with silver spoons in your mouths.” And proud mudsills they would remain.45

  Because of the Confederacy’s class system, and the exploitation of poor whites by the planter elite, Republican congressmen and military leaders from the outset of the war argued in favor of a confiscation policy that went at the planters’ pocketbooks. It was in the border states, where allegiances were divided, that the policy of punishing rich Confederate sympathizers took shape. In Missouri, where irregular rebel guerrillas dismantled railroads and terrorized Unionist civilians, General Henry W. Halleck decided to mete out retribution in a highly selective manner. Rather than punish the entire citizenry, he ordered wealthy Missourians alone to pay reparations.46

  In
Halleck’s mind, the price of war had to be felt at the top. As refugees flooded into St. Louis—poor white women and children—Halleck and his fellow officers agreed that elites should cover the costs. Street theater complemented the army’s campaign, as Union officers sought to make punishments visible to the general public. Under Halleck’s stern but discriminating system of assessments, Missouri Confederates who refused to pay up were publicly humiliated by having their most valuable possessions confiscated and sold at auction. Military police officers entered homes and carted off pianos, rugs, furniture, and valuable books. The contrast between the rich and poor was stark. Displaced families from the Arkansas Ozarks showed up a hundred miles west of the Mississippi in the vicinity of Rolla. Led by a former candidate for governor, they formed a strange caravan of oxcarts, livestock, and dogs, altogether numbering over two thousand. The men were categorized by observers as white trash: “tall, sallow, cadaverous, and leathery.” They joined the starving, mud-covered women and barefoot children who comprised the South’s forgotten poor white exiles.47

  Public shaming was another tactic used by the Union army. In New Orleans, General Benjamin Butler’s infamous Order No. 28 declared that any woman showing disrespect to a Union soldier would be treated as a prostitute, a punitive measure that denied the assumption of moral purity accorded upper-class women. More devastating was Order No. 76, by which Butler required all men and women to give an oath of allegiance; those who failed to do so had their property confiscated. Women’s equal political treatment exposed what lay hidden behind the “broad folds of female crinoline,” that men were hiding assets in their wives’ names. A victorious officer observed that in taking Fredericksburg in 1862, Union soldiers destroyed the homes of the wealthy, leaving behind dirt from their “muddy feet.” Vandalism was another way to disgrace prominent Confederates: seizing the symbols of wealth and status, smashing them, and leaving it behind as rubbish. The muddy footprint of the mudsill foot soldier was an intentionally ironic symbol of class rage.48

  One person who took this message to heart was Andrew Johnson of Tennessee. As a military governor, Johnson became the bête noire of Confederates, the only U.S. senator from a seceding state to remain loyal to the Union. His loyalty earned him a place on the Republican ticket as Lincoln’s running mate in 1864. Johnson, an old guard Jacksonian Democrat, felt no constraint in voicing his disgust with the bloated planter elite. By the time he took over as military governor, he was already known for his confrontational style, eager to duke it out with those he labeled “traitorous aristocrats.” He vigorously imposed assessments to pay for poor refugee women and children, who he claimed were reduced to poverty because of the South’s “unholy and nefarious rebellion.” Not surprisingly, Johnson’s detractors looked upon the once-lowly tailor as undeserving white trash. He had a reputation for vulgarity in the course of his stump speeches. One politician he ran against before the war went so far as to call him “a living mass of undulating filth.” If Lincoln was white trash in the eyes of genteel southerners, Johnson looked worse.49

  By the time General William T. Sherman orchestrated his famous March to the Sea in 1864, Union leaders believed that only widespread humiliation and suffering would end the war. Turning his army into one large foraging expedition, Sherman made sure his men understood the class dimension of their campaign. The most lavish destruction occurred in Columbia, South Carolina, the fire-eaters’ capital, where the most conspicuous planter oligarchy held court. In tiny Barnwell, sixty miles south of Columbia, Brevet Major General Hugh Judson Kilpatrick of New Jersey staged what he called a “Nero’s ball,” forcing the southern belles of the town to attend and dance with Union officers while the town burned to the ground.50

  In justifying his violent course of action, Sherman revived one of Thomas Jefferson’s favorite terms for tackling class power. That word was “usufruct.” Sherman contended that there was no absolute right to private property, and that proud planters only held their real estate in usufruct—that is, on the good graces of the federal government. In theory, southerners were tenants, and as traitorous tenants, they could be expelled by their federal landlords. Jefferson had used the same Roman concept to develop a political theory for weakening the hold of inherited status and protecting future generations against debts passed on by a preceding generation. Sherman went further: property did not exist without the sanction of the federal government. His philosophy not only rejected states’ rights, but equated treason with a return to the state of nature. The southern oligarchy would be shorn of its land and class privilege. The only way for elite Confederates to protect their wealth was to submit to federal law.51

  Union generals and their senior officers expected the cotton oligarchy to fall along with Davis’s administration. They were convinced that class relations would radically change in the aftermath of the war. A kind of missionary zeal shaped this strain of thinking. After the siege of Petersburg, Virginia, in 1865, Chaplain Hallock Armstrong sized up what he called “the war against the Aristocracy,” predicting in a letter to his wife that dramatic change was coming to the Old South. It was not slavery’s demise alone that would transform society, he said, but increased opportunities for “poor white trash.” He assured her that the war would “knock off the shackles of millions of poor whites, whose bondage was really worse than the African.” He observed their wretched conditions, appalled that generations of families had never seen the inside of a classroom.52

  Many others recognized that it would be an insurmountable task to raise up the poor. A New York artillery officer named William Wheeler encountered ragged refugees in Alabama, and found it hard to believe that they could be classed as “Caucasians,” or considered the same “flesh and blood as ourselves.” Some Union men were prepared to encounter cadaverous poor whites in the southern backwaters, but they were surprised to see these people in the Confederate ranks. They described deserters, prisoners, and Confederate prison guards as seedy, slouching, ignorant, and oddly attired. Soldiers in the western theater were taken aback by the mud huts they espied along the Mississippi. The North’s mudsills seemed like royalty compared to the South’s truly mud-bespattered swamp people. 53

  Mud could well be the central image in sizing up the cost of this war to Union and Confederate sides alike. There was no glamour, only tedious muddy marches, food shortages, foraging (which often entailed stealing from civilians), and the inhuman conditions that prevailed in fetid muddy camps. Union and Confederate dead alike were hastily laid to rest in shallow, muddy mass graves.54

  But it was the “foul mudsill” in wartime propaganda that captured the political imagination on both sides. “Mudsill” joined other Confederate slurs for Union men: vagabonds, bootblacks, and northern scum. And we mustn’t forget Jefferson Davis’s insult of choice: “offscourings of the earth.” By adopting such a vocabulary, rebels could imagine northern soldiers as Lincoln’s indentured servants, low-class hirelings. To convince themselves of easy victory, Confederates insisted that the Federal army was filled with the “trash” of Europe, rubbish flushed from northern city jails and back alleys, all brought together with the clodhoppers and dirt farmers from interior sections of the Union. For their part, northerners perceived the bread riots, desertions, poor white refugees, and runaway slaves as firm evidence of a fractured Confederacy. In this way, North and South each saw class as the enemy’s pivotal weakness and a source of military and political vulnerability.55

  Both sides were partially right. Wars in general, and civil wars to a greater degree, have the effect of exacerbating class tensions, because the sacrifices of war are always distributed unequally, and the poor are hit hardest. North and South had staked so much on their class-based definitions of nationhood that it is no exaggeration to say that in the grand scheme of things, Union and Confederate leaders saw the war as a clash of class systems wherein the superior civilization would reign triumphant.

  Union men had a way of identifying “w
hite trash” with the dual bogeymen of southern poverty and elite hypocrisy. They saw secession as a fraud perpetrated against hapless poor whites. A Philadelphia journalist had the best, or at least the most original, putdown of the Confederacy’s overproud social system when he directed Jeff Davis’s government to put a slave on their five-cent stamp; for only then, he argued, would “poor white trash” be able to “buy the chattel cheap.” But he didn’t let his fellow northerners entirely off the hook either. Little separated northern mudsills from southern trash. Neither class gained much when reduced to cannon fodder.56

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Thoroughbreds and Scalawags

  Bloodlines and Bastard Stock in the Age of Eugenics

  It is better for all the world if, instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. . . . Three generations of imbeciles are enough.

  —Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Buck v. Bell (1927)

  In 1909, at the National Negro Congress in New York City, W. E. B. Du Bois gave a provocative speech on the reception of Darwinism in the United States. In the published version of the speech, “The Evolution of the Race Problem,” Du Bois declared that social Darwinism had found such favor in America because the very idea of “survival of the fittest” ratified the reactionary racial politics that already prevailed. The Harvard-trained scholar underscored, with more than a touch of irony, how the “splendid scientific work” of Darwin endorsed an “inevitable inequality among men and the races of men that no philanthropy ought to eliminate.” Du Bois’s argument went this way: if one accepted the racist assumption that blacks are of “inferior stock,” then it was pointless to “legislate against nature”; proving the supremacy of the white race needed no help from politicians, because any form of philanthropy would be “powerless against deficient cerebral development.”1