For the social critic Du Bois, it was one short step from the racism contained in the Americanization of Darwinian selection to the realization that white rule had corrupted the normal course of evolution. Instead of allowing the best (whether black or white) to rise, racism had actually undermined the Darwinian argument. It had not only not improved the white race, but a false hegemony had led to “the survival of some of the worst stocks of mankind.” As much as the lower class of whites remained where they had always been, one found throughout the U.S. South “efficient Negroes,” able and productive, being trampled under the heels of elected officials who supported white vigilante justice and propped up the heinous lynch law––catering to the interests of the unreconstructed white trash of the postwar South.2
Du Bois reasoned that by denying equal education across racial lines, in preventing the laws of evolution from operating freely in the South, white political hegemony had reapplied the “evils of class injustice.” White supremacy, as a thesis, lacked any basis in science, while it wreaked more and more havoc upon a perverse, fear- and hate-based class system. Despite popular claims that the white race was destined for global dominance, it was, Du Bois assured, in decline. Among the “many signs of degeneracy” was the overall reduction in birthrates. Thus any threat of white deterioration came “from within.” Yet when Democrats gained control of the southern states in 1877, after a decade of black enfranchisement, they invariably blamed Republican egalitarians for producing social chaos and triggering white downward mobility. By refusing to hold up the mirror to themselves, Du Bois contended, southern whites were failing to see their own degeneracy.3
In the larger scheme of things, Du Bois was retelling the history of Reconstruction and its aftermath. Much later, in 1935, he would expand his perspective into a full-length study. Yet in the 1909 speech he was already exposing several crucial connections. Above all, he understood how southern politics had set the stage for the dual appeal of Darwinism and the eugenics movement. Darwin’s best-known works, On the Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871), scored big in America, as did the work of his cousin Francis Galton, the founder of eugenics.
Evolution rested on nature’s law, whereas eugenics found nature wanting. Galton’s adherents stressed the necessity for human intervention to improve the race through better breeding. Darwin himself endorsed eugenics, and he drew on the familiar trope of animal husbandry to make the case: “Man scans with scrupulous care the pedigree of his horses, cattle and dogs before he mates them; but when it comes to his marriage, he rarely, or never, takes such care.” Compare Thomas Jefferson—the wording is practically identical: “The circumstance of superior beauty is thought worthy of attention in the propagation of our horses, dogs, and other domestic animals; why not that of man?” Almost as a mantra, eugenicists compared good human stock to thoroughbreds, equating the wellborn with superior ability and inherited fitness.4
Pseudoscience, masquerading as hereditary science, provided Americans with a convenient way to naturalize class and racial differences. The appeal of this language, which reached its zenith in the early twentieth century, first took hold during Reconstruction. Both Republicans, who wanted to rebuild the South in the image of the North, and Democrats, who wished to restore elite white rule, saw the grand scope of national reunion as part of a larger evolutionary struggle. And so Darwin’s “survival of the fittest” became the watchword of politicians and journalists. They invoked a vocabulary that highlighted unnatural breeding, unfit governance, and the degenerate nature of the worst stocks. At the center of the argument was the struggle that pitted poor whites against freed slaves.
• • •
It was perhaps inevitable that poor whites would figure prominently in the debates over Reconstruction. Many northern thinkers had never for a moment bought into the old Cavalier myth of southern superiority. As one insisted in 1864, most southerners traced their lineage to the “scum of Europe,” to lowly descendants of “brothels and bridewells,” and could therefore dub themselves a “plebeian aristocracy” at best. When the patrician-led Confederacy collapsed, so did the illusion of the superior powers attached to southern refinement.5
For most Republicans, rebuilding the South meant (a) introducing a free-labor economy and (b) ensuring a loyal population. They perceived southern Unionists and freedmen as the most loyal element. The issue for Republicans was simply put: would poor whites help to transform the South into a literate society and free-market economy, or would they resist change and drag the South down?6
President Andrew Johnson contributed to the debate when he issued his plan for restoration of the Union. He included in his requirements disfranchisement of the wealthiest slaveholders, so that, as the New York Herald reported in 1865, the oligarchs of the South would be “shorn of their strength,” while—and here the newspaper underscored the class dynamic—“the ‘poor white trash’ heretofore compelled to walk behind them and to do their bidding, are made masters of the situation.” Yes, masters. Johnson expressed the same opinion in an address to a delegation from South Carolina: “While this rebellion has emancipated a great many negroes,” he said, “it has emancipated still more white men.” He would elevate the “poor white man” who struggled to till barren, sandy soil for subsistence, and who were looked down upon by the Negro and elite planter alike.7
The president imagined a three-tiered class system in the reconstructed states. The disenfranchised planter elite would keep their land and a certain social power, but would be deprived of any direct political influence until they regained the trust of Unionists. The middle ranks would be filled by a newly dominant poor white class. In exercising the vote and holding office, they would hold back the old oligarchy, while preventing a situation from arising in which they themselves would have to compete economically (or politically) with the freedmen. On the bottom tier, then, Johnson placed free blacks and freed slaves—the latter emancipated in fact, yet treated as resident aliens, bearing rights but still denied the franchise. The plan Lincoln’s unloved successor had in mind was not a “restoration” of the old order, nor did it promise to establish a democracy. Instead, it offered America something entirely original. So let us call the Johnson plan what it would have been if actually undertaken: a white trash republic.
The Tennessean decidedly saw black suffrage as a low priority. He was still intent, however, on redefining the old planter elite. Despite disfranchisement, the aristocracy retained some wealth and, just as important, the power to persuade others. They would turn their former slaves, now employees, into political pawns. This was a prospect that President Johnson looked upon with some disapproval. Yet he would undermine his own design by granting individual pardons to representatives of the former ruling elite, which he may have done because he felt he needed them to win reelection.8
Something more dangerous loomed if blacks obtained political equality. Long-standing animosities would resurface between the two lower classes in Johnson’s construct (blacks and poor whites), triggering a “war of races.” Andrew Johnson’s race war was not Thomas Jefferson’s, however. The third president had foretold a contest of annihilation brought on by universal emancipation, once liberated slaves took their place alongside their former masters; the seventeenth president was talking about a war of racial outcasts. As he saw it, the formerly dispossessed classes, one black and one white, would wage a vicious struggle for survival. Its cause: the federal imposition of universal suffrage on the southern states.9
Though Johnson soon abandoned his white trash republic, his thinking allows us to better visualize the existing spectrum of ideas about Reconstruction. It is meaningful, too, that the recently established Freedmen’s Bureau paired impoverished whites and freed people not as cutthroat adversaries, but as the worthy poor. From its inception in 1865, shortly before Lincoln’s assassination, the bureau was specifically empowered to extend relief to “all refugees, and all freedmen,” black and
white. In debating the bureau’s merits, many senators agreed that the destitution of white refugees, now “beggars, dependents, houseless and homeless wanderers,” was as significant as that of the freedmen. In Alabama, Arkansas, Missouri, and Tennessee, the bureau extended twice—and in some cases four times—as much relief to whites as to blacks; in Georgia, nearly 180,000 white refugees secured food and provisions. As Republican congressman Green Clay Smith of Kentucky noted during the debate to extend the Freedmen’s Bureau in 1866, “There are a large number of white people who never owned a foot of land, who never have been in possession of any property, not even a cow or a horse, yet who have been as true and devoted loyalists as anybody else.” The problems of the South went deeper than the war itself, Smith acknowledged. The twin evils of poverty and vagrancy were a permanent fixture among the white population.10
Yet few bureau officials embraced Smith’s vision of loyal, honorable poor whites. Those who visited the refugee camps, or watched what one New York Times correspondent called the “loafing whites” in southern towns, offered little in their favor. A skeptic in New Orleans offered this droll observation: although “poor white trash” had proven themselves incapable of doing anything before the war, they had suddenly discovered a trade in “the refugee business,” by which he meant living off government handouts. In Florida, bureau agent Charles Hamilton, who later served in Congress, confessed to his superiors that freedmen were only marginally below the “white plebeians of the South” in intelligence. Widely circulated bureau reports claimed that hundreds of thousands of destitute whites lived off “Uncle Sam’s rations.” The typical recipients were women “covered in rags and filth, and a dozen greasy and dirty little ‘innocent prattlers’ in train.” Perhaps the most damning assessment came from Marcus Sterling, a Union officer turned civilian administrator. After working as a bureau agent for four years in rural Virginia, he wrote a final report in 1868. While he believed that black freedmen had made great progress, were “more settled, industrious and ambitious” as a result of federal intervention, and eager to achieve literacy with “honest pride and manly integrity,” the same could not be said of that “pitiable class of poor whites,” the “only class which seem almost unaffected by the [bureau’s] great benevolence and its bold reform.” In the race for self-reliance, poor whites seemed to many bureau agents never to have left the starting gate.11
Agents of the Freedmen’s Bureau were not alone in offering a grim prognosis for poor whites. Journalists from major newspapers headed south, sending back regular dispatches and publishing monographs for curious northern readers. Prominent articles appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, Putnam’s Magazine, and Harper’s New Monthly Magazine. The New York Times published a series of essays on the subject: in 1866, its anonymous correspondent authored a scathing exposé of white poverty, accompanied by the innocuous title “From the South: Southern Journeyings and Jottings.” Writing for the Chicago Tribune and Boston Advertiser, the Illinois-based reporter Sidney Andrews expressed his unvarnished views of wretched whites, which he reissued as a book, The South Since the War. After having been a correspondent for the Cincinnati Gazette, Whitelaw Reid compiled his unsympathetic observations in a travelogue, After the War: A Tour of the Southern States. Finally, John Trowbridge produced The South: A Tour of Its Battlefields and Ruined Cities, which focused a harsh lens on rural whites.12
All of the above were published in the single year of 1866. Yet one of the most talked-about books in those wobbly years came out before the war had officially ended. Down in Tennessee (1864) was also a travel account, its author the New York cotton merchant and novelist James R. Gilmore. His argument was unique because he distinguished between “mean whites” and “common whites,” arguing that the latter class were enterprising, law-abiding, and productive citizens. They stood in sharp contrast to the shiftless, thieving, and brutish mean whites, whose homes reminded him of a “tolerably-kept swine-sty or dog-kennel.” Though he identified this group as a minority, they were still a dangerous class, he said, owing to their infectious character; they were a diseased segment of the prostrate South, a “fungus growth” on the body of society, “absorbing the strength and life of its other parts.”13
All of these writers had a common desire: to unravel the enigma of the southern racial and class system in order to prognosticate about its uncertain future. If they agreed on any point, it was that which was summed up by one of Sidney Andrews’s imitators: “It is now not so much a question of what is to become of poor blacks of the South, as it is one of what is to become of poor whites of the South?”14
The insistence of Republican-leaning journalists that poor whites languished below freedmen as potential citizens may seem startling, but it was not unexpected. Distrust was strong both of former Confederate elites and the “groveling” poor men who, like “sheep to slaughter,” were dragged off to war. Whitelaw Reid felt that black children were eager to learn, while Sidney Andrews believed that blacks exhibited a “shrewd instinct for preservation,” which white trash seemed to lack. In account after account, freedmen were described as capable, thrifty, and loyal to the Union. A writer for the Atlantic Monthly asked: why should government “disfranchise the humble, quiet, hardworking negro” and leave the North vulnerable to the vote of the “worthless barbarian”—the “ignorant, illiterate, and vicious” poor white?15
Thus the popular vocabulary had become more ominous. No longer were white trash simply freaks of nature on the fringe of society; they were now congenitally delinquent, a withered branch of the American family tree. As a “fungus growth,” they could weaken the entire stock of southern society. More than tallow-colored skin, it was the permanent mark of intellectual stagnation, the “inert” minds, the “fumbling” speech, and the “stupid, moony glare, like that of the idiot.” They were, it was said, of the “Homo genus without the sapien.” Hardworking blacks were suddenly the redeemed ones, while white trash remained undeveloped, evolutionarily stagnant creatures.16
During Reconstruction, Republicans designated white trash as a “dangerous class” that was producing a flood of bastards, prostitutes, vagrants, and criminals. They violated every sexual norm, from fathers cohabiting with daughters, to husbands selling wives, to mothers conniving illicit liaisons for daughters. The danger came from a growing population that had stopped disappearing into the wilderness. Reid was appalled by the filthy refugees living in railroad cars, an uncomfortable foreshadowing of twentieth-century trailer trash. John W. De Forest, a bureau agent and yet another novelist, concluded that white trash were tolerable as long as Darwin’s “severe law” of natural selection killed off most of them.17
In 1868, a writer for Putnam’s Magazine told the “history of a family,” tracing a corrupted genealogical tree back to it roots. This one basic story anticipated a host of studies that included The Jukes (1877), which proved the most enduring chronicle of a degenerate lineage, and which influenced Charles Davenport, the leading American eugenicist of the early twentieth century. The author of the 1868 Putnam’s piece claimed to have discovered a real couple, with an actual name—thus going beyond Daniel Hundley’s more general dismissal of southern rubbish as the heirs of indentured servants dumped in the American colonies.
One Bill Simmins was the erstwhile progenitor of this corrupt family tree. A British convict and Virginia squatter, he married a London courtesan turned “wild woman,” who gave birth to a tribe of low-down, dependent people. According to the author, the only cure for white trash had to be a radical one: intervention. Take a child out of his family’s hovel and place him in an asylum, where he might at least learn to work and avoid producing more inbred offspring. The genealogical link had to be cut. As we can see, the line from delinquency to eugenic sterilization was growing shorter.18
The idea that white trash was a measure of evolutionary progress (or lack thereof) was so pervasive in the nineteenth century that it conditioned the reception of the first federa
l study of soldiers. The U.S. Sanitary Commission undertook a major statistical study of some 16,000 men who had served in the Union and Confederate armies. Only a small percentage of them were nonwhite (approximately 3,000 black men and 519 Indians). When the study was published in 1869, a surgeon who had served in the Union army queried in the prestigious London Anthropological Review whether it was possible to draw conclusions about racial differences unless researchers actually compared blacks and poor whites. The “low down people” may have come from Anglo-Saxon stock, but they had “degenerated into an idle, ignorant, and physically and mentally degraded people.” It was time to see whether intelligence was a racially specific inherited trait or not.19
• • •
While Republican journalists, Freedmen’s Bureau agents, and Union officers published extensively, in the partisan climate of the postwar years Democrats just as painstakingly worked to rebuild an opposition party and chip away at Republican policies, and they reached for the racial arguments at hand to help. Instead of celebrating the hardworking black man and the promise of social mobility, they fretted about the loss of a “white man’s government.” Unconcerned with inbreeding, they focused obsessively on outbreeding, that is, the supposedly unhealthy combination of distinct races.
“Mongrel” became one of the Democrats’ favorite insults in these years. The word called forth numerous potent metaphors. Both defeated Confederates and Democratic journalists in the North predicted that Republican policies would usher in a “mongrel republic.” They drew paranoid comparisons to the Mexican Republic, the nineteenth-century example of racial amalgamation run amok.20
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