White Trash

by Nancy Isenberg

  32.See report of speech in “Slavery in Kentucky,” Philanthropist, May 5, 1841. Wilmot privately used the arguments of blood to attack the southern white slaveholder, claiming that “men born and nursed by white women are not going to be ruled by men who were brought up on the milk of some damn Negro wench!” In the theory of the time, as stated earlier, the quality of bloodlines was passed through a mother’s milk. For the Wilmot quote, see Earle, Jacksonian Antislavery, 131.

  33.On Frémont’s acceptance speech, see Bigelow, Memoir of the Life and Public Services of John Charles Fremont, 458; also see “America vs. America,” Liberator, July 22, 1842; and Helper, The Impending Crisis, 42, 121, 149, 376.

  34.Helper, The Impending Crisis, 67–72, 90–91; Weston, The Poor Whites of the South; and on how southerners used the agricultural address to lament southern decline, see Drew Gilpin Faust, “The Rhetoric and Ritual of Agriculture in Antebellum South Carolina,” Journal of Southern History 45, no. 4 (November 1979): 541–68.

  35.For the description of “Hard-scratch,” see Warren Burton, White Slavery: A New Emancipation Cause Presented to the United States (Worcester, MA, 1839), 168–69; and Henry David Thoreau, “Slavery in Massachusetts,” in Reform Papers, ed. Wendell Glick (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973), 109; and for a discussion of this point, see Jennifer Rae Greeson, Our South: Geographic Fantasy and the Rise of National Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 207.

  36.Stowe, Dred, 105–6, 190–93.

  37.Jeff Forret, Race Relations at the Margins: Slaves and Poor Whites in the Antebellum Southern Countryside (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006), 112; Timothy James Lockley, Lines in the Sand: Race and Class in Lowcountry Georgia, 1750–1860 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001), 115, 129, 164.

  38.Forret, Race Relations at the Margins, 29, 97, 105, 112; and for Gregg’s speech, see Helper, The Impending Crisis, 377; also see Tom Downey, “Riparian Rights and Manufacturing in Antebellum South Carolina: William Gregg and the Origins of the ‘Industrial Mind,’” Journal of Southern History 65, no. 1 (February 1999): 77–108, esp. 95; and Thomas P. Martin, “The Advent of William Gregg and the Grantville Company,” Journal of Southern History 11, no. 3 (August 1945): 389–423.

  39.On New Orleans laborers and poor white men and women in the fields, see Helper, The Impending Crisis, 299–301; also see Seth Rockman, Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009).

  40.On the class barriers to social mobility among poor whites, see Charles C. Bolton, Poor Whites of the Antebellum South: Tenants and Laborers in Central North Carolina and Northeast Mississippi (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), 14, 25, 27–29, 53, 67, 69, 94; and Stephen A. West, From Yeoman to Redneck in the South Carolina Upcountry, 1850–1915 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008), 28–39, 43–44. On the declining opportunities for nonslaveholding whites, see Gavin Wright, The Political Economy of the Cotton South: Households, Markets, and Wealth in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Norton, 1978), 24–42.

  41.Stowe, Dred, 27, 37, 109, 194.

  42.See William Cooper’s introduction in Hundley, Social Relations in Our Southern States, xv–xx.

  43.Hundley, Social Relations in Our Southern States, xxxii–xxxiii, 27–29, 31, 34–36, 40–41, 43–44, 60, 70–71, 82, 91, 198, 226, 239, 251, 255–57.

  44.Stowe, Dred, 81, 83, 86–87, 89–90, 99, 107–9, 190–94, 400, 543, 549.

  45.“Curious Race in Georgia,” Scientific American, July 31, 1847. Emily Pillsbury of New Hampshire took a teaching position at the Savannah Female Orphan Asylum in 1840 and stayed in the South for nine years. She married the Reverend A. B. Burke while there, but he died and she left for Ohio. See Burke, Reminiscences of Georgia, 206. For the “abnormal classes in the slave states,” also see “Selections: Manifest Destiny of the American Union,” Liberator, October 30, 1857 (reprinted from the English publication the Westminster Review).

  46.On white trash women as a wretched specimen of maternity, see “Up the Mississippi,” Putnam’s Monthly Magazine of American Literature, Science, and Art (October 1857): 433–56, esp. 456. On their strange complexion and hair, see Burke, Reminiscences of Georgia, 206; “Sandhillers of South Carolina,” Christian Advocate and Journal, August 7, 1851; “The Sandhillers of South Carolina,” Ohio Farmer, January 31, 1857; “Clay-Eaters,” Ballou’s Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion, July 31, 1858. On clay-eating infants, see “The Poor Whites of the South,” Freedom’s Champion, April 11, 1863; and Hundley, Social Relations in Our Southern States, 264–65.

  47.Isabella D. Martin and Myrta Lockett Avary, eds., A Diary from Dixie, as Written by Mary Boykin Chesnut (New York, 1905), 400–401.

  48.Hammond also claimed that mulattoes existed primarily in the cities and resulted from sex between northerners/foreigners and blacks. He called them “mongrels.” On Hammond, see Drew Gilpin Faust, James Henry Hammond and the Old South: A Design for Mastery (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982), 278–82; and James H. Hammond, Two Letters on Slavery in the United States, Addressed to Thomas Clarkson, Esq. (Columbia, SC, 1845), 10–11, 17, 26, 28. On others in the proslavery intelligentsia, see Drew Gilpin Faust, “A Southern Stewardship: The Intellectual and Proslavery Argument,” American Quarterly 31, no. 1 (Spring 1979): 63–80, esp. 67, 73–74; and Laurence Shore, Southern Capitalists: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 43.

  49.On Tucker, see Faust, “A Southern Stewardship,” 74. On the Richmond Enquirer, see “White Slavery—The Privileged Class,” National Era, January 24, 1856. And on the Republican reaction to this conservative southern defense of slavery, see “Charles Sumner’s Speech,” Ohio State Journal, June 19, 1860. Also see Hundley, Social Relations in Our Southern States, 272. Peter Kolchin has argued that proslavery defenders turned to defending servitude without regard to complexion; see Kolchin, “In Defense of Servitude: Proslavery and Russian Pro-Serfdom Arguments, 1760–1860,” American Historical Review 85, no. 4 (October 1980): 809–27, esp. 814–17.

  50.The decision was issued on March 6, 1857. Justice Taney insisted that the Declaration of Independence did not refer to slaves or descendants of the African race. He argued that there was no distinction between the slave and free black or mulatto, and that a “stigma” and “deepest degradation” was forever applied to the whole race. This “impassable barrier” was in place by the time of the Revolution and the federal Constitutional Convention. He further insisted that the black race was set apart by “indelible marks.” He upheld the idea that Dred Scott was a “Negro of African descent; his ancestors were of pure African blood.” See Scott v. Sandford, 19 How. 393 (U.S., 1856), 396–97, 403, 405–7, 409–10, 419. On the importance of pedigree, see James H. Kettner, The Development of American Citizenship, 1608–1870 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978), 326, 328. Taney had rejected the authority of the Northwest Ordinance in an earlier 1851 decision, which he then used in the Dred Scott decision; see William Wiecek, “Slavery and Abolition Before the Supreme Court,” Journal of American History 65, no. 1 (June 1978): 34–58, esp. 54, 56. Taney was able to insist that there was no difference between slaves and free blacks because he placed all the descendants of the entire race into one single category—again proving the importance of pedigree. Also see Dan E. Fehrenbacher, Slavery, Law, and Politics: The Dred Scott Case in Historical Perspective (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 187–98.

  Chapter Seven: Cowards, Poltroons, and Mudsills: Civil War as Class Warfare

  1.See the account of the arrival and speech of President Jefferson Davis in Montgomery, Alabama, in the Charleston [SC] Mercury, February 19, 1861, in Jefferson Davis, Constitutionalist: His Letters, Papers and Speeches, ed. Dunbar Rowland, 10 vols. (Jackson: Mississippi Department of Archives
and History, 1923), 5:47–48.

  2.Thomas Jefferson saw national unity as rooted in shared cultural values and national stocks. He wrote that too many immigrants would turn America into a “heterogeneous, incoherent, distracted mass.” He wished for the U.S. government to be “more homogeneous, more peaceable, more durable” by limiting immigrants. See Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 84–85. Others used the “one flesh trope,” such as the writer who argued that all the southern slave states were metaphorically married and “no Yankee shall put asunder”; see Richmond Examiner, October 19, 1861.

  3.Davis used “degenerate sons” in four speeches and “degenerate descendants” in another. For his February 18, 1861, speech, see Rowland, ed., Jefferson Davis, 5:48; for other references, see ibid., 4:545; 5:4, 391; 6:573.

  4.For Davis’s speech of December 26, 1862, see “Jeff Davis on the War: His Speech Before the Mississippi Legislature,” New York Times, January 14, 1863.

  5.See “Speech of Jefferson Davis at Richmond” (taken from the Richmond Daily Enquirer, January 7, 1863), Rowland, Jefferson Davis, 5:391–93.

  6.On the importance of demonizing the enemy, see Jason Phillips, Diehard Rebels: The Confederate Culture of Invincibility (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007), 40–41.

  7.On masking divisions within the Confederacy, see Paul Escott, After Secession: Jefferson Davis and the Failure of Confederate Nationalism (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978); and George C. Rable, The Confederate Republic: A Revolution Against Politics (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 27; Michael P. Johnson, Toward a Patriarchal Republic: The Secession of Georgia (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977), 41. On southerners fighting for the Union, see William W. Freehling, The South vs. the South: How Anti-Confederates Shaped the Course of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), xiii. On class strife, see David Williams, Rich Man’s War: Class, Caste, and Confederate Defeat in the Lower Chattahoochee Valley (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998); and Wayne K. Durrill, War of Another Kind: Southern Community in Great Rebellion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). And on dissent in the South during the war, see Victoria E. Bynum, The Long Shadow of the Civil War: Southern Dissent and Its Legacies (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); and Daniel E. Sutherland, ed., Guerrillas, Unionists, and Violence on the Confederate Homefront (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1999).

  8.The New York Herald reprinted the quote and claimed that the article came from the Muskogee Herald in Alabama. The New York Herald writer complained that this was one of many attacks that could be found in numerous southern newspapers in Virginia, Mississippi, Louisiana, South Carolina, and Alabama. See “Ridiculous Attacks of the South upon the North, and Vice Versa,” New York Herald, September 16, 1856.

  9.For the banner of “greasy mechanic,” see “Great Torchlight Procession! Immense Demonstrations,” Boston Daily Atlas, October 1856.

  10.Speech of Jefferson Davis at Aberdeen, Mississippi, May 26, 1851, in Rowland, Jefferson Davis, 2:73–74. He made a similar argument in a speech before the Mississippi legislature, November 16, 1858; see ibid., 3:357. This idea was widely used in the South by ruling elites to reaffirm the allegiance of poor whites; see Williams, Rich Man’s War, 28; and William J. Harris, Plain Folk and Gentry in a Slave Society: White Liberty and Black Slavery in Augusta’s Hinterlands (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1985), 75.

  11.“Offscourings,” which can be traced back to English insults aimed at vagrants, was a vicious slur. It meant fecal waste—dispelling the worst remains from the lining of the intestines. On urban roughs and the Union army, see Lorien Foote, The Gentlemen and the Roughs: Violence, Honor, and Manhood in the Union Army (New York: New York University Press, 2010). On immigrants, see Tyler Anbinder, “Which Poor Man’s Fight? Immigrants and Federal Conscription of 1863,” Civil War History 52, no. 4 (December, 2006): 344–72. On Union men as worse than “Goths and Vandals,” see “The Character of the Coming Campaign,” New York Herald, April 28, 1861. The Confederacy refused to recognize black soldiers as soldiers, or as prisoners of war, and promised death to any Union officer commanding such troops; see Dudley Taylor Cornish, The Sable Arm: Black Troops in the Union Army, 1861–1865 (1956; reprint ed., Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1987), 158–63, 178.

  12.James Hammond, Speech to the U.S. Senate, March 4, 1858, Congressional Globe, 35th Congress, 1st Session, Appendix, 71; also see Faust, James Henry Hammond and the Old South, 374.

  13.Hammond, Speech to the U.S. Senate, 74. The equation of the Republican Party (and its philosophy) with a socialist revolution was common among southern writers; see Harris, Plain Folk and Gentry, 138; and Manisha Sinha, The Counter-Revolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 191, 223–29.

  14.For “Red Republicans,” see “The War upon Society—Socialism,” De Bow’s Review (June 1857): 633–44. On black Republicans making slaves the equals of poor whites, see Williams, Rich Man’s War, 47; also see Arthur Cole, “Lincoln’s Election an Immediate Menace to Slavery in the States?,” American Historical Review 36, no. 4 (July 1931): 740–67, esp. 743, 745, 747. For the threat of amalgamation, see George M. Fredrickson, “A Man but Not a Brother: Abraham Lincoln and Racial Equality,” Journal of Southern History 41, no. 1 (February 1975): 39–58, esp. 54. And for race-mixing charges during Lincoln’s reelection campaign, see Elise Lemire, “Miscegenation”: Making Race in America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 115–23.

  15.Alexander Stephens, “Slavery the Cornerstone of the Confederacy,” speech given in Savannah, March 21, 1861, in Great Debates in American History: States Rights (1798–1861); Slavery (1858–1861), ed. Marion Mills Miller, 14 vols. (New York, 1913), 5:287, 290.

  16.For Wigfall’s remarks, see “Proceedings of the Confederate Congress,” Southern Historical Society Papers (Richmond, VA, 1959), 52:323. For the bootblack reference, see “Latest from the South,” [New Orleans] Daily Picayune, February 15, 1865. For class components of his speech, see “The Spring Campaign—Davis’ Last Dodge,” New York Daily Herald, February 9, 1865. Also see Edward S. Cooper, Louis Trezevant Wigfall: The Disintegration of the Union and the Collapse of the Confederacy (Lanham, MD: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2012), 137–40.

  17.Williams, Rich Man’s War, 184. On conscription, see Albert Burton Moore, Conscription and Conflict in the Confederacy (New York, 1924), 14–18, 34, 38, 49, 53, 67, 70–71, 308. On desertion and the unequal burden of military service, see Scott King-Owen, “Conditional Confederates: Absenteeism Among Western North Carolina Soldiers, 1861–1865,” Civil War History 57 (2011): 349–79, esp. 377; Rable, The Confederate Republic, 294; and Jaime Amanda Martinez, “For the Defense of the State: Slave Impressment in Confederate Virginia and North Carolina” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Virginia, 2008). Some Georgians thought that arming slaves would dispel the cries of “rich man’s war and poor man’s fight” and convince white deserters to rejoin the Confederate ranks; see Philip D. Dillard, “The Confederate Debate over Arming Slaves: View from Macon and Augusta Newspapers,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 79, no. 1 (Spring 1995): 117–46, esp. 145.

  18.On the attitudes and policy of Union generals, see Mark Grimsley, The Hard Hand of War: Union Military Policy Toward Southern Civilians, 1861–1865 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995); and Ulysses S. Grant: Memoirs and Selected Letters (New York: Library of America, 1990), 148–49. Grant used the same five-to-one reference in a letter written during the war. He also voiced a similar view amid the war that the “war could be ended at once if the whole Southern people could express their unbiased feeling untrammeled by leaders.” See Grant to Jesse Root Grant, August 3, 1861, and Grant to Julia Dent Grant, June 12, 1862, in ibid., 972, 1009. On Hinton Rowan Helper, Land of Gold (1855)
, see chapter 6 of this book.

  19.The Irrepressible Conflict. A Speech by William H. Seward, Delivered at Rochester, Monday, Oct 25, 1858 (New York, 1858), 1–2.

  20.See “The Destinies of the South: Message of His Excellency, John H. Means, Esq., Government of the State of South-Carolina, . . . November 1852,” Southern Quarterly Review (January 1853): 178–205, esp. 198; also see James Hammond, Governor Hammond’s Letters on Southern Slavery: Addressed to Thomas Clarkson, the English Abolitionist (Charleston, SC, 1845), 21; Jefferson Davis, “Confederate State of America—Message to Congress, April 29, 1861,” in A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Confederacy, ed. James D. Richardson, 2 vols. (Nashville: United States Publishing Co., 1906), 1:68; and Christa Dierksheide and Peter S. Onuf, “Slaveholding Nation, Slaveholding Civilization,” in In the Cause of Liberty: How the Civil War Redefined American Ideals, eds. William J. Cooper Jr. and John M. McCardell Jr. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2009): 9–24, esp. 9, 22–23.

  21.“The Union: Its Benefits and Dangers,” Southern Literary Messenger (January 1, 1861): 1–4, esp. 4; and “The African Slave Trade,” Southern Literary Messenger (August 1861): 105–13; also see Rable, The Confederate Republic, 55. On the reaction to Helper’s book, see Brown, Southern Outcast; and Williams, Rich Man’s War, 31–32.

  22.See Memoir on Slavery, Read Before the Society for the Advancement of Learning, of South Carolina, at Its Annual Meeting at Columbia. 1837. By Chancellor Harper (Charleston, SC, 1838), 23–24. On lower literacy rates and fewer opportunities for the poor to receive a common school education in the South, see Carl Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic: Common Schooling and American Society, 1780–1860 (New York, 1893), 195, 206; James M. McPherson, Drawn with the Sword: Reflections on the American Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 19. Estimates on illiteracy vary widely. McPherson chose the lower number of a three-to-one margin in illiteracy rates between slave and northern states. Wayne Flynt noted that the 1850 federal census announced that illiteracy rates among whites were 20.3 percent in the slave states, 3 percent in the middle states, and .42 percent in New England. That makes it over 40:1 with New England and 7:1 for the middle states. See Wayne Flynt, Dixie’s Forgotten People: The South’s Poor Whites (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979), 8. On the call for a Confederate publishing trade, see Michael T. Bernath, Confederate Minds: The Struggle for Intellectual Independence in the Civil War South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013).