No land, no job, no prospects

Keri Leigh Merritt wrote the book Masterless Men: Poor White and Slavery in the Antebellum South. Ian Reifowitz wrote a review of the book for Daily Kos and also included an interview of Merritt with Robin Lindley of History News Network. Merritt also participated in the discussion in the comments.

Reifotwitz starts us off with a common assumption:

The general impression I had of the pre-Civil War South was that the white population operated essentially as a single entity when it came to the system of slavery that dominated the economy, politics, and legal system of the region. I figured that just about all whites from top to bottom reaped the benefits of the so-called peculiar institution, even if those at the top received the lion’s share.

Merritt’s book refutes that idea by examining the poor whites in the time before and after the Civil War.

About one-third of the white population in the early 19th Century – about 1000 families – controlled all the land and most of the wealth and used slavery to generate that wealth. Another third was the middle class. These were landowners whose estates were too small to own slaves or merchants, lawyers, and bankers. The last third was the poor whites.

These poor whites were mostly illiterate because there were no public schools. They couldn’t get jobs because who would pay a white man when the labor of a black man was free (after the high purchase price). They couldn’t buy property because the price was too high (and the wealthy made sure it was). They had no access to white privilege. About the only difference between a poor white and a slave was the regularity and brutality of the beatings. The poor whites and slaves had much in common and sometimes bartered with each other.

The poor whites were kept illiterate for the same reason slaves were – so that they didn’t know another option in life. Slaveholders saw these poor whites as a nuisance who had to be controlled to keep slavery profitable. The government of the Deep South (Mississippi to South Carolina) was for and of the slaveholders. During the interview Merritt said:

Scholars such as Manisha Sinha have written about how the leaders of the secession movement were oligarchs. They were aristocrats. I show evidence of this too – they simply didn’t believe in democracy. They didn’t want poor people voting regardless of color. They didn’t think impoverished people should be involved on a political level at all. In the 1840s and 50s, slaveholders were increasingly attempting to remove civil liberties from poor whites. Furthermore, if you look at the laws passed by the Confederacy, you see more evidence of disdain for both poor whites and democracy itself.

Commenters to the post noted the similarities between between Antebellum landowners and today’s GOP. It seems the North won the war and the South won the peace. A commenter quoted from Conservative Southern Values Revived on Alternet in 2012. First a mention of people like Warren Buffet who use their wealth for the betterment of society. Then…

Which brings us to that other great historical American nobility -- the plantation aristocracy of the lowland South, which has been notable throughout its 400-year history for its utter lack of civic interest, its hostility to the very ideas of democracy and human rights, its love of hierarchy, its fear of technology and progress, its reliance on brutality and violence to maintain “order,” and its outright celebration of inequality as an order divinely ordained by God.

During the leadup to the Civil War the poor whites started withholding their support for the institution of slavery. In response, the slaveholders created an “explosion of propaganda” predicting a racial war between freed slaves and poor whites. This propaganda was full of incendiary, vile, and vicious racist language.

When war broke out many poor whites were forced to fight for the Confederate cause, even though they didn’t support the cause that benefited only their overlords – “rich man’s war and poor man’s fight.”

After the war the lives of the poor whites improved – they were also emancipated. The value of land dropped without slaves to work it and poor whites could now afford it. The Homestead Act allowed many to move West. Public schools were established.

But all this was driven by former slaveholders and their desire to make sure former slaves were worse off than any white. The lives of whites improved to keep them above blacks. These former poor whites were also taught to be racist, leading to their cooperation in Jim Crow laws.