White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America

by Nancy Isenberg

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

"Let them eat cake"