All knew that poor whites were cursed because they were routinely consigned to the worst land: sandy, scrubby pine, and swampy soil. This was how they became known in the mid-nineteenth century as “sandhillers” and “pineys.” Forced to the margins, often squatting on land they did not own, they were regularly identified with the decaying soil. The poor whites of “Hard-scratch” were, in the words of one, as “stony, stumpy, and shrubby, as the land they lived on.” In a throwback to Buffon, Helper insisted that the “degenerate population” produced men and animals that were “dwarfed into shabby
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