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

by Nancy Isenberg

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Liberia, a country founded by the British and former American slaves, that first established universal suffrage for adult men, in 1839.74

If whiteness was not an automatic badge of superiority,

then the ideals of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness were unobtainable.

filibuster,

Slaveowners had unusual financial instruments that situated them above nonslaveholders: they raised slave children as an investment, as an invaluable source of collateral and credit when they sought to obtain loans.

Like many other proslavery advocates, Davis was convinced that slavery had elevated poor whites by ensuring their superiority over blacks.

He was wrong: in the antebellum period, class hierarchy was more extreme than it ever had been.10

The South was fighting against degenerate mudsills and everything they stood for: class mixing, race mixing, and the redistribution of wealth.

Confederate ideologues turned to the language of class and breeding for obvious reasons. They were invested in upholding a hierarchy rooted in the ownership of slaves.

Protecting that racial and class system was why southerners had seceded.

Conscription Act of 1862,

instituting the draft for all men between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five. Exemptions were available to educated elites, slaveholders, officeholders, and men employed in valuable trades—leaving poor farmers and hired laborers the major target of the draft. Next the draft was extended to the age of forty-five, and by 1864 all males from seventeen to fifty were subject to conscription.

With a docile workforce, the South had eliminated conflict between labor and capital.

Not surprisingly, evidence exists to prove that southern whites lagged behind northerners in literacy rates by at least a six-to-one margin. Prominent southern men defended the disparity in educational opportunity. Chancellor William Harper of South Carolina concluded in his 1837 Memoir on Slavery, “It is better that a part should be fully and highly educated and the rest utterly ignorant.” Inequality in education was preferable to the system in the northern states, in which “imperfect, superficial, half-education should be universal.” As the Civil War arrived, editors and intellectuals called for an independent publishing industry in the Confederacy, in order to shield its people from the contamination of Union presses.22

“Tartars”

Pockets of poor men and their families had become the anarchists that upper-class southerners had long feared.

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.

Reid was appalled by the filthy refugees living in railroad cars, an uncomfortable foreshadowing of twentieth-century trailer trash.