Stowe had popularized the term “white trash” to Northern audiences in her A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which she had published to demonstrate the factual basis of her best-selling novel. Slavery, Stowe had written, had produced “a poor white population as degraded and brutal as ever existed in the most crowded districts of Europe.” Even when these whites had gained enough wealth to own slaves, the slaves were “in every respect, superior to their owners.”
