The 1860s The South had become “a section apart,” in C. Vann Woodward’s words, because of the plantation system. This system deeply affected well-to-do white planters and black slaves, of course. But it also left a deep imprint on another large group we often forget—poor white sharecroppers, small farmers, and tenant farmers, some of whom were the ancestors of those I came to know in Louisiana. In his classic The Mind of the South, W.J. Cash says that the plantation system “threw up walls [which] . . . enclosed the white man, walls he did not see.” The poor white did not see himself “locked
...more
