Poor Whites in Crisis in Antebellum South...

Kirk's Raider's said:

Obviously we can't throw rocks at GGG grand Pappy on the other hand who's responsibility is it not to be prejudiced ?

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Not his, only ours today.

Kirk's Raider's said:

Based on my readings we have four separate dynamics from the perspective of many although certainly not all Unionist soldiers.
1. All my life I was taught from my parents and my clergy plus community that people of color are inferior and dangerous so therefore they are.
2. Slave owners look down on me therefore why should I fight and die for them?
3. Cousin Jedeidia got blown away or had his limbs blown off without a pot to piss in.
4.I never had a problem with a United States.
Kirk's Raider's

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Part of the problem with getting any accurate number of White Southerners who might have genuinely thought better of Blacks than their peers (I won't use the work equal since there were varying degrees of views on this at the time) is how dangerous it was for them.

My 3rd Great Uncle was a Miles Ledford Langley who was a preacher in Arkansas. He was a delegate to the 1864 Arkansas Constitutional Convention and was most certainly considered a scalawag. During the debates he had recounted that when he spoke against slavery and the war he was robbed, shot, and imprisoned. I'll use his words here since they are far more articulate than I could be:

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Sir, for speaking in favor of universal freedom, for advocating the rights, and contending for the interests, of the down-trodden and cruelly oppressed people of our country, especially the colored race, I have been incarcerated in dark and loathsome dungeons, as hellish as the Bastile of France, the Inquisition of Spain, or the Black Hole in Calcutta.
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He also spoke for women's rights and suffrage (arguing their equality based on a scientific truth), he failed and wrote his failed results to Susan B Anthony

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But next morning, just as I was about to commence my speech, some of the members tried to "bully" me out of the right to speak on that question. I replied that I had been robbed, shot, and imprisoned for advocating the rights of the slaves, and that I would then and there speak in favor of the rights of women if I had to fight for the right!
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Now, I don't think he was the common case, his treatment even after the war shows that. Though my 2nd great grandfather, Isom Paul Langley my profile picture, who was his brother was conscripted in the Confederacy, got out on sick leave, and then joined the Union. I don't know if they agreed, but I do know they attended the same church and considering their actions I wouldn't be surprised. Two of their brothers served the Confederacy and stayed in.

So I wouldn't be surprised if there were more people like him, that genuinely disagreed with slavery and treating Black people as inferior (at least to the degree they were in their society) but saw responses like that and were afraid to show those beliefs.

MattL said:

Part of the problem with getting any accurate number of White Southerners who might have genuinely thought better of Blacks than their peers (I won't use the work equal since there were varying degrees of views on this at the time) is how dangerous it was for them.

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MattL said:

Black Hole in Calcutta.

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Link; What Is the Black Hole of Calcutta?

MattL said:

Sir, for speaking in favor of universal freedom, for advocating the rights, and contending for the interests, of the down-trodden and cruelly oppressed people of our country, especially the colored race, I have been incarcerated in dark and loathsome dungeons, as hellish as the Bastile of France, the Inquisition of Spain, or the Black Hole in Calcutta.

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A man after my liberal heart...

5fish said:

I want to pint out we do have a historical reference of poor whites and runaway slaves working together: Free State of Jones... They made a film about it...

Link; The True Story of the ‘Free State of Jones’ | History ...​

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A very good point. I forgot about the underground railroad and the brave whites that risked everything to participate in their part. Probably a lot more we don't even know about.

A man after my liberal heart...

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Some of his statements from 1864 would ironically fit quite well as liberal statements today, my favorite is

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Progress is an unchangeable law of nature. This is an age of improvement. Reform is the order of the day. We are passing through a crisis unparalleled in the history of the world. We have just struggled through a gigantic war, and are inaugurating a new era in the history of our national policy. We must reconstruct the government of our country on radical principles—universal freedom, impartial suffrage, and equal rights. We must he governed by natural justice and scientific principles. Scientific truth must be our guide in ethics, in religion, in politics, in social life, and in legal matters.
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The crisis in Antebellum south was education of the poor … it was woefully inadequate... a case South Carolina…

Link: https://www.carolana.com/SC/1800s/antebellum/educational_opportunities.html

Even so, in 1860 only about half the state's white children were in school - probably because the free schools were stigmatized as schools for the poor and were treated as such by the men who operated them. In the Richland District, school commissioner John Bryce said that except in Columbia, the funds expended on public schools were wasted.

Children of parents with means attended private schools or were tutored at home. For example, the Palmers of South Santee sent their daughters to Miss Murden's Seminary for Young Ladies in Charleston, Josiah O'Bear's in Winnsboro, and Barhamville in Columbia, and their sons to Moses Waddell's Willington Academy in the Abbeville District and Mount Zion Academy in Winnsboro.

There were private schools in every district, and the education they provided varied with the schoolmaster. In 1830, the Richland School, a male academy, briefly attracted students as far away as Louisiana and Pennsylvania, however, by 1835 it had closed its doors. Throughout the antebellum period, St. David's Academy in Society Hill and Mount Zion Academy in Winnsboro, educated primarily the elite of their respective districts. In 1860, there were 227 private academies and other schools within the state of South Carolina.

There had been schools for the black population, however, in the aftermath of the Nullification Crisis, these were abruptly shut down. One of them was Daniel Payne's, a free person of color who operated his school for six years with the support of white clergy. In 1835, he closed his school and left for the North.

Only about half of the state's white children received any elementary education at all in 1860. Of these, only those in the Charleston city schools, about ten percent of the total, obtained anything like a real education. In 1860, there were 1,395 teachers operating 1,270 schools for 18,915 students.

The link also go into higher education in South Carolina during the Antebellum period...

Here is Alabama educating the poor...

Link: http://www.encyclopediaofalabama.org/article/h-2599

The structure of a common classroom varied from school to school, but all were crude at best. Schools were often located in buildings deemed unfit for other enterprises, lacked any indoor plumbing or sanitary services, and provided one common container for drinking water.

A single individual might teach all grades, and at some schools, classes were ungraded and harsh discipline was the rule, with corporal punishment administered with paddles, or in extreme cases, the lash.

Despite the new school law, public education suffered from fiscal mismanagement, lack of public and legislative dedication, and annual uncertainty over funding. Tax revenues for school funding were so meager that most public schools depended on local support, including subscriptions and donations, to remain open.

How long the doors remained open, however, depended largely upon the region in which a school resided and the local ability to supplement school funding. In more affluent areas of the state, schools had the resources to remain open longer, some for up to nine months. In poorer areas, schools might stay open for only five months. Even these meager gains would be set back with the outbreak of the Civil War,

From ... wiki

By 1860, about a quarter of White school-aged children were enrolled.[4] The 1868 constitution required free, racially integrated public school funded by the state.[5] During this period, it was a crime in Alabama to teach a slave to read.[6]

In 1880, a quarter of all Whites over the age of ten were illiterate. The number was 18.84% in 1890 and 14.8% in 1900. Only two states, South Carolina and Louisiana had lower figures.[7] Comparable national illiteracy rates are 1880 17%, 1890 13% and 1900 11%.[8] In 2012, the state reported 14.8% of all adults were illiterate.[9] Recent reports use different standards of illiteracy than earlier compilations, and so the numbers are not completely comparable.

The South just did not fund the education of the poor whites was meager at best... This is how the plantation class kept the white poor disenfranchised from opportunities...

MattL said:

Progress is an unchangeable law of nature. This is an age of improvement. Reform is the order of the day. We are passing through a crisis unparalleled in the history of the world. We have just struggled through a gigantic war, and are inaugurating a new era in the history of our national policy. We must reconstruct the government of our country on radical principles—universal freedom, impartial suffrage, and equal rights. We must he governed by natural justice and scientific principles. Scientific truth must be our guide in ethics, in religion, in politics, in social life, and in legal matters.

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He seems to have a understand the future that was coming...

Reconstruction brought us this:

https://eji.org/history-racial-injustice-convict-leasing

After the Civil War, slavery persisted in the form of convict leasing, a system in which Southern states leased prisoners to private railways, mines, and large plantations. While states profited, prisoners earned no pay and faced inhumane, dangerous, and often deadly work conditions. Thousands of black people were forced into what authors have termed “slavery by another name” until the 1930s.

The Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, ratified in 1865, prohibited slavery and involuntary servitude, but explicitly exempted those convicted of crime. In response, Southern state legislatures quickly passed “Black Codes” – new laws that explicitly applied only to black people and subjected them to criminal prosecution for “offenses” such as loitering, breaking curfew, vagrancy, having weapons, and not carrying proof of employment. Crafted to ensnare black people and return them to chains, these laws were effective; for the first time in U.S. history, many state penal systems held more black prisoners than white – all of whom could be leased for profit.

Industrialization, economic shifts, and political pressure ended widespread convict leasing by World War II, but the Thirteenth Amendment’s dangerous loophole still permits the enslavement of prisoners who continue to work without pay in various public and private industries. As recently as 2010, a federal court held that “prisoners have no enforceable right to be paid for their work under the Constitution.”

You can see the courts tried to plug the loophole... in 2010...

5fish said:

Reconstruction brought us this:

https://eji.org/history-racial-injustice-convict-leasing

After the Civil War, slavery persisted in the form of convict leasing, a system in which Southern states leased prisoners to private railways, mines, and large plantations. While states profited, prisoners earned no pay and faced inhumane, dangerous, and often deadly work conditions. Thousands of black people were forced into what authors have termed “slavery by another name” until the 1930s.

The Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, ratified in 1865, prohibited slavery and involuntary servitude, but explicitly exempted those convicted of crime. In response, Southern state legislatures quickly passed “Black Codes” – new laws that explicitly applied only to black people and subjected them to criminal prosecution for “offenses” such as loitering, breaking curfew, vagrancy, having weapons, and not carrying proof of employment. Crafted to ensnare black people and return them to chains, these laws were effective; for the first time in U.S. history, many state penal systems held more black prisoners than white – all of whom could be leased for profit.

Industrialization, economic shifts, and political pressure ended widespread convict leasing by World War II, but the Thirteenth Amendment’s dangerous loophole still permits the enslavement of prisoners who continue to work without pay in various public and private industries. As recently as 2010, a federal court held that “prisoners have no enforceable right to be paid for their work under the Constitution.”

You can see the courts tried to plug the loophole... in 2010...

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See the documentary " The Thirteenth".
Kirk's Raider's

5fish said:

Reconstruction brought us this:

https://eji.org/history-racial-injustice-convict-leasing

After the Civil War, slavery persisted in the form of convict leasing, a system in which Southern states leased prisoners to private railways, mines, and large plantations. While states profited, prisoners earned no pay and faced inhumane, dangerous, and often deadly work conditions. Thousands of black people were forced into what authors have termed “slavery by another name” until the 1930s.

The Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, ratified in 1865, prohibited slavery and involuntary servitude, but explicitly exempted those convicted of crime. In response, Southern state legislatures quickly passed “Black Codes” – new laws that explicitly applied only to black people and subjected them to criminal prosecution for “offenses” such as loitering, breaking curfew, vagrancy, having weapons, and not carrying proof of employment. Crafted to ensnare black people and return them to chains, these laws were effective; for the first time in U.S. history, many state penal systems held more black prisoners than white – all of whom could be leased for profit.

Industrialization, economic shifts, and political pressure ended widespread convict leasing by World War II, but the Thirteenth Amendment’s dangerous loophole still permits the enslavement of prisoners who continue to work without pay in various public and private industries. As recently as 2010, a federal court held that “prisoners have no enforceable right to be paid for their work under the Constitution.”

You can see the courts tried to plug the loophole... in 2010...

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Forrest post war tried to make money from convict leasing but failed. Former Civil War era Georgia Governor Joe Brown was financially successful in leasing convicts.
Kirk's Raider's

General Lee said:

Iv'e read plenty of book

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There is a book mentioned in this thread you may want to read... the worst thing to be in the south before the war was to be poor white and landless...

5fish said:

There is a book mentioned in this thread you may want to read... the worst thing to be in the south before the war was to be poor white and landless...

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you may want to ping @General Lee, as i don't believe he's getting alerts for a thread that is nearly a year old and in which he thusly never partook

5fish said:

the worst thing to be in the south before the war was to be poor white and landless...

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Do you have a link to the book or post?

This brings up an interesting point re the end of slavery. Just how long the 1860 status quo would last without the Civil War.

@Mike12 , Did you know the plight of landless whites in the South?

5fish said:

@Mike12 , Did you know the plight of landless whites in the South?

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What a narrative! That makes some $$$... Hitler was all alone up there.... How "CAN" the Plantation upper crust control the Presbyterians and re-take Southern Government into the 1920's?! Because! Not without my mint julip, wicker chair, and china from London.

Mike12 said:

What a narrative!

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I hope you at least read post #1 and see the upper class feared the landless whites... Again, you are off on your years look up the Redeemer Movement in the South after the civil war.... not 1920?

a link to read... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redeemers

5fish said:

It amazing how poor whites were looked out of land and work and still fought for those who stymied thier economic fortunes.

LinK: https://www.lawcha.org/2017/07/17/poor-whites-labor-crisis-slave-south/

While studies on southern slaveholders, yeomen, and even the enslaved abound, relatively little has been written about the Deep South’s white working-class.

Problems for non-slaveholding whites continued accruing throughout the 1840s, right on the heels of the economic recession, as over 800,000 slaves poured into the Deep South, displacing unskilled and semi-skilled white laborers.

By this time, the profitability and profusion of plantation slavery had rendered most low-skilled white workers superfluous, except during the bottleneck seasons of planting and harvest.

Shut out from much of the Deep South’s agricultural work, many poor white laborers spent the late-antebellum period experiencing long bouts of unemployment or underemployment

Even as poor whites increasingly became involved in non-agricultural work, there were simply not enough jobs to keep them at a level of full employment. Rarely did they have long-term contracts; most were hired daily, weekly, or seasonally, leaving many of the poor underemployed for parts of the year

They took the South’s dirtiest, most dangerous jobs, like ditching and mining, work often deemed “too hazardous for Negro property.”

Yet as poor whites attempted to enter construction, mechanical, factory, and other jobs, they were constantly made aware of the thousands of readily available black strikebreakers waiting to take their places should they ask for better wages or request safer working conditions.1

Snip... This is Pres. Andrew Johnson views...

Indeed, poor white southerners not only possessed class consciousness but as the antebellum period wore on, they became overtly resentful of slaveholders

Yet the prevalence of slave hiring in the 1840s and 50s further exacerbated class tensions, just as an influx of impoverished white immigrants into southern cities intensified racial tensions.

Snip...

a blatant warning to both slaveholders and slave hirers: an “early, decided course for the speedy suppression of the intolerable abuses” suffered by white laborers was necessary for the “permanent welfare of the institution of slavery itself.” It seemed as if poorer whites were finally at their tipping point. They were willing – at least in theory – to threaten the institution of slavery in the interests of their own economic class.3

Indeed, as slaveholders came to face a three-front assault on slavery – from northern abolitionists and free-soilers, the enslaved themselves, and poor white southerners – they realized they had few viable options left

Read the link it short... LINK: https://www.lawcha.org/2017/07/17/poor-whites-labor-crisis-slave-south/

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That's why many poor Southeners joined the Union Army or became Unionist guerrillas Newt Knight being the famous example.
That's also why there was a whole lot of desertion and conscript evasion as well. David Williams " Bitterly Divided the South's inner Civil War " examines this issue.
Leftyhunter

Leftyhunter said:

That's also why there was a whole lot of desertion and conscript evasion as well. David Williams " Bitterly Divided the South's inner Civil War " examines this issue.
Leftyhunter

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Looks like a good one Lefty. Here is a review and synopsis of the book.

O' Be Joyful said:

Looks like a good one Lefty.

Here is a review and synopsis of the book.

https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2793&context=cwbr

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I owned it for years and my friend CSA Today hated it but oh well.
Leftyhunter

Leftyhunter said:

I owned it for years and my friend CSA Today hated it but oh well.
Leftyhunter

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CSA and I were frenemies also.