By John Slaughter

The original Southerners came to this land from Asia some 40,000 years ago, making their way from north and west to east across much of what later came to be known as Mexico. The Europeans and Africans, the latter not of their own choosing, joined them some 500 years ago. Initially the Europeans came as conquerors and plunderers, but soon turned to forced labor as a principal source of accumulated wealth in the newly developing colonies. Slavery has been a practice in almost every society at a certain level of its development. Slavery was not originally based on color or race, and that was the case in Europe, as Europeans enslaved other Europeans. But as the conquest of America developed, a justification for the enslavement and genocide of entire native peoples was needed. That justification was the ideology of white supremacy.

From the time of European contact and as long as it was profitable and sufficient numbers were available, the native Americans were captured and enslaved. As their numbers dwindled, they were replaced by the Africans. Tens and hundreds of thousands of the original Southerners were sold into slavery, but it is estimated that the number of Africans imported to the Americas totaled from 10 to as many as 50 million over the course of 4 centuries. Land grant companies and labor contractors also organized the passage of the poor of Europe to the colonies. Alongside of the importation of slave labor from Africa, for many Europeans their first introduction to America was as indentured servants, forced to work for a period of at least 5 to 7 years to pay for their passage. Eventually slavery replaced indentured servitude because of the higher profits generated from unpaid labor, but this also meant that the white worker, especially in the South, had to compete with slave labor. Some did become “yeoman” or subsistence farmers, who grew enough to provide for themselves and their families, but did not farm to sell and exchange in the marketplace. But there were also many landless whites who had nothing to sell but their labor.

Crispus Attucks would join more than 5000 other black men on the side of the revolution in the North, but in the South, the slaves often gained their freedom by entering the British army. This was especially true in Georgia, where over 10,000 slaves flocked to freedom behind British lines, one of the largest mass escapes in the history of American slavery. Eventually more than 65,000 from across the South joined them. Thomas Jefferson originally included a clause in the Declaration of Independence chastising the King of England for promoting the slave trade, but delegates from Georgia and South Carolina forced him to delete it. The slave-owning class from the South insisted as a condition of their participation in the Union that their interests be protected in the very fabric of the Constitution itself. Consequently the slaveholders would control the presidency of the new republic for 41 of its first 50 years, and 18 of 31 Supreme Court justices would be slaveholders.

Before the Civil War, the number of landless white laborers in the South ranged from 40 to 50 percent, Most of them served as farm laborers or tenants, essentially serving as a mobile work force that filled the labor needs of slave owners and some prosperous yeomen. Slaveholders often augmented their slave work force with white laborers, and at such times they worked side by side with black slaves in the fields. The existence of slavery played a major role in perpetuating white poverty because it limited the need for white farm labor and also retarded the development of industrial wage jobs. The cost of slave labor set a ceiling on the wages white laborers could receive.

The advent of cotton mills in the late 1830s provided poor whites with an additional source of work, but these jobs were filled primarily by women and children. The status of poor whites was in many ways parallel to the free black population. In a society that equated white skin with independence and freedom, poor whites stood out as an aberration. They belied the notion that all whites were superior to all people of color. In some instances free black laborers actually earned more than white laborers performing the same work.

As poor whites and black slaves who picked cotton alongside each other for the benefit of wealthy slave owners met on a similar ground of dependence and poverty, there were increasing fears not only of slave rebellion but of poor white participation in their resistance. In some areas, particularly in the plantation areas of Mississippi, poor whites represented an excess and potentially dangerous population. Although Jacksonian democracy extended the franchise to virtually all adult white males in the South during the first 3 decades of the 19th century, the slave owning class managed to continue to lock out poor whites by virtue of property qualifications. For example, in North Carolina every adult white male who wished to cast a ballot in the state senate elections must own at least 50 acres of land, a restriction that effectively disfranchised half of the voting population. In Mississippi over 80 percent of the men in the state legislature were slave owners, even though property qualifications had supposedly been eliminated by 1860.  

As civil war loomed and the move for secession developed in the South, significant opposition emerged from both poor whites and non-slaveholding white farmers. Flying the banner of white supremacy, the secessionists launched a campaign that would end in war. But it was the supremacy of the slave owning class that was at stake. The slaveocracy knew that it must expand or die. Not one of the states which seceded from the Union submitted their actions to a vote of the people.

Contrary to the view that the Southern white population rose as one to repel the Yankee invader, opposition in the South both to the Confederacy and to the slave power was widespread. Opposition was concentrated primarily in the Appalachian and other areas in the South where slave production did not predominate, but opposition also fell primarily along class lines. The poor white landless laborer had no interest in defending either slavery or protecting the interests of the very class who oppressed them.

It is estimated that 104,000, or roughly 12 percent of the 850,000 men who served in the Confederate army deserted. The belief that this was a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight was a major cause of desertion. At the end General Robert E. Lee would claim that desertion was a major cause of the failure of the Confederacy. On top were the slave holders, an aristocracy that ruled society. On the bottom were the poor “white trash.” The deserters belonged almost exclusively to the poorest non-slaveholders, primarily because their labor was indispensable to the survival of their families. In the areas where poor white families were concentrated, the approach of the Confederate cavalry was dreaded as much as invasion from the North. As supplies were confiscated to feed the Confederate troops, the families were reduced to a condition of extreme want.

The turning point in the Civil War occurred when the war for the preservation of the Union was transformed into a struggle for the liberation of 3.5 million slaves. By the end of the war some 180,000 blacks had served in the Union army, and were indispensable to the defeat of the Confederacy.

Reconstruction: Forty Acres and a Mule

The task now at hand was the reconstruction of the South. The cause of the new freedmen was taken up in the call for “40 acres and a mule,” the confiscation of the plantation estates and the redistribution of the land to the former slaves (and poor whites). It would mean that the domination of the slave owning class would be broken, and the basis laid for the self-determination of a free people. But the Northern financial and industrial interests were not interested in seeing so radical a program come to pass. While they wanted the Southern planters subordinate to them, they could not countenance the abolition and redistribution of private property. In an historic betrayal, the North abandoned reconstruction, and in the South the Ku Klux Klan led the way in rolling back the gains of the fledgling democracy. The bloody shirt of white supremacy would be waved again. The Klan in effect functioned as an extra-legal military force to serve the interests of the planter class and the Democratic Party. The Southern plantation elite, now in service to the interests of Wall Street, would return to power.

The “Redeemer” state governments would slash state budgets by over 50 percent, levy taxes on virtually everything the laborers and small farmers owned, close public hospitals, and cut services to the bare minimum, including public education. Poll taxes were levied, and ballot fraud became the order of the day. The law’s were rewritten to establish the planter’s control over the work force. Vagrancy and lien laws were passed, and the convict lease system was developed. Sharecropping would replace 40 acres and a mule, defined is such a way that the sharecropper had no property rights as a partner in the raising of the crop, but only as a wage laborer, with the right only to work the land. White laborers as well as blacks were cast down into the grinding poverty of the system.

Even as the old slave power used white supremacy as a battering ram to consolidate its rule, they were opposed again not only by the African Americans, but also by the poor whites who had opposed their rule. The Populists, or People’s Party emerged as a new political formation opposed to the Democratic Party in the South, the party of white supremacy. The Populists would express a new kind of equalitarianism, based upon a common want and poverty and a common oppressor. Tom Watson of Georgia would promise that the People’s Party would “wipe out the color line.” Southern Populists would oppose lynch laws and the convict lease system. The noted historian C. Vann Woodward observed that the Populist upheaval of the 1890s experienced a greater unity of black and white workers than at any time before or since in the South.

But the Populists were intimidated by social ostracism, firings from jobs, expulsion from tenant and sharecropping lands, and finally, the scapegoating of the African American masses. Even while ballot fraud reached epidemic proportions in the hands of the Democrats, the finger of blame was pointed at the African Americans. The victim of electoral corruption was identified as the cause of it. To prevent their votes from being stolen, they were to be disfranchised! By 1906 Populism was routed, and Tom Watson himself would go over to the side of white supremacy. Property, literacy and poll tax requirements were set up as the main barriers to voting, and the Democratic Party organized itself as a private club and instituted the “white primary.” In 1896 there were 130,334 African American registered voters in Louisiana. By 1904 that number had declined to 1,342.

In the struggle over which whites would rule, the African American was disfranchised, but in the process a great many poor whites were eliminated as well. Woodward notes that in Mississippi “the poll tax gets rid of most of the Negro voters there, but it gets rid of a great many whites at the same time … in fact a majority of them.” Destroying any common ground between blacks and whites was the key to controlling all the laboring people in the South. African Americans were ground down into a new kind of slavery, and poor whites were not far behind. Both by custom and by the passage of “Jim Crow” laws, a period of the most rigid forms of segregation were instituted. Race hatred reached pathological levels.

World War II saw American soldiers, black and white, fighting alongside one another to defeat international fascism, an extreme form of “master race” ideology matched only by the white supremacy of the Jim Crow South. Confronted with the hypocrisy of returning home to a society which paralleled the same values against which they had been fighting, the Freedom Movement of the African Americans was rekindled. This coincided with profound economic developments that were beginning to occur, and together unleashed forces that would bring down Jim Crow and launch a second Reconstruction of the South.

 

February.2006.Vol16.Ed2
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