There was a time, before universal white male suffrage and the closing of the frontier, when the poor whites of the South were considered shiftless and without caste. If we were to look at the South as a hierarchical system, it could be argued that the poor whites were a kind of pariah. There’s a common misconception that all whites during the antebellum period had an equal standing economically and socially.
The Old South was a complex society, not just a place comprised merely of free whites and enslaved blacks. There were indentured servants, African slaves, Native Americans, poor white yeoman farmers, and a wealthier landowning aristocracy. Some of the first colonies were owned by wealthy English barons (like the Lords Proprietors in Carolina) and after the Revolution, most states had property requirements that kept the poor whites from voting.
More @ The Abbeville Institute
Most of my ancestors (many of these who had fought in the Revolution) lived in dirt floor two room pens and owned very little "property" through the 1940's. As a note, one of my Alabama Confederate ancestors was "all muscle, over six feet tall, and weighed more than two hundred pounds".
ReplyDeleteThanks and I read a story once before the Internet that portrayed a family working in the fields with lanterns at night ad it mentioned that when they had finally succeeded in doing well their blue veins showed through their hands which is where 'blue blood' came from. Can't find it on the Internet unfortunately.
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