Discrimination against black people because of the color of their skin is wrong. Slavery hurt Americans from Africa, and that damage is still far-reaching.
“A poor black family is much more likely than a poor white one to live in a neighborhood where many other families are poor, too, creating what sociologists call the ‘double burden’ of poverty,” writer Emily Badger says.
America slavery also hurt “poor whites.”
“The institution of slavery deprived the majority of poor whites of wealth, culture, and political power,” William M. Brewer said.
“Slavery imposed upon this class nearly three hundred years of ignorance, inertia, and peculiar prejudice.”
Ms. Keri Leigh Merritt, a historian and writer in Atlanta, GA., is the author of "Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South." Writing about years leading to America’s Civil War, Merritt says, “The enslavement of millions of Africans warped the South’s economy, politics, and culture — including in ways that often hurt poor white Southerners. Poor whites were seen as a threat to the ruling planter class in the South.”
Merritt estimates poor whites made up about one-third of the white population in the cotton South states. She says they lived hard material lives, “enduring cyclical poverty, hunger, and want, primarily because they were surplus workers competing in a labor market with brutalized, unpaid enslaved people.”
After the forced migration of around 800,000 enslaved laborers from the Upper South to the Deep South in the 1830s and 1840s, job opportunities for poor whites were scarce, Merritt says.
“By the 1850s, poor white men had either dropped out of the workforce altogether, cobbling together a meager existence by hunting, fishing, and trading with the enslaved in the underground economy, or by trying to work in non-agricultural jobs,” she says. “These ‘mechanics,’ as they called themselves, began forming labor unions, or ‘associations,’ and by the late 1850s many of them were openly threatening to withdraw their support for slavery if something was not done to protect their jobs and their wages.”
Merritt argues that the push from poor and working-class whites essentially created a 3-front battle for slave owners, who had to defend slavery against Northern abolitionists, the enslaved themselves, and lower-class Southern whites.
“Slaveholders had little chance but to secede to preserve slavery,” Merritt says.
She adds that no system of universal or public education existed in the Deep South prior to the Civil War because slave-owners did not want poor whites teaching blacks how to read in the growing underground economy the two groups operated.
“Poor whites’ illiteracy also meant that they remained ignorant about nearly everything going on at the national level,” Merritt says.
This fact, along with their often being left out of politics, meant that poor whites were completely distrustful of government in general and were politically apathetic, Merritt says, adding, “It was an incredibly unequal society at every level, and whether through incentives or threats or outright terrorism, slaveholders controlled every aspect of politics and suffrage.”
Many 1850s church leaders justified slavery.
In an article called “Why Non-Slaveholding Southerners Fought,” Gordon Rhea writes that some church leaders argued that because Abraham, Jacob, Isaac, and Job owned slaves, slavery was OK.
“While slavery was not expressly sanctioned in the New Testament, Southern clergymen argued that the absence of condemnation signified approval,” Rhea says. “They cited Paul’s return of a runaway slave to his master as Biblical authority for the Fugitive Slave Act, which required the return of runaway slaves.”
Some leaders promoted “race superiority” appeals.
Rhea writes that in the fall of 1860, John Townsend, owner of a cotton plantation on Edisto Island, authored a pamphlet saying that if Lincoln were elected President, the abolition of slavery would be inevitable and that people who did not own slaves would also be in danger.
“It will be to the non-slaveholder, equally with the largest slaveholder, the obliteration of caste and the deprivation of important privileges,” Townsend wrote. “The color of the white man is now, in the South, a title of nobility … . The poorest non-slaveholder may rejoice with the richest of his brethren of the white race, in the distinction of his color. He may be poor, it is true; but there is no point upon which he is so justly proud and sensitive as his privilege of caste; and there is nothing which he would resent with more fierce indignation than the attempt of the Abolitionist to emancipate the slaves and elevate the Negroes to an equality with himself and his family.”
Slavery hurt black people (and poor white people) and warred against these words written by Clare Herbert Woolston: “Red and yellow, black and white; they are precious in His Sight.”
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