"The mass of the population of the Atlantic Coast of the slave region of the South are descended from the transported convicts and outcasts of Great Britain.... Oh, glorious chivalry and hereditary aristocracy of the South! Peerless first families of Virginia and Carolina!... Progeny of the highwaymen, and horse-thieves and sheep-stealers, and pick-pockets of Old England!"
The South was not to be outdone, and here was a retort from De Bow's Review, July, 1858:
"The basis, framework, and controlling influence of Northern sentiment is Puritanism—the old Roundhead, rebel refuse of England, which ... has ever been an unruly sect of Pharisees ... the worst bigots on earth and the meanest of tyrants when they have the power to exercise it."[69]
And the non-slave-holder of the South did not escape from the pitiless pelting of the storm. He was sustaining the slave-holder, and this was not only an offence but a puzzle.
It became quite common in the North for anti-slavery writers to classify the non-slave-holding agricultural classes of the South as "poor whites," thus distinguishing them from the slave-holders; and the idea is current even now in that section that as a class the lordly slave-holder despised his poor white fellow-citizen. The average non-slave-holding Southern agriculturist, whether farming for himself or for others, was a type of man that no one who knew him, least of all the Southern slave-holder, his neighbor and political ally, could despise. Educated and uneducated, these people were independent voters and honest jurors, the very backbone of Southern State governments that always will be notable in history for efficiency, purity, and economy.
This class of voters, however, came in for much abuse in the literature of the crusade. They were all lumped together as "poor whites," sometimes as "poor white trash," and the belief was inculcated that their imperious slave-holding neighbors applied that term to them. "Poor white trash," on its face, is "nigger talk," caught up, doubtless, from Southern negro barbers and bootblacks, and used by writers who, from information thus derived, pictured Southern society.
This is a sample of the numerous errors that crept into the literature of one section of our Union about social conditions in the other during that memorable sectional controversy. It is on a par with the idea that prevailed, in some quarters in the South, that the Yankee cared for nothing but money, and would not fight even for that.
Southerners were practically all of the old British stock. Homogeneity, common memories of the wars of the Revolution, of 1812, and with Mexico, and Fourth of July celebrations, all tended to bind together strongly the Southern slave-holder and non-slave-holder.
There were, of course, many classes of non-slave-holders—the thrifty farmer, the unthrifty, and the laborer who worked for hire, but more frequently for "shares of the crop." Then there were others—the inhabitants of the "sand-hills" and the mountain regions. These people were, as a rule, very shiftless; too lazy to work, they were still too proud to beg, as the very poor usually do in other countries. The mountaineers were hardier than the sand-hillers, and it was from the mountains of Tennessee, Alabama, etc., that the Union armies gathered many recruits. This was not, as is often stated, because mountaineers love liberty better than others, but because these mountaineers never came into contact with either master or slave. The crusade against slavery, therefore, did not threaten to affect their personal status.
There were very few public schools in the South, but in the cities and towns there were academies and high-schools, and the country was dotted with "old field schools," most of them not good, but sufficient to train those who became efficient leaders in social, religious, and political circles.