re: #65 sagehen

Most of us actually don’t have ancestors who were, because there were 25 million white Americans in the 1860’s,

I am Whitey McWhiterson. Every single family line I have been able to trace out, the ancestors arrived no later than 1720. And my ancestors migrated from the northeast and mid-Atlantic to the South and border states. The thing about my ancestors is they were landless white people who moved every generation or more often. My maternal great-grandmother was born in Tennessee in 1890, and before she died in California in 1984, she had lived in Arkansas, Texas and Oklahoma. She was not unusual. Most took the Tennessee > Kentucky > Arkansas > Texas >Oklahoma route. It’s kind of amazing to find ancestors of both sides of my family in the same counties in the same states at the same time. Poor white people, not tradesmen, but sharecroppers.

What I want to know is how the wealthy white plantation owners kept the poorer whites pacified. Anyone got some reading on that?