re: #159 mmmirele

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?

Many were moved to marginal areas that were not suitable for plantation agriculture, ie the hills. This why most of the anti-Confederate sentiment in the south was concentrated in the Appalachian highlands. There were few slaves in the area and there were ancient resentments against the lowland planter class. In the areas where planters (big slave holders) and white small farmers were mixed, the planters consciously set out to emulate European aristocrats, taking a paternalistic interest in their inferiors while limiting education and information to their own class, and exacting loyalty in return. It was these illiterate small farmers who supplied the bulk of the Confederate army’s manpower, while planters and urban merchants supplied the officers.