/u/RoidParade describes how poor whites were viewed and treated in the Confederate South.https://www.reddit.com/r/redneckrevolt/ ... s/fht6nzn/A few reminders:
Your household owning 20 slaves exempted you from military service in the Confederacy effectively relieving around 85% of slave owners and their families from their military obligation. This meant that they saw little to no reduction in their quality of life as a result of the war.
The strategy for upward mobility according to most of the gentry? Save up for 1 female slave and “breed her” yourself. So you could be as rich as us if you were up for owning people and rape with the intent to force childbirth. Living through childbirth as a black woman back then was like trying to get through the AC of a beholder. So even if we ignore the monstrousness and look at pure numbers it’s like telling people the way to class mobility is Vegas.
States’ Rights?
It was illegal in the Confederacy for any state to outlaw slavery.The poor starved in the street while the gentry sacrificed nothing. This led to multiple uprisings (bread riots etc) among poor southern women. One in RVA proper included the women throwing stale bread at Jefferson Davis as he tried to calm them. Women were often jailed or worse for trying to get food for their children.
We actually have quite a bit of evidence that the bulk of the destruction inflicted by the Union in the South was targeted rather than the wild reckless chaos we were sold. Several generals had their men under orders to burn plantation houses and other upper class strongholds but to leave the shantytowns and the like untouched. The Union was highly conscious of whose war it was.
The people were also aware whose war it was. The rate of deserting confederate soldiers was staggering until the punishment for deserting was increased to death. That worked for a short time but in the long term all it did was give deserters less incentive to return. So towards the end of the war the punishment for deserting was reduced again in the hopes that the deserters would return.
None of this awfulness was particularly secret. In Confederate propaganda the Union was referred to as “a nation of mudsills” with mudsills being the absolute bottom of the class structure. At the time it was argued that there would always be mudsills and that a barely surviving lower class was necessary to build the rest of society on top of. In other words; a less cool sounding word for Morlocks. The Confederacy wanted Morlocks to be a thing and they were basically saying to poor whites; society is gonna have Morlocks- is it gonna be you or the blacks? In fact they were so committed to keeping the poor destitute they came up with a whole ass economic theory about it. That wiki is a good read if you were worried about having low blood pressure today.
We also know that the Confederate gentry actually believed poor whites to be less valuable than blacks or native americans. Poor white men were actually encouraged to breed with natives in the hopes that the addition of “proud indian blood” would wash the shiftlessness out of their weak poor white garbage blood. The thought it was absurd that white people didn’t work as hard as slaves plus they wanted to be paid?!? Ew no why?!
Also, if you thought that the Confederate gentry was completely without principles, you should know that several of them were running around trying to broker slave deals as the war was drawing to a close. The reasons for this were two-fold; some people actually believed that the correct state of blacks was slavery, and others just wanted to recoup costs. There’s a statue on Monument Avenue in RVA of just such a man whose goal was to find buyers in the Caribbean so that they didn’t have to actually set anyone free. I assume their descendants would go on to sell bad loans to poor people a hundred and fifty years hence.
All of this is to highlight when OP used the derogatory term ‘bootlicker’ not only did they mean it, but history damned meant it too.
EDIT it seems the bootlickers have arrived. Sorry I don’t have a link. What I do have is a book by the T Harry Williams Professor of American History at Louisiana State University, Professor Nancy Isenberg: White Trash: A 400 Year History of Class In America. Y’all can check her sources. You won’t, but you could. They’re all right there in the back of the book.
also one chucklecuck down there tried the “states’ rights” argument again. Fool, that’s why I bothered to include it when it had nothing to do with the rest of my comment. That was for you; I wrote that when I saw you coming. The least you could do is read what I wrote for you.