45.“A Soldier’s Speech,” Wooster [OH] Republican, November 12, 1863. One essay argued that mudsills were the backbone of the economy; see “Who Are the Mudsills?,” American Farmer’s Magazine, August 1858. Garfield was less generous in his assessment of Confederate deserters. He described them as “men of no brains who had been scared into the rebel army and whose lives were not worth to the county what the bullet would cost to kill them”; see Harry James and Frederick D. Williams, eds., The Diary of James Garfield, 4 vols. (East Lansing: Michigan State University, 1967–1981), 1:65, and Mitchell, Civil War Soldiers, 33. For another rousing defense of northern mudsills, see the poem “Northmen, Come Out!,” with the stanzas, “Out in your strength and let them know / How working men to work can go. / Out in your might and let them feel / How mudsills strike when edged with steel”; see Charles Godfrey Leland, “Northmen, Come Out!,” Hartford Daily Courant, May 6, 1861, originally published in Vanity Fair. Northerners also reported on “secesh nabobs” paying high prices for “mudsill substitutes”; see Hartford Daily Courant, December 20, 1861.
46.Grimsley, The Hard Hand of War, 15–16, 56, 68–70. Halleck was an expert on international law, and the principle of occupying armies taxing disloyal citizens was laid out in Emmerich de Vattel’s 1793 treatise The Law of Nations. This practice was not new to the Civil War, but what was different was the decision to target the rich. See W. Wayne Smith, “An Experiment in Counterinsurgency: The Assessment of Confederate Sympathizers in Missouri,” Journal of Southern History 35, no. 3 (August 1969): 361–80, esp. 361–64; Louis S. Gerteis, Civil War St. Louis (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2001), 172–76. And on guerrilla warfare shaping these policies, see Daniel E. Sutherland, “Guerrilla Warfare, Democracy, and the Fate of the Confederacy,” Journal of Southern History 68, no. 2 (May 2002): 259–92, esp. 271–72, 280, 288; and Michael Fellman, Inside War: The Guerrilla Conflict in Missouri During the American Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 88, 94, 96.
47.John F. Bradbury Jr., “‘Buckwheat Cake Philanthropy’: Refugees and the Union Army in the Ozarks,” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 57, no. 3 (Autumn 1998): 233–54, esp. 237–40. Estimates vary on the total number of southern refugees. Stephen Ash claims that nearly 80,000 white refugees had entered Federal lines by 1865. Elizabeth Massey contends that 250,000 were displaced by the war and the majority were women. See Stephen V. Ash, When the Yankees Came: Conflict and Chaos in the Occupied South, 1861–1865 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999); Stephen V. Ash, Middle Tennessee Society Transformed, 1860–1870: War and Peace in the Upper South (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1988); and Mary Elizabeth Massey, Women in the Civil War (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1966), 291–316.
48.Grimsley, The Hard Hand of War, 108; and Smith, “An Experiment in Counterinsurgency,” 366; Jacqueline G. Campbell, “There Is No Difference Between a He and a She Adder in Their Venom: Benjamin Butler, William T. Sherman, and Confederate Women,” Louisiana History: Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association 50, no. 1 (Winter 2009): 5–24, esp. 12, 15, 18–19. Marion Southwood not only commented on the wealthy hiding assets but emphasized that it was the elites who “turned up their aristocratic noses” at the thought of assenting to the oath of allegiance; see Marion Southwood, “Beauty and Booty”: The Watchword of New Orleans (New York, 1867), 123, 130–33, 159. The same rule of punishing rude women and subjecting disloyal women to confiscation was established by General Halleck in Missouri; see Gerteis, Civil War St. Louis, 174. Confederates described the destruction of elite property in class terms: as one account wrote, men from the “dunghill” of the North holding “saturnalias round the princely mansions of the Southern planters”; see “Rebel (Yankee Definition),” Houston Tri-weekly Telegraph, November 18, 1864. In Maryland, when one Virginia slaveowner demanded the return of his slaves, a dozen Union soldiers threw the man onto a blanket and tossed him up in the air. One sergeant described the slaveowner as “a perfect specimen of a Virginia gentleman,” and he was pleased to think that man must have been horrified to be humiliated and unmanned by “Union soldiers—northern mudsills.” See James Oakes, Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861–1865 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2012), 365.
49.Hans L. Trefousse, Andrew Johnson: A Biography (New York: Norton, 1989), 19, 21–23, 43, 55, 138, 152, 155–56, 168, 179; Ash, Middle Tennessee Society Transformed, 107, 159–60; also see Rufus Buin Spain, “R. B. C. Howell, Tennessee Baptist, 1808–1868” (M.A. thesis, Vanderbilt University, 1948), 105–7. It is interesting that Johnson planned to have all citizens take the loyalty oath and would begin with the wealthiest class, then ministers, doctors, and measured secessionist sympathies according to a class scale; see ibid., 101, 104–6.
50.Grimsley, The Hard Hand of War, 169, 202–3; and Debra Reddin van Tuyll, “Scalawags and Scoundrels? The Moral and Legal Dimensions of Sherman’s Last Campaigns,” Studies in Popular Culture 22, no. 2 (October 1999): 33–45, esp. 38–39. Soldiers blamed South Carolina for the war, and thought of its political elite as the very symbol of tyranny and arrogance. They looked forward to wreaking vengeance on the capital—where they vandalized property, set fire to buildings, and targeted the homes of the elites. See Charles Royster, The Destructive War: William Tecumseh Sherman, Stonewall Jackson, and the Americans (New York: Knopf, 1991), 4–5, 19–21.
51.Grimsley, The Hard Hand of War, 173–74, 188; Burstein and Isenberg, Madison and Jefferson, 204–5.
52.Hallock Armstrong to Mary Armstrong, April 8, 1865, in Letters from a Pennsylvania Chaplain at the Siege of Petersburg, 1865 (published privately, 1961), 47.
53.Letter from William Wheeler, April 1, 1864, in Letters of William Wheeler of the Class of 1855 (Cambridge, MA: H. G. Houghton & Co., 1875), 444–46; Grimsley, The Hard Hand of War, 173–74; John D. Cox, Traveling South: Travel Narratives and the Construction of American Identity (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005), 165, 174–76. And for the indistinguishable quality of shanties of poor white or blacks, see George H. Allen, Forty-Six Months with the Fourth R. I. Volunteers in the War of 1861 to 1865: Comprising a History of Marches, Battles, and Camp Life, Compiled from Journals Kept While on Duty in the Field and Camp (J. A. & R. A. Reid Printers, 1887), 219; also see “Confederate Prisoners at Chicago,” Macon Daily Telegraph, February 14, 1863; Mitchell, Civil War Soldiers, 42, 95, 97; Diary of Robert Ransom, Andersonville Diary, Escape, and List of the Dead, with Name, Co., Regiment, Date of Death and No. of Grave in Cemetery (Auburn, New York, 1881), 71.
54.On marching through mud, fighting swamps and rebels, see Manning Ferguson Force, “From Atlanta to Savannah: The Civil War Journal of Manning F. Force, November 15, 1864–January 3, 1865,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 91, no. 2 (Summer 2007): 185–205, esp. 187–90, 193–94. And on muddy mass graves, see Drew Gilpin Faust, The Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York: Random House, 2008), 73–75.
55.Phillips, Diehard Rebels, 56, 62. Confederates also hoped that the New York City draft riots were a sign of class revolution in the North; see “Important News from the North” and another report in the Richmond Enquirer, July 18, 1863; also see A. Hunter Dupree and Leslie H. Fischel Jr., “An Eyewitness Account of the New York City Draft Riots, July, 1863,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 47, no. 3 (December 1960): 472–79, esp. 476.
56.“Recent News by Mail,” Philadelphia Inquirer, April 14, 1861.
Chapter Eight: Thoroughbreds and Scalawags: Bloodlines and Bastard Stock in the Age of Eugenics
1.W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Evolution of the Race Problem,” Proceedings of the National Negro Conference (New York, 1909), 142–58, esp. 148–49.
2.Ibid., 147–48, 152–54, 156.
3.Ibid., 153–54, 157.
4.Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man (London, 1871), 2:402–3. Galton’s major publications were an article, “Hereditary
Talent and Character” (1865), and books Hereditary Genius (1869), Inquiry into Human Faculty (1883), and Natural Inheritance (1889); see Mark H. Haller, Eugenics: Hereditarian Attitudes in American Thought (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1963), 4–6, 8–12. Also see Richard A. Richards, “Darwin, Domestic Breeding and Artificial Selection,” Endeavour 22, no. 3 (1988): 106–9; and for the importance of animal breeding in shaping Darwin’s theory of natural selection, see Robert J. Roberts, “Instinct and Intelligence in British Natural Theology: Some Contributions to Darwin’s Theory of Evolutionary Behavior,” Journal of the History of Biology 14, no. 2 (Autumn 1981): 193–230, esp. 224–25.
5.“Plebein [sic] Aristocracy,” Independent (May 24, 1864); and Heather Cox Richardson, West from Appomattox: The Reconstruction of America After the Civil War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 17–20.
6.For a typical example of a free-labor economy for poor whites and free slaves, see “The Emancipation and Free Labor Question in the South,” New York Herald, May 18, 1865; also see Heather Cox Richardson, The Death of Reconstruction: Race, Labor, and Politics in the Post–Civil War North, 1865–1901 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 21–22, 24–25, 34, 39, 42.
7.The newspapers focused on the stipulation that exempted the elite class from the amnesty: “All persons who have voluntarily participated in said rebellion and the estimated value of whose taxable property is over $20,000”; see “President Johnson’s Plan of Reconstruction in Bold Relief,” New York Herald, May 31, 1865; “President Johnson and the South Carolina Delegation,” Philadelphia Inquirer, June 26, 1865. And for an article pointing out how all the New York newspapers stressed this point, see “The New York Press on the President’s Talk with the South Carolina Delegation,” Daily Ohio Statesman, July 6, 1865. Also see Andrew Johnson, “Proclamation 134—Granting Amnesty to Participants in the Rebellion, with Certain Exceptions,” May 29, 1865; and “Interview with South Carolina Delegation, June 24,” in The Papers of Andrew Johnson, May–August 1865, ed. Paul H. Bergeron (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992), 8:128–29, 280–84.
8.On Johnson’s decision to pardon the elites because he needed their support, see Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 191. Johnson pardoned 13,500 out of the 15,000 who applied; see Richardson, The Death of Reconstruction, 16.
9.For Johnson’s view of a racial war of extermination, see “The Negro Question—Dangers of Another ‘Irrepressible Conflict,’” New York Herald, July 12, 1865; also see [San Francisco] Evening Bulletin, July 31, 1865. On Johnson’s opinion that Negro suffrage would breed a race war between the freedmen and poor whites, see “The President upon Negro Suffrage,” Philadelphia Inquirer, October 25, 1865; also see “Interview of George L. Stearns,” October 3, 1865,” The Papers of Andrew Johnson, 9:180.
10.See the remarks by Senators David Schenck, Henry S. Lane, John P. Hale, and Reverdy Johnson, Congressional Globe, 38th Congress, 2nd Session, 959, 984–85, 989; and Congressman Green Clay Smith, Congressional Globe, 39th Congress, 1st Session, 416; also see Paul Moreno, “Racial Classification and Reconstruction Legislation,” Journal of Southern History 61, no. 2 (May 1995): 271–304, esp. 276–77, 283–87; and Michele Landis Dauber, “The Sympathetic State,” Law and History Review 23, no. 2 (Summer 2005): 387–442, esp. 408, 412, 414–15.
11.For “loafing whites,” see “North Carolina: Blacks and Whites Loafing,” New York Times, May 28, 1866; and “From Over the Lake. Barancas—Gens. Steel and Ashboth—The Seen and Unseen—The Refugee Business, Etc., Etc.,” New Orleans Times, March 9, 1865. On poor white refugees and children, see “Poor White Trash,” Independent (September 7, 1865): 6; Daniel R. Weinfield, “‘More Courage Than Discretion’: Charles M. Hamilton in Reconstruction-Era Florida,” Florida Historical Quarterly 84, no. 4 (Spring 2006): 479–516, esp. 492; and William F. Mugleston and Marcus Sterling Hopkins, “The Freedmen’s Bureau and Reconstruction in Virginia: The Diary of Marcus Sterling Hopkins,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 86, no. 1 (January 1978): 45–102, esp. 100. It was also reported that North Carolina had the highest number of “white trash,” and most of the cases adjudicated by the Freedmen’s Bureau involved this class. See “Affairs in the Southern States: North Carolina,” New York Times, March 22, 1865.
12.“From the South: Southern Journeyings and Jottings,” New York Times, April 15, 1866; Sidney Andrews, The South Since the War (Boston, 1866); Whitelaw Reid, After the War: A Tour of the Southern States (London, 1866); John T. Trowbridge, The South: A Tour of Its Battlefields and Ruined Cities (Hartford, CT: 1866). Andrews’s book was known for providing a “portraiture of the poor whites” that was “painfully true to nature”; see “New Books,” Philadelphia Inquirer, April 23, 1866. His portrait of the typical poor white as physically stunted and displaying “insipidity in his face, indecision in his step, and inefficiency in his whole bearing” was reprinted verbatim in “Poor Whites of North Carolina, Wilmington, October 14,” Freedmen’s Record. Organ of the New England Aid Society (November 1, 1865): 186–87.
13.Gilmore’s allusion to a fungus was identical to social Darwinist Herbert Spencer’s argument that “whatever produces a diseased state in one part of the community, must inevitably inflict injury upon all other parts”; see Spencer, Social Statistics, or, The Conditions Essential to Human Happiness Specified and the First of Them Developed (London, 1851), 456. Edward Kirke (pseudonym of James Roberts Gilmore), Down in Tennessee, and Back by Way of Richmond (New York, 1864), 104, 184, 188–89. Excerpts from Gilmore’s book were printed in the newspapers; see “The White Population in the South. ‘Poor Whites’—‘Mean Whites’—And the Chivalry,” New Hampshire Sentinel, November 10, 1864; “The Common People of the South” Circular (September 26, 1864): 222–23; “From ‘Down in Tennessee.’ The ‘Mean Whites’ of the South,” Friends’ Review (October 15, 1864): 101–2. Gilmore also published an article; see J. R. Gilmore, “The Poor Whites of the South,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine (June 1, 1864): 115–24.
14.Andrews wrote, “I should say that the real question at issue in the South is, not ‘What shall be done with the negro? but ‘What shall be done with the white?’” Andrews, The South Since the War, 224. The variation on Andrews’s phrase quoted in the text, which added “poor white,” appeared in a Colorado newspaper article (reprinted from the Chicago Republican), “The Rising Race in the South,” Miner’s Register, January 12, 1866. The same question was raised in the Christian Advocate and Journal: “It is not the negro who calls for pity, he can take care of himself; it is the ignorant, landless, clay-colored, hope-abandoned whites that demand and yet defy relief”; see Reynard, “A Vacation Tour in the South and West: Hell Opens Her Mouth,” Christian Advocate and Journal (August 24, 1865), 266.
15.A writer for the New York Times argued that poor whites had had the vote for eighty years and remained “improvident, ignorant and debased” and the “easy dupes of designing leaders”; see “The Suffrage Question,” New York Times, February 13, 1866; also see “The Poor Whites,” Miner’s Register, October 18, 1865; Reid, After the War, 59, 221, 247–50, 255, 302–3, 325, 348; Andrews, The South Since the War, 335–36. On freedmen having a greater desire for education than poor whites, see “A Dominant Fact of the Southern Situation,” New York Times, August 10, 1865. On rapid educational progress of freedmen, see “Condition of the South,” New York Times, August 27, 1867. On the equal need for education of poor whites, see “The Education of Poor Whites,” New York Times, October 5, 1865. On neatness and thriftiness and preparation for the franchise among the freedmen, see Trowbridge, The South, 220, 458, 589; also see Stephen K. Prince, Stories of the South: Race and Reconstruction and Southern Identity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 28. On freedmen’s superiority to poor whites in brains and muscle, see “The Negro, Slave and Free,” Hartford Daily Courant, Marc
h 6, 1865. On loyalty of the freedman and distrust of poor whites, see “Governing and Governed” and “Two Reasons,” New Orleans Tribune, June 8, 1865, August 27, 1865; “Reconstruction,” Wilkes Spirit of the Times, August 26, 1865; “Reconstruction and Negro Suffrage,” Atlantic Monthly 16, no. 94 (August 1865): 238–47, esp. 245; also see Richardson, The Death of Reconstruction, 32–37.
16.For “inert,” see “The Poor Whites,” Miner’s Register, October 18, 1865. For deformed and idiotic, see Gilmore, Down in Tennessee, 187. For “thoughtless,” “fumbling,” and the “moony glare” of the lunatic, see “The Poor White Trash,” New Orleans Tribune, September 1, 1865. For poor whites ranked on the lowest level in Darwin’s evolutionary scale, see “From the South: Southern Journeyings and Jottings,” New York Times, April 7, 1866; also see “The Poor Whites,” The Congregationalist, September 22, 1865. For belonging to the “genus Homo,” but “from long effects of long generations of ignorance, neglect, degradation and poverty, it has developed few of the higher qualities of the race to which it belongs,” see J. S. Bradford, “Crackers,” Lippincott’s Magazine, vol. 6 (November 1870): 457–67, esp. 457.
17.For “dangerous class,” see “The Poor Whites,” Miner’s Register, October 18, 1865. On intermarrying, incest, and wife selling, see Gilmore, Down in Tennessee, 184, 187. On mothers conniving illicit liaisons for daughters and poor white women having sex with black men, see “The Low-Down People,” Putnam’s Magazine (June 1868): 704–13, esp. 705–6. On filthy refugees in boxcars, see Reid, After the War, 248; also see W. De Forest, “Drawing Bureau Rations,” Harper’s Monthly Magazine 36 (May 1868): 792–99, esp. 794, 799. On Herbert Spencer, see Robert J. Richards, Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 303–4; Spencer first used “survival of the fittest” in his Principles of Biology (London, 1864), 1:444, 455. On the popularity of Darwin and Spencer, see “The Theory of Natural Selection,” The Critic (November 26, 1859), 528–30; “Natural Selection,” [New Orleans] Daily Picayune, January 9, 1870. And for an article underscoring Darwin’s tree analogy, and that the harsh law of natural selection meant that certain branches have “decayed and dropped off,” see “Review of Darwin’s Theory of the Origins of Species by Means of Natural Selection,” American Journal of Science and the Arts (March 1860): 153–84, esp. 159.
White Trash Page 52
