White Trash

by Nancy Isenberg

  18.“The Low-Down People,” Putnam’s Magazine of Literature, Science, Art and National Interests (June 1868): 704–16. On the importance of The Jukes, see Nicole Hahn Rafter, White Trash: The Eugenic Family Studies, 1877–1919 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988), 2–3, 6–7.

  19.See Sanford B. Hunt, “The Negro as Soldier,” Anthropological Review 7 (January 1869): 40–54, esp. 53; also see John S. Haller Jr., Outcasts from Evolution: Scientific Attitudes of Racial Inferiority, 1859–1900 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971), 20–32.

  20.“Mongrel” came from various sources: animal and plant breeding, evolutionary science, racist arguments for miscegenation and amalgamation, and older theories of conquest (barbarian and Mongol hordes became “mongrel hordes”), and the English slur of “mongrel pup” for a lower-class man without any pedigree. For free blacks as a spurious and mongrel race, see “Free Blacks of the North,” [Fayetteville, NC] Carolina Observer, October 7, 1858. On the mongrel party voting themselves down to the level with degraded Negroes, see “Correct Likeness of the Union Party,” [Millersburg, OH] Holmes County Farmer, October 5, 1865; and “Mexico and the Indians—Two More ‘Twin Relics’ for the Next New Party,” New York Herald, June 28, 1867. On preserving the “best blood” from “admixture of baser blood,” see “Our People,” New-Orleans Times, November 24, 1865. And since mongrels were often identified as dogs without any known pedigree, see “Strange Dog,” [New Orleans] Daily Picayune, June 12, 1866. On the famous English mongrel pup rhyme (“Of mongrel, pup, ay, whelp and hound, / And curs of low degree”), see “Letter from Mobile,” Daily Picayune, August 16, 1866. On comparing the South to the mongrel republic of Mexico, see “The Future of the Freemen,” New-Orleans Times, October 22, 1865; “Southern Self-Exile—Mexico and Brazil,” Richmond Examiner, April 14, 1866; “The Mongrel Republics of America,” Old Guard, September 1867, 695–702; “Editor’s Table,” Old Guard (September 1868): 717–20. And for mongrel hordes, see “Speech of Gen. Geo. W. Morgan,” Daily Ohio Statesman, October 5, 1865. Also see Elliott West, “Reconstructing Race,” Western Historical Quarterly 34, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 6–26, esp. 11; Haller, Outcasts from Evolution, 72–73, 82; John G. Menke, Mulattoes and Race Mixture: American Attitudes and Images, 1865–1918 (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1979), 51, 60–61, 101–2; Forrest G. Wood, Black Scare: The Racist Response to Emancipation and Reconstruction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 65–70. For the long-standing English slur for a dog “without a breed,” see Neil Pemberton and Michael Worboys, Mad Dogs and Englishmen: Rabies in Britain, 1830–2000 (New York: Palgrave, 2007), 30–31. And on the Greek etymology of the word “mongrel” meaning “lust” and “an outrage on nature,” see Warren Minton, “Notes. On the Etymology of Hybrid (Lat. Hybrida),” American Journal of Philology (October 1, 1884): 501–2.

  21.On the carpetbagger and his black valise, see Ted Tunnell, “‘The Propaganda of History’: Southern Editors and the Origins of the ‘Carpetbagger’ and the ‘Scalawag,’” Journal of Southern History 72, no. 4 (November 2006): 789–822, esp. 792. For the theme of race traitor and treason, see Hyman Rubin III, South Carolina Scalawags (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2006), xvi; Foner, Reconstruction, 297.

  22.On President Johnson’s veto of the Civil Rights Act described as rejecting “mongrel citizenship,” see “Veto of Civil Rights Bill,” [Harrisburg, PA] Weekly Patriot and Union, April 5, 1866; also see Francis S. Blair Jr. to Andrew Johnson, March 18, 1866, and the Veto of the Civil Rights Bill, March 27, 1866, in Bergeron, The Papers of Andrew Johnson, vol. 10, February–July 1866, 10:270, 312–20. Johnson was more explicit in his Annual Message to Congress, December 3, 1867, in which he contended the two races could never subject be to “amalgamation or fusion of them into one homogeneous mass”—and to try to force this on the South would “Africanize half the country.” Johnson’s attack on mongrel citizenship in his veto of the Civil Rights Act echoed the speeches of Edgar Cowan in the Senate, who had raised the danger of gypsies, Chinese, and Indians gaining citizenship from the act. See Senate, Congressional Globe, 39th Congress, 1st Session, May 30, 1866, 2890–91. Johnson was personally invested in the idea of “fitness.” He wrote that section of the veto. See John H. Abel Jr. and LaWanda Cox, “Andrew Johnson and His Ghost Writers: An Analysis of the Freedmen’s Bureau and Civil Rights Veto Messages,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 48, no. 3 (December 1961): 460–79, esp. 475.

  23.In one term, Johnson vetoed twenty-nine legislative bills, far more than Jackson or any previous president; during the period from Washington to the Civil War, all the presidents combined had vetoed only fifty-nine acts of Congress. On the revolutionary significance of the Fourteenth Amendment, see Robert J. Kraczorowski, “To Begin the Nation Anew: Congress, Citizenship, and Civil Rights After the Civil War,” American Historical Review 92, no. 1 (February 1987): 45–68, esp. 45; and see Wood, Black Scare, 111–13. On Johnson’s obstruction leading to impeachment, especially his opposition to the Fourteenth Amendment and control of the military, see Michael Les Benedict, The Impeachment and Trial of Andrew Johnson (New York: Norton, 1973), 49; and Hans L. Trefousse, Impeachment of a President: Andrew Johnson, the Blacks, and Reconstruction (New York: Fordham University Press, 1999), 41–48, 54.

  24.For “pride of caste” and “pride of race,” see “Extension of Suffrage,” Macon Daily Telegraph, October 28, 1865. For women protecting bloodlines, see “Our People,” New-Orleans Times, November 24, 1865. Senator Montgomery Blair, brother of Francis Blair Jr., in a speech at a large Democratic rally in New York City, argued that only abandoned women would marry black men; see “The New York Campaign,” New York Herald, October 19, 1865; and F. Fleming, ed., “The Constitution and the Ritual of the Knights of the White Camelia,” in Documents Relating to Reconstruction (Morgantown, WV, 1904), 22, 27. On the Knights of the White Camelia and racial purity, also see “Arkansas,” New York Herald, October 31, 1868. On treating a mixed-race child as bastard progeny, see “Miscegenation,” Georgia Weekly Telegraph, February 27, 1870.

  25.On Blair’s fondness for Darwin’s Origins of Species, see Foner, Reconstruction, 340. On his speeches, see “General Blair’s Letter to General George Morgan, July 13, 1868” and “Speeches of Horatio Seymour and Francis P. Blair, Jr., Accepting the Nominations, July 10, 1868,” in Edward McPherson, The Political History of the United States of America During the Period of Reconstruction (from April 15, 1865, to July 15, 1870) . . . (Washington, DC, 1880), 369–70, 381–82; “General Blair’s Speeches,” [Alexandra, LA] Louisiana Democrat, September 2, 1868; “Blair on the Stump,” New York Times, August 9, 1868. On the Georgia case, see Scott v. State, 39 Ga. 321 (1869). For coverage of the case, see “Social Status of the Blacks,” New York Herald, June 27, 1869; also see Charles Frank Robinson III, Dangerous Liaisons: Sex and Love in the Segregated South (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2003), 24, 37–38; Pascoe, What Comes Naturally, 20; James R. Browning, “Anti-Miscegenation Laws in the United States,” Duke Bar Journal 1, no. 1 (March 1951): 26–41, esp. 33. For the theory that mongrel mixtures exaggerate the vices of both races, see “The Philosophy of Miscegenation,” New-Orleans Times, January 4, 1867. It is just as important to understand that Democratic politicians supported laws against amalgamation in order to curb the “waywardness” of low-down whites for degrading Saxon blood; see “Remarks of Thomas Orr, in the Senate, on the Bill to Prevent the Amalgamation of the African with the White Race in Ohio,” [Columbus, OH] Crisis, February 28, 1861.

  26.Hyman argues that violence was the key to the dismantling of the Republican Party, including targeted assaults against scalawags who were political leaders; see Hyman, South Carolina Scalawags, xvi, xxv, 41, 45, 48. Republican vice presidential candidate Schuyler Colfax gave a powerful speech in the defense of scalawags, and stressed the vicious threats made against them; see “Political Intelligence,” New York Herald, October 8, 1868. For han
ging scalawags, see “The Rebel Press,” [Raleigh, NC] Tri-Weekly Standard, 1868. The editor of the Atlanta Constitution argued that the inauguration of a Democratic president would be a signal for hanging scalawags and carpetbaggers; see George C. Rable, But There Was No Peace: The Role of Violence in the Politics of Reconstruction (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1984), 69. On the trial for the murder of radical Republican Mr. Ashburn, the defense attorney—none other than former governor Joseph Brown—used the scalawag slur to justify the attack; see “The Ashburn Tragedy,” Georgia Weekly Telegraph, July 17, 1868. On the KKK targeting scalawags, see “Editorial,” Daily Memphis Avalanche, June 7, 1868. On calls to shoot scalawags, see “Reconstruction Convention,” Daily Austin Republican, July 22, 1868. And for a Republican election poem mocking the Democratic Party’s campaign: “Then let’s shoot and stab and kill, / The men who dare their thoughts to tell / If we lack the power, we have the will / To drive the scalawags, down to hell”; see “Democratic Principles,” Houston Union, May 7, 1869. On assassinations of prominent Republican politicians in 1868, also see Foner, Reconstruction, 342.

  27.For an account of the stereotypical black man “Cuffy” kissing a scalawag, see “‘I Salute You, My Brother,’” [Memphis, TN] Public Ledger, May 7, 1868; and “A Scalawag Senator Invites a Darkey to His House,” [Atlanta] Daily Constitution, July 3, 1868. For scalawags as “piebald,” “mangy,” “slarapery” (meaning flabby-headed or feebleminded) and “stinkee,” see “Arkansas,” “News in Brief,” and “The Scalawag,” Daily Avalanche, May 20, June 24, August 27, 1868; “Ye Stinkee and the Perry House,” Georgia Weekly Telegraph, March 27, 1868. For “slaves of the scalawag white trash,” see “Mississippi,” New York Herald, August 12, 1868. On inciting Negroes with “low-flung” speeches, a comment made by Judge Carlton after observing a Republican gathering in Virginia, see “Meeting at Music Hall Last Night,” [Albany, IN] Daily Ledger, October 31, 1868. On the role as party operatives, see “Carpet Baggery and Scalawagerie,” New-Orleans Times, August 16, 1868; Foner, Reconstruction, 297.

  28.“The Autobiography of a Scalawag,” Boone County [IN] Pioneer, March 13, 1868.

  29.For reference to “low born scum and quondam slaves,” see the poem “White Men Must Rule,” published in the [Raleigh] North Carolinian, February 15, 1868, as quoted in Karen L. Zipf, “‘The Whites Shall Rule the Land or Die’: Gender, Race, and Class in North Carolina Politics,” Journal of Southern History 65, no. 3 (August 1999): 499–534, esp. 525. For a specific call to return the hereditary elite to power in place of “mongrel Republicanism,” see “Address of the Conservative Men of Alabama to the People of the United States,” Daily Columbus [GA] Enquirer, October 1, 1867.

  30.For Wade Hampton, see “The Week,” Nation 7, no. 165 (August 27, 1868): 161; and “America,” London Daily News, September 18, 1865. For scalawag as vagabond stock, see “Horse and Mule Market,” [New Orleans] Daily Picayune, February 9, 1867. For carpetbaggers as the “offscourings of the North” and scalawags the “spewed up scum of the South,” see “Feels Bad,” [Raleigh, NC] Tri-Weekly Standard, May 14, 1868. The same theme was used again to sum up the failure of Reconstruction; see Charles Gayarre, “The Southern Question,” North American Review (November/December 1877): 472–99, esp. 482–83.

  31.For his speech, see “Bullock Ratification Meeting,” Georgia Weekly Telegraph, March 27, 1868.

  32.For motley breeds, see “Negro Suffrage,” Abbeville [SC] Press, March 16, 1866; and that mongrels communicate all the vices and few of the virtues of the parent stock, see “Results of Miscegenation,” Pittsfield [MA] Sun, March 16, 1865. For scalawag cattle as a low breed dragging down the rest to its level, see New York Tribune, October 24, 1854. One journalist made fun of the term “scalawag” as the “elegant language of refined Virginia gentleman,” and observed that the word applied to all natives who were loyal or Republicans, regardless of their class background; see “Virginia,” New York Times, July 27, 1868. Scholars who have studied actual “scalawags” have shown that they were not white trash, but they were of a lower class than either antebellum politicians in the South or their opponents who formed the Redeemer governments in the 1870s. Many had only a public school education. Many supported black suffrage, as James Baggett has argued, “to prevent conservatives, who were judged their betters, from ruling”; see Baggett, “Summing Up the Scalawags,” and appendix Table 3, The Scalawags: Southern Dissenters in the Civil War and Reconstruction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003), 261–62; Hyman, South Carolina Scalawags, xxi, 27–28, 52; also see James Baggett, “Upper South Scalawag Leadership,” Civil War History 29, no. 1 (March 1983): 53–73, esp. 58–60, 73. On the modest landholdings (and the majority as nonslaveholders), see Richard L. Hume and Jerry B. Gough, Blacks, Carpetbaggers, and Scalawags: The Constitutional Conventions of Radical Reconstruction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008), 6, 19, 262, 270.

  33.On the importance of education uniting the North and South, see “National Help for Southern Education,” “President Hayes’s Speech,” and “Education for the South,” New York Times, January 31, September 2, December 17, 1880; Charles F. Thwing, “The National Government and Education,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 68 (February 1884): 471–76; Allen J. Going, “The South and the Blair Education Bill,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 44, no. 2 (September 1957): 267–90. Reverend A. D. Mayo was one of the strongest supporters of the Blair bill, and a vocal advocate of training poor whites in the South; see A. D. Mayo, “The Third Estate of the South,” Journal of Social Sciences (October 1890): xxi–xxxii. On reconciliation stories, see Nina Silber, “‘What Does America Need So Much as Americans?’: Race and Northern Reconciliation with Southern Appalachia, 1870–1900,” in Appalachians and Race: The Mountain South from Slavery to Segregation, ed. John Inscoe (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2001): 245–58.

  34.Mary Denison, Cracker Joe (Boston, 1887), 9–10, 17, 33, 97–198, 206, 233, 248–55, 314, 317, 320. For other reconciliation stories presenting positive portrayals of crackers, see “The Southern Cracker,” Youth’s Companion (May 13, 1875): 149–50; Charles Dunning, “In a Florida Cracker’s Cabin; To the Mockingbird,” Lippincott’s Magazine (April 1882): 367–74; Zitella Cocke, “Cracker Jim,” Overland Monthly and Out West Magazine 10, no. 55 (July 1887): 51–70.

  35.William Goodell Frost, “University Extension in Kentucky” (September 3, 1898): 72–80, esp. 72, 80; also see Frost, “Our Contemporary Ancestors in the Southern Mountains,” Atlantic Monthly 83 (March 1899): 311–19; and James Klotter, “The Black South and White Appalachia,” Journal of American History 66, no. 4 (March 1980): 832–49, esp. 840, 845. For less flattering portrayals, see Will Wallace Harvey, “A Strange Land and Peculiar People,” Lippincott’s Magazine 12 (October 1873): 429–38, esp. 431. Others stressed their isolation in the mountains, cut off from modern commerce, as the cause of their shiftlessness, lawlessness, ignorance, and clanlike vendettas; see James Lane Allen, “Mountain Passes of the Cumberland (with Map),” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 81 (September 1890): 561–76, esp. 562. Allen also stressed their distinctive physiognomy—their time warp style of living—which gave them a “general listlessness,” angular bodies “without great muscular robustness,” and “voices monotonous in intonation”; see James Lane Allen, “Through the Cumberland Gap on Horseback,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 73 (June 1886): 50–67, esp. 57.

  36.Davis of Arkansas served from 1901 to 1913; Tillman, who also served as a senator, was first elected governor of South Carolina in 1890; Vardaman was Mississippi governor from 1904 to 1908, then senator from 1913 to 1919. See Stephen Kantrowitz, Ben Tillman and the Reconstruction of White Supremacy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); William F. Holmes, White Chief: James Kimball Vardaman (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1970); Albert D. Kirwan, Revolt of the Rednecks: Mississippi Politics, 1876–1925 (Lexington: Unive
rsity of Kentucky Press, 1951), 145–47, 152–53, 160–61. And on Jeff Davis, see Richard L. Niswonger, “A Study in Southern Demagoguery: Jeff Davis of Arkansas,” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 39, no. 2 (Summer 1980): 114–24. For the story of the term “redneck” involving Guy Rencher, see “Mississippi Campaign Reaches Noisy Stage,” [New Orleans] Daily Picayune, July 11, 1911. For rednecks in the Mississippi swamps, see Hunt McCaleb, “The Drummer,” Daily Picayune, April 2, 1893. On rednecks in the Boer War, see “Dashing Sortie by British,” [Baltimore] Sun, December 11, 1899. One article noted that the Boers called the British and Americans “damned rednecks”; see “The News from Ladysmith,” New York Daily Tribune, November 2, 1899. On Guy Rencher, see Dunbar Rowland, The Official and Statistical Register of the State of Mississippi, 1908, vol. 2 (Nashville, 1908): 1156–57. On one of the earliest usages of “redneck” in Mississippi politics, on August 13, 1891, see Patrick Huber and Kathleen Drowne, “Redneck: A New Discovery,” American Speech 76, no. 4 (Winter 2001): 434–43. For the folk rhyme “I Would Rather Be a Negro Than a Poor White Man,” see Thomas W. Talley, Negro Folk Rhymes: Wise and Otherwise (New York, 1922), 43. For the dating of the rhyme, see Archie Green, “Hillbilly Music: Source and Symbol,” Journal of American Folklore 78, no. 309 (July–September 1965): 204–28, esp. 204.