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THE POOR WHITE

The broad and beautiful Southland is peopled by about thirty million human beings (26,000,000 in 1900), who constitute the “South” as a community conscious of a life separate in many respects from that of the North. What is there in these thirty millions which sets them apart? First of all is the sharp division into two races—two thirds of the people Whites and one third Negroes, which in uncounted open and obscure ways makes the South unlike any other country in the world. In the second place account must be taken of the subdivision of the white people into social and economic classes—a division common in all lands, but peculiar in the South because of the relations of the strata to each other.

An analysis of the elements of white population may begin with the less prosperous and progressive portion commonly called the Poor Whites. As used in the South the term means lowlanders; and it is necessary to set off for separate treatment the mountaineers, who are, if not typical Southerners, at least unlike anything in the North. No other inhabitants of the United States are so near the eighteenth century as the people to whom an observer has given the name of “Our contemporary ancestors.” For nowhere else in the United States is there a distinct mountain people. The New England mountaineers live nowhere higher than 1,500 feet above the sea, and have no traits which mark them from their neighbors in the lower lands; in the Rocky Mountains the population is chiefly made up of miners; the Sierra Nevadas are little peopled; in the South alone, where some elevated valleys have been settled for two hundred years, is there an American mountain folk, with a local dialect and social system and character.

The mountains and their inhabitants are a numerous and significant part of the population in all the upper tier of the Southern States, including Oklahoma; and though they are much less numerous in the lower South, they furnish a large body of voters, and their slow progress is in itself a difficult problem. The Appalachian range, from Canada to Alabama, is made up of belts of parallel ridges; in a few places, such as Mount Washington in New Hampshire, and Mount Mitchell in North Carolina, they rise above 6,000 feet, but they include comparatively few elevations over 3,000 feet, and no lofty plateaus. Between the ridges and in pockets or coves of the mountains are lands that are easily cultivated, and in many places the mountains, when cleared, are fertile to their summits. The scenic culmination of the Appalachians is Blowing Rock in North Carolina, 3,500 feet above the sea, where the rifleman without stirring from one spot may drop his bullets into the Catawba flowing into the Atlantic, the New, which is a head water of the Ohio, and the Watauga, a branch of the Tennessee. Above this spot rises, 3,000 feet higher, the mass of Grandfather’s Mountain; and below is an enchanting series of mountains, range after range, breaking off to the eastern foothills.

Within the Appalachians, south of Pennsylvania, dwell about two and a half million people of whom but a few thousands are of African or European birth. These are true Americans, if there are any, for they are the descendants of people who were already in the country as much as a century and a half ago. In a Kentucky churchyard may be found such names as Lucinda Gentry, John Kindred, Simeon Skinner, and William Tudor. Side by side stand Scotch-Irish names, for many of that stock drifted southwestward from Pennsylvania into these mountains; and in the oldest burying ground, on the site of Daniel Boone’s Watauga settlement, the first interment seems to have been that of a German. Just as in central Pennsylvania, and the Valley of Virginia, the English, Scotch-Irish, and Pennsylvania Dutch were intermingled. It is an error to suppose that these highlanders are descended from the riffraff of the colonial South; they have been crowded back into the unfavorable parts of the mountains because, as the population increased, there was a lack of good land; and the least vigorous and ambitious of them, though sons or grandsons of stalwart men, have been obliged to accept the worst opportunities.

The life of the Mountain Whites is not very unlike that of New England in the seventeenth century, New York in the eighteenth, and Minnesota in the nineteenth century. The people are self-sustaining in that they build their own houses, raise their own food, and make their own clothing. There have been instances where in the early morning a sheep was trotting about wearing a pelt which in the evening a mountaineer was wearing, it having been sheared, spun, woven, dyed, cut, made, and unfitted in that one day. Abraham Lincoln, as a boy in Indiana and a young man in Illinois, lived the same kind of life that these people are now going through; for here is the last refuge of the American frontier. These conditions seem not in themselves barbarous, for there are still thousands of Northern people who in childhood inhabited intelligent and well-to-do communities with good schools, in which most of the families still made their own soap and sugar, smoked their own hams, molded their own candles, and dyed their own cloth, where the great spinning-wheel still turned and the little wheel whirred.

The Mountain Whites, however, are more than primitive or even colonial, they are early English; at least among them are still sung and handed down from grandmother to child Elizabethan ballads. Lord Thomas still hies him to his mother to know

Whether I shall marry fair Elender,

Or bring the brown girl home.

Local bards also compose for themselves such stirring ditties as “Sourwood Mounting.”

Chickens a-crowin’ in the sourwood mountain,

Ho-de-ing-dang, diddle-lal-la-da.

So many pretty girls I can’t count ’em,

Ho-de-ing-dang, diddle-lal-la-da.

My true love lives up in the head of a holler,

She won’t come and I won’t call ’er.

My true love, she’s a black-eyed daisy,

If I don’t get her, I’ll go crazy.

The most unfavorable mountain conditions are fairly illustrated by eastern Kentucky, a veritable back country. Along the roads the traveler passes a number of one-room houses, without glass windows, and is told many tales of the irregular or no-family life of the people. Perhaps along a creek he chances on a traditional Mountain White family, such as Porte Crayon drew fifty years ago, when these people were first described as a curiosity. Below a dirty and ill-favored house, down under the bank on the shingle near the river, sits a family of five people, all ill-clothed and unclean; a blear-eyed old woman, a younger woman with a mass of tangled red hair hanging about her shoulders, indubitably suckling a baby; a little girl with the same auburn evidence of Scotch ancestry; a boy, and a younger child, all gathered about a fire made among some bricks, surrounding a couple of iron saucepans, in which is a dirty mixture looking like mud, but probably warmed-up sorghum syrup, which, with a few pieces of corn pone, makes their breakfast. A counterbalance to the squalor is the plump and pretty girls that appear all along the way, with the usual mountain headdress of the sunbonnet, perched at a killing angle. Such people have their own peculiarities of speech like the mountain woman’s characterization of a forlorn country-seat: “Warn’t hit the nighest ter nowhar uv ary place ever you’s at?”

The miserable family described above are a fair type of what a writer on the subject calls the “submerged tenth among the mountaineers”; but they belong to the lowest type, to which those who know them best give no favorable character; they live in the remotest parts of the mountains, in the rudest cabins, with the smallest provision of accumulated food. Most of them are illiterate and more than correspondingly ignorant. Some of them had Indian ancestors and a few bear evidences of negro blood. The so-called “mountain-boomer,” says an observer, “has little self-respect and no self-reliance.... So long as his corn pile lasts the ‘cracker’ lives in contentment, feasting on a sort of hoe cake made of grated corn meal mixed with salt and water and baked before the hot coals, with addition of what game the forest furnishes him when he can get up the energy to go out and shoot or trap it.... The irregularities of their moral lives cause them no sense of shame.... But, notwithstanding these low moral conceptions, they are of an intense religious excitability.... They license and ordain their own preachers, who are no more intelligent than they are themselves, but who are distinguished by special ability in getting people ‘shouting happy,’ or in ‘shaking the sinner over the smoking fires of hell until he gets religion.’” They are all users of tobacco—men, women, and children. They smoke and chew and “dip snuff.”... Bathing is unknown among them.... When a garment is put on once it is there to stay until it falls to pieces. The washtub is practically as little known among them as the bathtub....

The same authority has abundant praise for the better type of the mountaineer, who loves the open-air life, cares nothing for luxury, and “has raised the largest average families in America upon the most sterile of ‘upright’ and stony farms, farms the very sight of which would make an Indiana farmer sick with nervous prostration. He has sent his sons out to be leaders of men in all the industries and activities in every part of our country.”

If there were no improvement in the mountaineer who remains on his land, the South would rue it; but in some parts of the mountains one may have such experiences as those of the writer in 1907 on a pedestrian journey across the mountains of North Carolina, among what has been supposed to be the most primitive and least hopeful people in the Southern mountains. He found beside a lonely creek near the little village of Sugar Grove the house of the son of a Swiss immigrant, the best one for many miles. It is also the Telephone Exchange in that remote region. The stranger is received hospitably, and sits down to a meal of a dozen good dishes, including the traditional five kinds of sauce. He is not required to sleep in the Telephone Exchange itself, which is the living room of the family occupied by the husband, wife, two babies, two older children squabbling in a trundle bed, and a space for two more, but receives a clean and comfortable room to himself. The host is justly proud that Sugar Grove has a good two-story school house put up by the labor of the people of the neighborhood, who tax themselves to increase the school term from the four months supported by the State fund to eight months. In that valley the people are as prosperous as in the average Maine village, and for much the same reason; it is lumber that has brought money and prosperity; for railroads were not built thither till the lumber was worth so much that the owners received considerable sums in cash, and the thrifty ones have saved it. A few nights later was tested the hospitality of a young couple newly married, who were running a little mill. They furnished a good room, a capital supper of eggs, bacon, good coffee, corn pone, and the equally delicious wheat pone, and arose in the dark so as to favor a five-o’clock departure; and they “allowed” that the entertainment was worth about twenty-five cents.

What has been done in Boone County, N. C., is likely to be done in most of the other mountains sooner or later; the coal and the timber draw the railroad, establish the village, make possible the school and start the community upward; but the mountaineers are slow to move, and the boarding schools, established partly by Northerners, are a godsend to the people. When in one such school mustering a hundred and fifty boys one hundred and thirty “guns” (that is, pistols) are turned over to the principal upon request, it is clear that the mountaineers need a new standard of personal relations. As you ride through parts of Kentucky, people point out to you where Bill Adams lay in wait to kill Sam Skinner last fall; or the house of the man who has killed two men and never got a scratch yet.

There is good in these mountain people, there is hope, there is potentiality of business man and college president. Take, for example, the poor mountain boy who, on a trip across the mountains with a fellow Kentuckian, seems to be reading something when he thinks he is not observed, and on closer inquiry reluctantly admits that it is a volume of poetry which some one had left at the house. “Hit’s Robert Burns’s poems; I like them because it seems to me they are written for people like us. Do you know who I like best in those poems? It is that ‘Highland Mary.’”

The reason for hope in the future of the Mountain Whites is that they are going through a process which has been shared at one time or another by all the country east of the Rocky Mountains. The Southern mountaineers are the remnant of the many communities of frontiersmen who cleared the forests, fought the Indians, built the first homes, and lived in a primitive fashion. Much of the mountains is still in the colonial condition, but railroads, schools, and cities are powerful civilizing agents, and a people of so much native vigor may be expected in course of no long time to take their place alongside their brethren of the lowlands. The more prosperous South is too little interested in these people, and is doing little direct civilizing work among them, in many districts leaving that task to be performed by schools founded by Northerners. But there are some good state schools among them, as, for instance, that at Boonesboro’, N. C.; and numerous small colleges mostly founded before the Civil War.

The Mountain Whites ought not to be confused with the Poor Whites of the lowlands. Although there are many similarities of origin and life, the main difference is that the mountaineers have almost no Negroes among them and are therefore nearly free from the difficulties of the race problem. In the lowlands as in the mountains, men whose fathers had settled on rich lands, as the country developed were unable to compete with their more alert and successful neighbors, who were always ready to outbid them for land or slaves; therefore they sold out and moved back into the poor lands in the lowlands, or into the belt of thin soil lying between the Piedmont and the low country. Hence the contemptuous names applied to them by the planting class—“Tar Heels” in North Carolina; “Sand Hillers” in South Carolina; “Crackers” in Georgia; “Clay Eaters” in Alabama; “Red Necks” in Arkansas; “Hill Billies” in Mississippi; and “Mean Whites,” “White Trash,” and “No ’Count” everywhere.

These so-called Poor Whites are to be found in every state in the South. They are the most numerous element in the Southern population. They are the people who are brought into the closest personal relations with the Negroes. A survey of their conditions and prospects is therefore essential for any clear understanding of the race question.

The present dominant position of the Poor Whites is different from that of their predecessors in slavery times. Distant from the highways of trade, having no crop which they could exchange for store goods, satisfied with primitive conditions from which almost none of them emerged, the Poor Whites then simply vegetated. With them the negro question was not pressing, for they had little personal relation with the rich planters, even when they lived in their neighborhood; and the free Negroes who were crowded back like themselves on poor lands were too few and too feeble to arouse animosity. Mountain people have little prejudice against Negroes: but in the hills and lowlands, where the two races live side by side, where the free black was little poorer than his white neighbor, the slave on a notable plantation felt himself quite superior to the Poor Whites, who in turn furnished most of the overseer class, and had their own opportunities of teaching how much better any white man was than any nigger.

The isolation of these Poor Whites was one if the greatest misfortunes of ante-bellum times: it was not wholly caused by slavery, but was aggravated because the slave owner considered himself in a class apart from the man who had nothing but a poor little farm. “Joyce,” said a Northern officer to a Poor White in Kentucky forty years ago, “what do you think this war is about?” “I reckon that you’uns has come down to take the niggers away from we’uns.” “Joyce, did you ever own a nigger?” “No.” “Any of your family ever own a nigger?” “No, sir.” “Did you ever expect to own a nigger?” “I reckon not.” “Which did the people that did own niggers like best, you or the nigger?” “Well, ’twas this away. If a planter came along and met a nigger, he’d say, ‘Howdy, Pomp! How’s the old massa, and how’s the young massa, and how’s the old missus, and how’s the young missus?’ But if he met me he’d say, ‘Hullo, Joyce, is that you?’”

But Joyce and his kind went into the Confederate army of which they furnished most of the rank and file, and followed Marse Robert uncomplainingly to the bitter end; and they had a good sound, logical reason for fighting what was apparently the quarrel of their planter neighbor. A white man was always a white man, and as long as slavery endured, the poorest and most ignorant of the white race could always feel that he had something to look down upon, that he belonged to the lords of the soil. In the war he was blindly and unconsciously fighting for the caste of white men, and could not be brought to realize that slavery helped to keep him where he was, without education for his children, without opportunities for employment, without that ambition for white paint and green blinds which has done so much to raise the Northern settler. Though a voter, and a possible candidate for office, he was accustomed to accept the candidates set up by the slave-holding aristocracy. Stump speakers flattered him and Fourth-of-July orators explained to him the blessings of a republican government.

The Poor White, in his lowest days, had a right to feel that he was a political person of consequence, for did he not furnish three presidents of the United States? Jackson was born a Poor White, and had some of the objectionable and most of the attractive qualities of those people; Andrew Johnson came from the upper Valley of the Tennessee; Abraham Lincoln was a Poor White, the son of a shiftless Kentucky farmer. Materially the Poor Whites contributed little to the community, except by clearing the land, and they took care that that process should not go uncomfortably far.

Let a Southern writer describe his own ante-bellum neighbors: “These folk of unmixed English stock could not cook; but held fast to a primitive and violent religion, all believers expecting to go to heaven. What, therefore, did earthly poverty matter? They were determined not to pay more taxes. They were suspicious of all proposed changes; and to have a school or a good school, would be a violent change. They were ‘the happiest and most fortunate people on the face of the globe.’ Why should they not be content?... holding fast to the notion that they are a part of a long-settled life; fixed in their ways; unthinking and standing still; ... unaware of their own discomfort; ignorant of the world about them and of what invention, ingenuity, industry, and prosperity have brought to their fellows, and too proud or too weak to care to learn these things.”

What is the present condition of the Poor White? The greater number of white rural families own their farms, though there is a considerable class of renters; and they till them in the wasteful and haphazard fashion of the frontier. Their stock is poor and scanty, except that they love a good horse. Most of their food except sugar they raise on their own places, and up to a few years ago they were clad in homespun. There are still areas such as southern Arkansas and northern Florida in which the life of the Poor Whites has little changed in half a century.

Otherwise, if one now seeks to find this primitive and sordid life in the South, he will need to search a long time. After the Civil War the disbanded soldiers went back to their cabins, and for a time resumed their old habits, but at present they are undergoing a great and significant change. Though there are five or six millions of Poor Whites scattered through the South, especially in the remote hill country, for the most part away from the rich cotton lands and the great plantations, you may literally travel a thousand miles through the back country without finding a single county in which they do not show a distinct uplift. Take a specific example. On January 2, 1908, on a steamer making its way up the Mississippi River, was a family of typical Poor Whites, undersized, ill-fed, unshaven, anæmic, unprogressive, moving with their household gods, the only deck passengers among the Negroes in the engine room. On inquiring into the case, it came out that they could no longer afford to pay the rent on the tenant farm which they had occupied for several years. “How do you expect to get started on a new farm?” “Oh, we’ve got some stock. You see it right over there on the deck. Seven head of cows.” “That isn’t your wagon, I suppose, that good painted wagon?” “Oh, yes, that’s our wagon, and them’s our horses, three of ’em.” “Is that pile of furniture and household goods yours too?” “Yes, that plunder’s ours; we’ve got everything with us. You see I want to take my little boys where they can have some schooling.” And this was the lazy, apathetic, and hopeless Poor White! He had more property than the average of small Southern farmers, and was moving just as the Iowa man moves to Nebraska, and the Nebraska man to Idaho, because full of that determination to give his children a better chance than he had himself, which is one of the main props of civilization.

Wherever the abject Poor White may be, a personal search shows that he is not in the hill country of Louisiana, Mississippi, or Alabama, nor in the enormous piney woods district of southern Alabama and Georgia. Visit Coosa County, Alabama, supposed to be as near the head waters of Bitter Creek as you can get, lay out a route which will carry you through by-roads, across farms, and into coves where even a drummer is a novelty. You will find many poor people living in cabins which could not be let to a city tenant if the sanitary inspectors knew it, some of them in one-room houses, with a puncheon floor, made of split logs; with log walls chinked with clay and moss, with a firestead of baked clay, and a cob chimney. Around that fire all the family cooking is carried on; the room is nearly filled up with bedsteads and chests or trunks, a few pictures, chiefly crude advertising posters, and not enough chairs to seat the family.

That is the way perhaps a fifth of the hill Whites live, but four fifths of them are in better conditions. The one-room cabins have given way to larger houses, a favorite, though by no means a type, being the double house with the “hall” or open passage from back to front; besides the two rooms there will probably be a lean-to, and perhaps additional rooms built on; and very likely a separate kitchen, used also as a dining room. Instead of the three to twelve little out-buildings scattered about, decent shelters begin to appear for the stock, and tight houses for tools and utensils.

Of the morals of these people it is difficult for a stranger to judge, but the intimate family life in the better cabins is in every way decorous. The pride of the family is the splendid patchwork bed quilt, with magnificent patterns, representing anything from the Field of the Cloth of Gold to the solar system. The children, who may be anywhere from two to fifteen in number, are civil, the spirit of the family hospitable; and though there are none of the books and newspapers which help to furnish both the sitting room and the brains of the Northern farmer’s family, they are a hopeful people. Some embarrassing questions arise when there are nine people, old and young, sleeping in the same room, but even in the one-room houses the people commonly have ways of disposing of themselves which are entirely decent. The poorest families live on “hog and hominy,” a locution which does not exclude the invariable salaratus biscuit, corn pone, and real or alleged coffee and string beans.

It is hardly fair to compare these people, who are at best only ten or twenty years away from the frontier, with New Englanders or Middle States or far Western farmers. In the Southern climate people get on with smaller houses, fewer fireplaces and stoves, and more ventilation through the walls. There is little necessity for large farm buildings, and the country is too rough to use much farm machinery. Their outside wants are simple—coffee, sugar, or the excellent cane-syrup, clothing (inasmuch as they no longer make their own), wagons and utensils; these can all be bought with their cotton, and they raise their own corn and “meat” (pork). In comparison with the North a fair standard would be to set a dozen of the Coosa County houses alongside a mining village in Pennsylvania, and the advantage of cleanliness, decency, and thrift would show itself on the Southern side.

Those people are rising; though still alarmingly behind, both in education and in a sense of the need of education. Unusually well-to-do farmers may be found who boast that they are illiterate, and who will not send their children steadily to good schools in the neighborhood; but they are learning one of the first lessons of uplift, namely, that the preparation for later comfort is to save money. Saving means work, and perhaps the secret of the undoubted improvement of the Poor Whites is that there is work that they can do, plenty of it at good wages. That is a marvelous difference from slavery times, when there was nothing going on in their region except farming, and it was thought ignoble to work on anybody else’s farm, for that was what niggers did. Nowadays some Whites are tenants or laborers on large plantations. Near Monroe, La., for instance, is a plantation carried on by Acadians brought up from lower Louisiana, with the hope that they will like it and save money enough to buy up the land in small parcels. There are plantations on which white tenants come into houses just vacated by negro tenants, on the same terms as the previous occupants; the women working in the fields, precisely as the Negroes do; there are plantations almost wholly manned by white tenants. But there are other more attractive employments, and it is so easy for the white man to buy land that there is no likelihood of the growth of a class of white agricultural laborers in the South.

The son of the Poor White farmer, or the farmer himself, if he finds it hard to make things go, can usually find employment in his own neighborhood, or at no great distance. Large forces of men are employed in clearing new land, a process which is going on in the hills, in the piney woods, and in the richest agricultural belt. Little sawmills are scattered widely, and the turpentine industry gives employment to thousands of people. Day wages have gone up till a dollar a day is easy to earn, and sometimes more; and the wages of farm laborers have risen from the old eight or ten dollars a month to fifteen dollars a month and upward. The great lumber camps give employment to thousands of people, both white and black, and are on the whole demoralizing, for liquor there flows freely; and though families are encouraged to come, the life is irregular, and sawmill towns may suddenly decay.

The great resource of the Poor White is work in the cotton mills, for which he furnishes almost the only available supply of the less highly skilled kinds of labor. Here the conditions are wholly different from those of half a century ago; he can find work every day for every healthy member of his family, and sometimes prefers adding up the wages of the women and children to making wages for himself. Whatever the drawbacks of the mill town, it has schools, the Sunday newspaper, and some contact with the outside world; and the man who really loves the farm may always return to it.

Even in slavery times the ambitious Poor White could get out of his environment, and furnished many of the business and political leaders of his time; and there was a class of white farmers working their own land. That class still exists, though no longer set off so sharply from the ordinary Poor Whites, inasmuch as the lower element is approaching the higher. As an instance, take a farmstead in Coosa County, Alabama, containing perhaps a hundred acres, and alongside the disused old house is a new and more comfortable one, flanked by a pump house; grouped near it are nine log outhouses, and one frame building intended for cotton seed. The front yard is beaten down flat, for it is very hard to make grass grow in the South near to houses; but it is neat and reasonably tidy; in the foreground stands an old syrup pan with red stone chimney, and near by is the rude horse-mill used for grinding the cane. Such a farm is a fair type of the average place, but still better conditions may be seen in new houses of four and even six rooms, with the front yard fenced in, and a gate, and a big barn for the storage of hay, just such as you might find in southern Iowa.

The evident uplift among the Poor Whites in their own strongholds is only a part of the story; for ever since the Revolution there has been a drift of these people into the more promising conditions of southern Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and the far West. If from the number of born South Carolinians now living in other states be subtracted the natives of other states now living in South Carolina, the State will still have contributed 179,000 to other communities. Georgia has lost 219,000, and there are similar though smaller drifts out of Alabama and Mississippi; while Texas counts more than 600,000 people born in other states, principally the South. Former Poor Whites and descendants of Poor Whites can be found in every Northwestern and Pacific state, and constitute a valuable element of population. The truth is, as the evidence adduced in this chapter proves, that the term “Poor Whites” is a misnomer; that a class of poor and backward people which has existed for decades in many parts of the South is now disappearing. There are poor farmers in every part of the South; but poor farmers can be found in every northwestern state. The average of forehandedness and intelligent use of tools and machinery is less among the back country farmers in the South than in other parts of the Union; but there is such uplift and progress among them—particularly since the high price of cotton—that the Poor Whites are ceasing to be an element of the population that needs to be separately treated.