Planters, Poor Whites and White Supremacy

We commonly think about the incredible social and political power of white supremacy during Reconstruction, but many white supremacists at the time were much more concerned with the brittleness of the racial alliance that held planters and poor whites together. Looking back from the twentieth century when the Jim Crow system--what Robert Korstad calls "racialized capitalism"--was firmly in place, we can assume too easily that all whites, whether rich or poor, powerful or powerless, agreed on how society should be ordered. However, in recent decades, scholars of the Civil War have emphasized that one of the key reasons for the defeat of the Confederacy was the growing disenchantment, dissent, and outright resistance of poor whites to support the war. No surprise, then, that when Reconstruction came and changed the rules of the game that many of these poor whites continued their opposition to the planters, sometimes even taking the bold step of allying themselves with those who had recently been enslaved.

photo of racially mixed group of oyster shuckers at work

Oyster Shuckers, South Carolina Lowcountry, ca. 1900
Library of Congress

Part of the reason that some poor whites sought alliances with freedpeople is that many of the policies of Reconstruction, such as homestead protections, helped poor people, whatever their color. Planters, accustomed as they were to commanding both their slaves and their poor white neighbors, reacted with a mixture of violence and puzzlement. Matthew C. Butler, a Confederate cavalry general, explains to the Congressional committee investigating the Ku Klux Klan in one of the documents below how men of his class felt when they realized that their counsel was not being listened to and that they could no longer exercise the prerogatives of command they had assumed to be their birthright. The Ku Klux Klan itself was hardly a model of white unity; they often attacked whites who supported the Republican party or even helped freedpeople with something as mundane as a church building.

As national Republican politics in 1872 and the Panic of 1873 began to weaken the foundations of Reconstruction, planters seized back the initiative and in South Carolina launched and all-out campaign against the Republican government in 1876. One of their key strategies was to get the support of all whites, whether by conviction or persuasion or coercion. Once in power, though, the planter Democrats, known often as Bourbons, reversed the Republican policies that assisted poor farmers by passing measures such as the fence law. This betrayal of poor whites led many to try to find a new political home, away from both the planter-dominated Democratic party and the discredited Republicans.

Sources:
Document 1. Sidney Andrews on Attitudes among North Carolina's Poor Whites
Document 2. J. B. Sitton's Petition for a Presidential Pardon
Document 3. North Carolina Constitutional Convention Protects Homesteads
Document 4. The Ku Klux Klan Attacks a White Man Assisting Blacks
Document 5. Matthew C. Butler: Planters React to Being Ignored by Government
Document 6: Belton O'Neall Townsend on 1876 Strategy
Document 7. A Description of Wade Hampton's Campaign
Document 8. T. D. Gwyn Argues Against the Fence Law
Document 9. South Carolina Greenbacker Explains His Opposition to Democrats

After Slavery

Planters, Poor Whites and White Supremacy

What People are Saying about After Slavery: