The New York World is often described as the newspaper that most reflected the views of the national leadership of the Democratic Party during the Reconstruction Era. This article in The World describes the Southern Elite class as the friends of the blacks and the real enemy as poor whites. The paper claims that the motive for hatred of blacks has more to do with class than race. Modern historians reject the claim that racial violence in the South was the exclusive preserve of “white trash.” Elites encouraged and sometimes directed the terrorism. Poor whites sometimes made common cause with freedpeople. Elites, who sometimes called for depriving poor whites of the vote along with blacks, made every effort to keep the two groups divided. When they united, as in the Readjuster movement in Virginia, great efforts were made to divide.
This article is piece of correspondence written apparently by someone from, or attached to, the upper class in Georgia. He describes race hatred as a natural result of class conflict between blacks and lower class whites. He neglects the careful cultivation of that racial distinction by the social and legal systems nurtured by elites to justify slavery during the century prior to the Civil War. After the war, while poor whites sometimes filled up the ranks of White Terror organizations, they rarely directed them.
Note: The author makes use a variety of derogatory terms for working class and poor whites including “cracker” and “Sand Hiller.”
World
Wednesday, Jan 13, 1869
New York, NY
Page: 10
