In 1938, President Franklin Roosevelt declared “that the South presents right now … the Nation’s No. 1 economic problem.” Nearly 80 years later, little has changed. The South remains the poorest region in America today. The Deep South — including Alabama — remains poorer still. While historians have traced the obvious legacies of slavery and Jim Crow to the deep inequalities between whites and blacks in the South, few have connected this factor to the region’s other enduring poverty: that of poor and working-class whites.
Although poor Southern whites were certainly never subjected to the daily violence and degrading humiliations of racial slavery, they did suffer tangible socio-economic consequences as a result of living in a slave society.
Slavery’s cruel grip extended widely, damaging the lives of poorer whites who would never benefit economically from the institution. Pushed off the land and forced to compete with unpaid, brutalized slave labor, a significant portion of white Southerners wallowed in extreme poverty, the vestiges of which are still evident today.
By the 1840s and 1850s, the global demand for cotton had skyrocketed. In response, slaveholders from the cotton-poor Upper South sold more than 800,000 African Americans to Lower South states. This influx of slaves drastically reduced the need for white laborers, creating a large underclass who were unemployed or underemployed. Like their forefathers, most poor whites had spent their lives working in agriculture. But with the increase of enslaved labor, free labor was rarely required, except during the bottleneck seasons of planting and harvest.
Some poor white Southerners struggled to make ends meet with occasional odd jobs and seasonal agricultural work. Others chose to drop out of the workforce altogether, living off the land and often running afoul of the law.
Illicitly trading alcohol and food with the enslaved, poor whites made particularly inviting targets for a Southern legal system dominated by slaveholders, who often incarcerated them for behavioral, nonviolent “crimes” such as gambling, drinking and social interactions with the enslaved and free blacks. Their increasingly frequent bouts with local law enforcement officials helped brand poor whites as hardened, troublesome criminals.
In the decades before the Civil War, therefore, the Deep South’s poor whites found themselves increasingly at odds with the slaveholding class. Their poverty rendered them pariahs in a slave society. Not masters, not slaves, these “masterless” men and women fit in nowhere, and instead served to threaten the existing social and economic order.