soldiers, in the immediate aftermath of the assassination, the great majority of Lincoln’s white mourners continued to speak in sweeping terms about the blameless poor white people of the South. 34
Trouble was, if the majority of southern whites resented the slaveholding aristocracy, they did not appreciate black freedom either. During the secession crisis and then during the war, the planter classes had indeed taken care to suppress, sometimes with violence, any heterodox antislavery ideas among whites in their midst, and poor and middling folk certainly benefitted from remaining in the good graces of those who held political and social power. But southern whites outside the planter classes allied with the rich not merely out of fear. Comradeship with a wealthy slaveholder could provide a gin to clean their few bales of cotton, a slave or two to borrow for a particularly arduous task, even the opportunity to work as a plantation overseer. Many poor whites also shared an antagonism toward federal power. And though the destruction of slavery might break the cross-class bonds of southern white people, racism easily persisted across class lines.
This was the problem that Lincoln’s white mourners elided. By exempting those beyond the planter classes, they let slide the fact that the vast majority of white southerners in 1865 remained loyal to white supremacy.Though African Americans had joined the chorus that blamed the Confederate leadership for secession, war, and the assassination, they were also among the few who raised the problem of racism among the so-called white masses of the South. In the speech he delivered in Rochester on the day Lincoln died, Frederick Douglass pointedly divided the South into two distinct populations: not rich and poor but, rather, black friends and white foes, mindful of the fact that all white southerners held a sturdy stake in black subjugation. A writer for the
New York Anglo-African
likewise wrote that “poor and ignorant” white people in the slave states should be emancipated from the “tyranny of the rich and educated” but doubted that they could be “emancipated from negro-hate.” A writer for the
Christian Recorder
wrote of the “class of ignorant white loyalists” who also believed that his people were “made to be slaves.” 35
When this complication occurred to Lincoln’s white mourners, they tended only to expand their idealism. Hallock Armstrong admitted that “poor white trash” in the South appeared to hate black people (he believed they craved “somebody more degraded than themselves”), yet he confidently imagined that by treating them with benevolence, the occupying Yankees could embark on the mission of “regenerating the misguided millions.” Just as the followers of William Lloyd Garrison had once imagined themselves ending slavery purely through the moral suasion of slaveholders, white mourners now imagined themselves enlightening poorer white southerners out of their racism. On the home front, in the days following the assassination, Anna Lowell attended a meeting of Bostonians who wished to “instruct & civilize,” not only freedpeople, but also poor whites, who “needed it even more.” The “white trash” of the South, John Green-leaf Whittier wrote in the
Liberator
(he put the phrase in quotation marks), looked toward African Americans “with a bitter hatred,” yet education, he believed, would cure the racism of these pitiable “misguided masses”—note the contrast with the black writer who described the Negro-hating wealthy classes of the South as “educated,” aware that education made no difference. 36
These convictions about moral uplift were sincere, part and parcel of deep-rooted ideas about the social mobility inherent in a system built on capital and labor, standing in turn on a foundation of faith in the inevitable progress of human civilization. Yet by implying that the institution of slaveryalone fueled racism, these white
Trouble was, if the majority of southern whites resented the slaveholding aristocracy, they did not appreciate black freedom either. During the secession crisis and then during the war, the planter classes had indeed taken care to suppress, sometimes with violence, any heterodox antislavery ideas among whites in their midst, and poor and middling folk certainly benefitted from remaining in the good graces of those who held political and social power. But southern whites outside the planter classes allied with the rich not merely out of fear. Comradeship with a wealthy slaveholder could provide a gin to clean their few bales of cotton, a slave or two to borrow for a particularly arduous task, even the opportunity to work as a plantation overseer. Many poor whites also shared an antagonism toward federal power. And though the destruction of slavery might break the cross-class bonds of southern white people, racism easily persisted across class lines.
This was the problem that Lincoln’s white mourners elided. By exempting those beyond the planter classes, they let slide the fact that the vast majority of white southerners in 1865 remained loyal to white supremacy.Though African Americans had joined the chorus that blamed the Confederate leadership for secession, war, and the assassination, they were also among the few who raised the problem of racism among the so-called white masses of the South. In the speech he delivered in Rochester on the day Lincoln died, Frederick Douglass pointedly divided the South into two distinct populations: not rich and poor but, rather, black friends and white foes, mindful of the fact that all white southerners held a sturdy stake in black subjugation. A writer for the
New York Anglo-African
likewise wrote that “poor and ignorant” white people in the slave states should be emancipated from the “tyranny of the rich and educated” but doubted that they could be “emancipated from negro-hate.” A writer for the
Christian Recorder
wrote of the “class of ignorant white loyalists” who also believed that his people were “made to be slaves.” 35
When this complication occurred to Lincoln’s white mourners, they tended only to expand their idealism. Hallock Armstrong admitted that “poor white trash” in the South appeared to hate black people (he believed they craved “somebody more degraded than themselves”), yet he confidently imagined that by treating them with benevolence, the occupying Yankees could embark on the mission of “regenerating the misguided millions.” Just as the followers of William Lloyd Garrison had once imagined themselves ending slavery purely through the moral suasion of slaveholders, white mourners now imagined themselves enlightening poorer white southerners out of their racism. On the home front, in the days following the assassination, Anna Lowell attended a meeting of Bostonians who wished to “instruct & civilize,” not only freedpeople, but also poor whites, who “needed it even more.” The “white trash” of the South, John Green-leaf Whittier wrote in the
Liberator
(he put the phrase in quotation marks), looked toward African Americans “with a bitter hatred,” yet education, he believed, would cure the racism of these pitiable “misguided masses”—note the contrast with the black writer who described the Negro-hating wealthy classes of the South as “educated,” aware that education made no difference. 36
These convictions about moral uplift were sincere, part and parcel of deep-rooted ideas about the social mobility inherent in a system built on capital and labor, standing in turn on a foundation of faith in the inevitable progress of human civilization. Yet by implying that the institution of slaveryalone fueled racism, these white
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