Note 41 — Chapter XXX · General Aspects of the South at the Close of the War.

I have several times spoken of this class. Lest it should be thought that I am exaggerating their condition, let me quote the description of a writer against whom no accusation of prejudice, or lack of familiarity with the subject, can be brought. Mrs. Fanny Kemble Butler says of the poor whites, on page 146 of her Journal of a Residence on a Georgia Plantation, (to wit, that of her husband):

“They are, I suppose, the most degraded race of human beings claiming an Anglo-Saxon origin, that can be found on the face of the earth—filthy, lazy, ignorant, brutal, proud, penniless savages, without one of the nobler attributes that have been found occasionally allied to the vices of savage nature. They own no slaves, for they are, almost without exception, abjectly poor; they will not work, for that, as they conceive, would reduce them to an equality with the abhorred negroes; they squat, and steal, and starve on the outskirts of the lowest of all civilized societies, and their countenances bear witness to the squalor of their condition and the degradation of their natures.”

Fortunately, this class is confined almost exclusively to the Eastern slaveholding States.