Note 51 — Chapter XXXIV · Knoxville and the Mountaineers—Glimpses of Southern Ideas.

I have said nothing concerning these poor whites, which is not mildness itself compared with the descriptions of other travelers. Here is one of the latest, from the very intelligent Southern correspondent of the Boston Advertiser, Mr. Sidney Andrews. Fortunately the classes he describes are confined, almost exclusively, to the south-eastern States:

“Whether the North Carolina ‘dirt-eater,’ or the South Carolina ‘sand-hiller,’ or the Georgia ‘cracker,’ is lowest in the scale of human existence, would be difficult to say. The ordinary plantation negro seemed to me, when I first saw him in any numbers, at the very bottom of not only probabilities but also possibilities, so far as they affect human relations; but these specimens of the white race must be credited with having reached a yet lower depth of squalid and beastly wretchedness. However poor or ignorant, or unclean, or improvident he may be, I never yet found a negro who had not at least a vague desire for a better condition, an undefined longing for something called freedom, a shrewd instinct of self-preservation. These three ideas—or, let me say, shadows of ideas—do not make the creature a man, but they light him out of the bounds of brutedom. The Georgia ‘cracker,’ as I have seen him since leaving Milledgeville, seems to me to lack not only all that the negro does, but also even the desire for a better condition, and the vague longing for an enlargement of his liberties and his rights. I walked out into the country, back of Albany and Andersonville, when at those places, and into the country back of Fort Valley this morning; and, on each occasion, I fell in with three or four of these ‘cracker’ families. Such filthy poverty, such foul ignorance, such idiotic imbecility, such bestial instincts, such groveling desires, such mean longings; you would question my veracity as a man if I were to paint the pictures I have seen! Moreover, no trick of words can make plain the scene in and around one of these habitations; no fertility of language can embody the simple facts for a Northern mind; and the case is one in which even seeing itself is scarcely believing. Time and effort will lead the negro up to intelligent manhood, but I almost doubt if it will be possible to ever lift this ‘white trash’ into respectability.”