Yet few bureau officials embraced Smith’s vision of loyal, honorable poor whites. Those who visited the refugee camps, or watched what one New York Times correspondent called the “loafing whites” in southern towns, offered little in their favor. A skeptic in New Orleans offered this droll observation: although “poor white trash” had proven themselves incapable of doing anything before the war, they had suddenly discovered a trade in “the refugee business,” by which he meant living off government handouts. In Florida, bureau agent Charles Hamilton, who later served in Congress, confessed to his superiors that freedmen were only marginally below the “white plebeians of the South” in intelligence. Widely circulated bureau reports claimed that hundreds of thousands of destitute whites lived off “Uncle Sam’s rations.” The typical recipients were women “covered in rags and filth, and a dozen greasy and dirty little ‘innocent prattlers’ in train.” Perhaps the most damning assessment came from Marcus Sterling, a Union officer turned civilian administrator. After working as a bureau agent for four years in rural Virginia, he wrote a final report in 1868. While he believed that black freedmen had made great progress, were “more settled, industrious and ambitious” as a result of federal intervention, and eager to achieve literacy with “honest pride and manly integrity,” the same could not be said of that “pitiable class of poor whites,” the “only class which seem almost unaffected by the [bureau’s] great benevolence and its bold reform.” In the race for self-reliance, poor whites seemed to many bureau agents never to have left the starting gate.11
Agents of the Freedmen’s Bureau were not alone in offering a grim prognosis for poor whites. Journalists from major newspapers headed south, sending back regular dispatches and publishing monographs for curious northern readers. Prominent articles appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, Putnam’s Magazine, and Harper’s New Monthly Magazine. The New York Times published a series of essays on the subject: in 1866, its anonymous correspondent authored a scathing exposé of white poverty, accompanied by the innocuous title “From the South: Southern Journeyings and Jottings.” Writing for the Chicago Tribune and Boston Advertiser, the Illinois-based reporter Sidney Andrews expressed his unvarnished views of wretched whites, which he reissued as a book, The South Since the War. After having been a correspondent for the Cincinnati Gazette, Whitelaw Reid compiled his unsympathetic observations in a travelogue, After the War: A Tour of the Southern States. Finally, John Trowbridge produced The South: A Tour of Its Battlefields and Ruined Cities, which focused a harsh lens on rural whites.12
All of the above were published in the single year of 1866. Yet one of the most talked-about books in those wobbly years came out before the war had officially ended. Down in Tennessee (1864) was also a travel account, its author the New York cotton merchant and novelist James R. Gilmore. His argument was unique because he distinguished between “mean whites” and “common whites,” arguing that the latter class were enterprising, law-abiding, and productive citizens. They stood in sharp contrast to the shiftless, thieving, and brutish mean whites, whose homes reminded him of a “tolerably-kept swine-sty or dog-kennel.” Though he identified this group as a minority, they were still a dangerous class, he said, owing to their infectious character; they were a diseased segment of the prostrate South, a “fungus growth” on the body of society, “absorbing the strength and life of its other parts.”13
All of these writers had a common desire: to unravel the enigma of the southern racial and class system in order to prognosticate about its uncertain future. If they agreed on any point, it was that which was summed up by one of Sidney Andrews’s imitators: “It is now not so much a question of what is to become of poor blacks of the South, as it is one of what is to become of poor whites of the South?”14
The insistence of Republican-leaning journalists that poor whites languished below freedmen as potential citizens may seem startling, but it was not unexpected. Distrust was strong both of former Confederate elites and the “groveling” poor men who, like “sheep to slaughter,” were dragged off to war. Whitelaw Reid felt that black children were eager to learn, while Sidney Andrews believed that blacks exhibited a “shrewd instinct for preservation,” which white trash seemed to lack. In account after account, freedmen were described as capable, thrifty, and loyal to the Union. A writer for the Atlantic Monthly asked: why should government “disfranchise the humble, quiet, hardworking negro” and leave the North vulnerable to the vote of the “worthless barbarian”—the “ignorant, illiterate, and vicious” poor white?15
Thus the popular vocabulary had become more ominous. No longer were white trash simply freaks of nature on the fringe of society; they were now congenitally delinquent, a withered branch of the American family tree. As a “fungus growth,” they could weaken the entire stock of southern society. More than tallow-colored skin, it was the permanent mark of intellectual stagnation, the “inert” minds, the “fumbling” speech, and the “stupid, moony glare, like that of the idiot.” They were, it was said, of the “Homo genus without the sapien.” Hardworking blacks were suddenly the redeemed ones, while white trash remained undeveloped, evolutionarily stagnant creatures.16
During Reconstruction, Republicans designated white trash as a “dangerous class” that was producing a flood of bastards, prostitutes, vagrants, and criminals. They violated every sexual norm, from fathers cohabiting with daughters, to husbands selling wives, to mothers conniving illicit liaisons for daughters. The danger came from a growing population that had stopped disappearing into the wilderness. Reid was appalled by the filthy refugees living in railroad cars, an uncomfortable foreshadowing of twentieth-century trailer trash. John W. De Forest, a bureau agent and yet another novelist, concluded that white trash were tolerable as long as Darwin’s “severe law” of natural selection killed off most of them.17
In 1868, a writer for Putnam’s Magazine told the “history of a family,” tracing a corrupted genealogical tree back to it roots. This one basic story anticipated a host of studies that included The Jukes (1877), which proved the most enduring chronicle of a degenerate lineage, and which influenced Charles Davenport, the leading American eugenicist of the early twentieth century. The author of the 1868 Putnam’s piece claimed to have discovered a real couple, with an actual name—thus going beyond Daniel Hundley’s more general dismissal of southern rubbish as the heirs of indentured servants dumped in the American colonies.
One Bill Simmins was the erstwhile progenitor of this corrupt family tree. A British convict and Virginia squatter, he married a London courtesan turned “wild woman,” who gave birth to a tribe of lowdown, dependent people. According to the author, the only cure for white trash had to be a radical one: intervention. Take a child out of his family’s hovel and place him in an asylum, where he might at least learn to work and avoid producing more inbred offspring. The genealogical link had to be cut. As we can see, the line from delinquency to eugenic sterilization was growing shorter.18
The idea that white trash was a measure of evolutionary progress (or lack thereof) was so pervasive in the nineteenth century that it conditioned the reception of the first federal study of soldiers. The U.S. Sanitary Commission undertook a major statistical study of some 16,000 men who had served in the Union and Confederate armies. Only a small percentage of them were nonwhite (approximately 3,000 black men and 519 Indians). When the study was published in 1869, a surgeon who had served in the Union army queried in the prestigious London Anthropological Review whether it was possible to draw conclusions about racial differences unless researchers actually compared blacks and poor whites. The “low down people” may have come from Anglo-Saxon stock, but they had “degenerated into an idle, ignorant, and physically and mentally degraded people.” It was time to see whether intelligence was a racially specific inherited trait or not.19
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While Republican journalists, Freedmen’s Bureau agents, and Union officers published extensively, in the partisan climate of the postwar years Democrats just as painstakingly worked to rebuild an opposition party and chip away at Republican policies, and they reached for the racial arguments at hand to help. Instead of celebrating the hardworking black man and the promise of social mobility, they fretted about the loss of a “white man’s government.” Unconcerned with inbreeding, they focused obsessively on outbreeding, that is, the supposedly unhealthy combination of distinct races.