“The Autobiography of a Scalawag” was a beautiful burlesque of the self-made northern man’s story of hard work and moral uplift. Stubbs was a far cry from the hereditary leadership of the Old South, whose education, refinement, and honorable bearing were legend even in defeat. He was a gross materialist, someone who lacked forethought, who lied and cheated to get ahead. He was a powerful reminder that elite southern Democrats still despised the lower classes. As one North Carolina conservative declared in 1868, the Republican Party was nothing more than the “low born scum and quondam slaves” who lorded over men of property and taste. When southern Democrats called for a “White Man’s Government,” they did not mean all white men.29
The scalawag was the Democrats’ version of white trash. Just ask ex–Confederate colonel Wade Hampton, who in 1868 was still eight years from being elected governor of South Carolina. He was a hero of the “Redeemers,” whose movement ultimately toppled Republican rule in the southern states, and he must be credited with the most memorable insult of all, as his words traveled all the way to England. Knowing his husbandry, Hampton invoked the best-known usage of “scalawag” as vagabond stock, “used by drovers to describe the mean, lousy, and filthy kine that are not fit for butchers or dogs.” The scalawag was human waste with an unnatural ambition. He was biologically unfit, and at the same time a skilled operative who stirred the scum and thrived in the muck.30
Thomas Jefferson Speer, a real scalawag, gave a speech that year proudly defending his “kine.” In contrast to Hampton, he was a former Confederate who had turned Republican, served in the Georgia constitutional convention, and would later sit in the U.S. Congress. Speer was unashamed of his common school education, admitting that he was “no speaker.” He had opposed secession, however, and believed that the terms of defeat offered by the Union had been magnanimous. A native Georgian whose “ancestors’ bones reposed beneath this soil,” he asserted that he was a “friend of the colored race.” 31
Like his own rather fortunate naming, T. J. Speer understood that “scalawag” was just a name too. But southern politics thrived on such symbolism. It was rooted in the inherited revulsion to both the real and the imagined dregs of society, whether white or black. When the lowdown dared to speak up, reach across the color line, the hereditary leadership class of the South simply could not stomach their overreach.
Mongrels and scalawags were conjoined twins, then, fusing the associated threats of racial and class instability. After the Civil War, and with the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment prohibiting slavery, unreconstructed white southerners imagined an almost gothic landscape in their midst, a theater of sexual deviance overseen by defective leaders. The Fourteenth Amendment appreciably added to those fears, granting equal protection under the law to black male voters, while divesting former Confederates of their right to hold office or even vote. It was a world turned upside down, as buffoons ruled the Republican kingdom. Of course, few white southern Republicans actually fit this manufactured tabloid image, yet the label stuck. Scalawags were assumed to be white trash on the inside, regardless of the wealth (or wealth of political experience) they might accrue.32
As the Reconstruction era ended, so-called men of inherited worth were returned to political power across the South. In the 1880s, the white North and South reconnected. The “redeemed” cracker became a hardworking farmer, while others praised the unsullied mountaineer, both capable of education and having risen enough that they would no longer be a burden on the southern economy. For a brief moment, reconciliation stories were popular, and previously warring sides in the national drama entertained bright prospects for domestic harmony.33
Cracker Joe (1883) was written by a New Englander. The title character’s story was set in Florida, and used love and forgiveness to overcome past wrongs and resentments. Joe, a “born Cracker,” runs a successful farm. He defies his heritage by exhibiting shrewd ambition. He is a “go-ahead” man, an avid reader with a phenomenal memory. He calls his wife, Luce, “the whitest woman, soul and body, I ever did see,” suggesting that he is not quite white, but “only a cracker, you know.” (Like the family in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Dred, Joe is a half-breed, his mother of “good blood.”) He is forced to make amends with the son of the wealthy planter whom he had tried to murder more than a decade earlier, and for his part, the planter’s son must reclaim his father’s dilapidated mansion and spoiled lands, saving his legacy in the only way possible, by marrying the daughter of a New York carpetbagger. If all of this isn’t improbable enough, Joe has a mulatto daughter, whom he welcomes into his home with his wife’s blessing.34
Convenient distinctions were drawn. In the 1890s, third-generation abolitionist William Goodell Frost, president of the integrated Berea College of Kentucky, redefined his mountain neighbors: “The ‘poor white’ is actually degraded; the mountain white is a person not yet graded up.” The latter had preserved a unique lineage for centuries, and in this important way had not lost the battle for the survival of the fittest. Frost saw the mountaineer as a modern-day Saxon, with the “flavor of Chaucer” in his speech, and a clear “Saxon temper.” He was, the college president wrote, “our contemporary ancestor!” What made this isolated white the best of America’s past was his “vigorous, unjaded nerve, prolific, patriotic—full of the blood of spirit of seventy-six.” Mountain folk formed the very trunk of the American family tree. Frost tried. For many who did not buy what he was selling, however, mountain whites were still strange-looking moonshine hillbillies, prone to clannish feuds.35
It was at about this time that the term “redneck” came into wider use. It well defined the rowdy and racist followers of the New South’s high-profile Democratic demagogues of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: South Carolina’s Ben Tillman, Arkansas’s Jeff Davis, and the most interesting of the bunch, Mississippi’s James Vardaman. The “redneck” could be found in the swamps. He could be found in the mill towns. He was the man in overalls, the heckler at political rallies, and was periodically elected to the state legislature. He was Guy Rencher, a Vardaman ally, who supposedly claimed the name for himself, railing on the floor of the Mississippi House about his “long red neck.” One other possible explanation deserves mention: “redneck” came into vogue in the 1890s, at the same time Afrikaners were calling English soldiers “rednecks” in the Boer War in South Africa, highlighting the contrast between the Brit’s sun-scored skin and his pale white complexion. Such terminology was also a staple of the sharecropper’s rhythmic chant (circa 1917): “I’d druther be a Nigger, an’ plow ole Beck, Dan a white Hill Billy wid his long red neck.”36
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