Black Rednecks & White Liberals Read online

  “Borderers” at that point would refer to people from the borderlands of Britain, those included in what Professor McWhiney and others have called the “Celtic fringe” and what Professor Fischer called “north Britons.” While the making of butter and cheese might seem to be an unremarkable activity in most rural communities, butter- and cheese-making by these farmers of non-Southerner origins was in fact exceptional in the South. One of Frederick Law Olmsted’s complaints during his travels through the antebellum South was the scarcity of butter, despite all the cows he saw.66 Even among plantation owners, he said, “as for butter, some have heard of it, some have seen it, but few have eaten it.”67 Hard data support his conclusions about the scarcity of butter in the antebellum South, despite an abundance of cows. In 1860, the South had 40 percent of all the dairy cows in the country but produced just 20 percent of the butter and only one percent of the cheese.68 As a study of antebellum Southern agriculture noted, “attempts to stimulate greater attention to commercial production were futile” and even the bluegrass regions “imported a large proportion of the cheese consumed.”The study concluded:In short, while the South abounded in cattle, the reported production of dairy products was very small. A table based on census statistics shows that some of the Southern States, such as Texas and Florida, had far more cattle per capita than important dairy states like Vermont and New York, and in most of the Southern States cattle per capita were nearly or quite as numerous as in the Northern States.Yet the production of butter and cheese per capita in most of the Southern States was insignificant as compared with per capita production in the principal Northeastern States.69

  A speaker before an agricultural society in Orange County, North Carolina, said:“It is a reproach to us as farmers, and no little deduction from our wealth, that we suffer the population of our towns and villages to supply themselves with butter from another Orange County in New York.”70 In colonial times, butter was imported from as far away as Ireland. Where butter was not imported, it was often produced locally by people of non-Southern origins.As a scholarly history of Southern agriculture reported:In 1858 the dairies producing whole milk for the city of Louisville, Kentucky, were described as “probably as well conducted as any in the country,” but almost without exception managed by Swiss or German operatives.71

  Meanwhile, a newspaper in South Carolina said in 1857: “Good butter is indeed a luxury to almost every planter in the Southern country, and there is, perhaps, no one article of food that is more eagerly sought after.”72 In antebellum Virginia, a Richmond newspaper likewise complained of the scarcity of good butter, saying that the quality of butter available in the local market “would hardly be thought good enough to grease a cart-wheel.”When considering legislation to try to remedy the situation, a member of the Virginia legislature attributed the poor quality of that state’s butter to the carelessness with which Virginia farmers prepared it.73

  One reason for the contrast between the abundance of butter and cheese produced by German farmers in states like Wisconsin, for example, and the scarcity of butter and cheese in the South was that German farmers, wherever they were located, tended to build fences and huge barns for their livestock, and to feed them there during the winter. Southerners more often let their cows and hogs roam freely during the winter, even though this meant that “in the spring they turned up half starved and it took the summer for them to put on normal weight.”74 This too was a continuation of patterns found among their ancestors in the British Isles,75 and was part of a more general pattern of carelessness: Many other observers noticed the broken fences and the stunted cattle running at large, unfed and unprotected. Their manure was put to no use.Artificial pasture long remained a rarity, and few farmers stored feed for the winter. In Virginia a French traveler of the late 17th century saw “poor beasts of a morning all covered with snow and trembling with the cold, but no forage was provided for them.They eat the bark of the trees because the grass was covered.” Wild animals—wolves, bears, and savage dogs—attacked the helpless cattle, and made the raising of sheep difficult.76

  Germans were better able than Southerners to milk their cows regularly and prepare dairy products, while cows owned by Southerners were more likely to run dry after calves were weaned. A contemporary observer said that even Southern farmers with many cows “will not give themselves the trouble of milking more than will maintain their Family.”77 As late as the 1930s, a scholar studying the geography and economy of the South wrote:“The close attention to duty, the habits of steady skillful routine accepted by butter fat producers of Wisconsin as a matter of fact, are traits not yet present in southern culture.”78 At that point, the Southern states, with 26 percent of the country’s dairy cows, produced just 7 percent of processed dairy products such as butter, cheese, ice cream and condensed milk.79

  There was a similar contrast between German farmers and Southern farmers when it came to clearing land for farming back in pioneering days. Germans cleared frontier land by both chopping down trees and laboriously removing their stumps and roots, so that all the land could be plowed thereafter. Southerners more often cut down the tree, or even simply girdled it and left it to die and rot, but in any case leaving the stump in the ground and plowing around it.80 Although the erosion-prone soils of the Southern uplands have been blamed for the poverty of the whites living on them, nevertheless on that same land Germans “were able to cultivate the hill soil, so as to avoid erosion and were willing to expend upon it the additional labor which its topography required” so that these soils in their hands “yielded excellent regular returns.”81

  Comments on the lack of enterprise by Southern whites were made by numerous observers in various parts of the South. In Alexis de Tocqueville’s classic Democracy in America, he contrasted the attitudes toward work among Southern and Northern whites as being so great as to be visible to the casual observer sailing down the Ohio River and comparing the Ohio side with the Kentucky side.82 These were not just the prejudices of outsiders. “No southern man,” South Carolina’s famed Senator John C. Calhoun said, “not even the poorest or the lowest, will, under any circumstances … perform menial labor…. He has too much pride for that.” General Robert E. Lee likewise declared:“Our people are opposed to work. Our troops officers community & press. All ridicule & resist it.”83 “Many whites,” according to a leading Southern historian,“were disposed to leave good enough alone and put off changes till the morrow.”84

  Very similar kinds of comments were made about these Southerners’ ancestors in the parts of the British Isles from which they came.85 Although the term “lazy” appears frequently in comments on these people on both sides of the Atlantic, there has been no evidence of any such aversion on their part to strenuous physical activity in dancing, fighting, hunting and other recreational activities, so sloth was not the real issue. Nor have rednecks or crackers been prominent in such less physically demanding activities as entrepreneurship or scholarship. It is the nature of the particular activities in which they have taken an active interest and on which they have expended their energies, rather than the physical demands of those activities, that seems to have been crucial.

  Not only did many of the groups who settled in the South disdain business as a career, as their ancestors had in those parts of Britain from which they came, they typically lacked the kinds of habits necessary to be successful in business. Among the habits needed to run a business, none is more basic than a steady application to the tasks at hand, doing things in a “business-like” way. But those relatively few Southerners who did run businesses often displayed no such business-like attitudes.

  Even when there was business to transact, Southerners would often stop to go watch a cockfight or a parade, or visit a saloon or go hunting.86 “In traveling in the South,” a Northern visitor commented in the 1850s,“you become astonished at the little attention men pay to their business.”87 Such views were not confined to Northerners, however, nor to urban businesses.According to a noted
history of the antebellum South, the Richmond Enquirer “attributed the success of Northern farmers where Southerners had failed to the social nature of the latter, which led them to gather around the courthouse and country stores to smoke, chew, talk politics, and, in general, to waste time.”88 Many Southern businessmen were unreliable about either paying their bills or delivering goods and services when promised.89

  Among Southerners in general, their improvident spending, and the indebtedness to which it often led, was widely commented on in the United States and in the places from which their ancestors came in Britain.90 Even large Southern plantation owners with lavish lifestyles were often deeply in debt.Among the Virginia gentry,“extravagant and even ruinous bets on horses” were common, according to a scholarly study.91

  Nor were Southerners alert to profitable investment prospects, according to observers in the antebellum South. For example, although there were large coal deposits and “a beautiful quality of marble” near Tuscaloosa, Alabama, the people there bought coal from Philadelphia, and marble for tombstones was imported from Italy.92 In antebellum Virginia, as well, Olmsted observed “the natural resources of the land were strangely unused, or were used with poor economy.”93 Nor was he alone in that conclusion. A twentieth century scholar also commented on the coal available in Alabama:The Alabama iron district is one of the cheapest, if not the cheapest, iron district in the entire world. It possesses a phenomenal natural equipment. Jutting out of the hillsides that flank one side of the broad open valley are thick deposits of iron ore. On the other side of the valley are the coal mines and coke ovens, and the limestone is at hand. Instead of carrying ore a thousand miles, as at Pittsburgh and the English furnaces, or fuel 600 miles as at Lake Champlain, the raw materials for these Southern furnaces are shifted across the valley by switching engines, and the local supply of cheap black labor helps to give a wonderfully low cost.94

  Yet it was more than 20 years after the Civil War before Birmingham became an iron and steel production center. As for the reasons for the belated development of such a promising combination of natural resources:In spite of the favors of geography, the iron and steel industry in the South was slow in its beginnings and development. Like everything southern, the industry was retarded by lack of capital and technical skill.95

  Capital was available from outside the South, or indeed from outside the country, as foreign capital was used to finance the building of the Pennsylvania Railroad and the Illinois Central during the same era. But the other factors had to be there to create a promising prospect of profitability that would attract investment. The difficulties of developing those other factors in Alabama was shown by the fact that in 1888 “Birmingham saw its first ton of steel run through the furnaces of the Henderson Steel Company and burn out the crude furnace linings in the process.”96

  Early explorers and settlers in the antebellum South “wrote in glowing terms of the wild fruits, especially the wild grapes of unusual size which excited extravagant hopes of the development of wine industries.”97 Yet early attempts to find a market for Southern wine in Britain were ruined by the fact that a sample of wine that was sent across the Atlantic spoiled in the musty casks in which Southerners had carelessly shipped it.98 Later efforts to establish a wine industry in the South were undertaken by foreigners—French, German, and Portuguese.A German settlement in Missouri created a wine industry with an annual output of about 100,000 gallons.99 But the South as a whole produced less than one-fifth of the wine in the United States in 1849100—and this was long before the development of the California wine industry.

  As late as the beginning of the twentieth century, there were still laments about the opportunities in the South missed by Southerners and put to use by outsiders with different patterns of behavior. Landowners in Alabama were said to have “cheated themselves out of millions of dollars by failing to see the opportunities within their grasp” which “lumbermen from the North and East” seized by cutting trees and shipping the lumber around the world. Some Southerners along the Gulf coast likewise spoke of “the golden opportunities which they failed to grasp, of the numerous successes of Northern and Eastern men and lamented the passing of the old school of gentlemen, the midday mint juleps, and the easy-going business methods.” Some of these Southerners, however, seemed to prosper “working shoulder to shoulder with the Yankees.”101

  Not only in the South, but in the communities from which white Southerners had come in the Scottish highlands, in Ulster, and in Wales of an earlier era, most of the successful businessmen were outsiders. 102 Even the poorest highland Scots would not skin their horses when they died. Instead,“Scots sold their dead horses for three pence to English soldiers who in turn got six pence for the skinned carcass and another two shillings for the hide.”103 This was not due to a lack of knowledge of skinning. In earlier times, when Scotland and England were at war, one of the atrocities committed by the Scots was skinning captured English officers alive.104 During the sixteenth century border feuds, the “Johnston-Johnson clan adorned their houses with the flayed skins of their enemies the Maxwells.”105 It was not the skill that was lacking, but the enterprise.

  Contemporary observers commented on another peculiarity of antebellum Southerners—fording rivers and streams, instead of building bridges over them. Nor was this due simply to poverty. A biography of famed nineteenth-century congressman John Randolph of Virginia referred to the “bridgeless streams” in the area where elite families like his lived. 106 Thomas Jefferson noted that he had to cross eight rivers between Monticello and Washington, “five of which had neither bridges nor boats.”107 This peculiarity was noted in other parts of the South and by observers in those parts of Britain from which Southerners came:Commenting on just how lazy Southerners were, one man noted that “no Northern farmer” would neglect to build a bridge over a stream that crossed his property; indeed, two “live Yankees” would complete the work in a single day, but “the Southern planter will ford the creek lying between his house & stable a whole lifetime.”The same complaint was made about Highland Scots, whose roads were equally bad as those of Ireland and the Old South. In the 1790s a minister, noting that fords rather than bridges crossed streams on one of the most heavily traveled roads in the Highlands, wrote:“From a desire to save labour or time, the ford is often attempted, when the…river [is] too high, and the consequence is frequently fatal.”108

  Again, it is necessary to emphasize that the culture which Southerners brought over from the parts of Britain from which they came changed in Britain in the years after they left. But all this happened after the ancestors of rednecks and crackers had immigrated to the American South from the outer regions of British society, rather than from central England.

  Intellectual Activity

  Given the historical background of crackers and rednecks in Britain, it could hardly be expected that intellectual activity would be a major interest of theirs in the United States. A study of 18,000 county records from seventeenth-century colonial Virginia showed that nearly half of all the white male Virginians “were so illiterate that they could not sign their names” and simply made a mark on legal documents. While the small Virginia aristocracy were often well educated and had impressive collections of books in their homes, these books were typically imported from England rather than purchased from local bookstores.Thomas Jefferson complained that the area where he lived was “without a single bookstore.”109 As late as the census of 1850, more than one-fifth of Southern whites were still illiterate, compared to less than one percent of New Englanders. 110

  In the Southern backcountry, levels of schooling “were lower here than in any other part of the United States,” according to a landmark historical study, and “there were no institutions comparable to New England’s town schools.”111 Although the white population of the South was only one-half as large as that of the North, the total number of illiterate whites in the South in 1850 was larger than the total number of illiterates in the North. In the
antebellum era, the total circulation of Northern newspapers was more than four times the total circulation of Southern newspapers. 112 Moreover, many editors of Southern newspapers were themselves from the North.113 The North had four times as many schools, attended by more than four times as many pupils.114 Children in Massachusetts spent more than twice as many years in school as children in Virginia.115