In her heroes and heroines Miller saw her ancestors: plain, simple men and women who barely survived but never wavered and passed life and hope on to the next generation. Smith’s “ Bill Arp” stories performed a similar service, but perhaps the most sensitive portrayal of poor whites in antebellum Georgia came in Caroline Miller’s 1934 Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, Lamb in His Bosom, which described the struggle for existence on subsistence farms in the isolated wiregrass region of southeastern Georgia. Richard Malcolm Johnston’s Georgia Sketches and Charles H. Before the Civil War Augustus Baldwin Longstreet sketched the foibles of ordinary, unpolished Georgians with humor, understanding, and even affection. Not all white elites shared the general contempt for the poor. Northerners and foreigners played this game, but the greatest hostility to poor whites came from their fellow southerners, sometimes Blacks but more often upper-class whites.
The terms, “ cracker ,” “hillbilly,” “clay eater,” “linthead,” “peckerwood,” “buckra,” and especially “redneck” only scratched the surface of their rejection and slander.Ĭourtesy of Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division Financially “poor whites” were increasingly labeled “poor white trash” and worse. Once-proud yeomen frequently became objects of ridicule, and sometimes they responded angrily and even viciously, often taking vulnerable Blacks as their targets. Sharecropping and tenant farming trapped families for generations, as did emerging industries, which paid low wages and imposed company-town restrictions. The disruptions of the Civil War (1861-65) and Reconstruction mired Black Americans in a new sort of poverty and dragged many more whites into a similar abyss. By the 1850s grim tenements for desperate Irish immigrants existed in Savannah, just as in Boston, Massachusetts, and New York City.Īlthough enslaved African Americans fared the worst by far, some poor whites faced intensely dire economic conditions. As in the rest of the country, hardscrabble farms and rough frontier were fertile ground for poverty, and slums grew rapidly in urban areas as well. Still, many of Georgia’s early settlers were poor people seeking a better life. But from the inaccurate story of original settlement of the colony by inmates of debtors’ prisons in England to the modern depictions of such writers as Margaret Mitchell, Flannery O’Connor, Erskine Caldwell, and James Dickey, the prevalence and depth of poverty are often exaggerated.
Georgians have always had the poor in their midst.