168 The Poor Whites (1850)

Although praise-worthy attempts have been made in various parts of Georgia to diffuse the means of education more extensively than was formerly thought necessary, still there is a class of people in that State as also in the Carolinas, who have never been benefitted by any of these privileges. And these individuals, though degraded and ignorant as the slaves, are by their little fairer complexions entitled to all the privileges of legal suffrage. These people are known at the South by such names as crackers, clay-eaters, and sand-hillers. I have previously mentioned the circumstance from which they derived the appellation of crackers. They are called clay-eaters, because all this class of people, from the oldest to little children, are as much addicted to the eating of clay as some communities are to the use of tobacco and snuff. This senseless habit is indulged in to such an extent that when a person has once seen a clay-eater, he can ever after instantly recognize any one of their number by their sickly, sallow, and most unnatural complexions, let them be seen in never so large a crowd. Children by the time they are ten or twelve years of age begin to look old. Their countenances are stupid and heavy and they often become dropsical and loathsome to the sight. Those who survive this practice thirty or forty years look very wrinkled and withered, their flesh shrunken to their bones like that of very aged people. They are also called sand-hillers from the grounds they usually occupy, which are the barren and sandy districts of Georgia and South Carolina to which these poor wretched beings have been driven by the powerful and rich planters who have wealth and avarice sufficient to secure to themselves all the best soil.

This part of the population of Georgia and some of the contiguous States are the lineal descendents of those paupers from England whom General Oglethorpe brought to this country and by whom Georgia was first settled. The same crushed spirit that will ever suffer one to accept of a home in an alms house seems to have been transmitted down to the present posterity of these emigrants and their situation has always been such. They never have had the power to acquire education or wealth sufficient to raise them above their original degradation or enable them to shake off that odium they have inherited from their pauper ancestry. They have no ambition to do anything more than just what is necessary to procure food enough of the coarsest kind to supply the wants of the appetite and a scanty wardrobe of a fabric they manufacture themselves. If they should ever cherish a desire for any other life than such as the brutes might lead, it would be all in vain, for the present institutions and state of society at the South are calculated to paralyze every energy of both body and mind. They are not treated with half the respect by the rich people that the slaves are, and even the slaves themselves look upon them as their inferiors. I have seen the servants when one of these poor women came into a planter’s house, dressed In her homespun frock, bonnet and shawl, collect together in an adjoining room or on the piazza and indulge in a fit of laughter and ridicule about her “cracker gown and bonnet,” as they would call them.

Slavery renders labor so disreputable and wages of slave labor so low that if places could be found where they might hire out to service, there would be but little inducement to do so. Sometimes a young man who has a little more ambition than usually falls to the lot of his people will succeed in obtaining a situation as overseer on a plantation. As such an office is to them quite honorable, they will almost give their services for it. I knew one young man about the age of nineteen who took the entire charge of a large plantation and even labored with his own hands in the time of preparing the cotton for market for the paltry sum of fifty dollars per year besides his board.

The sand-hillers usually cultivate a few acres of that barren land they are allowed to live upon, in the labor of which the females are obliged to take a part as well as the man. In this way they raise their corn, vegetables, and cotton sufficient for domestic manufacture and sometimes a small quantity for market. When they do this they can provide themselves with such luxuries as coffee, tea, sugar, etc., though besides coffee they seldom use any thing that is not the product of their own industry.

While I was residing in the interior of Georgia, one of these women sent her little daughter for me on horseback to go and make her a visit. I returned with the child on the beast with her, in the evening she carried me home in the same way. I found this woman living in a small log house, very neat, but there was nothing belonging to it to which the term comfortable could be applied. She had a bed, a table, two or three benches that were used instead of chairs and a very little crockery. The kitchen was a separate little building, of course scantily supplied with cooking utensils. The entertainment she prepared for me while I sat with her in her little kitchen on a stool consisted of coffee without sugar, fried bacon and corn bread mixed with water only. She had neither vegetables, or butter, or any other condiment we consider essential to any repast. In the course of the afternoon she showed me a roll of cloth she had just taken from the loom which she told me was all the product of her own hard labor, commencing with the cotton seed. On inquiring if she could not purchase cloth much cheaper than she could manufacture it, she replied “she could if her time was worth anything, but there was no labor she could perform that would bring her any money.”

At that age when the youth of the North are confined at hard lessons [in school] for six hours a day from one season to another, these children are wasting the springtime of their lives in the fields and woods, climbing trees, robbing bird’s nests, or breaking up the haunts of squirrels and engaged in every such kind of mischief, enough of which is always to be found for idle hands to do. These are the children and youth that the advantages of education which some enjoy at the South have never yet reached and probably never will, till some special effort is made in their behalf by missionary labor. As long as the present feeling between the rich and poor exists, they can never be brought together into the same schools and if this could be effected it would not be expedient. I have seen the results of such an experiment in my own school. While I was teaching in the north part of Georgia, I gave two little girls belonging to one of these poor families their tuition for the purpose of encouraging them to come to school. But the neglect and scornful treatment they received from those who considered themselves their superiors because they had wealthy parents and servants and could dress fashionably while they were obliged to wear their coarse homespun dresses, contributed to make them so miserable they could derive but little advantage from their instruction. And such will always be the case if attempts are made to bring them into the schools of the wealthy.

Efforts have been made to persuade these parents to put their sons to useful trades. But if they do this they are obliged to labor in the shops with the slaves and this being placed on a level with the colored people they feel is a degradation they cannot submit to. Therefore they choose to bring up their sons to hunting and fishing.

Source: Emily P. Burke, Reminiscences of Georgia (1850), 205-211. https://archive.org/details/americanhistoryt00ivunse/page/58/mode/2up