Oct 2, 2023 10:02 PM
(This post was last modified: Oct 2, 2023 10:04 PM by C C.)
THOMAS SOWELL
https://youtu.be/RR8SdfDE0ZU
VIDEO EXCERPTS: Observers of the white population of the Antebellum South often commented not only on their poverty, but also on their lack of industriousness or entrepreneurship.
A contemporary characterized many white Southerners as too poor to keep slaves and too proud to work. A landmark history of agriculture in the Antebellum South described the poor whites this way:
They cultivated in a casual and careless fashion small patches of corn or rice, sweet potatoes cow peas. Women and children did a large part of the work. The men spent their time principally in hunting or idleness.
The men were inveterate drunkards and sometimes the women joined them in drinking inferior whiskey. Licentiousness was prevalent among them.
Among their equals the men were quarrelsome and inclined to crimes of violence. The poor whites were densely ignorant. Their labors tended to be intermittent.
Summarizing his observations in the Antebellum South Olmsted said: "...their destitution is not material only, it is intellectual, and it is moral."
When Olmsted found work done efficiently, promptly, and well during his travels through the South -- when he found well-run businesses, good libraries, impressive churches and efficiently functioning institutions in general -- he almost invariably found them to be run by Northerners, foreigners, or Jews.
Nor was he the only visiting observer to reach such conclusions. Another observed that nearly all of the old South's successful storekeepers were either Yankees or Yankee trained Southerners.
A French visitor said that when you saw a plantation in better condition than others, you would often discover that it was owned by someone from the North.
A history of Southern agriculture presented this picture of North Carolina in the early 18th century:
"Many of the inhabitants were rough borderers who lived a crude half-savage existence. Some were herdsmen dependent mainly on the product of the range and under the necessity of eating meat without bread. There were also many thriftless and lazy families who had been attracted to the country by the mild climate and the ease with which a bare livelihood could be obtained by hunting and fishing, raising a little corn, and keeping a few head of swine and possibly a cow or two on the range..."
Redneck poverty: Why Southern whites were poorer than Northerners in the US