The Potter journal. [volume] (Coudersport, Pa.) 1857-1872, 1865-10-10
THE POOR WHITES.

thing has been offered for their accept
ance. but they make no bid-they give
no sign of hopeful life. The Government
would be too happy to transfer into their
keeping the civil power of the Southern
States but they send out no represtatiYe
men-nobody but their old rulers come
forward in response to our call. What
are they about? Their day has dawned
and they seem to be asleep. From Vir-
glnia, for example, we sometimes hear
that they have got up a riot or killed a
negro but where are their gatherings to
consider the signs Of the times, aud to
act independently, and, if need be, in
opposition to the ancient Lords of the
Lash? A dreary silence reigns through.
out the region Of the poor whites, broken
only by the report Of musket shot as a
murdered freedman falls.
Everywhere we hear that the negroes
are focking to school; tottling children,
mothers with their babes at their breasts,
worklngmen after their days toll is over,
aged patriarchs and white haired grand
dames-all may be seen porlDg over their
primers wherever the Teachers Of the
Freedmen's Aid Societies are stationed
They learn with wonderful rapidity. This
Is the uniform report-from Louisiana
and Virginia, from Tennessee and the
Carolinas. Their eagerness to learn has
been described as almost disease. There
is no checking it, no controlling it; it is
as fierce as fever at its hight.
Meanwhile, neither the adult poor
whites nor their children show any such
propensitie8. Their stolid apathy not
even the artillery of contending armies
has dlspelled AS they were in the bad
old times, they are now IN the holy era
that has dawned on our land. They are
as lazy and listless, as inert and abiect as
ever. Every ignorant class is dangerous
class and the history Of the last genra-
tion and especially of the war, has shown
how very dangerous a people the poor
whites are For, by their lack of lnteIli-
gence, an oigarchy has ruled the South
from time imuemoral; and when its
time for rebellion came they were driven,
like sheep to the s!aughter,to fight against
every earthly interest Of their class and
nation.
How profound the ignorance of the
poor whites is, it required this war to
expose. Our soldiers stood aghass at it
and the amazing immorraiities that
gathered around it. Everywhere adul,
ferrous miscegenation, incestuous mar
riages, indiscrlminate and universal I'M
purity were found hand in hand with
stolid stupidity, listless hopelessness,
and darkness of mind of which, happily,
the North knows nothing but by report.
Statistics are inadequate-to describe it.
For, what avails it to say that there must
be to day One Hundred Thousaod adults
IN Virginia who can neither read nor
write? There were IS, ,520 by the Cen
gus of 1850 But man who can neither
read nOr waite may be thrifty, prudent,
ambitious and have fully developed his
common sense and his habits of industry !;
he may be competent to discriminate
between rival platforms, not a resolution
of which he could copy or spell out
Not so the poor white trash.
Mr.. NJ. d. Conway, in brochure not
circulated here, has published an account
of the poor whites of his native State
He had ample opportunities to see them
in their homes-for not only was he reared
among them, but he travelled a circuit in
Virginia and Maryland as a Methodist
preacher. He writes: II have thus
learned enough to convince me that this
dumb, degraded, crushed class in the
Southern States is destined in the end to
rest upon the American mind more heaV-
lily than do the negroes. His description
is much too long to copy; but we will
give the salient point of it.
They are exceedingly prolific. They
swarm. The old woman of the shoe is
in every poor white hut; their floors are
alive with bloomIess, squaid children.
Sheir social position is really that Of serfs
of the soil. LaDdless, they squat on
some rich mans estate, and soon become
his debtor, and keep out Of Jail by his
mercy only. Their large families soon
make this serfdom perpetual. They are
not SO we'll fed nor so well dressed as the
slaves hence the poor whites aud the
negroes hate each other. The two classes
correspond to the laboring and the pauper
classes elsewhere. The negro is the
laborer of this statement. Their employ
ment Mr.. Conway was never able to dis
cover. They whipped refractory negroes
he thought, and their wives sewed cloth,
ing for slaves. Other authorities state
that the men used to hunt fish, sell whis.
Ky and groceries to the plantation slaves,
receiving therefor property which the
negroes, with "a keen foresight of Con
gressional action, took the liberty to con.
fscate, before the Lincum gunboats
4 H.