White Slavery Proposal in the CSA?

This is to answer my curiosity of something I could swear I remember being mentioned... but can't seem to find any info on.

Was there a proposal in the Confederacy to allow white people to be enslaved just as blacks were?

OTL Poor whites were even lower than black slaves.
For example, after the Irish Potato Famine (1848), poor Irish immigrants counted themselves lucky if they could find work as day-labourers. Day-laborers got the most dangerous work: breaking horses to saddle, draining snake-infested swamps.
In many respects, day-laborers' economic status is worse than (post Civil War) share-cropers.

Another form of slavery was indentured labor. Poor European emigrants often signed indenture contracts with ship-owners who sold those contracts to plantation owners. The laborer was bound to work off his debt. Typical denture contracts took 7 years to pay off debts. Many plantation owners worked laborers to death before 7 years.

Indentured Servants as a proportion of the population declined propitiously and basically disappeared by the beginning of the 18th century, though.

*Reads the title and feels a sense of dread*
*Reads the proposal and breathes a sigh of relief*

Yeah in the social hierarchy poor whites were on the same level as Black Slaves, perhaps lower as Slaves had value. People have said it before, and Indentured Servitude would be the result.

I've seen accusations from pro-slavery advocates that the white lower classes in Britain would be better off if they were enslaved, and I've seen accusations from Northern anti-slavery advocates that the ultimate logic of Southern slavery would be to enslave the white lower classes, but I've never actually seen a proposal from a Southern slave-owner that white people should be forced either into indentured servitude or full-blown slavery. The two names that have been put forward are George Fitzhugh and Robert Rhett, though nobody ever provides a quote from the latter to support the argument.

The former's book Sociology for the South argued "in countries where there are no negroes, we can see no reason why the whites in all cases might not be allowed to sell their persons for short periods" but "we need never have white slaves in the South, because we have black ones". He actually argued for the elevation of the poor whites on racial grounds:

"Educate all Southern whites, employ them, not as cooks, lacqueys[sic], ploughmen, and menials, but as independent freemen should be employed, and let negroes be strictly tied down to such callings as are unbecoming white men, and peace would be established between blacks and whites. The whites would find themselves elevated by the existence of negroes amongst us. Like the Roman citizen, the Southern white man would become a noble and a privileged character, and he would then like negroes and slavery, because his high position would be due to them."

I think it may be a myth, though I'm keeping an open mind on the topic.

Yes, several, in fact, both de facto and de jure

Rainbow Sparkle said:

This is to answer my curiosity of something I could swear I remember being mentioned... but can't seem to find any info on. Was there a proposal in the Confederacy to allow white people to be enslaved just as blacks were?

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Yes, several, in fact, both de facto and de jure.

Look up George Fitzhugh, for de jure; a Virginia and pro-slavery writer, he advocated white slavery as the appropriate model for labor relations in an industrialized society. There were others, of course, including many who wrote approvingly of serfdom in the Russian Empire.

For de facto, the following from the NYT's Disunion project makes the realities of white slavery in the southern US quite clear:

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/01/30/the-young-white-faces-of-slavery/

See:



You may also wish to consider just who the "Yellow Rose of Texas" was, and why the phrase "high yaller" was in use for certain women in the slave states.

Best,

TFSmith121 said:

Yes, several, in fact, both de facto and de jure.

Look up George Fitzhugh, for de jure; a Virginia and pro-slavery writer, he advocated white slavery as the appropriate model for labor relations in an industrialized society. There were others, of course, including many who wrote approvingly of serfdom in the Russian Empire.

(...)

You may also wish to consider just who the "Yellow Rose of Texas" was, and why the phrase "high yaller" was in use for certain women in the slave states.

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Fascinating article! While we can argue that modern "racism" has its roots in the degrading status quo of European domination over Africans and native Americans through the centuries after the Age of Discovery, it's even more bizarre, regarding the cultural ideology of slavery's advocates, that the institution was conceived as a means of "improving" the lives of poor white minorities.

One even claims that Alexander Stephens advocated white slave labor.

You are quite welcome; the entire Disunion series is

Rdffigueira said:

Fascinating article! While we can argue that modern "racism" has its roots in the degrading status quo of European domination over Africans and native Americans through the centuries after the Age of Discovery, it's even more bizarre, regarding the cultural ideology of slavery's advocates, that the institution was conceived as a means of "improving" the lives of poor white minorities.

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You are quite welcome; the entire Disunion series is well worth reading. The pieces are all short and straightforward, but generally scholarly and - especially read chronologically - are a really interesting grounding in the issues, events, and personalities of the era, both in the US and elsewhere - including Latin America, South America, and Brazil.

And it's all available for free.

Best,

One of the primary arguments for the moral virtue of black slavery in the pre-CW South was that the slavery of blacks, considered to be a naturally inferior people, was a necessary condition for white equality. Or, to quote Jefferson Davis in 1858:

Jefferson Davis said:

You too know, that among us, white men have an equality resulting from a presence of a lower caste, which cannot exist where white men fill the position here occupied by the servile race.

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Obviously, white slavery would have completely undermined this position - if whites are slaves, black slavery cannot very well be justified with the argument that it maintains white equality and dignity by keeping whites out of menial, servile roles. In this way, pro-slavery forces argued, Southern slavery was actually morally superior to the economy of the industrial North, which held white people in "wage slavery." And lest you think these people were only talking about white Southern gentlemen:

Georgia Gov. Joseph Brown said:

Among us the poor white laborer is respected as an equal. His family is treated with kindness, consideration and respect. He does not belong to the menial class. The negro is in no sense of the term his equal. He feels and knows this. He belongs to the only true aristocracy, the race of white men. He black no masters boots, and bows the knee to no one save God alone.

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This is surely a mendacious claim; I'm skeptical that as a rule the wealthy plantation owner treated the poor white farm laborer with "kindness, consideration, and respect," and I doubt that the same laborer believed that the only "true aristocracy" that existed in the South included himself as a member. Nevertheless, in slave-owning society, it was a truism that black slavery allowed a noble brotherhood of white men to exist. Fitzhugh's proposal notwithstanding, to imagine that white slavery was a possibility in the 19th century is to ignore just how much the ideology of white supremacy was interwoven with the economic institution of slavery.

To have any chance of this I think you'd have to go back to the days when white indentured servitude was still common.

There was the Mudsill Theory which basically argued that there needs to be lower classes to act as a foundation for upper classes. While that's not necessarily advocating white slavery I'd still say it's worth a look.

Ah, but you are overlooking the one drop theory...

Carp said:

One of the primary arguments for the moral virtue of black slavery in the pre-CW South was that the slavery of blacks, considered to be a naturally inferior people, was a necessary condition for white equality. Or, to quote Jefferson Davis in 1858:

Obviously, white slavery would have completely undermined this position - if whites are slaves, black slavery cannot very well be justified with the argument that it maintains white equality and dignity by keeping whites out of menial, servile roles. In this way, pro-slavery forces argued, Southern slavery was actually morally superior to the economy of the industrial North, which held white people in "wage slavery." And lest you think these people were only talking about white Southern gentlemen.

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Ah, but you are overlooking the one drop theory... as per the children referenced in the NYT Disunion piece.

Given that several of the southern states had passed legislation essentially outlawing free status for those identified as of African ancestry (Arkansas, for example) that gave said individuals the choice of moving and abandoning everything they had or face being sold in slavery, the only thing keeping ANY southern white from the coffles and auction block is a) how well they get along with the slaveholder, who hold all political power as it is; and b) hiding any possibility of ancestry that is not 100 percent FFV.

And even then, it's not like DNA evidence was accepted widely in the antebellum south.

You step out of line, the man come and take you away...

And given the value of slaves by 1860 and the ban on trafficking in slaves from overseas, the financial incentive is certainly there.

Best,

Ah, but you are overlooking the one drop theory... as per the children referenced in the NYT Disunion piece.


Good point, Sally Hemings was of 75% European descent and therefore the children she had with TJ would have been of 87.5% European descent yet they were still slaves until they were freed after TJ's death.

This is surely a mendacious claim; I'm skeptical that as a rule the wealthy plantation owner treated the poor white farm laborer with "kindness, consideration, and respect," and I doubt that the same laborer believed that the only "true aristocracy" that existed in the South included himself as a member.


Agree with the first part but not the second. I'm sure most plantation owners viewed poor white farmers and laborers and "poor white trash" and had little use for them. However, I am sure that at least some poor whites in the south did view themselves as superior and blessed because they were white, that's just human nature.

I may get myself in trouble with this statement but frankly, I think part of the whole "lost cause" and the bit about the Confederate Battle Flag being heritage not hate that still plagues American society to this day has to do with the ancestors of Confederate veterans trying to convince themselves that their poor hard scrabble farmer fore fathers fought for something more than propping up the life style of the slave owning aristocracy. I realize the ACW is hardly the only war in human history that had this aspect to it.

Weren't there black slave owners? stands to reason there would or could be white slaves.

TFSmith121 said:

Ah, but you are overlooking the one drop theory... as per the children referenced in the NYT Disunion piece.

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Ultimately the answer to the OP's question depends on what you mean by white - because by the one drop rule you just mentioned, those NYT children were not white, even if they were indistinguishable from people who were, and even if white appearance was quite enough to make Northern readers even more uneasy about Southern slavery.

If the question is whether people who appeared white could have been enslaved, then the obvious answer is not only that they could, but they were. If the question is whether people acknowledged socially as "white" could have been enslaved, however, that's different. It's more than a small leap to go from enslaving the children of known slave ancestry who happen to have a white appearance to routinely enslaving free southern whites.

I'm not saying it could never (or did never) happen that a free white was mistaken for a slave, but for it to become more than a marginal phenomenon requires overturning the ideology of white supremacy that was so embedded in 19th century slavery. I think that's supremely unlikely.

Zheng He said:

I'm sure most plantation owners viewed poor white farmers and laborers and "poor white trash" and had little use for them. However, I am sure that at least some poor whites in the south did view themselves as superior and blessed because they were white, that's just human nature.

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I'm sure they thought of themselves as superior to blacks. The question is whether they saw themselves as the "true aristocracy" of the South alongside plantation owners. I suspect that Governor Brown's statement that poor white farmers were his peers and "bowed the knee to no one save God alone" was, at best, quite an exaggeration. The antebellum South was far too class-conscious for it to be otherwise. Thus, I tend to dismiss that kind of language as propaganda aimed at morally justifying slavery rather than an accurate depiction of Southern white society at the time.

Part of the political theory of the south/CSA was that as long as lower class whites were one rung above slaves, and blacks could never rise above that rung, then they (the whites) would be placid and let their "betters" run things. There was significant discussion that the CSA (after winning independence) might reinstate property qualifications or similar for the franchise amongst whites. Furthermore the whole idea of "color/racial" slavery (and the one drop of blood idea) would be invalidated if whites were placed on the same level with blacks. Yes, in some cases whites worked under conditions as bad or worse than blacks sometimes side by side, however at the end of the day the lowest white laborer had a status no black slave, and often no black person, could obtain.

Once you introduce race as the "qualification" for slavery/freedom, the only way to make it work is to identify the free/masters as being a different race than the slaves. This is how the Draka worked, they were a unique race and all other humans (black, white, yellow, etc) were lumped together as another race.

thekingsguard said:

Weren't there black slave owners? stands to reason there would or could be white slaves.

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I think there were a very small number of free blacks who owned slaves (like somebody might own one or two slaves) but just because a free black could own a black slave does not mean a he could own a white slave.

AFAIK there were no serious proposals for this. Yes, George Fitzhugh argued that in principle slavery was right for whites as well as blacks. But in the first place, Fitzhugh was something of an eccentric, and in the second place even he did not think slavery for whites would be practical in the US for a long time, due to the frontier: "Until the lands of America are appropriated by a few, population becomes dense, competition among laborers active, employment uncertain, and wages low, the personal liberty of all the whites will continue to be a blessing. We have vast unsettled territories; population may cease to increase, or increase slowly, as in most countries, and many centuries may elapse before the question will be practically suggested, whether slavery to capital be preferable to slavery to human masters." http://www.wwnorton.com/college/history/america7_brief/content/multimedia/ch15/research_02c.htm

David T said:

AFAIK there were no serious proposals for this. Yes, George Fitzhugh argued that in principle slavery was right for whites as well as blacks. But in the first place, Fitzhugh was something of an eccentric, and in the second place even he did not think slavery for whites would be practical in the US for a long time, due to the frontier: "Until the lands of America are appropriated by a few, population becomes dense, competition among laborers active, employment uncertain, and wages low, the personal liberty of all the whites will continue to be a blessing. We have vast unsettled territories; population may cease to increase, or increase slowly, as in most countries, and many centuries may elapse before the question will be practically suggested, whether slavery to capital be preferable to slavery to human masters." http://www.wwnorton.com/college/history/america7_brief/content/multimedia/ch15/research_02c.htm

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Agreed. This was a radical view among radical views in the Deep South, and it would undermine the entire system and theory of White Supremacy. Southern slavery persisted in the face of the Enlightenment by retroactively changing the justification for slavery. In the 17th century Africans had been kept as slaves on the ancient justification that they were pagans; a model of slavery that came into being when all sorts of unfree labor was common and when non-Christian prisoners of war could expect to become slaves. But by the 18th and 19th century, this justification for enslavement had fallen by the wayside, and black American slaves had been Christians for generations. But since keeping people in bondage was so profitable, a new justification was cooked up, the idea of racial inferiority. I argue that blacks were increasingly dehumanized in the 19th century, to justify the continuation of slavery even as rights for whites and even for certain non-whites became universal. As universal rights grew for whites, so did the idea of white supremacy and contrasting black inferiority, in order to justify the continuing highly-profitable economic exploitation of the later through slavery.

Point is, white slavery and even proposing white slavery would erode the very bedrock that slavery in the US stood upon.