| Historians of the antebellum South have long examined the master-slave relationship on one hand, and relations between slaveholders and nonslaveholders on the other. But many dispossessed and marginalized lower-class Southerners, both black and white, routinely came into contact with one another outside the purview of the master. In the Carolinas and Virginia between 1820 and 1860, slaves and poor whites inhabited a shared social world. In this negotiated space, racial hostilities sometimes pitted them against one another, but a stubborn postbellum legacy of racial animosity and segregation has obscured a much more complex interracial past between slaves and poor whites, one marked by a curious mix of love and hate, equality and inequality. Slaves and poor whites sometimes competed for work, engaged in violent, rough-and-tumble brawls, and committed sexual assaults against the other, but they also often worked and played in relative harmony. They sometimes reveled in an interracial subculture of drinking and gambling, gathered together for shared religious or supernatural experiences, traded goods illicitly, or pursued intimate and loving relationships. Some poor white men served as overseers, patrollers, and slave catchers, while others helped slaves run away or conspire to rebel. On a daily basis, slave and poor white interaction both reinforced and challenged southern racial boundaries. An analysis of court records, petitions, census records, slave narratives and autobiographies, folk songs and folk rhymes, nineteenth-century travelers' accounts and fiction, newspapers, manuscripts, and church records illuminates the wide-ranging relationships between slaves and poor whites.;That slaves and poor whites frequently crossed racial lines in violation of social convention to forge bonds of mutual interest, understanding, and affection suggests the limitations of the Herrenvolk thesis, whose adherents maintain that race created social cohesion among whites, regardless of socioeconomic standing. Often, the mutual hostilities that slaves and poor whites allegedly harbored toward each other did not prove strong enough to deter interracial social contact. Even under slavery, compassion, camaraderie, and cooperation sometimes prevailed, offering a fleeting glimpse of an alternative history of race relations in the United States South. |
