Race Relations at the Margins: Slaves and Poor Whites in the Antebellum Southern Countryside (review)

Jeff Forret's new book is a welcome addition to the historiography of the antebellum South. Taking as his subject the complex relationships that existed between two of the South's largest social groups, poor whites and slaves, Forret has marshaled an impressive array of primary sources to support his principal argument that race relations were anything but straightforward in the antebellum era. Forret is not breaking new ground with this idea. My own work, as well as that of Martha Hodes, Diane Miller Sommerville, Adam Rothman, and Charles Bolton, among others, has suggested this before, but what is impressive and distinctive about Forret's book is the generous geographic scope and the depth of his research. Many previous works on this theme have taken only a small geographic area, or only part of the biracial relationship, whereas Forret is interested in "the antebellum southern countryside," by which he means Virginia and the Carolinas. This large swath of the countryside was probably fairly typical of the rural South and, on the whole, Forret ignores Richmond, Raleigh, and Columbia, despite their significant populations of poor whites and slaves. Others have written on urban encounters between these two groups, so Forret makes his work particularly distinctive by sticking to rural areas.

In fact, for all Forret's dedication to the countryside, what is striking is that many of the biracial encounters that can be found in the towns and cities of the antebellum South were also occurring in rural areas. Slaves and poor whites evidently worked, traded, prayed, fought, and slept together throughout the South, so one major achievement of Forret is to establish just how common these encounters actually were. Like many before him, Forret struggles to come up with an acceptable and viable definition of just who poor whites actually were. Everyone seemed to know a poor white when they saw one, but establishing a clear and unambiguous definition has eluded historians for generations. Forret ends up seeing "poor white" as almost a moral definition, since it was possible to be described as "poor white" and yet own slaves and land, and, equally, some who owned neither land nor slaves were not "poor whites" but whites who happened to be poor. In other words, behavior, and especially behavior toward slaves and other whites, was what earned the label "poor white." This is an interesting, and clever solution to the problem, and is viable in the context of this book.

Forret's descriptions of the multitude of different encounters between poor whites and slaves helps us to learn more about how both social groups saw themselves in the antebellum South. It is hard to speak of the "typical" poor white relationship with slaves, and vice versa, because they varied so infinitely. For every poor white who traded illegally, or took an enslaved lover, there was another who took great pleasure in hunting down runaway slaves as a patroller. This complexity leads Forret to his most interesting observation. Faced with the failure of poor whites to join with slaves against the slaveholding elite, even when secession became a reality, Forret posits the idea that the confused nature of the biracial relationship itself mitigated against such alliances. Poor whites simply did not have a uniform view of the enslaved, and vice versa.

I will certainly be recommending this book to my students as a detailed and nuanced examination of a complex topic.