Josh The Lighthouse Guy
Major
- Joined
- Apr 30, 2012
- Location
- Jupiter, FL
A comment about Gideon Welles got me thinking about something.
It seems like this, or something similar, was a common attitude. That black could not be elevated without white being debased. Race relations were a zero sum game.
The Antebellum South certainly has a class structure: plantation owners at the top, tradesmen and merchants in the middle, poor white farmers on the bottom, and blacks in the cellar. Emancipation and Radical Reconstruction sought to change that, and at least put the white and black agricultural workers on the same tier.
Did Southern whites view lifting blacks out of the proverbial cellar require putting lower class whites in the cellar? The bottom rail could stay on the bottom or be put on top, but could not be on the same level because they perceived a class hierarchy as necessary and proper? There must be **** or black supremacy?
Or was asking white Americans to consider black Americans to be on their level perceived as "debasing" in an of itself?
Certainly in the North, where the class hierarchy was not as rigid as the South, there were plenty of men who didn't have to live alongside blacks and disliked slavery, but who - like Welles - who would seemingly agree to the debasement comment.
It seems like this, or something similar, was a common attitude. That black could not be elevated without white being debased. Race relations were a zero sum game.
The Antebellum South certainly has a class structure: plantation owners at the top, tradesmen and merchants in the middle, poor white farmers on the bottom, and blacks in the cellar. Emancipation and Radical Reconstruction sought to change that, and at least put the white and black agricultural workers on the same tier.
Did Southern whites view lifting blacks out of the proverbial cellar require putting lower class whites in the cellar? The bottom rail could stay on the bottom or be put on top, but could not be on the same level because they perceived a class hierarchy as necessary and proper? There must be **** or black supremacy?
Or was asking white Americans to consider black Americans to be on their level perceived as "debasing" in an of itself?
Certainly in the North, where the class hierarchy was not as rigid as the South, there were plenty of men who didn't have to live alongside blacks and disliked slavery, but who - like Welles - who would seemingly agree to the debasement comment.
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