Editing White trash (section)

===Early 19th century===
The first use of "white trash" in print to describe the Southern poor white population occurred in 1821.{{sfnp|Isenberg|2016|p=135}} It came into common use in the 1830s as a pejorative used by the [[house slave]]s of "quality folk" against poor whites.{{sfnp|Wyatt-Brown|2001|p=13}}{{efn|In 1833, [[Fanny Kemble]], an English actress visiting Georgia, wrote: "The slaves themselves entertain the very highest contempt for white servants, whom they designate as 'poor white trash'."<ref>[[Fanny Kemble|Kemble, Fannie]] (1835) ''Journal''. p. 81</ref><ref>{{harvp|Wray|2006}} suggests that the term may have originated in the Baltimore-Washington area during the 1840s, when Irish and blacks were competing for the same jobs. ([https://books.google.com/books?id=LX0oi9tz2H8C&pg=PA41 pp. 42] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160624092542/https://books.google.com/books?id=LX0oi9tz2H8C&pg=PA41&lpg=PA42 |date=June 24, 2016 }},[https://books.google.com/books?id=LX0oi9tz2H8C&pg=PA41 p.44] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160610173508/https://books.google.com/books?id=LX0oi9tz2H8C&pg=PA41&lpg=PA44 |date=June 10, 2016 }}). The quote from Kemble is reprinted in [https://books.google.com/books?id=LX0oi9tz2H8C&pg=PA41 page 41] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160611021531/https://books.google.com/books?id=LX0oi9tz2H8C&pg=PA41&lpg=PA41 |date=June 11, 2016 }} of the book.</ref>}} This term achieved widespread popularity in the 1850s,{{sfnp|Isenberg|2016|p=135}} and by 1855, it had passed into common usage by upper-class whites, and was in common usage among Southerners of all races throughout the rest of the 19th century.<ref name="Newitz p170">{{cite book |last1=Newitz |first1=Annalee |author-link1=Annalee Newitz |last2=Wray |first2=Matthew |editor=Hill, Mike |date=1997 |title=Whiteness: A Critical Reader |publisher=New York University Press |isbn=978-0-8147-3545-9 |page=170 |chapter=What is 'White Trash'? Stereotypes and Economic Conditions of Poor Whites in the United States |chapter-url=https://archive.org/details/whitenesscritica0000unse/page/169/mode/1up?view=theater |chapter-url-access=registration}}</ref>

In 1854, Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote that slavery not only produces "degraded, miserable slaves", but also "a poor white population as degraded and brutal as ever existed in any of the most crowded districts of Europe". She said the [[plantation system]] forced these whites to struggle for subsistence, becoming an "inconceivably brutal" group resembling "some blind, savage monster, which, when aroused, tramples heedlessly over everything in its way". Beyond economic factors, Stowe traces the existence of this class to the shortage of schools and churches in their communities.{{sfnp|Wray|2006|pp=57–58}}<ref name="Machado 2017">{{cite web |url=https://southernstudies.olemiss.edu/study-the-south/revisiting-deliverance/ |title=Revisiting Deliverance: The Sunbelt South, the 1970s Masculinity Crisis, and the Emergence of the Redneck Nightmare Genre |last=Machado |first=Isabel |publisher=Center for the Study of Southern Culture, University of Mississippi |date=June 19, 2017 |access-date=March 5, 2019 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190306111541/https://southernstudies.olemiss.edu/study-the-south/revisiting-deliverance/ |archive-date=March 6, 2019 |url-status=live}}</ref> In her second novel ''Dred'', Stowe describes the poor white inhabitants of the [[Great Dismal Swamp]], on the border between Virginia and North Carolina, as an ignorant, degenerate, and immoral class of people prone to criminality.{{sfnp|Isenberg|2016|p=137}} [[Hinton Rowan Helper]]'s influential 1857 book ''[[The Impending Crisis of the South]]'' describes the region's poor Caucasians as a people of lesser physical stature who were oppressed by the effects of slavery and would be driven to extinction by the South's "cesspool of degradation and ignorance".<ref>Helper, Hinton Rowan (1968) [1857] ''[[The Impending Crisis of the South]]''. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press; quoted in {{harvp|Isenberg|2016|p=137}}</ref> Historian Jeffrey Glossner of the [[University of Mississippi]] writes: "While their voices are often unheard, we can gauge the broader importance of their presence through the social, political, and cultural developments of the period."<ref>Glossner, Jeffrey (July 12, 2019) [https://networks.h-net.org/node/11465/discussions/4297558/poor-whites-antebellum-us-south-topical-guide "Poor Whites in the Antebellum U.S. South (Topical Guide)"] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190712192401/https://networks.h-net.org/node/11465/discussions/4297558/poor-whites-antebellum-us-south-topical-guide |date=2019-07-12 }}, H-Net</ref>