Editing White trash (section)

===Economic status===
Many poor whites in the 19th century South were only able to locate themselves on the worst possible land available to whites, since the best land had already been taken by the white slaveholders, large (such as the large-scale [[Plantation complexes in the Southern United States|plantations]] owned by the [[planter class]]) and small. They lived and attempted to survive on ground that was sandy, swampy or covered in scrub pine and not suited for agriculture; for this, some became known as "sandhillers" and "pineys".{{sfnp|Isenberg|2016|p=146}} These "hard-scratch" inhabitants were seen to match their surroundings: they were "stony, stumpy, and shrubby, as the land they lived on".<ref>{{cite book |author=Burton, Warren |date=1839 |title=White Slavery: A New Emancipation Cause Presented to the United States |location=Worcester, Massachusetts |pages=168–69 |ref={{harvp|Isenberg|2016 |p=146}}}}</ref> Many ended up in the mountains, at the time the first frontier of the country. After the Civil War, these people began to be referred to as "hillbillies".<ref name="Harkins 2003">{{cite book |title=Hillbilly: A Cultural History of an American Icon |last=Harkins |first=Anthony |publisher=Oxford University Press |location=New York |edition=1st |date=November 20, 2003 |isbn=978-0-1951-4631-8}}</ref>

In the popular imagination of the mid-19th century, "poor white trash" were a "curious" breed of degenerate, gaunt, haggard people who suffered from numerous physical and social defects. They were seen as dirty, ragged, emaciated, and disgusting, and had feeble children with distended abdomens who were wrinkled and withered beyond their physical years, so that even 10-year-olds' "countenances are stupid and heavy and they often become dropsical and loathsome to sight", according to a New Hampshire schoolteacher. The skin of a poor white Southerner was described as waxy, "ghastly yellowish-white" like old parchment, or so white they almost appeared to be [[albino]]s. The parents were listless and slothful, neglected their children, and were alcoholics. They were looked on with contempt by both upper-class [[Planter class|planters]] and [[Yeoman#Yeoman farmers|yeoman farmers]] &ndash; the non-slave-owning [[smallholding|smallholders]].{{sfnp|Isenberg|2016|pp=136, 146, 151-52, 167, 170}}

[[Harriet Beecher Stowe]] described a white trash woman and her children in ''[[Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp]]'', published in 1856:

{{blockquote|Crouched on a pile of dirty straw, sat a miserable haggard woman, with large, wild eyes, sunken cheeks, disheveled matted hair, and long, lean hands, like a bird's claws. At her skinny breast an emaciated infant was hanging, pushing, with its little skeleton hands, as if to force nourishment which nature no longer gave; and two scared-looking children, with features wasted and pinched blue with famine, were clinging to her gown. The whole group huddled together, drawing as far away as possible from the new comer {{sic}}, looking up with large, frightened eyes, like hunted wild animals.<ref>{{cite book |author=Stowe, Harriet Beecher |orig-date=1856 |date=2000 |title=[[Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp]] |publisher=University of North Carolina Press |pages=105–06 |ref={{harvp|Isenberg|2016 |pp=148-49}}}}</ref>}}

White Southerners of the period equated coarse and disagreeable appearances with immoral thoughts and uncivil or criminal behavior – an evil countenance often meant a villainous character. In this way poor whites with unhealthy or ugly bodies &ndash; the result in large part of poor diets, lack of personal grooming, and a toxic environment &ndash; were condemned by the larger white community at first sight, with no thought given to investigating or ameliorating the conditions that were responsible for their appearances.{{sfnp|Wyatt-Brown|2007|pp=397-398}}

The physical characteristics of white trash were thought to be inherited in nature, serving to separate poor whites from the Southern gentility and those yeomen who shared patrician values. Slavery apologist Daniel R. Hundley's 1860 book ''Social Relations in Our Southern States'' includes a chapter entitled "White Trash". He used the existence of poor whites with supposed "bad blood" to argue that genetics and not societal structure was the problem, and that therefore slavery was justified. He called white trash the "laziest two-legged animals that walk erect on the face of the Earth", describing their appearance as "lank, lean, angular, and bony, with ... sallow complexion, awkward manners, and a natural stupidity or dullness of intellect that almost surpasses belief".<ref name="Machado 2017"/>{{sfnp|Wyatt-Brown|2007|pp=46, 117|postscript=; see Hundley, Daniel R. (1999) [1860] [https://docsouth.unc.edu/southlit/hundley/hundley.html ''Social Relations in Our Southern States'']. Chapel Hill, North Carolina: Academic Affairs Library, University of North Carolina (digital edition). p. 251: "Who ever yet knew a [[Godolphin (novel)|Godolphin]] [ideal man] that was sired by a miserable scrub?," asks Hundley as supposed proof for his theory, "or who ever yet saw an athletic, healthy human being, standing six feet in his stockings, who was the offspring of runtish forefathers or wheezy, asthmatic, or consumptive parents?"}} Hundley considered the white trash population to be morally inferior not only to other whites, but to the black slave population as well.  His evaluation was seconded by Randolph Shotwell, a future [[Ku Klux Klan]] leader, who described them as "a distinct race of people ... thriftless, uneducated, unthinking beings, who live little better than negroes".<ref>Fitzgerald, Michael W. (2007) ''Splendid Failure: Postwar Reconstruction in the American South''. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee. {{isbn|978-1-56663-739-8}} pp.8-9</ref>

[[W. J. Cash]] in ''[[The Mind of the South]]'' (1941) writes in his description of the mythical [[Old South]] that beneath the aristocratic Cavalier planters was perceived to be:

<blockquote>...a vague race lumped together indiscriminately as the poor whites &ndash; very often, in fact, as the "white-trash". These people belong in the main to a physically inferior type, having sprung for the most part from the convict servants, redemptioners, and debtors of old Virginia and Georgia, with a sprinkling of the most unsuccessful sort of European peasants and farm laborers and the dregs of the European town slums. And so, of course, the gulf between them and the master class was impassable, and their ideas and feeling did not enter into the make-up of the prevailing Southern civilization.{{sfnp|Cash|1991|pages=xlix-l}}</blockquote>

Cash goes on to explain that those who arrived in the New World under these circumstances &ndash; at least early in the history of European settlement &ndash; were as likely to end up in the planter class or as yeoman farmers as they were to become poor whites, as land, at first, was cheap and available, and hard work could pay off in a rise in economic and social status.{{sfnp|Cash|1991|pages=5-6}} But there were some who did not succeed,

<blockquote>...the weakest element of the old backcountry population ... those who had been driven back [by the plantation system] to the red hills and the sandlands and the pine barrens and the swamps &ndash; to all the marginal lands of the South; those who, because of the poorness of the soil on which they dwelt or the great inaccessibility of markets, were, as a group, completely barred from escape or economic and social advance. They were the people to whom the term "cracker" properly applied &ndash; the "white-trash" and "po' bukra" ... [They exhibited] a distinctive physical character &ndash; a striking lankness of frame and slackness of muscle in association with a shambling gait, a boniness and misshapeness of head and feature, a peculiar swallow swartness, or alternatively a not less peculiar and a not less faded-out colorness of skin and hair.{{sfnp|Cash|1991|pages=23-24}}</blockquote>

According to Cash, this physical appearance is not, for the most part, genetically determined, but is the result of the brutal circumstances in which this group had to survive.{{sfnp|Cash|1991|page=25}}