ufficient to maintain them
in comfort. From this class came always the best and strongest men in
the South. Comparatively few of them became Slaveowners, and then but
rarely owned more than one or two negroes. A very large proportion found
homes in the great free States north of the Ohio River.

14

On the other hand, none of this accession to comparative wealth seemed
possible to the "White Trash." The boys and girls mated, squatted on
any ground they could find unoccupied, raised there the merest shelter,
which never by any chance improved, no matter how long they lived there,
and proceeded to breed with amazing prolificacy others like themselves,
destined for the same lives of ignorance and squalor. The hut of the
"Clay Eater" in South Carolina, the "Sand Hiller" in Georgia, the "Sang
Digger" in Virginia was the same as that his grandfather had lived in.
It was the same that his sons and grandsons to the third and fourth
generations built on the bleak knobs of the Ozarks or the malarious
banks of the Mississippi. The Census of 1850 showed that about 70,000
of the population of Missouri had come from Kentucky, 45,000 from
Tennessee, 41,000 from Virginia, 17,000 from North Carolina and 15,000
from the other Southern States. Nearly 40,000 had gone from Ohio,
Indiana and Illinois, but a very large proportion of this number was the
same element which had streamed across the southern parts of those
States on its way to Missouri. Only 13,000 had entered from the great
States of New York and Pennsylvania, and but 1,100 from New England.
Nearly 15,000 Irishmen, mostly employed along the rivers, had settled
in the State.

While the Slaveowners and their "White Trash" myrmidons were Pro-Slavery
Democrats, the Middle Class were inclined to be Whigs, or if Democrats,
belonging to that wing of the party less subservient to Slavery which in
later years was led by Stephen A. Douglas.

15

Upon these three distinct strata in society, which little mingled
but were all native Americans, was projected an element of startling
differences in birth, thought, speech and manners. The so-called
Revolution of 1848 in Germany was a movement by the educated,
enthusiastic, idealistic youth of the Fatherland to sweep away the horde
of petty despots, and unite their pigmy Principalities and Duchies into
a glorious and wide-ruling Germany. They were a generation too soon,
however, and when the movement was crushed under the heavy hand of