lies in a new environment. Thus the small
farmers became enthusiastic supporters of the great machine of which
slavery was the base.

Not only so, the growers of corn and wheat in the remote hills and
mountains of the South, the men who distilled their grain into strong
drink, those who raised pigs or cotton a hundred or two hundred miles
west of the tobacco and cotton belts, could always find a market in the
plantation towns where calicos, "store-clothes," and trinkets could be
had for themselves and families. The long trains of quaint, covered
tobacco wagons which wound their way over rough roads from the
mountains to the black belt carried whiskey or other up-country products
to the plantations; the droves of mules, cattle, or hogs which poured
into the Carolinas and the Gulf region from East Tennessee and Kentucky
were bonds of attraction between the planters and the non-slaveholding
elements too powerful to be ignored. And as time passed the legislatures
under planter control built better highways and projected railways into
the richer sections of the interior, which invariably made allies of
these new economic communities, and gradually slavery followed in the
wake of the new channels of communication.

The most helpless of the Southern groups were the poorer farmers, who
lived on the semi-sterile lands which the planters refused to occupy or
in the pine barrens of the eastern Carolinas, and the landless class
which hung on to the skirts of slavery. Unambitious, ignorant, and
improvident, frequently the "ne'er-do-wells" of the old families,
ignored by the wealthy and spurned by the slaves, who gave them the name
of "poor white trash," their lot was hard, indeed. They earned a few
dollars a year at odd jobs, raised a few hogs or at most a bale or two
of cotton, and lived in cabins little better than those occupied by the
negroes. Their children were numerous, without educational advantages,
and accustomed to the poor and meager cultural life of an outcast class.
Their outlook was no better than that of their parents. Barefoot,
half-clad, yet alert and agile, hating negroes and fearing the masters,
these "Anglo-Saxons" offered the problem of the South. Unaccustomed to
independent voting, they did not endanger the existing order, and even
when they were aroused to a sense of their position, their ignorance and
dependence and prejudices prevented them from organizing in
self-defense. They usually followed their econo