On class, race and slavery

And many slaveholding Southerners begin to realize that that means that many whites cannot afford to gain entry into the slaveholding system any more. A book published in 1857 by a white South Carolinian, a deep racist named Hinton R. Helper, argued that non-slaveholding Southern whites ought to wake up to their economic exploitation by slaveholding whites.

That’s the kind of message that many slaveholding whites took to heart, and so they spoke about reopening the international slave trade with the idea that if you increase the supply, you lower the price.

The people most vociferously opposed to this were the residents of Virginia. The reason was self-serving. As of 1860, the second most important export of the commonwealth of Virginia was human flesh.

Virginians wanted to make sure that if white Southerners were going to buy slaves, they were going to buy slaves that bore the phrase “made in Virginia.”

This from a 2000 piece from the Southern Poverty Law Center titled White Lies.

Also worth reading? A piece from the University of Houston’s Digital History on The Old South: Images and Realities and the New York Times Disunion series.