Description:
Covering a broad geographic scope from Virginia to South Carolina between 1820 and 1860, Jeff Forret scrutinizes relations among rural poor whites and slaves, a subject previously unexplored and certainly under-reported. Forret's findings challenge historians' long-held assumption that mutual violence and animosity characterized the two groups' interactions; he reveals that while poor whites and slaves sometimes experienced bouts of hostility, often they worked or played in harmony and camaraderie.
Review Quotes: Jeff Forret's Race Relations at the Margins offers the most comprehensive and detailed look to date at how poor whites and blacks interacted in the Old South. Creatively utilizing an impressive array of primary sources, Forret greatly advances our understanding of the world of antebellum poor whites. At the same time, Forret demonstrates the complexity of race relations on the bottom of the Old South's social structure. Although poor whites and blacks encountered each other frequently at work and beyond, their relations were not exclusively characterized by mutual hostility or class-based understanding; rather, Forret shows that the two groups interacted in ways more varied and complicated than previously assumed by students of the antebellum South.--Charles C. Bolton, author of Poor Whites of the Antebellum South: Tenants and Laborers in Central North Carolina and Northeast Mississippi