Lines in the Sand: Race and Class in Lowcountry Georgia, 1750-1860

Abstract

Over the last two decades or so, a number of studies have rescued the antebellum South's non-slaveowners from historical invisibility. A central question that has in some way informed most of these inquiries is why the Old South's plain folk supported slavery and, in 1860–1861, the Confederacy. Timothy James Lockley, in Lines in the Sand, tackles this issue head-on by focusing on how non-slaveholders in the Georgia low country interacted with the region's African American population during the colonial, early national, and antebellum periods. In the Georgia low country, half of the white population did not own slaves; these whites were generally marginalized economically, scratching out a living in a variety of occupations—farmer, artisan, overseer, shopkeeper, laborer. Slavery fostered a wide range of contacts between poor whites and African Americans. The two groups often worked, played, and slept together, leading to unstructured social situations in which some poor whites “carried on a normal day-to-day existence with African Americans that was not characterized by hatred and suspicion.” While poor white artisans often recognized slave craftsmen as economic competitors, the common poverty of African Americans and poor whites also led to a number of clandestine economic encounters between the two groups that were mutually beneficial, from shopkeepers and poor farmers trading with slaves to poor whites “hiring” escaped slaves. Though less common, poorer whites in the low country also joined African Americans in criminal activity that threatened to undermine the very foundations of slave socie t y. Finally, African Americans and poor whites, at least in the rural areas of the low country during the early national period, also worshiped together in mixed evangelical churches, which “to some extent blurred the racial distinction between poor whites and African Americans.” When many of the elite converted to the evangelical churches later in the antebellum years, however, religion became more a bulwark of than a challenge to the established social order.