Poor White Men Research Articles

An Archaeology of Convict Leasing in the American South

ABSTRACT Between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, thousands of men, women, and children in the American South were forced to labor for private businesses and individuals under the convict lease system. This system disproportionately impacted Black men and boys, although it also ensnared Black women and girls as well as poor white men, women, and children. Motivated by the financial gains achieved through leasing prisoners, states ensured that the system continued despite numerous highly-publicized human rights violations. Although numerous scholars and grassroots activists have brought attention to the history of convict leasing, historical archaeology has only engaged with the phenomenon in a limited capacity. In this article, we call for archaeologists, and archaeologists of the African Diaspora in particular, to engage with sites and materialities of convict leasing more directly. Our article outlines a potential path forward for such a research program.

Only the Clothes on Her Back: Clothing and the Hidden History of Power in the Nineteenth-Century United States by Laura F. Edwards

Reviewed by: Only the Clothes on Her Back: Clothing and the Hidden History of Power in the Nineteenth-Century United States by Laura F. Edwards Eva Sheppard Wolf Only the Clothes on Her Back: Clothing and the Hidden History of Power in the Nineteenth-Century United States. By Laura F. Edwards. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022. Pp. xviii, 433. $34.95, ISBN 978-0-19-756857-6.) In Only the Clothes on Her Back: Clothing and the Hidden History of Power in the Nineteenth-Century United States, Laura F. Edwards marries [End Page 361] two of her longtime interests: her award-winning work in legal history, including in this journal, and her fascination with needlework and textiles. It might seem an odd combination, but Edwards shows that the law interacted in distinct and important ways with textiles, making it possible for people who had no property rights to produce, buy, sell, trade, invest in, and protect their ownership of textiles. The title refers to women and clothing, but the book actually addresses more capacious subjects—all people without full legal standing or on the margins of the economy, especially white women but also enslaved people and poor white men; and textiles of all sorts, meaning everything one wore or could wear on one’s body as well as household items such as sheets and table linens. Useful as a clearly written, engaging, and often humorous introduction to an aspect of early American material culture, Only the Clothes on Her Back also demonstrates the centrality of textiles to economic and social life, and it reveals how important nineteenth-century changes in law and economy diminished the economic power of those who had previously used textiles to their advantage. In Part 1, “Old Clothes in a New Country,” Edwards describes how, in the late colonial period and early republic, those without full rights relied on a long-standing tradition, barely noted in written law but well understood and respected in local courts, that people owned their clothing and also any textiles they made or purchased for later use. In 1842, when Polly, an enslaved woman in upcountry South Carolina, found that some yarn that she had spun was stolen from her yard, she took the matter to court. Her owner’s name was on the complaint, but Polly asserted that the “spun cotton belonged to her” and the court agreed (p. 21). Although Edwards acknowledges that marginalized people owned items beyond textiles, she does not fully explain her assertion that “textiles were different” from other material goods in law and practice (p. 37). The second section, “Protective Coverings in a Hostile World,” opens up a new view of the early American economy by showing how almost everyone used textiles as money, capital, and credit. Historians have largely missed this story because they have looked for economic activity in ledgers and account books, when it can also be found in women’s diaries, pawnshop records, and criminal court cases, which were open to women and enslaved people who could not bring civil suits to recover property. Although the American Revolution did not change how people used textiles, the rights-based legal principles of that era slowly grew dominant in American law and—along with a changing economy in which textiles became more numerous and their value became less stable—altered the fabric of American life. As described in Part 3, “Rags,” behaviors that had once been common, such as pawning or selling one’s clothes in order to leverage their value, had by the 1850s become suspect. The ability of people on the margins to use textiles to advance their economic interests diminished as their status outside the realm of rights-holders became more important. Women remained without rights the longest and after the Civil War were left with “only the clothes on their backs” (p. 289). Edwards’s historiographical point is that if we want to understand “the actual relationship of most Americans to law and economy,” we need to look [End Page 362] well beyond white male property owners (p. 299). She thus contributes to the recent form of economic history that places ordinary, and often struggling, people at the...

Transactional Revolutionaries

For historians of the American Revolution, there are supposed to be few more certain paths to fame and fortune than writing a flattering book about the Founders, as Woody Holton observes in the closing pages of Liberty Is Sweet. That may or may not be true. But as anyone who has followed the controversies and talking points of our own time surely knows—whether the topic is the enduring appeal of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States (1980; rev. ed., 2015) or The New York Times’s 1619 Project—there is also mileage and, I suspect, decent money in books by historians whom Holton admiringly calls “the debunkers” (568). As the “hidden history” in his title suggests, that debunking tradition is where Holton situates his latest contribution to scholarship on the revolution. Although readers looking for famous men and women will not be disappointed, Holton’s primary interest is the history of “women, Native Americans, African Americans, and other unknown Americans,” including poor white men (568). Some of his hidden actors are better known today than they were in their own time. Boston King, who escaped enslavement in South Carolina by joining the British army, features prominently in my own teaching and writing, as I’m sure he does for many of my colleagues. Others are familiar names in unfamiliar places. I confess that I did not know that Daniel Boone started his fabled career as a wagon driver in General Edward Braddock’s ill-fated expedition to the Monongahela in 1755—this despite growing up in one of the Pennsylvania valleys that Boone and Braddock marched on Fort Duquesne to secure. The role of female war and peace chiefs in Pontiac’s War, the Native insurgency that swept the Midwest during the mid-1760s, will come as no surprise to specialists, but it may surprise general readers, who are the book’s intended audience. Britain responded by stationing an army of ten thousand regulars in Indian country, which in turn supplied the pretext for the parliamentary taxes that so outraged colonists on the Atlantic seaboard. Had the Wabash River’s Indigenous matrons “not founded a pan-Indian confederacy to battle the British,” writes Holton, the American Revolution might not have happened (160).

North Carolina’s Free People of Color, 1715–1885 by Warren Eugene Milteer Jr

Reviewed by: North Carolina’s Free People of Color, 1715–1885 by Warren Eugene Milteer Jr Christy Clark-Pujara (bio) North Carolina’s Free People of Color, 1715–1885. By Warren Eugene Milteer Jr. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2020. Pp. 301. Cloth, $45.00.) Using court records, census data, church meeting minutes, wills, deeds, newspapers, letters, pension files, oral histories, and an array of additional secondary sources, Warren Milteer reconstructs the varied experiences of free people of color in North Carolina from the colonial period through Reconstruction. He convincingly demonstrates that the free “colored” population was much more varied, layered, and complex than historians have acknowledged. Milteer asserts that their lives were shaped by more than a single racial category; the lived experiences of free people of color in North Carolina varied according to their wealth, gender, work, and reputation. For example, a freeborn property-holding man of color lived a fundamentally different life than a formerly enslaved free woman of color who struggled to support herself. Milteer examines the daily lives of free people of color in North Carolina and their interactions with each other, their white neighbors, and the state. Many free people of color lived in poverty and were socially and politically marginalized; however, their status as free people had the potential to place them above white women and poor white men. North Carolina’s Free People of Color is both chronological and narrative. Milteer uses the personal stories of propertied, well-connected, and prominent free people of color and their poverty-stricken marginalized counterparts to illuminate how their lives were profoundly shaped by, but not entirely restricted by, racial category. He contends that free people of color held a legal status closer to that of whites than of enslaved people. Their personhood was legally recognized, as were their familial relationships; until 1835, propertied free men of color could vote. Milteer highlights that proslavery radicals were unsuccessful in their attempts to enslave or expel free people of color after the American Revolution, and it took them decades to disenfranchise free men of color. Milteer illuminates the varied racial compositions of the people categorized as free people of color. They were of African, Native, East Indian, [End Page 414] white, and mixed heritage and ancestry. He also reminds readers that racial classifications collapsed after the American Revolution; people who had been referred to as “Indian,” “mulatto,” or even “white” became “free people of color” in the early American republic. Moreover, Milteer reveals how important community memory was to recognized racial identity and status. If your neighbors remembered your mother was white or a free woman of color, then you were free. Milteer also details the myriad restrictions placed on free people of color as the colonial period progressed and the American republic came into being; they had to pay race-based taxes and bonds for “good” behavior, had curfews, could not testify against whites in court, and were fined for, and later banned from, marrying whites. White women who had children with nonwhite men were fined or bound out, and their children were apprenticed by the state well into adulthood. Nevertheless, Milteer reminds us that propertied free men of color could and did hold slaves, apprentices, and servants. Milteer also carefully reveals that the families of free people of color “regularly disrupted the boundaries that racial categories were supposed to create” (127). Some free people of color were emancipated and had close relationships with enslaved people. Others were descended from Native people, white mothers, or those who had been free so long that they did not share close bonds with enslaved people. These free people of color often lived in “colonies” together, intermarried, and had close associations with their white neighbors. Often, free people of color who did not have close association with enslaved people tended to be the wealthy few or middling small landowners and artisans. Poor free people of color, especially women, often struggled to support themselves and keep their children from being bound out by the state. Milteer contends that because scholars have spent so much time examining the restrictions placed on free people of color, they have not acknowledged how free people...

Regulating Passion: Sexuality and Patriarchal Rule in Massachusetts 1700–1830 by Kelly A. Ryan (review)

Regulating Passion: Sexuality and Patriarchal Rule in Massachusetts 1700-1830. By Kelly A. Ryan. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. Pp. 288. Cloth, $55.00.)Reviewed by Kara M. FrenchIn Regulating Passion, Kelly A. Ryan has expertly crafted a history of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Massachusetts that is fully intersectional in its understanding of how hierarchies of gender, race, class, and age created an enduring system of white male dominance. Her work deftly builds upon the arguments made by women of color feminists such as Kimberle Williams Crenshaw, who have long championed that identity and oppression are intersectional, and reinforces the idea that gender as a category of analysis cannot be understood in isolation. Ryan argues that sexuality and patriarchy are inextricably linked because Governmental, social, and private authority over Indians and African Americans derived from the power that fathers and husbands had over wives and children (59). Regulating Passion also demonstrates that patriarchal control was not a casualty of the War of Independence. Rather it transformed and evolved, the direct of the colonial era replaced by a new standard of sexual reputation promoted by the moral reformers and print literature of the early republic (4-5).The American Revolution is the hinge on which Ryan's analysis of sexuality and patriarchy swings. The first half of the book focuses on how elite white men used their status as patriarchs to control the sexuality of white women, poor white men, African Americans, and Native Americans through the legal system, while simultaneously ensuring that their own indiscretions remained shielded from public scrutiny. The statistical evidence Ryan has assembled from court records is very persuasive, and her analysis of the legal system's regulation of white women's sexuality is a highlight of the book. The court records plainly show that by 1760, only women were facing criminal prosecution for unmarried sex in Massachusetts. Unwed fathers were not, however, subject to the same fines or physical punishments as unwed mothers in the late colonial period. What is striking is that the courts continued to punish white women for fornication even in cases where they married the child's father or suffered a miscarriage. As Ryan notes, the court's interest in such cases had little to do with the maintenance of the child and a great deal more to do with punishing white women for activity outside of marriage.Even more telling is that magistrates did not prosecute Native American women and enslaved women for fornication with the same regularity as they did white women. Such prosecutions would have brought the indiscretions of elite white men with slaves and servants out of the shadows and into the public eye. The courts only seemed to take an interest in cases of infanticide, when the loss of an enslaved woman's child would have resulted in a loss of property for her master. Enslaved men were similarly not prosecuted for interracial liaisons with white women because compelling an enslaved man to support a child would have given enslaved men a right to patriarchy that undermined the slave system.Regulating Passion is also innovative for noting the ways in which white men's and women's participation in the American Revolution was not only gendered but highly sexualized. …

Hobos in Heaven

Between 1880 and 1910, the U.S. West was, per capita, the nation’s leading site of incarceration. Across the region, poor white men comprised the vast majority of prisoners who lost all civil rights and often were sentenced to chain gangs, rock piles, and road crews building public infrastructure. Focused on Los Angeles, where local elites built one of the nation’s largest jail systems, this article excavates a nearly forgotten history of poor white men targeted for incarceration, stripped of civil rights, subjected to forced labor, and systematically marginalized in the U.S. West. It also chronicles how the effort to build an idyllic white settler society drove the phenomenal rise of white male imprisonment at the turn of the twentieth century. In turn, this article unearths a uniquely western tale within the history of race and imprisonment in the United States.

Why Aren’t Middle-Class White Women Laughing in Eudora Welty’s Fiction?

Why Aren’t Middle-Class White Women Laughing in Eudora Welty’s Fiction? Rebecca Mark The subject of Eudora Welty and humor is fascinating, but humor is not the main focus of this essay. The subject of this essay is instead: why, when, and if middle-class white women characters in Welty’s fiction laugh. In her article “Strange Felicity: Welty’s Women, Laughing, Disguising, Revising, Seizing Speech,” Lois Welch makes the astute observation that when reading Welty’s texts, we are caught in a strange liminal state unable to laugh and unable to keep from laughing. While Welty’s readers may find themselves in a passive position laughing and not laughing against their will, Welty’s female characters try to wield more power over the laugh act. Welty’s women characters often laugh or do not laugh for strategic reasons. Manfred Pfister in A History of English Laughter notes that the traces of laughter found in artistic representation reveal “the fault lines of the anxieties and the social pressures at work at a given historical moment” (vii). Pfister argues that these representations “do not only ‘represent’ the laughter of a particular society, but … give a pointed and pregnant shape to it, analyse and frequently problematise it,” and he argues that “actual laughter itself always contains a more or less marked element of self-conscious performance and theatrical representation, complete with actors and audiences” (vii). Pfister’s parameters help us recognize that each time Welty marks the text with laughter, her marks are “pointed” and “pregnant” and comment on the historical anxieties of the time. Each time a character laughs in a Welty text, we are standing on a social fault line. Welty makes us acutely aware of this fault line and, like a discerning movie critic, she comments on exactly how a character performs their laugh. In the already liminal performance of laughter in Welty’s texts, the laughter of women is even more opaque. Women laugh where we least expect them to and do not always laugh when other characters, or the plot line, or a funny joke, calls upon them to do so. Throughout her essay, Welch views laughter as a potentially liberating force for women, referencing the spiritual power of laughter in the Native American community. She quotes Joseph Epes Brown who argues that “there is no access to a deeper spiritual reality if there is not the opening force of laughter present” (qtd. in Welch 153 from Lincoln 67). [End Page 39] For Welch, women characters’ laughter is feminist, essential to breaking the bonds that keep them subservient in a patriarchal world. Although I am indebted to almost every aspect of Welch’s argument, I think that Welty’s women have a much more nuanced and strategic relationship to laughter. I argue that when Welty’s women characters withhold their laughter, they are often being more politically radical, more feminist, than when they join in the laughter of the group. Their withholding becomes a strategic self-preservation, a social commentary, a silent disapproval, and the controlling force of the comedian. Welty scores laughter in her text quite consciously; whether the “Hee! hee!” and “Hee! hee! hee!” of Keela in “Keela, the Outcast Indian Maiden” or the “AHA HA HA HA HA HA HA!” of the owl in Losing Battles, she marks each laugh with a unique sound and rhythmic pattern (49, 50, 53, 806). For Welty, laughter functions simultaneously as textual and extra-textual, literally breaking out of the confines of the narrative. Laughter, as Ingvild Saeilid Gilhus argues in Laughing Gods, Weeping Virgins: Laughter in the History of Religion, “is situated at the intersection between body and mind, individual and society, the rational and the irrational,” and as such always unsettles any plot structure (10). Laughter invades narrative progress and often supersedes literal meaning. A thorough survey of key words in The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty, Delta Wedding, The Ponder Heart, Losing Battles, and The Optimist’s Daughter reveals, that, in Welty’s fiction, poor white women laugh, poor white men laugh, rich white men laugh, and rich white men laugh at others. Big men like Uncle Noah Webster and Battle laugh whole...

Unveiling Collar City: A Conversation with Brenda Ann Kenneally

This interview with Brenda Ann Kenneally took place during her six-month residency at VSW. Kenneally came to VSW to build a series of books of photographs from her ongoing project Upstate Girls, in which she investigates the hallmarks of the permanent culture of class disparity in the US by documenting the lives of a group of working-class young women living on the same block in Troy, New York (near where Kenneally herself grew up). The city of Troy is one of the earliest centers of the American industrial revolution, and Kenneally incorporates the city's history into her hard and intimate look at post-industrial life in Troy. Kenneally worked with students at VSW to build a historical timeline. She also worked with students at Rochester Institute of Technology (PIT) to build a layered documentary website incorporating the videos, photographs, and historical documents she has made and collected. Kenneally is the recipient of the W. Eugene Smith Award, a Soros Criminal Justice Fellowship, and the Mother Jones Award for her in-depth and intimate coverage of complex social issues and injustice. She was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for her work covering Hurricane Katrina. MEREDITH DAVENPORT: Let's start with who you are and what you're doing here at VSW. BRENDA ANN KENNEALLY: I'm a visual journalist, now that everybody is, and I am living here now at VSW, fulfilling the print portion of one of my lifelong dreams. In my twenty-year career I have been juggling photography, video, and now visual history projects. This project, called Upstate Girls, I started in 2004. It just snowballed into a participatory media project, doing scrapbooks with the young women I've been documenting, collecting historic ephemera, audio interviews, and contextualization from the town they live in, Troy, New York. About a year ago, I met Tate Shaw [Director of VSW1 after doing a talk at nearby RIT. We hit it off immediately and decided that this kind of project is something that has so many layers that it's very open for a lot of students to work on. I need lots of help. Here I am, a few months later, and I've come with a carload full of digital material. What I'm working on here specifically, in conjunction with RIT, is a web database project, and in conjunction with VSW, a series of five print books that will be about a hundred pages each--really cheaply printed and not precious at all--that are the stories of these eight young women in Troy. The birth of a child, De Anthony (Tony) Stocklas, was the genesis of the project. It was a relationship that started with two young women who were fourteen years old at the time, who were romantically and physically involved with each other. One girl, Kayla, became pregnant by the other girl's cousin. I was on an editorial assignment close to the neighborhood where I grew up and I was invited to photograph Kayla's labor and delivery of her son, Tony. And it is a history of prison and incarceration surrounding the family, because the boy, the cousin of Sabrina, the other young woman, went to prison, and the two girls teamed up basically to parent Tony, who is now nine years old. That is the genesis of the project, but I began to see all these connections: the prison culture, the fact that these were not the only young girls sometimes deliberately having babies. I started to think of the incarceration figures, the fact that we still continue to imprison more people than any other country in the world. Of course it's men--it's seeping over into women, but it's men: black men, Hispanic men, poor white men--and then working its way up the socioeconomic scale to women in that color spectrum. I began to think about the real boots-on-the-ground impact of just having fewer men around, the way men were thought about, the way relationships changed between mother and son. The emasculation of men, the fact that they really didn't have control in their own homes or their own lives, but largely they would answer to the authorities who were outside the home--and that authority was the paternal influence in the home--but really the physical influence was the women. …

The Memorialization of Southern Poor White Men's Labor in Rick Bragg's Memoir Trilogy

This article explores the ways that Rick Bragg memorializes poor white men's labor across his memoir trilogy, examining the tensions that arise as he attempts to bring poor whites into the center of the southern community. I consider the neo-Agrarian strains within his work, as well as Bragg's responses to the globalization of the region. The work addresses the absences within the South's memorial landscape, and questions the extent to which Bragg's work addresses those gaps.

Democracy and Slavery in Frontier Illinois: The Bottomland Republic

During the late eighteenth century, southern immigrants introduced black bondage—un-der the pseudonym of indentured servitude— into Illinois Territory. They did this despite the Northwest Ordinance's exclusion of slavery from it and other territories in the region. In 1824, after Illinois had become a state, voters rejected, by a margin of 6,822 to 4,950, a call for a constitutional convention that in all likelihood would have allowed slavery to continue indefinitely. The relatively close vote suggests that Illinois could have become a slave state. Imagine the impact of such an outcome on the sectional conflict! James Simeone's Democracy and Slavery in Frontier Illinois is an admirable contribution to our evolving understanding of American political development. It is based on a thorough understanding of the interaction of class, culture, sectionalism, republicanism, and religion. Yet readers who on the basis of the book's title assume it centers on the issue of slavery in early Illinois will be disappointed. Instead the book analyzes an effort by poor white men to destroy elitist politics in that new state and establish for themselves an egalitarian democracy. According to Simeone, slavery in this context was a peripheral issue. It helped galvanize support for a state constitutional convention, but it was subsidiary to taking power away from the elite.

Where are the Women in the History of Aging?

Many Historians of the social aging process have focused primarily on the experiences of aging white men. A prime example is provided in the seminal work of David Hackett Fischer, Growing Old in America (1978). In tracing the reversal in societal attitudes toward the aged, from gerontocratic to gerontophobic, Fischer argues that the authority of the elders in the eighteenth century was very great (1978: 220). Clearly, he was not referring to women for, as Fischer himself acknowledges, “no one would claim that colonial females exerted much political power.” And obviously, he was not including black male and female slaves or poor white men. Nor does his general theme of exultation apply to aging colonial widows who were treated with a contempt which deepened all the more by their womanhood. Some were actually driven away by their neighbors, who feared an increase in the poor rates. The legal records of the colonies contain many instances of poor widows who were … forced to wander from one town to another (Fischer, 1978: 63).