‘Poor Whites’ is a convenient label, used indiscriminately to describe the white population of North America living in two quite distinct areas south of the Mason-Dixon line; the coastal area with its coloured people and cotton and tobacco plantations, and the mountain area of the Southern Appalachians. The material poverty that marks both groups has led the industrialized Northern States to lump them together under a common condemnation. Poverty is scarcely a virtue to men whose Calvinistic background once made material prosperity a manifest sign of divine favour. Hence the average New Englander, for example, bred in a highly acquisitive tradition had little re-gaid for those whites of the South, who had been left far behind in the race for worldly possessions and still lived in circumstances not far removed from those of primitive pioneering days.

In the case of the Poor Whites proper, who live in the Tobacco and Cotton States, economic and climatic factors have been responsible for their depressed condition. Before and since Emancipation the coloured people have provided the labour in the plantations; they are better suited to heavy toil in a warm climate and cost less than white labour. Consequently the poorer whites have gained a reputation for shiftlessness and lack of enterprise. The coloured population generally refers to them as ‘Poor White Trash,’ and the name has spread all over the continent.