I have so much to do today but if I could I'd write an op-ed on the ways slaveholders & the #Confederacy kept poor whites uneducated, illiterate, & ignorant of US #history to maintain white supremacy & oligarchic control.

So - short thread I'll try to add to thruout the day: /1

"There is but one way for the oligarchy to perpetuate slavery in the Southern States, and that is by perpetuating absolute ignorance among the non-slaveholding whites."
– Hinton Helper (1857) /2

"The interests of slavery cannot be made at one with the interests of free society; there cannot be any legitimate institution of free society—as the free press, free speech, free school—which is not a bomb for Slavery."
– Moncure Conway (1850s) /3

“In the South,” proclaimed the abolitionist Henry Ward Beecher, “ignorance is an institution. They legislate for ignorance the same way we legislate for school-houses.” /3

To protect and preserve slavery, the master class understood that preventing education among poor whites helped to stifle the spread of abolitionist ideas. /4

Illiterate or semi-literate, the white masses remained largely uninformed & politically apathetic. Slaveholders realized that allowing non-slaveholders access to information would disrupt their own fortunes, and thus imposed a strict system of censorship throughout the region. /5

As Beecher concluded, “Knowledge is not only power in the South but powder, also, liable to blow false institutions to atoms.” /6

The overwhelming majority of poor southern whites, it seems, were grossly uneducated. Many of them never received enough of an education to even sign their names. /7

Left wallowing in ignorance, the impoverished had little chance to become anything else in the world besides unskilled, low-wage laborers. /8

By continuing to allow the illiteracy of the white masses, slaveholders wittingly or not reinforced this cycle of poverty. They obviously knew that this lack of education among the poor would help them maintain their position at the top of society. /9

This pervasive ignorance undoubtedly decreased poor whites’ ability to understand the more complicated arguments against slavery, and certainly precluded them from clearly formulating their own reasons to oppose the institution. /10

Slaveholders’ obsession with censorship further suggests that they preferred to keep the masses in ignorance. Upper South states had censorship laws as well, but the Deep South’s penal code carried savage penalties. /11

Most of this legislation was passed in the 1830s, likely in response to the proliferation of abolitionist literature. They were so resolute and comprehensive that the master class did not have to strengthen them throughout the late antebellum period. /12

During John Abbott’s travels through the South, he was struck by the high levels of illiteracy, and linked that issue to the region’s pervasive censorship. /13

“It is very rare that I see here any newspapers offered in the cars; there is no aspect of intelligence at the stopping places, and the poor whites seem as totally destitute of ambition as are the slaves,” he wrote. /14

Numbering illiterate white South Carolinians in the “scores of thousands,” he recognized how “it is easy for unprincipled men to rouse the masses to any violence.” /15

*Gotta get some work done, more later.