Reminder that wealthy white slaveowners and secessionists galvanized poor white southerners to fight in the Civil War with a mix of the bootstrap narrative and the threat of being inferior to free blacks 
Sounds soooooo similar to how modern day poor whites are manipulated to put race before class at the benefit of wealthy whites, huh?
Even though slavery stripped poor whites of social mobility (they rarely owned land and got paid less than their northern counterparts), secessionists convinced them that northern whites were suffering without slavery. An easy feat because they were deliberately kept uneducated
It’s good to note that wealthy southerners opposed universal education both before AND after the civil war, while northerners thought the right kind would create more subservient poor whites and free blacks
“We tend to forget that an estimated three hundred thousand white southerners, many from the border states, fought for the union side, and that four border states never seceded.”
Jefferson Davis and other secessionists pushed the narrative that poor whites benefited from a racial hierarchy, and that southern life was *the* American way. That class differences and slavery were natural.
Take a look at the state of poor folks today and the slave labor going on in prisons and you’ll see the narrative of classism and slavery being “natural” has persisted.
