Some historical readings for our defenders of the redneck faith

BikeMonkey PostI have been enjoying the protestations of those who don’t like my conceptualization of “redneck” as a pejorative directed against bigoted attitudes. You can read them here as well as in the thread following Isis’ graphical depiction provided for those with reading comprehension difficulties. There are a few more comments at Adventures in Ethics and Science. In this fine discussion, commenters D. C. Sessions and Isabel have been maintaining that “redneck” is really not much different than “nigger”. Furthermore they’ve been trying to establish that, historically speaking, those who maintain the real power in the US have treated those they consider to be rednecks and niggers more or less equally badly.
I have some additional readings for your consideration of these assertions.

The way I happened across this is a bit convoluted but I started with this, clicked this link (“Drapetomania”? WTF?) and found a fun little link to something at Google books.
De Bow’s Sourthern and Western Review: A monthly industrial and literary journal, Vol. XI. – New Series, Vol. IV. July 1851 – January 1852
I obtained the entire pdf and started reading.
Article IV, Professor Dew’s Essays on Slavery starts on page 23 of the publication. The good professor spends a good deal of time talking about the enslavement of tan folk by non tan folk but, to his credit, draws the fault back to European feudalism. I think Isabel will particularly enjoy the justification of the US version of black slavery in the South circa 1850s on the basis of the treatment of presumptively white peasantry in the European feudal systems of centuries prior.
Article VI, Samuel A. Cartwright, MD, has an essay on How to Save the Republic and the Position of the South in the Union which starts on page 184 of the publication. It contains numerous insights of value including:

But the hypothesis which is undermining our Union, “that the negro is a white man only painted black,” has no foundation in Truth or Nature.
The reason is that the African is not constituted in mind or body, in the skin or under the skin, like the white man..
Slavery, therefore, of the black to the white man is not incompatible with the economy of Nature.
Chemistry could declare whether the composition of the bones, the blood, the flesh, skin and the secretions, be composed of the same elementary substances, in the same proportions and combinations, in the two races, or in different proportions and combinations

You can read the whole thing yourself and see where I might be missing something. But I sure as hell can’t suss out where this presumably white doctor is thinking that rednecks are just like niggers. Where he’s dissing those of socioeconomic disadvantage regardless of race. Maybe D. C. Sessions can find it for us? Sure reads to me like he’s distinguishing white folks from black folks regardless of their socioeconomic privilege.
And how about that blue collar / labor / farming and the origin of the redness of the neck in question, eh?

The labor, requiring exposure to a mid-day’s summer sun, from the laws of the white man’s nature, cannot be performed in the cotton and sugar region without exposing him to disease and death; yet the same kind of labor experience proves to be only a wholesome and beneficial exercise to the negro, awakening him from his natural torpor to a new life of pleasure and activity.

I wonder who benefits from the strawberry and lettuce fields and might be awakened from “natural torpor” therein. Eh, Dr. Isis?
And hey, since this is ScienceBlogs and you people like to talk about the acquisition and dissemination of knowledge, there’s a couple of more gems.

Neither party, North or South, has viewed the question of negro slavery in a philosophical point of view. It has been mere experience on the one side, and mere theory on the other.
Much of the knowledge, in regard to the physical differences between our white and black population, is confined to the few scientific men in private life, and to those persons in the South who have had opportunities of acquiring it by observation, but have not the requisite acquirements and opportunities for diffusing it.

Oh SNAP. Damn closed access publication! If only these men of private science and persons of opportunity in the South could have diffused their knowledge of the black to those damned theorists in the North..
Art VII. Slave Laws of the Southern States: Mississippi by Col. H. W. Walter starts on page 617 of the publication. I include this here because it delves into the real reason slavery should not be expanded in one of the slave states- environmentalism! (And capitalism, which was actually a good point given that those that want to cast the US Civil War (1861-1865) in economic terms make a good case that obsession with a slave-based agrarian economy was a big mistake for the South…)

Our “wild land” is now nearly cleared, and our slave force is fully adequate to its culture; yet our citizens are still pursuing the ruinous policy of expending all their surplus capital in increasing the number of their slaves. No rest is given to lands, and the soil is daily losing its strength and fertility
In our eagerness to grow more cotton, we have wholly neglected the more important duties of manufacturing our clothing and making our breadstuffs, and for both food and raiment are dependent on our more sagacious sister states.

This is really just the tip of the iceberg for this single issue. Happy Reading!