Race Relations at the Margins: Slaves and Poor Whites in the Antebellum Southern Countryside

Race Relations at the Margins: Slaves and Poor Whites in the Antebellum Southern Countryside. By Jeff Forret. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006. Pp. xiv, 269. $45.00, ISBN 978-0-8071-3145-9.)

In this fine study of the antebellum South, Jeff Forret takes aim at one of the seemingly unassailable verities of southern historiography: the "mutual hostility that characterized relations between slaves and poor whites" (p. 20). Cognizant of the challenge of studying two groups whose social position prevented them from generating rich evidentiary trails, Forret necessarily examines an array of sources and argues that "a complex relationship [existed] between slaves and poor whites, a curious mix of love and hate, equality and inequality" (p. 15). In claiming that "camaraderie" as well as conflict characterized these relations, he inevitably addresses a second major historiographic question: to what extent did poor whites challenge or support the slaveholders' regime (p. 19)? So, while the central questions shaping the book address interracial relations among the poor, the empirical and interpretive thrusts of...