“So Cheapened the White Man’s Labor”: Conflict Between Black and White Workers

Background: Far from viewing Black workers as allies, most southern white workers saw them as competitors and hoped to exclude them from their trades. In this 1838 open letter to a local newspaper, a white Georgia artisan complains about whites hiring cheaper enslaved tradesmen over white men struggling for economic survival. He also lays out his case for the superiority of white tradesmen and their role in maintaining the slave system.

Gentlemen:

 . . . I am aware that most of you have [such a] strong antipathy to encouraging the masonry and carpentry trades of your poor white brothers, that your predilections for giving employment in your line of business to ebony workers have either so cheapened the white man’s labor, or expatriated hence with but a few solitary exceptions, all the white masons and carpenters of this town.

The white man is the only real, legal, moral, and civil proprietor of this country and state. . . . By white men alone was this continent discovered; by the prowess of white men alone (though not always properly or humanely exercised), were the fierce and active Indians driven occidentally: and if swarms and hordes of infuriated red men pour down from the Northwest, like the wintry blast thereof, the white men alone, aye, those to whom you decline to give money for bread and clothes, for their famishing families . . . would bare their breasts to the keen and whizzing shafts of the savage crusaders—defending negroes too in the bargain, for if left to themselves without our aid, the Indians would or can sweep the negroes hence, “as dewdrops are shaken from the lion’s mane.”

The right, then, gentlemen, you will no doubt candidly admit, of the white man to employment in preference to negroes, who must defer to us since they live well enough on plantations, cannot be considered impeachable by contractors. . . . As masters of the polls in a majority, carrying all before them, I am surprised the poor do not elect faithful members to the Legislature, who will make it penal to prefer negro mechanic labor to white men’s. . . . 

Yours respectfully,

J. J. Flournoy

Source: Athens (Georgia) Southern Banner, January 13, 1838.