| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Race Relations at the Margins: Slaves and Poor Whites in the Antebellum Southern Countryside. By Jeff Forret. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006. xiv, 269 pp. $45.00, ISBN 978-0-8071-3145-9.)
One of the challenges of studying groups of people such as antebellum "poor whites" is definition. The term was ill defined in the antebellum South, and, since then, "poor whites" have been even more prone to stereotyping and scholarly neglect than the "plain folk" white majority. Another challenge concerns historical sources. Poor whites were often illiterate and left few written records. They are, Jeff Forret argues, one of the last groups of antebellum southern whites to become "the subjects of legitimate scholarship" (p. 4).	1
Race Relations at the Margins explores the social relationships between poor whites and slaves in Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina, an area large enough to contain both agricultural and nonagricultural economies and a variety of southern subregions. Using primarily public records from the county, state, and national levels, the author skillfully teases out their stories. He defines most poor whites as owning neither land nor slaves, although some may have owned "a few paltry acres or another form of wealth, such as a grog shop" (p. 10). It was a fluid group. Poor whites in their teens and twenties could escape poverty and become small landowners, but those in their thirties and forties were often less fortunate.	. . .

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