There were many occasions when poor whites were "caught" supporting efforts of enslaved people to free themselves.
In return, blacks helped whites in need. One black runaway told of a slave woman who had received fifty lashes of the whip for giving food to a white neighbor who was poor and sick.
When the Brunswick canal was built in Georgia, the black slaves and white Irish workers were segregated, the excuse being that they would do violence against one another. That may well have been true, but Fanny Kemble, the famous actress and wife of a planter, wrote in her journal:
"But the Irish are not only quarrelers, and rioters, and fighters, and drinkers, and despisers of n_____s*—they are a passionate, impulsive, warm-hearted, generous people, much given to powerful indignations, which break out suddenly when not compelled to smoulder sullenly—pestilent sympathizers too, and with a sufficient dose of American atmospheric air in their lungs, properly mixed with a right proportion of ardent spirits, there is no saying but what they might actually take to sympathy with the slaves, and I leave you to judge of the possible consequences. You perceive, I am sure, that they can by no means be allowed to work together on the Brunswick Canal."
Excerpt From
A People's History of the United States
Howard Zinn
(*In the text quoted above, as a courtesy, I have suppressed the racial slur that appears in the original.)
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