The instances where poor whites helped slaves were not frequent, but sufficient to show the need for setting one group against the other. Genovese says:
"The slaveholders . . . suspected that non-slaveholders would encourage slave disobedience and even rebellion, not so much out of sympathy for the blacks as out of hatred for the rich planters and resentment of their own poverty. White men sometimes were linked to slave insurrectionary plots, and each such incident rekindled fears."
This helps explain the stern police measures against whites who fraternized with blacks.
Excerpt From
A People's History of the United States
Howard Zinn
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