> My pitiful memory of US history east of the Mississippi: weren't the
> Appalachians settled by a a lot of "po' white trash," teeming masses from
> the British Isles who were not terribly wealthy or enlightened when they
> arrived and did not automatically upgrade themselves on this side of the
> pond? As I recall they came in pretty opressed by the British class system
> and one key basis for feeling human about themselves was being better'n
> those n-words.
>
> Okay , I KNOW the picture is more complicated than that, but....
>
> DC
the term white trash was initially used by blacks to describe whites, originating, IIRC, in Baltimore. It was picked up by whites to hurl, later, at other whites. It was situated in middle and upper class whites' fear of miscengention. Ah, yes, Matt Wray has an online essay:
The term white trash dates back not to the 1950s but to the 1820s. It arises not in Mississippi or Alabama, but in and around Baltimore, Maryland. And best guess is that it was invented not by whites, but by African Americans. As a term of abuse, white trash was used by blacks—both free and enslaved—to disparage local poor whites. Some of these poor whites would have been newly arrived Irish immigrants, others semiskilled workers drawn to Baltimore and Washington, D.C. in the postrevolutionary building boom, and others still may have been white servants, waged or indentured, working in the homes and estates of area elites. The term registered contempt and disgust, as it does today, and suggests sharp hostilities between social groups who were essentially competing for the same resources—the same jobs, the same opportunities, and even the same marriage partners.
While white trash is likely to have originated in African American slang, it was middle-class and elite whites who found the term most compelling and useful and they who, ultimately, made it part of popular American speech.
Over the next forty years, the term began to appear more and more frequently in print. In 1854 white trash appeared in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s bestselling Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin—her defense of the abolitionist play that had garnered her international fame. Stowe devoted an entire chapter to “Poor White Trash,” explaining that the slave system produced “not only heathenish, degraded, miserable slaves, but it produces a class of white people who are, by universal admission, more heathenish, degraded, and miserable.” The degradation was due, Stowe argued, in part because plantation slavery locked up productive soil in the hands of a few large planters, leaving ordinary whites to struggle for subsistence. But there were other factors as well: “Without schools or churches, these miserable families grow up heathen on a Christian soil, in idleness, vice, dirt, and discomfort of all sorts. They are the pest of the neighborhood, the scoff and contempt or pity even of the slaves. The expressive phrase, so common in the mouths of the negroes, of ’poor white trash,’ says all for this luckless race of beings that can be said.”
Southern secessionists and proslavery apologists countered that it wasn’t the lack of access to good farm land, nor the lack of compulsory education, nor the lack of religious influence that made poor white trash so worthy of the contempt heaped upon them. In their view, the depravity of white trash had its source in the “tainted blood” that ran through their veins. As one educated southerner averred on the eve of the Civil War in 1860, “every where, North and South, in Maine or Texas, in Virginia or New-York, they are one and the same; and have undoubtedly had one and the same origin, namely, the poor-houses and prison-cells of Great Britain. Hence we again affirm that there is a great deal more in blood than people in the United States are generally inclined to believe.” That is, the cause of poor white depravity was not attributable to any economic or social system—it was to be found in their inherited traits.
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http://nsrc.sfsu.edu/MagArticle.cfm?Article=735
The essay is a condensed version of Wray's book, Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness
http://www.amazon.com/Not-Quite-White-Boundaries-Whiteness/dp/0822338734