Rensselaer Republican, Volume 19, Number 35, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 5 May 1887 — The White Man of the New South. [ARTICLE]

The White Man of the New South.

Indeed, it is the white man of the South more than the black that has been freed by the civil war; and the greatest blessing which has thus far resulted to the South from the emancipation of the Southern slaves is its effect upon the white man of that region in transforming from him a dependent idler, or “gentleman of leisure,” supported by his slaves, into an independent, self-reliant worker.' We speak of the typical, representative Southern white man, not of all classes, for there were working white men in the old South, and there are idle white men in the new. But the white man of the new South is pie eminently a worker as compared with the white man of the old South, who, if not an idler, was at least a man of multitudinous leisure. But Laving now been set free from that bondage to leisure and that contempt of labor which is inseparable from slaveholding, the representative of that region has‘become a new man, and has entered upon a new probation among the industrious races of the earth. If the old South had a contempt for the worker, the new South has a greater contempt for the do-nothing and the idler—for the man who does no honest work, it matters not how white his skin or how full his exchequer. The “gentleman idjer” has lost caste in the South; he is an institution of the past. Century.