Poor white Southerners benefited more from emancipation’s policy gains than Black people did

Evidence

White Southerners of all economic classes, on the other hand, thanks in significant part to the progressive policies and laws Black people had championed, experienced substantial improvement in their lives even as they forced Black people back into quasi-slavery. As Waters McIntosh, who had been enslaved in South Carolina, lamented, “It was the poor white man who was freed by the war, not the Negroes.” — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 155

Categorization

• SHARE: The Waters McIntosh quote is a devastating single line worth sending to any historian friend working on Reconstruction.