Slavery functioned as the formal mechanism maintaining white racial hierarchy even for poor whites.

Evidence

Violent insurrection, however, was not the only fear seizing the minds of many white Southerners in the aftermath of the Civil War. White people of all classes and backgrounds feared permanent economic ruin, a disordered social system, and the loss of white privilege. Without the stolen labor of formerly enslaved people, the region’s economy swiftly collapsed, and without the institution of slavery, there was no longer a formal mechanism for maintaining racial hierarchy and preventing “amalgamation” with a group of people considered intrinsically inferior and vile. Plantation owners had benefited the most from the institution of slavery, yet the collapse of the racial order was a bitter pill for poor white people as well. In the antebellum South, the lowliest white person at least possessed his or her white skin—a badge of superiority over the most skilled enslaved or prosperous free Black person. Poor white people feared that the abolition of slavery would erase the line that separated them from the most abused and despised people on earth. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 382

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the earlier reframing thesis that slavery is foundational, and to the ‘badge of superiority’ idea paralleling the poor-white solidarity dynamics across scholarship on race and class. — connects to: Irish absorption into whiteness helped sustain slavery rather than vice versa. — Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White, 261
• DEFINE: Defines the ‘foundational vs peripheral’ question in concrete terms: slavery was the formal racial-hierarchy mechanism, so its abolition removed a structural pillar, not just an economic one.