A HINDERING HAND SUPPLEMENTARY TO THE HINDERED HAND. [Illustration] _A Review of the Anti-Negro Crusade of Mr. Thomas Dixon, Jr._ * * * * * A HINDERING HAND. THE POOR WHITE AND THE NEGRO. From the door of a squalid home, situated mayhaps upon a somewhat decent spot in a marsh or upon the very poorest of soil, the poor white man of the South, prior to his emancipation by the Civil War, looked out upon a world whose honors and emoluments cast no favoring glances in his direction. Between the poor white and his every earthly hope stood the Negro slave. As his thoughts now and then stole upward toward the higher social circles, he realized that the absence of slave quarters from his home entailed his absence from those upper realms. If in the marts of toil he offered the labor of his hands, he felt his cheeks tingling from the consciousness that others regarded him as being upon a level with slaves; and at the best the market for his labor was very limited, for the fatted slave stood in his way. So utterly forlorn was the condition of the poor white that the enslaved Negro felt justified in meeting his protruding claim of racial superiority with contemptuous scorn. In the very nature of things the strongest sort of repulsion developed between this class of whites and the Negro slaves. The work, therefore, of overseeing and driving the slaves on the plantations of the more wealthy whites, fitted the habitual mood of the poor white exactly. No form of service was more congenial to him than that of whipping intractable Negroes for their masters. It thus came to pass that the poor white man registered it as his first duty to wreak vengeance upon this unbowing, scornful Negro standing between him and all that was dear to his heart. This feeling of hostility was handed over from father to son, from generation to generation, until the very social atmosphere was charged with this bitter feeling. When the Civil War came this neglected and despised class suddenly became important and furnished its quota of soldiers and commanders. Nathan Bedford Forrest hailed from this class, and as a result the American people have on their annals Fort Pillow and its savage-like massacre. When the war was over, the poor white class began to bestir itself in civil life, and from that class the nation derived the Hon. Benjamin R. Tillman, of South Carolina.