The isolation of these Poor Whites was one if the greatest misfortunes of ante-bellum times: it was not wholly caused by slavery, but was aggravated because the slave owner considered himself in a class apart from the man who had nothing but a poor little farm. "Joyce," said a Northern officer to a Poor White in Kentucky forty years ago, "what do you think this war is about?" "I reckon that you'uns has come down to take the niggers away from we'uns." "Joyce, did you ever own a nigger?" "No." "Any of your family ever own a nigger?" "No, sir." "Did you ever expect to own a nigger?" "I reckon not." "Which did the people that did own niggers like best, you or the nigger?" "Well, 'twas this away. If a planter came along and met a nigger, he'd say, 'Howdy, Pomp! How's the old massa, and how's the young massa, and how's the old missus, and how's the young missus?' But if he met me he'd say, 'Hullo, Joyce, is that you?'" But Joyce and his kind went into the Confederate army of which they furnished most of the rank and file, and followed Marse Robert uncomplainingly to the bitter end; and they had a good sound, logical reason for fighting what was apparently the quarrel of their planter neighbor. A white man was always a white man, and as long as slavery endured, the poorest and most ignorant of the white race could always feel that he had something to look down upon, that he belonged to the lords of the soil. In the war he was blindly and unconsciously fighting for the caste of white men, and could not be brought to realize that slavery helped to keep him where he was, without education for his children, without opportunities for employment, without that ambition for white paint and green blinds which has done so much to raise the Northern settler. Though a voter, and a possible candidate for office, he was accustomed to accept the candidates set up by the slave-holding aristocracy. Stump speakers flattered him and Fourth-of-July orators explained to him the blessings of a republican government. The Poor White, in his lowest days, had a right to feel that he was a political person of consequence, for did he not furnish three presidents of the United States? Jackson was born a Poor White, and had some of the objectionable and most of the attractive qualities of those people; Andrew Johnson came from the upper Valley of the Tennessee; Abraham Lincoln was a Poor White, the son of a shiftless Kentucky farmer. Materially the Poor Whites contributed little to the community, except by clearing the land, and they took care that that process should not go uncomfortably far.