Those “who have no interest in the soil”: Poor Southern White People and Property in Antislavery Arguments for Homesteading

Abstract In the US, scholars have long argued that white people across class lines share a taken for granted interest in property. Yet in the antebellum period, as land was concentrated in the hands of a few slaveholders, southern nonslaveholding white people were largely unable to partake in land ownership. Only after the Civil War did many more white people benefit from “whiteness as property,“ in part through homesteading (free land), a policy strongly pushed for by antislavery elites – who argued for, in addition to freedom from slavery, white people’s inherent interests in property. How do we explain what changed, and the specific ideology – that white people have an interest in property – which helped shape this policy? Using the case of the Homestead Act of 1862, I argue that antislavery elites articulated a property interest in whiteness. The Homestead Act is an example of struggles to articulate poor southern white peoples’s ideal relationship to landed property, according to antislavery conceptions of middle-class farming and agrarian capitalism. I show articulation processes, as antislavery figures responded to white poverty in the South, resulting in arguments for free land for white people. I also show a shift in rhetoric among antislavery Republicans in the late 1850s and early 1860s, in which they expanded their framing of homesteading to include an emphasis on bringing poor white people into modernity and civilization compatible with the politics of scientific agriculture. This article complicates accounts of whiteness as property by tracing historically specific ideologies of whiteness and land in the south in the antebellum period.