Burton K Wheeler
Moderator
This is interesting but I'm not sure I understand it. Could you expand on this?
Sure. Specifically, in the cities I named, slaves were too expensive to do labor like ditch digging. That work was done by large groups of Irish immigrants, mostly single men. Southerners were really bothered by seeing white men doing heavy labor while black slaves in the cities, a lot of whom were skilled craftsman, were superficially higher on the social ladder. The habits of the Irish also bothered Southerners, who thought they were giving a bad impression of white people to the black population. They also had no compunctions about mixing with black people socially.