The documentary record tells a very different story, however. When White Congressman David Wilmot authored the Wilmot Proviso to keep Black slaves out of the American West he did so, he said, to preserve that vast expanse of territory for "the sons of toil, my own race and color."
This is precisely what most White people in America were, "sons of toil," performing backbreaking labor such as few of us today can envision. They had no paternalistic welfare system; no Freedman's Bureau to coo sweet platitudes to them; no army of bleeding hearts to worry over their hardships. These Whites were the expendable frontline soldiers in the expansion of the American frontier. They won the country, felled the trees, cleared and planted the land