What do you mean more liked ? lol it ' s not about who likes them , it ' s about who has access to material resources . Would the tiny planter class have been pissed ? Sure , but fuck them . They should have mostly been tried for treason anyway . Your mistake is assuming that poor whites were automatically good to dislike black people the way they do today . But the fact that this is our reality today is a legacy of the mishandling of Reconstruction not the other way around . Poor whites would have been benefitted from a land redistribution too . Even in the actual Reconstruction era , working class , transracial solidarity movements were starting to be built , but they were laid low when the plantocracy was returned to power after federal troops withdrew .