“Some upcountry non-slaveholding whites had already become disillusioned fighting the slaveholders’ war.
“Alexander H. Jones of eastern North Carolina helped organize the 10,000-man Heroes of America, which laid an ‘underground railroad’ for White Unionists in Confederate territory to escape.
“‘The fact is,’ Jones wrote in a secret antiracist circular referring to the rich planters, that ‘these bombastic, highfalutin aristocratic fools have been in the habit of driving negroes and poor helpless white people until they think…. that they themselves are superior….”
— From “Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America” by Ibram X. Kendi (2016)