" meaningful, too, that the recently established Freedmen’s Bureau paired impoverished whites and freed people not as cutthroat adversaries, but as the worthy poor. From its inception in 1865, shortly before Lincoln’s assassination, the bureau was specifically empowered to extend relief to “all refugees, and all freedmen,” black and white. "

― Nancy Isenberg , White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America