That can't be possible. If you didn't work you didn't eat if you were white.
Well, poor whites could eat poorly.
"Olmstead was in fact deeply depressed by the squalor, ignorance, and social degredation which he found in large parts of the South. The great mass of Southern whites he described as ill-clothed, ill-fed, and uneducated. Talking to everyone as he jogged along the roads and put up at night at farmhouses, he found that most common people did not know the elementary facts of geography: they thought Virginia south of Carolina, and Indiana somewhere between Georgia and Texas; they believed New York, then a city of seven hundred thousand, a town in which Olmsted must know everybody and see southern visitor; they talked in 1856 of the recent annexation of Nebrasky, which they thought as large as the original thirteen states. Many of them read nothing and knew nothing outside outside the affairs of their locality.
He found their tables spread with coarse, ill-cooked food. He travelled almost the length of the South without finding a farmhouse which boasted of two sheets on a bed...The scattered homes of the large planters bespoke prosperity, and sometimes elegance; but the great majority of Southerners dwelt upon a level of poverty. Indeed, he declares in A Journey in the Back Country that he honestly believes that the average free negro in New York or New England lived in greater comfort than the average white man of the lower South...[Olmsted] was distressed by their ignorance, indigence, and helplesness. Intelligent representatives of the underpriviledged whites voluntarily told him that slavery laid a heavy incubus upon their folk. The sand-hillers of South Carolina, gaunt, cadaverous and listless, living in shanties on rice and milk, their women sometimes working on hand looms for sixteen cents a day; small subsistance-farmers on the Congaree superstititous and idle, their dress the coarsest cloth, their sustenance a porridge of cow-peas; the illiterate folk of the frontier regions of Louisiana and Arkansas, the wretched starvelings and wild men of the pine woods in Georgia, the backward hillbillies of north Alabama -- these were all victims of slavery. He noted that white artisans were constantly made to feel to feel themselves engaged in a degrading competition with slave labor. He commented upon the lack of educational facilities for the poor in most slave areas--holding communities."
-- from "The Emergence of Lincoln Vol. 1" p. 207-210 by Allan Nevins
Walt