I take exception to your “rednecks versus elitist” characterization. Its more like intelligent, productive, educated white people versus low IQ, slovenly, filthy, inbred ignorant white people.
Nor do I think it's fair to use the term "redneck" as interchangeable with "low IQ, slovenly, filthy, inbred ignorant white people." The term originated in Scotland as a taunt by Anglicans to refer to Presbyterian ministers, who wore a red collar with their black robes. it migrated here with the Scots-Irish peoples in the early 1800s and became generalized to Scots-Irish as a group by the self-regarding English planter aristocracy. Only a very small percentage of whites actually owned slaves and the cotton and tobacco industries that used slave labor. Most of the whites were small farmers, sharecroppers and merchants.
After the Civil War, the entire Confederacy was occupied (its only powerful industries taken over by northern owners, sucking profits out) by Northern political and economic powers to keep it from "rising" again to the point of secession, throwing the white farmers into a poverty scarcely distinguishable from their free black neighbors, that was carried forward nearly a century until the aftermath of WWII. Characterizing these white victims of northern aggression as lazy, slovenly, et cetera, when they were primarily concerned with self-sufficiency was part of the progressive northern elites' demonization of their enemy. This was one of the great losses of Lincoln's death: it is widely speculated that he would have been far kinder to the common man after the Civil War than was Grant or the other architects of Reconstruction.
None of this is a justification for slavery or Jim Crow. it's just that the Scots-Irish working poor whites of the south went from being used by English Virginia planter elites to being used by the Army of the Confederacy to being used by the North, with barely a moment to spare. They are only since the past three decades able to rebuild their economies around Atlanta, Richmond, Research Triangle and a few other spots.
Just one more historical note: the term "cracker" originated in Irish and Scots Gaelic as the word "craik", which means to talk or shoot the breeze, or the act of being a big talker. This word, too, migrated in the early 1800s and was transmogrified into "cracker" as a way to taunt those who also spoke Gaelic as opposed to the elites' higher-regarded English. You can still hear this word in Ireland and Scotland today -- I just heard it recently in a pub scene in the 1990s in the Irish soap opera Ballykissangel which is often on PBS.