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
From Alexis de Tocqueville Democracy in America
Another very remarkable thing is Ohio is this: Ohio is perhaps the State of the Union in which it is easiest to see, in a striking way and close up, the effects of slavery and of liberty on the social state of a people. The State of Ohio is separated from Kentucky just by one river; on either side of it the soil is equally fertile, and the situation equally favorable, and yet everything is different.Here a population devoured by feverish activity, trying every means to make its fortune; the population seems poor to look at, for they work with their hands, but that work is the source of riches. There is a people which makes others work for it and shows little compassion, a people without energy, mettle or the spirit of enterprise. On one side of the stream, work is honored and leads to all else, on the other it is despised as the mark of servitude. Those who are forced to work to live cross over into Ohio where they can make money without disgrace.
The population of Kentucky, which has been peopled for nearly a century, grows slowly. Ohio only joined the Confederation thirty years ago and has a million inhabitants. Within those thirty years Ohio has become the entrepot for the wealth that goes up and down the Mississippi; it has opened two canals and joined the Gulf of Mexico to the North Coast; meanwhile Kentucky, older and perhaps better placed, stood still.
These differences cannot be attributed to any other cause but slavery. It degrades the black population and enervates the white. Its fatal effects are recognized, and yet it is preserved and will be preserved for a long time more. Slavery threatens the future of those who maintain it, and it ruins the State; but it has become part of the habits and prejudices of the colonist, and his immediate interest is at war with the interest of his own future and the even stronger interest of the country.
So nothing shows more clearly than the comparison I have just made that human prosperity depends much more on the institutions and the will of man than on the external circumstances that surround him. Man is not made for slavery; that truth is perhaps even better proved by the master than by the slave.(Tocqueville, p. 285)