White Trash

by Nancy Isenberg

  It was something more than a figure of speech to describe the lovely Indian princess Pocahontas, the mother of America, as a child of nature who had married into the English community. A common trope had it that English explorers “married” the land they discovered. Marriage implied custodial authority, a sovereign right to a corner of the earth. In dedicating a book to Sir Walter Raleigh in 1587, Hakluyt the younger reminded his patron of the “sweet embraces” of Virginia, “that fairest of nymphs,” whom the queen had conferred upon him as his bride. The land patent was thus a marriage contract.55

  Visual images likewise celebrated the fecundity of the land. In Flemish artist Jan van der Straet’s classic drawing The Discovery of America (1575), exploration was metaphorically a sexual encounter. Depicting Amerigo Vespucci’s landing in the New World, the artist has the explorer standing erect, surrounded by ships and tools of navigation, while a plump, naked Indian woman lies languidly on a hammock before him, extending her hand. English writers took up the same potent theme, claiming that the feminine figure of North America was stretching out her hand (and land) to “England onelie,” her favored suitor.56

  The richest embellishment of New World fertility came from the pen of Thomas Morton, whose New English Canaan, or New Canaan, containing an abstract of New England (1637) offered humorous double entendres amid lush descriptions of the land. Historians are divided over what to make of the controversial Morton. Some reckon him a scoundrel and libertine, while others regard him as a populist critic of Governor John Winthrop and the Puritan establishment.57

  He arrived in 1624, with thirty servants in tow, and set himself up on a pastoral manorial estate. From there he established an outpost to trade in furs with Native tribes. He served as a lawyer in defense of a royal patent pursued by other non-Puritan investors to the northern part of New England. But he also battled Winthrop’s Puritans, was arrested three times, had his goods confiscated and his house burned down. He was banished from the colony twice, writing New English Canaan while in exile in England, where he worked (unsuccessfully) at getting the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s patent revoked.58

  His dislike of the Puritans is manifest in his observations about their use of the land. They were no better than “moles,” he wrote, blindly digging into the earth without appreciating its natural pleasures. It bothered him that the Puritans had no real interest in the Native people beyond converting them. He dismissed Winthrop and his followers as “effeminate”—as bad husbands of the land. He satirized the Puritans in New English Canaan as sexually impotent second husbands to a widowed land, which Morton (who had married a widow himself) and his business associates could rescue. They were ready to move in on the incompetent Puritans—strutting nearby, attractive and decidedly more virile lovers waiting in the wings.

  Morton’s New England landscape contained “ripe grapes” supported by “lusty trees,” “dainty fine round rising hillocks,” and luscious streams that made “so sweet a murmuring noise to hear as would ever lull the senses with delightful sleep.” He connected fertility to pleasure in the prevailing medical context: women, it was said, were more likely to conceive if they experienced sexual satisfaction. Morton was so consumed with the fertility of the physical environment that he marveled at the apparent ease with which Indian women became pregnant. The region’s animals were especially generative too, with wild does bearing two or three fawns at a time. With fewer women and a shorter history, New England had produced more children than Virginia, at least according to Morton. He could not resist including in his New English Canaan the strange story of the “barren doe,” a single woman from Virginia who was unable to conceive a child until she traveled north.59

  As compelling as these passages are, Morton was actually stealing from earlier accounts. Ralph Hamor had written apocryphally in 1614 that in Virginia, lions, bears, and deer usually had three or four offspring at a time. This was the fulfillment of Hakluyt’s claim that Raleigh’s bride Virginia would “bring forth new and most abundant offspring.” Others would repeat similar claims. In A New Voyage to Carolina (1709), John Lawson contended that “women long married without children in other places, have removed to Carolina and become joyful mothers.” They had an “easy Travail in their child-bearing, in which they are so happy, as seldom miscarry.” The argument went that happy, healthy European women moved closer to nature in America. Like deer in the wild, women in the New World became instinctive, docile breeders.60

  Breeding had a place in more than one market. In Virginia and elsewhere in the Chesapeake region in the early seventeenth century, a gender imbalance of six to one among indentured servants gave women arriving from England an edge in the marriage exchange. Writing of Maryland in 1660, former indentured servant George Alsop claimed that women just off the boat found a host of men fighting for their attention. Females could pick and choose: even servants had a shot at marrying a well-heeled planter. Alsop called such unions “copulative marriage,” through which women sold their breeding capacity to wealthy husbands. In language that was decidedly uninhibited, he wrote that women went to “market with their virginity.” Another promoter, writing about Carolina, went so far as to say that a woman could find a husband in America no matter what she looked like. If, newly arrived, she appeared “Civil” and was “under 50 years of Age,” some man would purchase her for his wife.61

  “Copulative marriage” was one option, remarriage another. Men of Jamestown found they could increase their acreage and add to the sum of laborers by marrying a widow whose husband had bequeathed land to her. In the scramble to get land and laborers during the tobacco boom, members of the council devised various means to get their hands on land—and not always ethically. One man married a woman because her first husband shared the last name of a wealthier dead man. He scammed the system by confusing the two names in order to get title to the more desirable property. Widows were obvious conduits of wealth and land, and with high mortality rates prevailing throughout the seventeenth century, those who survived rampant disease would likely have married two or three times.62

  Battles over class interests, land, and widows came naturally to Virginians, and at times grew quite deadly. Bacon’s Rebellion of 1676 was one of the greatest conflicts the colony witnessed. It pitted a stubborn governor, William Berkeley, against Nathaniel Bacon, a recent immigrant of some means but also of frustrated ambition. Historians still debate the causes of the crisis and its ultimate meaning, but there is ample evidence to show that the participants made it about class warfare. Bacon wanted Berkeley to launch attacks on a tribe of Indians who ostensibly threatened the more socially vulnerable people of Virginia’s frontier, and he made himself a leader of the disaffected. A power struggle ensued.

  To the governor in Jamestown, only the meanest of men, those who had recently “crept” out of indentured servitude, could find common cause with the rebels. Berkeley dismissed Bacon as an upstart and a demagogue. Other prominent supporters of the governor called the rebels “ye scum of the country” and—here is where the language gets especially evocative—“offscourings” of society. “Offscourings” (human fecal waste) was one of the most common terms of derision for indentured servants and England’s wandering vagrants. Meanwhile, landholders who sided with Bacon were summarily dismissed as “Idle” men, whose “debauchery” and “ill husbandry” had led them into debt. The rebels were directly compared to swine rooting around in the muck.63

  Slaves and servants joined Bacon’s force too, being promised their freedom after the expected showdown with Berkeley. Nothing like this had occurred in Virginia before. Slavery had been slow to take hold, with only around 150 slaves counted in 1640, and barely 1,000 out of a total population of 26,000 in 1670. Massachusetts and English possessions in the Caribbean, not Virginia, were the first colonies to codify slave law. By the time of Bacon’s Rebellion, there were some 6,000 servants in the southern colony, and roughly one-third of all freeholders, many of them for
mer indentured servants, were barely scraping by, weighed down by debts and unfair taxes. Indeed, Governor Berkeley had thought even before Bacon’s challenge that a prospective foreign invasion or large-scale attack by Indians would automatically devolve into class warfare. The “Poor Endebted Discontented and Armed” would, he wrote, use the opportunity to “plunder the Country” and seize the property of the elite planters.64

  The struggle also was concerned as well with the status of friendly Indians residing in the sprawling colony. Bacon claimed that Berkeley and the men around him were protecting their own lucrative trade with preferred tribes instead of saving frontier settlers from raids and reprisals. Taxing colonists for forts made of mud were not only useless, the rebels held, but were yet another means for Berkeley’s “Juggling Parasites” in the Assembly to increase taxes without offering meaningful protection in return. Virginians living farther from the capital (and coast) felt they were not reaping the same advantages from the land that the wealthier planters in older parts of the colony were. As one drifted west from the seat of power, class identity felt less secure.65

  It is likely that a fair number among Bacon’s following wanted to push the Indians off desirable lands, or felt an impulse to lash out against them in retaliation for recent frontier attacks. There is little doubt that a sizable number of Bacon’s men were frustrated by declining tobacco prices amid an economic downturn that made it more difficult to acquire good land. Valuable acreage was hoarded by those whom one contemporary called the “Land lopers,” who bought up (or lopped off) large tracts without actually settling them. The “lopers” had inside connections to the governor. Discontent was unavoidable when men were unable to support their families on the little land they had.66

  The problems faced in 1676 were not new, nor would they ever disappear from the American vocabulary of class. Distance from power intensified feelings of vulnerability or loss. Bacon died of dysentery the same year the rebellion began, and Berkeley was gratified to learn that his adversary met his maker covered in lice—a cruel commentary on the filth and disease that attached to an enemy of the ruling class. It is worth repeating that although Bacon himself was from an elite family, he consorted with the dregs of society; his lice-covered body proved he had become one of them. Some of his followers were executed, while others died in prison. Berkeley did not escape untarnished either. He was escorted by troops to England to face an official inquiry. He died in London, outlasting Bacon by only eight months.67

  Nor was the power struggle confined to strong-willed men. The wives of the mutineers also assumed a prominent role in the rebellion. Elizabeth Bacon defended her husband’s actions in a letter to her sister-in-law in England, hoping to build a metropolitan defense for his frontier cause. Because she came from a prominent family, her words had weight. Other women who vocally supported the resistance were heard as well. The “news wives” told everyone within their circle that the governor planned to take everything they owned (down to their last cow or pig) if they failed to pay a new round of taxes. Beyond spreading seditious rumors of this kind, women assumed a symbolic role in the conflict. At one point, Bacon rounded up the wives of Berkeley supporters—his phalanx of “white aprons”—to guard his men while they dug trenches outside the fortified capital of Jamestown. The women were meant to represent a neutral zone (white aprons standing in for a white flag, the sign of truce). They were too valuable a resource for either side to waste.68

  One of the most dramatic moments in the trial of the rebels involved Lydia Chisman. In a scene that resembled Pocahontas’s dramatic gesture (whether or not true) to save John Smith, Chisman offered up her own life for that of her husband, confessing that she had urged him to defy the governor. Her plea fell on deaf ears, and her husband, who was probably tortured, died in prison. While Berkeley damned Chisman as a whore, the female rebels were largely able to avoid the most severe penalties. In English law, the wife and children of a traitor were subject to an attainder in blood—the loss of all property and titles. But widows Bacon and Chisman were permitted to regain their estates. Both remarried, Bacon twice and Chisman once.69

  How could such a catastrophe occur and yet the women evade punishment? Though Governor Berkeley had hoped to confiscate as much property as he could from the rebels, his reckless pursuit of vengeance led to his downfall. The royal commissioners, their authority reinforced by the ships and troops sent to quell the rebellion, quickly turned against the governor. They insisted that the king’s pardon was universal, they overturned many of Berkeley’s confiscations, and they called for his removal. To preserve the colony, peace and justice had to be restored. One of the ways to restore order was to show mercy to rebellious wives.70

  These facts matter. Keeping the land and widows in circulation was more important to the royal commissioners than impoverishing unrepentant women. In 1690, English playwright Aphra Behn wrote a comedy based on Bacon’s Rebellion, aptly titled The Widow Ranter. The plot centers on a lowborn, promiscuous, cross-dressing, tobacco-smoking widow (she wrongly thinks smoking is a sign of good breeding) who twice marries above her station. Despite her uncouth ways, she knows her worth. As she tells a newcomer to the colony, “We rich Widdows are the best Commodity this Country affords.”71

  Fertility was greatly prized in colonial America. Good male custodians were needed to husband the land’s wealth. Widows were expected to quickly remarry, so that their land did not go to waste. Some women used this practice to their advantage. Lady Frances Culpeper Stevens Berkeley Ludwell (1634–95) married three colonial governors, including William Berkeley. She bore no children and was consequently able to keep a tight rein on the proceeds of the estates she inherited. She husbanded the land instead of allowing her trio of husbands to control her. Nevertheless, Lady Berkeley was a highly controversial figure during Bacon’s Rebellion, blamed for egging on her husband and behaving as a treacherous Jezebel by sexually manipulating the much older man.72

  Husbanding fertile women remained central to colonial concepts of class and property. This dictate became even more fixed as Virginians began to regulate the offspring of slave women. In a law passed in 1662, a slave was defined not only by place of origin, or as a heathen, but also for being born to an enslaved woman. In the wording of the statute, a law without any British precedent, “condition of the mother” determined whether a child was slave or free. It was Roman law that provided the basis for treating slave children as the property of masters; the English law of bastardy served as a model for children following the condition of the mother. It was the case that a slave followed the condition of the mother as far back as Saint Thomas Aquinas. The analogy Aquinas used associated the womb with the land: if a man visited the island of another man, and sowed his seed in another man’s land, the owner still had a right to the produce. The 1662 Virginia law could as easily have been based on a breeder’s model: the calves of the cow were the property of the owner, even if the male bull belonged to someone else.73

  Fertility played an equally significant role in defining women’s and men’s places in society. A woman’s breeding capacity was a calculable natural resource meant to be exploited and a commodity exchanged in marriage. For slave women, fertile capacity made the womb an article of commerce and slave children chattel—movable property, like cattle. (The word “chattel” comes from the same Latin root as “cattle.”) Slave children were actually listed in the wills of planters as “breedings,” and a slave woman’s potential to breed was denoted as “future increase,” a term that applied to livestock as well.74

  At the opening of the century of settlement, English philosopher Francis Bacon noted in 1605 that wives were for “generation, fruit, and comfort.” To compare a woman’s body to arable land that produced fruit made perfect sense to his readers. The act of propagation and issue encompassed children as much as calves, alike valued as the generation of good stock. Women and land were for the use and benefit of man.75

 
Land held power because of its extent, potential for settlement, and future increase. Knowing how to master the land’s fruitfulness was the true definition of class power. It is important that we understand Bacon’s Rebellion for what it revealed: the most promising land was never equally available to all. The “Parasites” who encircled Governor Berkeley held a decided advantage. Inherited station was mediated by political connections or the good fortune of marrying into a profitable inheritance. By 1700, indentured servants no longer had much of a chance to own land. They had to move elsewhere or become tenants. The royal surveyors made sure that large planters had first bids on new, undeveloped land, and so the larger tracts were increasingly concentrated in fewer hands. Then, as more shipments of slaves arrived in the colony, these too were monopolized by the major landholding families.76

  For all their talk of loving the land, Virginians were less skilled in the art of husbandry than their English counterparts. Few ploughs were used in seventeenth-century Virginia. The simple hoe was the principal tool in the raising of tobacco, an implement that demanded considerable human labor. The majority of those who landed on American shores did not live long enough to own land, let alone to master it. Slavery was thus a logical outgrowth of the colonial class system imagined by Hakluyt. It emerged from three interrelated phenomena: harsh labor conditions, the treatment of indentures as commodities, and, most of all, the deliberate choice to breed children so that they should become an exploitable pool of workers.

  Waste men and waste women (and especially waste children, the adolescent boys who comprised a majority of the indentured servants) were an expendable class of laborers who made colonization possible. The so-called wasteland of colonial America might have had the makings of a New Canaan. Instead, waste people wasted away, fertilizing the soil with their labor while finding it impossible to harvest any social mobility.