White Trash

by Nancy Isenberg

  CHAPTER TWO

  John Locke’s Lubberland

  The Settlements of Carolina and Georgia

  Surely there is no place in the World where the Inhabitants live with less Labour than in N[orth] Carolina. It approaches nearer to the Description of Lubberland than any other, by the great felicity of the Climate, the easiness of raising Provisions, and the Slothfulness of the People.

  —William Byrd II, “History of the Dividing Line” (1728)

  When Americans think of the renowned English Enlightenment thinker John Locke, what comes to mind is how Thomas Jefferson tacitly borrowed his words and ideas for the Declaration of Independence. Locke’s well-known phrase “Life, Liberty and Estate” was transformed by the Virginian into “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Locke was the must-read of every educated man, woman, and child in the British American colonies. Called the “great and glorious asserter of natural Rights and Liberties of Mankind,” he was responsible for more than the Two Treatises of Government (1689), which became the playbook of American Revolutionaries. Most important for our present consideration, he authored the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina (1669), which granted that “every Freeman in Carolina shall have ABSOLUTE POWER AND AUTHORITY over his Negro Slaves.” As one of his loudest critics exclaimed in 1776, “Such was the language of the humane Mr. Locke!” Nor was this surprising. For Locke was a founding member and third-largest stockholder of the Royal African Company, which secured a monopoly over the British slave trade. His relationship to Carolinian slavery was more than incidental.1

  In 1663, King Charles II of England issued a colonial charter to eight men, whom he named the “absolute Lords and proprietors” of Carolina. They were given extensive powers to fortify, settle, and govern the colony. Two years later, the first surveyor sized up the northeastern part of the colony, Albemarle County, named after one of the proprietors, George Monck, Duke of Albemarle. But it would take another powerful proprietor, Lord Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury, to fashion a more recognizable political design of his “darling” Carolina.2

  Shaftesbury held a powerful position in London as head of the Council of Trade and Foreign Plantations, and he encouraged Locke to join him in the colonial venture. Through Shaftesbury, then, Locke secured the post of secretary of the Council of Trade, and he became the private secretary of the Lords Proprietors, which obliged him to open a correspondence with agents in Carolina and to forward instructions to them. Though he never set foot on American soil, Locke was given the concocted title of “Landgrave,” and forty-eight thousand acres of Carolina land was conferred on him for his services. With his intimate knowledge of the colony and his wide reading on the New World generally, Locke undoubtedly had a decisive hand in drafting the inherently illiberal Fundamental Constitutions.3

  The Fundamental Constitutions did more than endorse slavery. It was a manifesto promoting a semifeudalistic and wholly aristocratic society. Much ink was spilled in devising a colonial kingdom that conferred favor upon titled elites and manor lords. It was on the basis of a fixed class hierarchy that the precious commodity of land was allocated. Each new county was divided into sections: one-fifth of the land was automatically reserved for proprietors, another fifth for the colonial nobility, and three-fifths for untitled manor lords and freeholders.4

  The eight proprietors comprised a supreme ruling body of the Palatine Court, which had an absolute veto over all laws. Governing powers were left in the hands of the Grand Council, run by the local nobility and the proprietors, and it was this body that had sole authority for proposing legislation. A top-heavy colonial parliament consisted of proprietors or their deputies, all of the hereditary nobility of the colony, and one freeholder from each precinct. The constitution made clear that power rested at the top and that every effort had been made to “avoid erecting a numerous democracy.”5

  Class structure preoccupied Locke the constitutionalist. He endowed the nobility of the New World with such unusual titles as landgraves and caciques. The first of these was derived from the German word for prince; the latter was Spanish for an American Indian chieftain. Both described a hereditary peerage separate from the English system, and an imperial shadow elite whose power rested in colonial estates or through commercial trade. A court of heraldry was added to this strange brew: in overseeing marriages and maintaining pedigree, it provided further evidence of the intention to fix (and police) class identity. Pretentious institutions such as these hardly suited the swampy backwater of Carolina, but in the desire to impose order on an unsettled land, every detail mattered—down to assigning overblown names to ambitious men in the most rustic outpost of the British Empire.6

  Yet even the faux nobility was not as strange as another feature of the Locke-endorsed Constitutions. That dubious honor belongs to the nobility and manor lord’s unique servant class, ranked above slaves but below freemen. These were the “Leet-men,” who were encouraged to marry and have children but were tied to the land and to their lord. They could be leased and hired out to others, but they could not leave their lord’s service. Theirs, too, was a hereditary station: “All the children of Leet-men shall be Leet-men, so to all generations,” the Constitutions stated. The heirs of estates inherited not just land, buildings, and belongings, but the hapless Leet-men as well.7

  More than some anachronistic remnant of the feudal age, Leet-men represented Locke’s awkward solution to rural poverty. Locke did not call them villains, though they possessed many of the attributes of serfs. He instead chose the word “Leet-men,” which in England at this time meant something very different: unemployed men entitled to poor relief. Locke, like many successful Britons, felt contempt for the vagrant poor in England. He disparaged them for their “idle and loose way of breeding up,” and their lack of morality and industry. There were poor families already in Carolina, as Locke knew, who stood in the way of the colony’s growth and collective wealth. In other words, Locke’s Leet-men would not be charity cases, pitied or despised, but a permanent and potentially productive peasant class—yet definitely an underclass.8

  But did Leet-men ever exist? Shaftesbury’s Carolina plantation, which was run by his agent, had slaves, indentured servants, and Leet-men of a sort. In 1674, the absent owner instructed his agent to hire laborers as “Leet-men,” emphasizing that by their concurrence to this arrangement he could retain rights to the workers’ “progeny.” In this way, Shaftesbury saw children as key to his hereditary class system—as did his colonial predecessors in Virginia and Massachusetts.9

  The Fundamental Constitutions was really a declaration of war against poor settlers. In the 1650s, even before King Charles had issued the Carolina charter, Virginia’s imperious governor, William Berkeley, had been selling land grants. The first surveyor reported that most of the Virginia émigrés in Carolina territory were not legitimate patent holders at all. They were poor squatters. The surveyor warned that the infant Carolina colony would founder if more “Rich men” were not recruited, that is, men who could build homes and run productive plantations. Landless trespassers (who were not servants) promised only widespread “leveling,” by which the surveyor meant a society shorn of desirable class divisions.10

  Locke agreed. Poor Virginians threatened to drag down the entire colony. Shaftesbury, too, believed that everything should be done to discourage “Lazy or debauched” men and their families from settling in Carolina. The proprietors definitely did not want a colony overrun with former indentured servants. They did not want Virginia’s refuse. In their grand scheme, Leet-men were intended to take the place of those who lived off the land without contributing to the coffers of the ruling elite. Serfs, in short, were better than those “lazy lubbers,” meaning stupid, clumsy oafs, the word that came to describe the vagrant poor of Carolina.11

  Locke’s invention of the Leet-men explains a lot. It enables us to piece together the curious history of North Carolina, to demonstrate why this col
ony lies at the heart of our white trash story. The difficult terrain that spanned the border with Virginia, plus the high numbers of poor squatters and inherently unstable government, eventually led Carolina to be divided into two colonies in 1712. South Carolinians adopted all the features of a traditional class hierarchy, fully embracing the institution of slavery, just as Locke did in the Fundamental Constitutions. The planter and merchant classes of South Carolina formed a highly incestuous community: wealth, slaves, and land were monopolized by a small ruling coterie. This self-satisfied oligarchy were the true inheritors of the old landgraves, carrying on the dynastic impulses of those who would create a pseudo-nobility of powerful families.12

  By 1700, we should note, slaves comprised half the population of the southern portion of the Carolina colony, an imbalance that widened to 72 percent by 1740. Beginning in 1714, a series of laws required that for every six slaves an owner purchased, he had to acquire one white servant. Lamenting that the “white population do not proportionally multiply,” South Carolina lawmakers had one more reason to wish that a corps of Leet-men and women had actually been formed. Encouraged to marry and multiply, tied to the land, they might have provided a racial and class barrier between the slaves and the landed elites.13

  North Carolina, which came to be known as “Poor Carolina,” went in a very different direction from its sibling to the south. It failed to shore up its elite planter class. Starting with Albemarle County, it became an imperial renegade territory, a swampy refuge for the poor and landless. Wedged between proud Virginians and upstart South Carolinians, North Carolina was that troublesome “sinke of America” so many early commentators lamented. It was a frontier wasteland resistant (or so it seemed) to the forces of commerce and civilization. Populated by what many dismissed as “useless lubbers” (conjuring the image of sleepy and oafish men lolling about doing nothing), North Carolina forged a lasting legacy as what we might call the first white trash colony. Despite being English, despite having claimed the rights of freeborn Britons, lazy lubbers of Poor Carolina stood out as a dangerous refuge of waste people, and the spawning ground of a degenerate breed of Americans.14

  The rivalry between the dueling Carolinas was only part of the story. The original charter of Carolina would eventually be divided three ways, when Georgia was parceled out of the original territory in 1732. This last southern colony was the most unusual of Britain’s offspring. An ex-military man, James Oglethorpe, was its guiding force, and he saw this venture as a unique opportunity to reconstruct class relations. It was a charitable endeavor, one meant to reform debtors and rescue poor men, by offering society a decidedly more humane alternative to Locke’s servile Leet-men. Georgia provided an advantageous venue for the “right disposing of the Poor” in the colonies, which would “breed up and preserve our own Countrymen,” one advocate insisted. In refusing to permit slavery, the Georgia colony promised that “free labor” would replace a reliance on indentured servants as well as African bondsmen.15

  But Georgia meant something more. Even as South Carolinians jealously eyed the new territory as a place where they might sell slaves and control the land, the colony of free laborers offered a ready boundary (and slave-free zone) that would protect the vulnerable planter class from Native tribes and Spanish settlers in Florida, who might otherwise offer a haven to their runaway slaves. Georgia, as we shall see, was a remarkable experiment.

  • • •

  North Carolina’s physical terrain was crucial in shaping the character of its people. Along the boundary between Virginia and Carolina was a large and forbidding wetland known as the Dismal Swamp. The word “swamp” was derived from Low German and Dutch, though it was first used by English setters in Virginia and New England. “Dismal,” on the other hand, conjured the superstitious lore of medieval times. The word was associated with cursed days, Egyptian plagues, sinister plots, and inauspicious omens. For William Shakespeare, it evoked a netherworld, as in the “dark dismal-dreaming night.”16

  Virginians viewed the twenty-two-hundred-square-mile wetland as a danger-filled transitional zone. The seemingly endless quagmire literally overlapped the two colonies. There were no obvious routes through its mosquito-ridden cypress forests. In many places, travelers sank knee-deep in the soggy, peaty soil, and had to wade through coal-colored, slimy water dotted with gnarled roots.17

  Little sunshine penetrated the Dismal Swamp’s trees and thickets, and the air gave off noxious fumes, which were colorfully described as “Noisome exhalations,” arising from a “vast body of mire and nastiness.” This statement comes from the travelogue of a wealthy Virginian, William Byrd II, who trekked through the bowels of the Virginia-Carolina borderland in 1728. A witty, English-educated planter, Byrd crafted a dark tale of an inhospitable landscape and weighed in on Carolina’s oafish inhabitants. Thus he was the first of many writers to draw a jaded portrait of the swampy origins of white trash rural life.18

  This bleak region became a symbol of the young North Carolina colony. The Great Dismal Swamp divided civilized Virginia planters from the rascally barbarians of Carolina. Swamps rarely have fixed borders, and so the northern dividing line was continually a point of contention during the first sixty-five years of Carolina’s existence. Virginia repeatedly challenged the boundary as set forth in Carolina’s 1663 charter. Jurisdictional disputes created a political climate of legal uncertainty and social instability.19

  Byrd’s solution to the Dismal Swamp was to drain it and remake it as productive farmland. Later projectors, including George Washington, got behind Byrd’s idea. Teaming with other investors, Washington established a company in 1763 whose purpose was to use slaves to drain the swamp, grow hemp, and cut wood shingles. By 1790, they were working to build a canal (a “ditch,” as it was more accurately called at the time) to tunnel through the morass of cypress trees, prickly briars, and muddy waterways.20

  The Carolina coastline was nearly as uninviting, cutting off the northern part of the colony from ready access to large sailing vessels. Only New Englanders, in their low-bottomed boats, could navigate the shallow, shoal-filled inlets of the Outer Banks. Without a major harbor, and facing burdensome taxes if they shipped their goods through Virginia, many Carolinians turned to smuggling. Hidden inlets made North Carolina attractive to pirates. Along trade routes from the West Indies to the North American continent, piracy flourished in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Several of Albermarle’s governors were accused of sheltering these high-seas thieves and personally profiting from the illicit trade. The notorious Blackbeard (a.k.a. Edward Teach, or Edward Thatch) made a home here, as did the Barbados gentleman turned pirate, Major Stede Bonnet. Supposedly, both were warmly welcomed into the humble homes of North Carolinians. At least that was what the surly Blackbeard claimed, until he lost his head in a grisly clash with Virginians in 1718.21

  The Albemarle section of North Carolina was comparable to the poorest districts in Virginia. Most of the settlements were widely scattered—something else the proprietors did not like. The settlers refused to pay their quitrents (land tax), which was one of the ways the proprietors hoped to make money.22 By 1729, when the proprietors sold their original grant to the British government, North Carolina listed 3,281 land grants, and 309 grantees who owned almost half the land. This meant that in a population of nearly 36,000 people, the majority received small or modest grants, or owned no land at all. Most poor households lacked slaves, indentured servants, or even sons working the land. In 1709, squatters in the poorest district in Albemarle petitioned “your honers” for tax relief, pointing out that their land was nothing more than sand. A few months later, an Anglican minister reported in disgust that the colonists “were so careless and uncleanly” that there was “little difference between the corn in the horse’s manger and the bread on their tables.” The entire North Carolina colony was “overrun with sloth and poverty.”23

  Worthless land and equally worthless se
ttlers had led Virginia officials to question the Virginia-Carolina boundary line as early as 1672, when Governor Berkeley initiated negotiations with the Carolina proprietors in an effort to absorb Albemarle into Virginia. That plan fell through, but it was tried again two decades later. Over the years, colonial officials rarely succeeded in collecting customs duties. The proprietors faced resistance in collecting quitrents. Disorder ruled. A British possession in name only, Albemarle County was routinely able to escape imperial rule.24

  During its first fifty years, the errant northern part of Carolina, which had its own government, was rocked by two internal rebellions and one war with Tuscarora Indians. The misnamed Culpeper’s Rebellion (1677–79) is particularly instructive. In a contest with Thomas Miller, an ambitious trader and tobacco planter who wanted to crack down on smugglers, collect customs duties, and gain favor with proprietors, Thomas Culpeper, a surveyor, sided with the poorer settlers. Theirs was a personal conflict with broad repercussions. Miller took advantage of a leadership vacuum to seize control of government. Like a petty tyrant, he surrounded himself with an armed guard, while Culpeper rallied popular support and organized an informal militia. Miller was forced to flee the colony. Back in London, he charged Culpeper with leading an uprising, and as a result in 1680 Culpeper was tried for treason.25

  In an unexpected development, the proprietor Lord Shaftesbury came to Culpeper’s defense. He delivered an eloquent oration before the Court of King’s Bench, arguing that a stable government had never legally existed in North Carolina. Anticipating Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, Shaftesbury concluded that the colony remained effectively in a state of nature. Without a genuine government, there could be no rebellion. Commentary like this merely underscored northern Carolina’s outlier status.26