White Trash

by Nancy Isenberg

  For a long time, Great Britain “engrossed us,” Paine explained, proud to be part of his adopted home, his American asylum. The government in London and the Crown were controlling land and resources of the North American continent for selfish purposes. But now the United Colonies were awake to a new reality: the British monopoly had run its course. Anything less than complete independence would be “like wasting an estate on a suit at law, to regulate the trespasses of a tenant, whose lease is just expiring.” Wasting an estate. Britain’s lease was up.50

  In advocating for an American breed bent on productivity and expansion, Paine’s richly evocative language of waste, idleness, breeding, and engrossing of land fed excitable minds. Knowing his impressionable audience, he compared the coming Revolution to Noah and the great flood: it would give birth to a “race of men, perhaps as numerous as all Europe,” their “portion of freedom” to be passed on to future generations. Population would grow and flourish as long as Americans filled the continent and harvested its resources for export. Paine’s economic heroes were overseas merchants, commercial farmers, shipbuilders, inventors, and property-owning and property-protecting Americans—but decidedly not the landless poor.51

  “Britain and America are now distinct empires,” declared Paine in 1776. Six years later, as the war was coming to an end, he would still be defending the distinct American breed. “We see with other eyes,” he wrote, “we hear with other ears, and think with other thoughts than those formerly used.”52

  To his credit, Paine held nothing back in poking holes in the dogma of hereditary monarchy. But with his broad swipes at royalty, he obscured other forms of injustice. He too loosely clothed the language of class in the garb of continental races and commercial impulses. Indians and slaves are marginalized in his grand vision of a new world order. Neither did he allow the ignoble waste people to make any appearance in Common Sense; the vast numbers of convict laborers, servants, apprentices, working poor, and families living in miserable wilderness cabins are all absent from his prose.

  For Paine, the crucial issue for Americans in 1776 was not whether but how soon a new and independent regime would advance toward its destiny as first among nations. He assumed that the mighty forces of commerce and continental expansion would eliminate idleness and correct imbalances. There was nothing wrong with cultivating Anglo-American commercial instincts and sustaining peaceful transnational trade alliances with Great Britain. But in other areas, Paine hoped that the British way of seeing and hearing would disappear from America. He presumed, incorrectly as it turns out, that class would take care of itself.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Thomas Jefferson’s Rubbish

  A Curious Topography of Class

  By this means twenty of the best geniusses will be raked from the rubbish annually, and be instructed, at the public expence, so far as the grammar schools go. . . .

  The circumstance of superior beauty is thought worthy of attention in the propagation of our horses, dogs, and other domestic animals; why not in that of man?

  —Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (1787)

  Like Thomas Paine and Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson thought about class in continental terms. His greatest accomplishment as president was the 1803 acquisition of Louisiana, a vast territory that more than doubled the size of the United States. He called the new western domain an “empire for liberty,” by which he meant something other than a free-market economy or a guarantee of social mobility. The Louisiana Territory, as he envisioned it, would encourage agriculture and forestall the growth of manufacturing and urban poverty—that was his formula for liberty. It was not Franklin’s “happy mediocrity” (a compression of classes across an endless stretch of unsettled land), but a nation of farmers large and small. This difference is not nominal: Franklin and Paine used Pennsylvania as their model, while Jefferson saw America’s future—and the contours of its class system—through the prism of Virginia.1

  Eighteenth-century Virginia was both an agrarian and a hierarchical society. By 1770, fewer than 10 percent of white Virginians laid claim to over half the land in the colony; a small upper echelon of large planters each owned slaves in the hundreds. More than half of white men owned no land at all, working as tenants or hired laborers, or contracted as servants. Land, slaves, and tobacco remained the major sources of wealth in Jefferson’s world, but the majority of white men did not own slaves. That is why Mr. Jefferson wafted well above the common farmers who dotted the countryside that extended from his celebrated mountaintop home. By the time of the Revolution, he owned at least 187 slaves, and by the Battle of Yorktown he held title to 13,700 acres in six different counties in Virginia.2

  Pinning down Jefferson’s views on class is complicated by the seductiveness of his prose. His writing could be powerful, even poetic, while reveling in rhetorical obfuscation. He praised “cultivators of the earth” as the most valuable of citizens; they were the “chosen people of God,” and they “preserved a republic in vigor” through their singularly “useful occupation.” And yet Jefferson’s pastoral paragon of virtue did not describe any actual Virginia farmers, and not even he could live up to this high calling. Despite efforts at improving efficiency on his farms, he failed to turn a profit or rescue himself from mounting debts. In a 1796 letter, he sadly admitted that his farms were in a “barbarous state” and that he was “a monstrous farmer.” Things continued downhill from there.3

  Though we associate Jefferson with agrarian democracy and the yeoman class, his style was that of a gentleman farmer. As a member of the upper class, he hired others or used slaves to work his land. He did not become an engaged farmer until 1795, prompted by his growing interest in treating agriculture as a science. He experimented with new techniques taken from his reading, and kept meticulous records in his farm and garden books. He owned the latest manuals on husbandry—there were fifty in Monticello’s library. He could ignore what didn’t spark his curiosity. His dislike of the vile weed of tobacco, which he kept growing for financial reasons, led him to admit in 1801 that he “never saw a leaf of my tobacco packed in my life.” For the most part, agricultural improvement fascinated him, and he did design a new plough, with its moldboard of least resistance, in 1794, hoping in large and small ways to modernize American farming.4

  The irony is that Jefferson’s approach to improving American farming was decidedly English, and not American at all. The books he read and the kind of husbandry he admired came primarily from the English agrarian tradition and British improvers of his day. His decision to raise wheat so as not to be completely dependent on tobacco, coupled with his plan to introduce merino sheep into every Virginia county in order to produce better wool, were attempts to correct what his fellow improver George Washington lambasted as the “slovenly” habits in farmers of their state. Virginians were far behind the English in the use of fertilizers, crop rotation, and harvesting and ploughing methods. It was common for large planters and small farmers alike to deplete acres of soil and then leave it fallow and abandoned. “We waste as we please,” was how Jefferson gingerly phrased it.5

  Jefferson knew that behind all the rhetoric touting America’s agricultural potential there was a less enlightened reality. For every farsighted gentleman farmer, there were scads of poorly managed plantations and unskilled small (and tenant) farmers struggling to survive. How could slaves, who did most of the fieldwork on Virginia plantations, assume the mantle of “cultivators of the earth”? For Jefferson, it seems, they were mere “tillers.” Tenants, who rented land they did not own, and landless laborers and squatters lacked the commercial acumen and genuine virtue of cultivators too. In his perfect world, lower-class farmers could be improved, just like their land. If they were given a freehold and a basic education, they could adopt better methods of husbandry and pass on favorable habits and traits to their children. As we will see, however, Jefferson’s various reform efforts were thwarted by those of the ruli
ng gentry who had little interest in elevating the Virginia poor. Even more dramatically, his agrarian version of social mobility was immediately compromised by his own profound class biases, of which he was unaware.6

  Historically hailed as a democrat, Thomas Jefferson was never able to escape his class background. His privileged upbringing inevitably colored his thinking. He could not have penned the Declaration of Independence or been elected to the Continental Congress if he had not been a prominent member of the Virginia gentry. He had the advantages of an education in the classics, and was trained in law and letters at the elite College of William and Mary. He collected books, amassing 6,487 volumes. Proficient in Latin and Greek, he enjoyed Italian, read old French and some Spanish, and was also versed in the obscure Anglo-Saxon language. He surrounded himself with European luxury goods and was an epicurean in his tastes, as displayed by his love of French sauternes. To imagine that Jefferson had some special insight into the anxious lives of the lower sort, or that he truly appreciated the unpromising conditions tenant farmers experienced, is to fail to account for the wide gulf that separated the rich and poor in Virginia.7

  If Franklin thought of class as principally conditioned by demography—the human compulsion to seek pleasure and avoid pain—Jefferson subscribed to a different philosophy. Though equally drawn to numbers and political arithmetic, he saw human behavior as conditional, plastic, adaptable; across generations, it would conform to shifts in the physical and social environment. If the hand of nature bestowed merit on some, so did local surroundings and the choice of a mate. But above all, what divided people into recognizable stations was the intimate relationship between land and labor. As he wrote in 1813, “the spontaneous energies of the earth are a gift of nature,” but man must “husband his labor” in order to reap its greatest benefits. In Jefferson’s larger scheme of things, class was a creature of topography; it was shaped by the bond forged between producers and the soil. By producers, of course, he meant husbandmen and landowners—not tenants, not slaves.8

  The occupation he loved, the descriptor that most delighted him, was cultivator. This word meant more than one who earned his bread through farming; it drew upon the eighteenth-century idiom that arose from the popular study of natural history. To cultivate meant to renew, to render fertile, which thus implied extracting real sustenance from the soil, as well as good traits, superior qualities, and steady habits of mind. Cultivation carried with it rich associations with animal breeding and the idea that good soil led to healthy and hearty stocks (of animals or people). Proficiency in tapping the land’s productive potential had the added benefit of improving the moral sense, which was what Jefferson meant when he described that “peculiar deposit of genuine and substantial virtue” found in the breast of every true cultivator. In this way, the soil could be regenerative, much like a deposit of calcium-rich marl, which educated farmers used to restore nutrients to the land.9

  In Jefferson’s taxonomy, then, class was less about Franklin’s commercialized language of “sorts,” whereby people and goods were readily equated and valued. Instead, Jeffersonian-style classes were effectively strata that mimicked the different nutritive grades within layers of the soil. To this bookish Virginian, idealizing rural society, classes were to be regarded as natural extrusions of a promising land, flesh-and-blood manifestations of an agrarian topography.

  • • •

  Revolutionary Virginia was hardly a place of harmony, egalitarianism, or unity. The war effort exacerbated already simmering tensions between elite Patriots and those below them. In British tradition, the American elite expected the lower classes to fight their wars. In the Seven Years’ War, for example, Virginians used the infamous practice of impressment to round up vagabonds to meet quotas. During the Revolution, General Washington stated that only “the lower class of people” should serve as foot soldiers. Jefferson believed that class character was palpably real. As a member of the House of Delegates, he came up with a plan to create a Virginia cavalry regiment specifically for the sons of planters, youths whose “indolence or education, has unfitted them for foot-service.”10

  As early as 1775, landless tenants in Loudoun County, Virginia, voiced a complaint that was common across the sprawling colony: there was “no inducement for the poor man to Fight, for he had nothing to defend.” Many poor white men rebelled against recruitment strategies, protested the exemptions given to the overseers of rich planters, and were disappointed with the paltry pay. Such resistance led to the adoption of desperate measures. In 1780, Virginia assemblymen agreed to grant white enlistees the bounty of a slave as payment for their willingness to serve until the end of the war. Here was an instant bump up the social ladder. Here was the social transfer of wealth and status from the upper to the lower class. But even this gruesome offer wasn’t tempting enough, because few took the bait. Two years later when the Battle of Yorktown decided the outcome of the war, the situation was unchanged. Of those fighting on the American side, only a handful hailed from Virginia.11

  There were other attempts to mollify poor white farmers. In drafting a new constitution in 1776, Virginia rebels embraced freehold suffrage: adult white men who were twenty-one and who had a freehold of twenty-five acres of cultivated land were awarded the right to vote. Yet the same Revolutionaries were stingy when it came to redressing landlessness and poverty. Jefferson’s proposal to lift up the bottom ranks, granting men without any land of their own fifty acres and the vote, was dropped from the final version of the constitution.12

  Appointed to a committee to revise Virginia’s laws, Jefferson tried another tactic that aimed to shift the balance of class power in the state. He succeeded in eliminating primogeniture and entail, two legal practices that kept large amounts of land in the hands of a few powerful families. His purpose was for land to be distributed equally to all children in a family, not just vested in the eldest male. Entail, which restricted the sale of land, would be replaced with privately owned land grants. Meanwhile, the committee considered a proposal granting each freeborn child a tract of seventy-five acres as an incentive to encourage poorer men to marry and have children. Jefferson’s freeholders needed children to anchor them to the land and as an incentive to turn from idleness.13

  But reform did not take easily. Virginia’s freehold republic failed to instill virtue among farmers, the effect that Jefferson had fantasized. The majority of small landowners sold their land to large planters, mortgaged their estates, and continued to despoil what was left of the land. They looked upon it as just another commodity, not a higher calling. Jefferson failed to understand what his predecessor James Oglethorpe had seen: the freehold system (with disposable land grants) favored wealthy land speculators. Farming was arduous work, with limited chance of success, especially for families lacking the resources available to Jefferson: slaves, overseers, draft animals, a plough, nearby mills, and waterways to transport farm produce to market. It was easy to acquire debts, easy to fail. Land alone was no guarantee of self-sufficiency.14

  If the ruling elite at the Virginia constitutional convention were unwilling to grant poor men fifty acres to become freehold citizens, they were quite content to dump the poor into the hinterland. With the opening up of the land office in 1776, a new policy was adopted: anyone squatting on unclaimed land in western Virginia and Kentucky could claim a preemption right to buy it. Like the long-standing British practice of colonizing the poor, the Virginians sought to quell dissent, raise taxes, and lure the less fortunate west. This policy did little to alter the class structure. In the end, it worked against poor families. Without ready cash to buy the land, they became renters, trapped again as tenants instead of becoming independent landowners.15

  Public education accompanied land reforms. In bill no. 79, for the “General Diffusion of Knowledge,” Jefferson laid out a proposal for different levels of preparation: primary schools for all boys and girls, and grammar schools for more capable males at the public ex
pense. For the second tier, he called for twenty young “geniusses” to be drawn from the lower class of each county. Rewarding those with merit, he devised a means of social mobility in a state where education was purely a privilege of wealthy families.16

  Writing of his plan in Notes on the State of Virginia, his wide-ranging natural history of his state, he chose a rather unsavory allusion to describe the reform. His handful of lucky scholars would be “raked from the rubbish,” leaving the majority to wallow in ignorance and poverty. “Rubbish” was his alliterative variation on the ever-present theme of waste people. He wasn’t anticipating Teddy Roosevelt’s Bunyanesque allusion to muckraking journalists, but rather was invoking the older, Elizabethan meaning of raking the muck of a bad crop. The “rubbish” designation showed contempt for the poor, a sad reminder that very few were capable of escaping the refuse heap. But the bill failed to pass: the Virginia gentry had no desire to pay for it. They had no interest in raising up a few stray kernels of genius from the wasteland of the rural poor.17

  The education reform bill had little chance of passing, but its companion piece for funding workhouses did. As was the case with England’s poor laws, the bill penalized those who “waste their time in idle and dissolute courses,” loitering and wandering or deserting their wives and children: such people were “deemed vagabonds.” The solution for poor children was not education, but hiring them out as apprentices. Jefferson made a minor change to the existing law, which dated to 1755: the poor would no longer wear identifying badges. But vagrants would still be punished, and their children would pay the price for their idleness in a way that was reminiscent of the exploited orphans of dead servants at Jamestown. They may have been a less visible class without badges, but they remained a powerful symbol of vice and sloth.18