White Trash

by Nancy Isenberg

His version of rustic republican simplicity reflected his experience in Virginia, where the gentry lived in grand houses like Monticello, and yet dressed down when commingling with the mass of small farmers during elections. A Federalist he particularly despised, the Virginian and chief justice of the Supreme Court John Marshall, was known for his slovenly appearance. Two men’s politics could not have been more different, but they dressed in the same style. Elite Virginians had a strong distaste for the nouveau riche, and believed that those with wealth, land, family names, and reputations didn’t need to show off. Some observers saw Jefferson as playing a role, appearing “affectedly plain in his dress.” In this climate, eliminating external signs of class did not necessarily erode expectations of deference. Dressing down just as easily masked social distinctions. The conservative art of emulation, assuming that the head of state had something to teach others, was very much a part of Jefferson’s philosophy. Indeed, he allowed his sheep to graze on the lawn of the President’s House, letting everyone know that a gentleman farmer occupied the highest office in the land.38

  • • •

  Jefferson may have hated artificial distinctions and titles, but he was quite comfortable asserting “natural” differences. With nature as his guide, he felt there was no reason not to rank humans on the order of animal breeds. In Notes, he wrote with calm assurance, “The circumstance of superior beauty is thought worthy of attention in the propagation of our horses, dogs, and other animals.” With emphasis, he added, “why not in that of man?”39

  Careful breeding was one solution to slavery. In his Revisal of the Laws, Jefferson calculated how a black slave could turn white: once a slave possessed seven-eighths “white” blood, the “taint” of his or her African past was deemed gone. In 1813, he explained to a young Massachusetts lawyer how the formula worked: “It is understood in Natural history that a 4th cross of one race of animals gives an issue of equivalent for all sensible purposes to the original bloods.” This was the same formula Jefferson used in breeding an original stock of merino sheep. William Byrd had earlier talked about blanching Native Americans through intermarriage with Europeans. As Buffon put it, breeding back to the “original” stock meant reconstituting blacks as white people.40

  Jefferson’s friend William Short took Buffon’s ideas quite seriously. In a 1798 letter to Jefferson, he noted how blacks in the United States were becoming lighter. He admitted that this was partly due to mixing with whites, but he felt that climate mattered as well. In posing a possible scenario, he came close to endorsing Buffon’s idea of regeneration: “Suppose a black family transplanted to Sweden, may we not presume . . . that in a sufficient number of succeeding generations, the color would disappear from meer effect of the climate?”41

  It was more than a theory. Jefferson was practicing race mixing under his own roof, fathering several children with his quadroon slave Sally Hemings. What is striking about this relationship is Hemings’s pedigree: her mother, Elizabeth, was half white, and her father was John Wayles, Jefferson’s English-born father-in-law. Jefferson’s children with Sally were the fourth cross, making them perfect candidates for emancipation and passing for white. Two of the children, Beverly and Harriet, ran away from Monticello and lived as free whites, while Madison and Eston were set free in Jefferson’s will and later moved to Ohio. Eston’s offspring also intermarried with whites.42

  On his plantation, Jefferson had little difficulty in breeding slaves as chattel. He counted slave children in cold terms as “increase,” and considered his female slaves to be more valuable than males. Men might raise food, but it was quickly consumed; women produced children that could be sold as stock. He did not shrink from saying, “I consider the labor of a breeding woman as no object, and a child raised every 2. years is of more profit than the crop of the best laboring man.” Women were meant to breed, for “providence has made our interests & duties coincide perfectly.”43

  The impulse to breed played an equally significant part in Jefferson’s agrarian republic. His trust of the people rested on his belief that a new kind of leadership class was bound to emerge in the United States. He laid out this theory in a series of letters he exchanged with John Adams in 1813. It was Adams who opened the friendly debate by mentioning the long human history of upholding the idea of the “Wellborn.” To prove his point, he quoted the ancient Greek poet-philosopher Theognis: “When we want to purchase Horses, Asses, or Rams, We inquire for the Wellborn. And every one wishes to procure from the good breeds. A good man does not care to marry a Shrew, the Daughter of a Shrew, unless They give him a great deal of money with her.” His contention was that men marry for money more than the desire for producing healthy offspring.

  Adams returned to this favorite theory that men are driven by vanity and ambition. Put a hundred men in a room, he conjectured, and soon twenty-five will use their superior talents, their cunning, to take control. This impulse would inevitably lead all kinds of men to divide into classes, and he was confident that the United States had not evolved beyond being ruled by this passion for distinction. By the eighteenth century, “wellborn” was synonymous with the landed aristocracy. Adams reminded Jefferson of the powerful families in Massachusetts and Virginia who were bound together through kinship and property. He observed that he and Jefferson were products of the desire to marry well. Jefferson’s lineage on his mother’s side linked him to one of the First Families of Virginia, the Randolphs, and Abigail Adams, by pedigree, was a Quincy.44

  Jefferson was unconvinced. He interpreted Theognis differently, believing that the poet was making an ethical argument. He was actually chastising humanity for marrying the “old, ugly, and vicious” for reasons of wealth and ambition, while they more sensibly bred domestic animals “to improve the race.” As Jefferson saw it, humans were animals guided by the overriding impulse (as Buffon said) of sexual desire. Nature made sure that humans would propagate the race, implanting in them lust mixed with love, through the “oestrum.” The oestrum was the state of female animals in heat, and provided the capacity for sexual arousal; in Notes, he wrote that “love was the peculiar oestrum of poets.” Sexual desire, in this way, would produce what Jefferson called a “fortuitous concourse of breeders.” He meant that desire was the real engine of breeding, and according to the law of averages, unconscious lust would outflank even unbridled greed.45

  Jefferson’s model of breeding generated an “accidental aristocracy” of talent. Class divisions would form through natural selection. Men would marry women for more than money; they would consciously and unconsciously choose mates with other favorable traits. It was all a matter of probability: some would marry out of sheer lust, others for property, but the “good and wise” would marry for beauty, health, virtue, and talents. If Americans had enough native intelligence to distinguish the natural aristoi from the pseudo-aristoi in choosing political leaders, then they had reasonable instincts for selecting spouses. A “fortuitous concourse of breeders” would produce a leadership class—one that would sort out the genuinely talented from the ambitious men on the make.46

  The question that Jefferson never answered was this: What happened to those who were not part of the talented elite? How would one describe the “concourse of breeders” living on the bottom layer of society? No matter how one finessed it, rubbish produced more rubbish, even if a select few might be salvaged. If the fortuitous breeders naturally rose up the social ladder, the unfortunate, the degenerate remained mired in the morass of meaner sorts.

  In all of his musings on class, Jefferson rarely used the word “yeoman.” He preferred “cultivator” or “husbandman.” One time that he did use the term was in an 1815 letter to William Wirt. Born to a Maryland tavernkeeper, Wirt was one of Jefferson’s apprentices whom he took under his wing, and he rose to become a noted attorney. He was one of the natural aristocracy of talent, and one of the beneficiaries of Jefferson’s patronage. In 1815, Wirt was putting the finishing touches on the b
iography of Patrick Henry, and he asked Jefferson to paint a social picture of eighteenth-century Virginia. Conjuring a potent topographical metaphor, Jefferson contended that the colony had had a stagnant class system, whose social order resembled a slice of earth on an archeological dig. The classes were separated into “strata,” which shaded off “imperceptibly, from top to bottom, nothing disturbing the order of their repose.”

  Jefferson divided the top tier of supposed social betters into “Aristocrats, half breeds, pretenders.” Below them was the “solid independent yeomanry, looking askance at those above, yet not ventured to jostle them.” On the bottom rung he put “the lowest feculum of beings called Overseers, the most abject, degraded and unprincipled race.” Overseers were tasked to keep slaves engaged in labor on southern plantations. By pitting the honest yeomanry against the “feculum” of overseers, Jefferson harshly invoked the old English slur of human waste. That wasn’t enough. He portrayed overseers as panderers, with their “cap in hand to the Dons”; they were vicious men without that desirable deposit of virtue, who feigned subservience in order to indulge the “spirit of domination.” Jefferson endowed his Virginia class of overseers with the same vices that he attributed to those toiling in manufacturing. The twirling distaff at the workbench had been replaced with the slave driver’s whip.47

  In this strange sleight of hand, slaves became invisible laborers outside his tripartite social ranking. Jefferson made them victims of overseers, not of their actual owners. The yeomanry might be the progenitors of his noble class of cultivators, but their lineage remained unclear. The small farmers whom Jefferson knew were neither noble nor particularly independent. But he presented the upper class as an odd collection of breeds: great planters (pure-blooded Aristocrats) sat at the top, but their children might marry down and produce a class of “half breeds.” The pretenders were outsiders who dared claim the station of the leading families, where they were never really welcomed. Despite his pose in his exchange with John Adams two years earlier, Jefferson’s brief natural history of Virginia’s classes proved that elites and upstarts married the “wellborn.” The Virginia upper class was a creation of marrying for money, name, and station, in which kinship and pedigree were paramount.

  In the end, though Jefferson hoped this old Virginia had disappeared, the truth was more complicated. Waste people lingered on, just as overseers did. The children of aristocrats, those of the half-breed class, and a new class that Jefferson called the “pseudo-Aristocrats” were rising to replace those who had once ruled Virginia. The composition of the strata of soil that he compared to the different classes may have changed, but the process of distinguishing the richest loam on the top and the less fertile lower layers remained in force.

  Class was a permanent fixture in America. If the yeoman looked askance at those above him, the poor farmers heading west faced a new breed of aristocrats: shrewd land speculators and large cotton and sugar planters. The more cynical Adams reminded Jefferson in 1813 that the continent would be ruled by “Land jobbers” and a new class of manor lords. The glorious title of cultivator would remain beyond the reach of most backcountry settlers.48

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Andrew Jackson’s Cracker Country

  The Squatter as Common Man

  Obsquatulate, To mosey, or to abscond.

  —“Cracker Dictionary,” Salem Gazette (1830)

  By 1800, one-fifth of the American population had resettled on its “frontier,” the territory between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi. Effective regulation of this mass migration was well beyond the limited powers of the federal government. Even so, officials understood that the country’s future depended on controlling this vast territory. Financial matters were involved too. Government sale of these lands was needed to reduce the nation’s war debts. Besides, the lands were hardly empty, and the potential for violent conflicts with Native Americans was ever present, as white migrants settled on lands they did not own. National greatness depended as much as anything upon the class of settlers that was advancing into the new territories. Would the West be a dumping ground for a refuse population? Or would the United States profit from its natural bounty and grow as a continental empire more equitably? There was much uncertainty.1

  The western territories were for all intents and purposes America’s colonies. Despite the celebratory spirit in evidence each Fourth of July beginning in 1777, many anxieties left over from the period of the English colonization revived. Patriotic rhetoric aside, it was not at all clear that national independence had genuinely ennobled ordinary citizens. Economic prosperity had actually declined for most Americans in the wake of the Revolution. Those untethered from the land, who formed the ever- expanding population of landless squatters heading into the trans-Appalachian West, unleashed mixed feelings. To many minds, the migrant poor represented the United States’ re-creation of Britain’s most despised and impoverished class: vagrants. During the Revolution, under the Articles of Confederation (the first founding document before the Constitution was adopted), Congress drew a sharp line between those entitled to the privileges of citizenship and the “paupers, vagabonds, and fugitives from justice” who stood outside the national community.2

  The image of the typical poor white resident of the frontier was pathetic and striking to observers, but it wasn’t new at all. He was an updated version of William Byrd’s lazy lubber. He was the English vagrant wandering the countryside. If anything about him was new, it was that some observers granted him a folksy appeal: though coarse and ragged in his dress and manners, the post-Revolutionary backwoodsman was at times described as hospitable and generous, someone who invited weary travelers into his humble cabin. Yet his more favorable cast rarely lasted after the woods were cut down and settled towns and farms appeared. As civilization approached, the backwoodsman was expected to lay down roots, purchase land, and adjust his savage ways to polite society—or move on.

  Whereas Franklin, Paine, and Jefferson envisioned Americans as a commercial people suited to a grand continent, those who wrote about the American breed during the nineteenth century conceived a different frontier character. This new generation of social commentators paid particular attention to a peculiar class of people living in the thickly forested Northwest Territory (Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, and Wisconsin), along the marshy shores of the Mississippi, and amid the mountainous terrain and sandy barrens of the southern backcountry (western Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia, plus the new states of Kentucky and Tennessee, and northern Alabama), and later the Florida, Arkansas, and Missouri Territories. In the heyday of James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851), who gave early America the fearless forest guide known as Leatherstocking, the abstract cartography of the Enlightenment yielded to the local color of the novelist in describing the odd quirks of the rustic personality. Americans were starting to develop a mythic identity for themselves. The reading public was more attuned to travelers’ accounts than they were to grid plans and demographic numbers. As Americans looked west, and many moved farther away from cities and plantations along the East Coast, they discovered a sparsely settled wasteland. In place of Jefferson’s sturdy yeoman on his cultivated fields, they found the ragged squatter in his log cabin.3

  The presumptive “new man” of the squatter’s frontier embodied the best and the worst of the American character. The “Adam” of the American wilderness had a split personality: he was half hearty rustic and half dirk-carrying highwayman. In his most favorable cast as backwoodsman, he was a homespun philosopher, an independent spirit, and a strong and courageous man who shunned fame and wealth. But turn him over and he became the white savage, a ruthless brawler and eye-gouger. This unwholesome type lived a brute existence in a dingy log cabin, with yelping dogs at his heels, a haggard wife, and a mongrel brood of brown and yellow brats to complete the sorry scene.

  Early republican America had become a “cracker” country. City life catered to a minority of the
population, as the rural majority fanned outward to the edges of civilization. While the British had made an attempt to prohibit western migration through the Proclamation of 1763, the Revolutionary War removed such barriers and acquiesced to the flood of poorer migrants. Both crackers and squatters—two terms that became shorthand for landless migrants—supposedly stayed just one step ahead of the “real” farmers, Jefferson’s idealized, commercially oriented cultivators. They lived off the grid, rarely attended a school or joined a church, and remained a potent symbol of poverty. To be lower class in rural America was to be one of the landless. They disappeared into unsettled territory and squatted down (occupied tracts without possessing a land title) anywhere and everywhere. If land-based analogies were still needed, they were not to be divided into grades of soil, as Jefferson had creatively conceived, but spread about as scrub foliage or, in bestial terms, mangy varmints infesting the land.4

  The plight of the squatter was defined by his static nature and transient existence. With no guarantee of social mobility, the only gift he received from his country was the liberty to keep moving. Kris Kristofferson’s classic lyric resonates here: when it came to the cracker or squatter, freedom was just another word for nothing left to lose.

  Both “squatter” and “cracker” were Americanisms, terms that updated inherited English notions of idleness and vagrancy. “Squatter,” in one 1815 dictionary, was a “cant name” among New Englanders for a person who illegally occupied land he did not own. An early usage of the word occurred in a letter of 1788 from Federalist Nathaniel Gorham of Massachusetts, writing to James Madison about his state’s ratifying convention. Identifying three classes of men opposed to the new federal Constitution, he listed the former supporters of Shays’ Rebellion in the western counties, the undecided who might be led astray by opinionated others, and the constituents of Maine: this last group were “squatters” who “lived upon other people’s land” and were “afraid of being brought to account.” Not yet a separate state, Maine was the wooded backcountry of Massachusetts, and Gorham was about to become one of the most powerful speculators in the unsettled lands of western New York State. In 1790, “squatter” appeared in a Pennsylvania newspaper, but written as “squatlers,” describing men who inhabited the western borderlands of that state, along the Susquehanna River. They were men who “sit down on river bottoms,” pretend to have titles, and chase off anyone who dares to usurp their claims.5