White Trash

by Nancy Isenberg

  62.On the marriage fraud to secure land, see Morgan, “The First American Boom,” 189–90. Historian Carole Shammas has noted that the colonies of Virginia and Maryland were more generous to widows, which benefited men who married them, encouraging a “lively marriage market in widows”; see Shammas, “English Inheritance Law and Its Transfer to the Colonies,” American Journal of Legal History 31, no. 2 (April 1987): 145–63, esp. 158–59. On high mortality rates and remarriage, see Lorena Walsh, “‘Till Death Do Us Part’: Marriage and Family in Seventeenth-Century Maryland,” in The Chesapeake in the Seventeenth Century: Essays on Anglo-American Society, eds. Thad W. Tate and David L. Ammerman (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979), 126–52. Widows were routinely made the executrix of their husband’s estates, and most women remarried one year and never longer than two years after a husband’s death; see James R. Perry, The Formation of a Society on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, 1615–1655 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 41, 79, 81.

  63.T. H. Breen, “A Changing Labor Force and Race Relations in Virginia, 1660–1710,” Journal of Social History 7, no. 1 (Autumn 1973): 3–25, esp. 10. For “ye scum of the country,” leveling language, and the charge that Bacon attracted the idle, or those in debt, see “William Sherwood’s Account” and “Ludlow’s Account,” in “Bacon’s Rebellion,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 1, no. 2 (October 1893): 169, 171, 183. For Bacon’s followers as “Vulgar and Ignorant,” and “lately crept out of the condition of Servants,” see “A True Narrative of the Late Rebellion in Virginia, by the Royal Commissioners, 1677,” in Narratives of the Insurrections, 1675–1690, ed. Charles M. Andrews (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1915), 110–11, 113. On comparing the rebels to swine, see William Sherwood, “Virginias Deploured Condition, Or an Impartiall Narrative of the Murders comitted by the Indians there, and of the Sufferings of his Maties Loyall Subjects under the Rebellious outrages of Mr Nathaniell Bacon Junr: to the tenth day of August Anno Dom 1676 (1676),” in Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, vol. 9, 4th ser. (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1871): 176.

  64.Stephen Saunders Webb, 1676: The End of American Independence (New York: Knopf, 1984; reprint ed., Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1995), 16, 34, 41, 66; Tomlins, Freedom Bound, 39–41, 425.

  65.In Bacon’s manifesto, he made it clear that the Berkeley faction had formed a powerful “Cabal” that protected the “Darling Indians” over the lives of its English settlers. Bacon’s rebels also protested against the governor’s policy that forbade military action against Indians without an express order from Berkeley. See Nathaniel Bacon, “Proclamations of Nathaniel Bacon,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 1, no. 1 (July 1893): 57–60; and Webb, 1676, 7, 74.

  66.On “Land lopers,” see Sherwood, “Virginias Deploured Condition,” 164. For unfair taxes and “Grandees” that “engrosse all their tobacco into their own hands,” see “A True Narrative of the Late Rebellion,” 108, 111; also see Peter Thompson, “The Thief, a Householder, and the Commons: Language of Class in Seventeenth Century Virginia,” William and Mary Quarterly 63, no. 2 (April 2006): 253–80, esp. 264, 266–67. For the mixture of taxes, debts, and declining tobacco prices as the economic causes of the rebellion, see Warren M. Billings, “The Causes of Bacon’s Rebellion: Some Suggestions,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 78, no. 4 (October 1970): 409–35, esp. 419–22, 432–33. And for the importance of land issues and abuses of the council in the aftermath of the rebellion, see Michael Kammen, “Virginia at the Close of the Seventeenth Century: An Appraisal by James Blair and John Locke,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 74, no. 2 (April 1966): 141–69, esp. 143, 154–55, 157, 159–60.

  67.Bacon died on October 26, 1676; Berkeley died on July 9, 1677. As Kathleen Brown notes, Bacon’s death by the bloody flux suggested that he was “defeated by his own body’s corruption”; see Brown, Foul Bodies, 67. The lice may have been just as important, as it associated Bacon with the meaner sort and animals that carried lice. One account recorded that he had the “Lousy disease; so that swarmes of Vermyne that bred in his body he could not destroy but by throwing his shirts into the fire.” See “A True Narrative of the Late Rebellion,” 139; Wilcomb E. Washburn, “Sir William Berkeley’s ‘A History of Our Miseries,’” William and Mary Quarterly 14, no. 3 (July 1957): 403–14, esp. 412; and Wilcomb E. Washburn, The Governor and the Rebel: A History of Bacon’s Rebellion in Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1957), 85, 129–32, 138–39.

  68.Andrews, Narratives of the Insurrections, 20. On white aprons, see Mrs. An. Cotton, “An Account of Our Late Troubles with Virginia. Written in 1676,” in Tracts and Other Papers, Principally Relating to the Origin, Settlement, and Progress of the Colonies of North America, from the Discovery of the Country to the Year 1776, ed. Peter Force, 4 vols. (Washington, DC, 1836–46), 1:8. In another account the women were called guardian angels, and Aphra Behn in her play on Bacon’s Rebellion alludes to the women being used as a truce to avoid combat; see “The History of Bacon’s and Ingram’s Rebellions, 1676,” in Andrews, Narratives of the Insurrections, 68; and Behn, The Widow Ranter, or, The History of Bacon in Virginia. A Tragi-Comedy (London, 1690), 35; also see Washburn, The Governor and the Rebel, 80–81; Terri L. Snyder, Brabbling Women: Disorderly Speech and the Law in Early Virginia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), 33–34; and Webb, 1676, 20–21.

  69.On Lydia Chisman, see “The History of Bacon’s and Ingram’s Rebellions,” in Andrews, Narratives of the Insurrections, 81–82. On Elizabeth Bacon’s later marriages, see “Bacon’s Rebellion,” 6. On the confiscation and return of the estates to widows of the rebels, see Washburn, The Governor and the Rebel, 141–42; and Wilcomb E. Washburn, “The Humble Petition of Sarah Drummond,” William and Mary Quarterly 13, no. 13 (July 1956): 354–75, esp. 356, 358, 363–64, 367, 371. Lyon G. Tylor, “Maj. Edmund Chisman,” William and Mary Quarterly 1, no. 2 (October 1892): 89–98, esp. 90–91, 94–97; Susan Westbury, “Women in Bacon’s Rebellion,” in Southern Women: Histories and Identities, eds. Virginia Bernhard, Betty Brandon, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, and Theda Perdu (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1992), 30–46, esp. 39–42.

  70.Webb, 1676, 102, 132–63.

  71.See Behn, The Widow Ranter, 3, 12, 42, 45, 48; Jenny Hale Pulsipher, “‘The Widow Ranter’ and Royalist Culture in Colonial Virginia,” Early American Literature 39, no. 1 (2004): 41–66, esp. 53–55; and Snyder, Brabbling Women, 11–12, 117, 122–23.

  72.Jane D. Carson, “Frances Culpeper Berkeley,” in Notable American Women, 1607–1950, ed. Edward James et al., 3 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), 1:135–36; Snyder, Brabbling Women, 19–25.

  73.Kathleen M. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 129–33; Tomlins, Freedom Bound, 455, 457–58.

  74.Morgan, Laboring Women, 77–83; Anderson, “Animals into the Wilderness,” 403.

  75.For the quotation see Francis Bacon, The Two Books of Francis Bacon, of the Proficience and Advancement of Learning, Divine and Human (London, 1808), 72; for a different interpretation of this quotation, see Parrish, “The Female Opossum and the Nature of the New World,” 489.

  76.Turk McClesky, “Rich Land, Poor Prospects: Real Estate and the Formation of a Social Elite in Augusta County, Virginia, 1738–1770,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 98, no. 3 (July 1990): 449–86; John Combs, “The Phases of Conversion: A New Chronology for the Rise of Slavery in Virginia,” William and Mary Quarterly 68, no. 3 (July 2011): 332–60; Emory G. Evans, A “Topping People”: The Rise and Decline of Virginia’s Old Political Elite, 1680–1790 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009), 1–30.

  Chapter Two: John Locke’s Lubberland: The Settlements of Carolina and Georgia


  1.On the words Jefferson borrowed from Locke, see John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 523, 415. For the idea that Locke should be read by everyone, men, women, and children, see advertisement for Locke’s Second Treatise on Government, in Massachusetts Evening Gazette, March 4, 1774; also see Boston Evening Gazette, October 19, 1772; and New London Gazette, October 9, 1767. Locke’s major critic (and of his “disciples”) was Welsh clergyman Josiah Tucker; see Josiah Tucker, A Series of Answers to Certain Popular Objections, Against Separating from the Rebellious Colonies, and Discarding Them Entirely; Being the Concluding Tract of the Dean of Gloucester, on the Subject of American Affairs (Gloucester, UK, 1776), in Four Tracts on Political and Commercial Subjects (Gloucester, 1776; reprint ed., New York, 1975), 21–22, 102–3. On Locke’s involvement in the slave trade, see David Armitage, “John Locke, Carolina, and the Two Treatises of Government,” Political Theory 32, no. 5 (October 2004): 602–27, esp. 608; James Farr, “Locke, Natural Law, and New World Slavery,” Political Theory 36, no. 4 (August 2008): 495–522, esp. 497; Wayne Glausser, “Three Approaches to Locke and the Slave Trade,” Journal of the History of Ideas 51, no. 2 (April–June 1990): 199–216, esp. 200–204; George Frederick Zook, “The Royal Adventurers in England,” Journal of Negro History 4, no. 2 (April 1919): 143–62, esp. 161.

  2.Shaftesbury referred to Carolina as “my darling” in a 1672 letter to another proprietor, Sir Peter Colleton; see Langdon Cheves, ed., The Shaftesbury Papers and Other Records Relating to Carolina (Charleston: South Carolina Historical Society, 1897), 416; also see L. H. Roper, Conceiving Carolina: Proprietors, Planters, and Plots, 1662–1729 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 15.

  3.Armitage, “John Locke, Carolina, and the Two Treatises of Government,” 603, 607–8; and Armitage, “John Locke, Theorist of Empire?,” in Empire and Modern Political Thought, ed. Sankar Muthu (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 7. For the important role of the secretary, see Herbert Richard Paschal Jr., “Proprietary North Carolina: A Study in Colonial Government” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of North Carolina, 1961), 145; and Barbara Arneil, John Locke and America: The Defense of English Colonialism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 1–2, 21–22, 24–26, 43–44.

  4.See “Concessions and Agreement Between the Lords Proprietors and Major William Yeamans and Others” (January 7, 1665) and The Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina (July 21, 1669), in North Carolina Charters and Constitutions, 1578–1698, ed. Mattie Erma Edwards Parker (Raleigh, NC: Carolina Charter Tercentenary Commission, 1963), 122–23, 129, 133.

  5.Ibid., 107, 112, 129–30, 132, 137–42, 145; Charles Lowry, “Class, Politics, Rebellion, and Regional Development in Proprietary North Carolina, 1697–1720” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Florida, 1979), 38–39; Paschal, “Proprietary North Carolina: A Study in Colonial Government,” 216, 229, esp. 236–37.

  6.Parker, The Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, 129, 134; The Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, in Locke: Political Essays, ed. Mark Goldie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 162; Farr, “Locke, Natural Law,” 498–500; Thomas Leng, “Shaftesbury’s Aristocratic Empire,” in Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1621–1681, ed. John Spurr (Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2011), 101–26; Shirley Carter Hughson, “The Feudal Laws of Carolina,” Sewanee Review 2, no. 4 (August 1894): 471–83, esp. 482.

  7.Parker, The Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, 129, 136–37.

  8.On Leet-men, see David Wootton, ed. and introduction, John Locke: Political Writings (New York: Penguin, 1993), 43; and John Locke, “An Essay on the Poor Law” (1697) and “Labour” (1661), in Goldie, Locke: Political Essays, 192, 328.

  9.See Daniel W. Fagg Jr., “St. Giles’ Seigniory: The Earl of Shaftesbury’s Carolina Plantation,” South Carolina Historical Magazine 71, no. 2 (April 1970): 117–23, esp. 123; and Shaftesbury to Mr. Andrew Percival, May 23, 1674, in Collections of the South Carolina Historical Society, vol. 5 (Charleston: South Carolina Historical Society, 1897), 5:443–44.

  10.Thomas Woodward to Proprietors, June 2, 1665, in The Colonial Records of North Carolina, ed. William L. Saunders (Raleigh: Hale, 1886), 1:100–101. Hereafter cited as CRNC. Lindley S. Butler, “The Early Settlement of Carolina: Virginia’s Southern Frontier,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 79, no. 1, Part One (January 1971): 20–28, esp. 21, 28. On the influx of squatters, see Robert Weir, “‘Shaftesbury’s Darling’: British Settlement in the Carolinas at the Close of the Seventeenth Century,” in The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 1, The Origins of the Empire: British Overseas Enterprise to the Close of the Seventeenth Century, ed. Nicolas Canny (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 381.

  11.For Locke’s and Shaftesbury’s dismissal of settlers who were “Lazy or debauched,” see Locke’s Carolina Memoranda, and Lord Ashley to Joseph West, December 16, 1671, Collections of the South Carolina Historical Society, 5:248, 366.

  12.See Richard Waterhouse, A New World Gentry: The Making of a Merchant and Planter Class in South Carolina, 1670–1770 (New York: Garland, 1989), 62–63, 71, 74; and Lori Glover, All Our Relations: Blood Ties and Emotional Bonds Among the Early South Carolina Gentry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 87–88.

  13.Theo. D. Jervey, “The White Indentured Servants of South Carolina,” South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine 12, no. 4 (October 1911): 163–71, esp. 166. Slaves were 72 percent of the population by 1740, and then declined to around 50 percent of the population over the next forty years; see Tomlins, Freedom Bound, 436–37. Fears of the high rates of importing slaves began in the 1690s, and the recruitment of Leet-men, to offset this imbalance, was still part of the equation; see Brad Hinshelwood, “The Carolinian Context of John Locke’s Theory,” Political Theory 4, no. 4 (August 2013): 562–90, esp. 579–80.

  14.Noeleen McIlvenna, A Very Mutinous People: The Struggle for North Carolina, 1660–1713 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 1, 13, 162; Kirsten Fischer, Suspect Relations: Sex, Race, and Resistance in Colonial North Carolina (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), 24; A. Roger Ekirch, “Poor Carolina”: Politics and Society in Colonial North Carolina, 1729–1776 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981), xviii–xix, 24. For “useless lubbers,” see Hugh Talmage Lefler, ed., A New Voyage to Carolina by John Lawson (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1967), 40.

  15.See “From the Gentlemen’s Magazine,” Boston Evening-Post, February 5, 1739. Italics in the original.

  16.See Oxford English Dictionary, 467; and William Shakespeare’s poem “The Passionate Pilgrim” (1598), line 201.

  17.Sharon T. Pettie, “Preserving the Great Dismal Swamp,” Journal of Forestry 20, no. 1 (January 1976): 28–33, esp. 29, 31; McIlvenna, A Very Mutinous People, 18. There are other estimates of the size of the swamp. Alexander Crosby Brown believes the swamp in the colonial era was between six hundred and one thousand square miles; see Brown, The Dismal Swamp Canal (Chesapeake: Norfolk County Historical Society of Chesapeake, Virginia, 1970), 17.

  18.William Byrd, “The Secret History of the Dividing Line” (hereafter SH) and his revised version, “The History of the Dividing Line Betwixt Virginia and North Carolina, Run in the Year of Our Lord, 1728” (hereafter HDL), in The Prose Works of William Byrd of Westover: Narratives of a Virginian (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1966), 19–20, 63, 70, 190, 196–97, 199, 202.

  19.For swamps having no fixed borders, and wetlands as transitional zones, see William Howarth, “Imagining Territory: Writing the Wetlands,” New Literary History 30, no. 3 (Summer 1999): 509–39, esp. 521. For the ongoing boundary dispute, see Lowry, “Class, Politics, Rebellion,” 31, 45–46.

  20.Byrd, HDL, 202; Charles Royster, The Fabulous History of the Dismal Swamp Company (New York: Knopf, 1999), 6–7, 82–83, 89–91, 98–
99, 117, 287–88, 292–93, 299–301, 340, 342–43. Though Byrd’s full “History of the Dividing Line” was not published until 1841, a shorter excerpt circulated to promote the company; see “A Description of the Dismal Swamp in Virginia,” The Mail, or Claypoole’s Daily Advertiser, March 15, 1792.

  21.Hugh T. Lefler and William S. Powell, Colonial North Carolina: A History (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1973), 81–86; Lindley Butler, Pirates, Privateers, and Rebel Raiders of the Carolina Coast (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 4–8, 30, 39–41, 46, 52–56, 60, 68; Marcus Rediker, “‘Under the Banner of the King of Death’: The Social World of Anglo-American Pirates, 1716–1726,” William and Mary Quarterly 38, no. 2 (April 1981): 203–27, esp. 203, 205–6, 218–19; David Cordingly, Under the Black Flag: The Romance and the Reality of Life Among the Pirates (New York: Harvest, 1995), 18–19, 198–202.

  22.Webb, 1676, 26, 98; Jacquelyn H. Wolf, “Proud and the Poor: The Social Organization of Leadership in Proprietary North Carolina, 1663–1729” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1977), 28–29. For the proprietors wanting more compact settlements, see Lord Ashley to Governor Sayle, April 10, 1671, Lord Ashley to Sir John Yeamans, April 10, 1671, and Lord Ashley to Sir John Yeamans, September 18, 1671, in Collections of the South Carolina Historical Society, 5: 311, 314–15, 344; Barbara Arneil, “Trade, Plantations, and Property: John Locke and the Economic Defense of Colonialism,” Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 55, no. 4 (October 1994): 591–609, esp. 607; McIlvenna, A Very Mutinous People, 31, 33; Lowry, “Class, Politics, Rebellion,” 33–34, 45–46, 80–81.

  23.Jacquelyn Wolf has calculated that 309 grantees owned 49 percent of all land grants. From 1663 to January 1729, the number of land grants recorded was 3,281. Out of this number, 2,161 were grants of two or more to the same person. By 1730, the total population was 36,000, and it has been estimated that between 3,200 and 6,000 were slaves. See Wolf, “The Proud and the Poor,” 25–28, 150–51, 157, 172–73; Fischer, Suspect Relations, 27. Charles Lowry, using land records instead of tithables, has calculated a lower population figure of 13,887 whites and 3,845 slaves. Contemporary observers in 1720 felt there were no more than 500 slaves in North Carolina. See Lowry, “Class, Politics, Rebellion,” 8–9, 79–80, 84, 113, 115–17, 122–23; McIlvenna, A Very Mutinous People, 23, 133–34. For the minister’s comments on sloth, see “Mr. Gordon to the Secretary, May 13, 1709,” in Saunders, CRNC, 1:714; and “Petition to Governor and Council, February 23, 1708/9,” in The Colonial Records of North Carolina, ed. Robert J. Cain, vol. 7, Records of the Executive Council, 1664–1734 (Raleigh: Department of Cultural Recourses, North Carolina Division of Archives and History, 1984), 431.