White Trash

by Nancy Isenberg

  8.Franklin, “Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind,” Franklin Papers, 231. On the value of marrying young, also see Franklin to John Alleyne, August 9, 1768, Franklin Papers, 3:30–31, 15:184.

  9.“The Speech of Miss Polly Baker,” April 15, 1747, Franklin Papers, 3:123–25. One writer has suggested that Polly Baker was based on a real woman, an Eleanor Kellog, who was tried in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1745 for having her fifth bastard child. See Max Hall, Benjamin Franklin and Polly Baker: The History of a Literary Deception (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1960; rev. ed., 1990), 94–98.

  10.For the punishment for bachelors, see “To All Married Men to Whom These Presents Shall Come,” New-York Gazette, March 20, 1749, reprinted in the Boston Evening Post, April 7, 1749; also see “From an Epistle from a Society of Young Ladies,” New-York Evening Post, October 28, 1751; and a call to tax bachelors, Boston Evening Post, August 4, 1746; Franklin wrote elsewhere that “a single Man has not nearly the Value he would have in that State of Union”; see Franklin, “Old Mistresses Apologue,” June 25, 1745, Franklin Papers, 3:30–31.

  11.William H. Shurr, “‘Now, God, Stand Up for Bastards’: Reinterpreting Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography,” American Literature 64, no. 3 (September 1992): 435–51, esp. 444. On Franklin’s “pronatalist convictions,” see Dennis Hodgson, “Benjamin Franklin on Population: From Policy to Theory,” Population and Development Review 17, no. 4 (December 1991): 639–61, esp. 640–41.

  12.Franklin, “Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind,” Franklin Papers, 4:231–32. See excerpts from Locke’s “Atlantis” writings (1678–79) in Goldie, ed., Locke: Political Essays, xxvi, 255–59.

  13.Franklin, “The Interest of Great Britain Considered (1760),” Franklin Papers, 9:59–100, esp. 73–74, 77–78, 86–87, 94.

  14.Franklin to Peter Collinson (1753), Franklin Papers, 5: 158–59; and “Information to Those Who Would Remove to America,” by Dr. Franklin, Boston Magazine (October 1784), 505–10. Franklin, “The Interest of Great Britain Considered (1760),” Franklin Papers, 9:86.

  15.Franklin, The Autobiography, 13–25. For runaway servants, see Marcus Rediker, “‘Good Hands, Stout Heart, and Fast Feet’: The History and Culture of Working People in Early America,” Labour/Le Travail 10 (Autumn 1982): 123–44, esp. 141; The Infortunate: The Voyage and Adventures of William Moraley, an Indentured Servant (1743), eds. Susan E. Klepp and Billy G. Smith, 2nd ed. (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005), xvii–xviii, xxv–xxvi, 16, 26, 41, 51, 72–74, 78–79, 87–88, 97.

  16.Billy G. Smith, “Poverty and Economic Marginality in Eighteenth-Century America,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 132, no. 1 (March 1988): 85–118, esp. 100–103, 105, 113; Gary B. Nash, “Poverty and Poor Relief in Pre-Revolutionary Philadelphia,” William and Mary Quarterly 33, no. 1 (January 1976): 3–30, esp. 12–13. On infant mortality rates, see Susan E. Klepp, “Malthusian Miseries and the Working Poor in Philadelphia, 1780–1830,” in Down and Out in Early America, ed. Billy G. Smith (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004), 63–92, esp. 64.

  17.Jack Marietta, The Reformation of American Quakerism, 1748–1783 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984), 21–24, 28, 51, 65; Jean R. Soderlund, “Women’s Authority in Pennsylvania and New Jersey Quaker Meetings, 1680–1760,” William and Mary Quarterly 44, no. 4 (October 1987): 722–49, esp. 743–44.

  18.See Frederick B. Tolles, “Benjamin Franklin’s Business Mentors: The Philadelphia Quaker Merchants,” William and Mary Quarterly 4, no. 1 (January 1947): 60–69; J. A. Leo Lemay, The Life of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 1, Journalist, 1706–1730 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 1:238, 258, 268, 458–59, and vol. 2, Printer and Publisher, 1730–1747 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 2:322–23; Jacquelyn C. Miller, “Franklin and Friends: Franklin’s ties to Quakers and Quakerism,” Pennsylvania History 57, no. 4 (October 1990): 318–36, esp. 322–26.

  19.On the rise of the non-Quaker elite, see Stephen Brobeck, “Revolutionary Change in Colonial Philadelphia: The Brief Life of the Proprietary Gentry,” William and Mary Quarterly 33, no. 3 (July 1976): 410–34, esp. 413, 417–18, 422–23; Thomas M. Doerflinger, “Commercial Specialization in the Philadelphia Merchant Community, 1750–1791,” Business History Review 57, no. 1 (Spring 1983): 20–49, esp. 22, 28, 46.

  20.See Robert F. Oaks, “Big Wheels in Philadelphia: Du Simitière’s List of Carriage Owners,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 95, no. 3 (July 1971): 351–62, esp. 351, 355. On Franklin’s horse and carriage, see Lemay, The Life of Benjamin Franklin, 2:320–21, and footnote 36 on 594; and see “Appendix 2: Franklin’s Residences and Real Estate to 1757” and “Appendix 8: Franklin’s Wealth, 1756,” in Lemay, The Life of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 3, Soldier, Scientist, and Politician, 1748–1757 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 3:599–602, 630–34. Franklin acquired other signs of elite status, such as a coat of arms and fine furniture, and he continued to purchase what he called “my Fancyings” while in England and Europe for his new home (which he began building in 1764) in Philadelphia; see Edward Cahill, “Benjamin Franklin’s Interiors,” Early American Studies 6, no. 1 (Spring 2008): 27–58, esp. 44–46.

  21.Lemay, The Life of Benjamin Franklin, 2:320.

  22.Pennsylvania Gazette, January 20, 1730, in Franklin: Writings, ed. J. A. Leo Lemay (New York: Library of America, 1987), 139. Approximately seventy-three thousand Europeans traveled to British North America during the 1730s, and at least seventeen thousand arrived in Philadelphia’s port. Nearly one of every three passengers disembarking in Philadelphia during the 1730s was an indentured servant, and an additional five hundred imported slaves joined them at the bottom of the social ladder. The largest influx of convict laborers from Britain occurred during the mid-eighteenth century. Philadelphians were concerned about absconding servants; see Pennsylvania Gazette, July 2, 1751.

  23.See Boston News Post-Boy, December 4, 1704; for fans, see [Boston] Weekly Rehearsal, May 14, 1733; for buttons, see New-York Gazette, or Weekly Post-Boy, June 15, 1747.

  24.[Boston] Weekly Rehearsal, March 20, 1732; see Jenny Davidson, Breeding: A Partial History of the Eighteenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 137–43; Boudreau, “Done by a Tradesman,” 529.

  25.Williams, “The ‘Industrious Poor’ and the Founding of the Pennsylvania Hospital,” 336–37, 339, 441–42; Franklin to Peter Collinson, May 9, 1753, and “‘Arator’: On the Price of Corn, and the Management of the Poor” (1766), Franklin Papers, 4:479–86, esp. 479–80; 13:510–15.

  26.Franklin to Peter Collinson, May 9, 1753, Franklin Papers, 4:480–82.

  27.“To the Author of the Letter on the Last Pennsylvania Gazette,” Pennsylvania Gazette, May 15, 1740; Franklin, Plain Truth: or, Serious Considerations on the Present State of the City of Philadelphia and Province of Pennsylvania. By a Tradesman of Philadelphia (Philadelphia, 1747), and “Form of Association,” Pennsylvania Gazette, December 3, 1747, in Franklin Papers, 3:180–212, esp. 198–99, 201, 211; “Extracts from Plain Truth,” New-York Gazette, or Weekly Post-Boy, December 14, 1747.

  28.Plain Truth, and “Form of Association,” in Franklin Papers, 3:198, 209, 211.

  29.“Petition to the Pennsylvania Assembly Regarding Fairs” (1731), Franklin Papers, 1:211; Pennsylvania Gazette, November 18, 1731, and Waldstreicher, Runaway America, 94; Franklin, The Autobiography, 34–35.

  30.On the inability to “wash out the stain of servility,” see “From the Reflector: Of Ambition and Meanness,” Boston Evening Post, March 2, 1752; on the meaner sort at the heels of those above them, see The New-York Weekly Journal, March 3, 1734. In England, there was actually more social mobility among the commercial classes; see Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and John Harold Plumb, eds., Birth of a Consumer Society
: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 20.

  31.“From a Paper entitled COMMON SENSE. The First Principles of Religion for Preserving Liberty,” Pennsylvania Gazette, February 12, 1741.

  32.Franklin to Benjamin Franklin Bache, September 25, 1780, Franklin Papers, 33:326.

  33.Franklin to Peter Collinson, May 9, 1753, Franklin Papers, 4:480–82.

  34.Ibid.; Franklin to Peter Collinson [1753?], Franklin Papers, 5:158–59.

  35.On the impact of Paine’s pamphlet, see Trish Loughan, “Disseminating Common Sense: Thomas Paine and the Problem of the Early National Best Seller,” American Literature 78, no. 1 (March 2006): 1–28, esp. 4, 7, 12, 14. On Paine’s background, see John Keane, Tom Paine: A Life (Boston: Little, Brown, 1995), 62, 73–74, 79, 84; J. C. D. Clark, “Thomas Paine: The English Dimension,” in Selected Writings of Thomas Paine, eds. Ian Shapiro and Jane E. Calvert (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), 538; John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688–1783 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1900), 104–5, 222–30; Edward Larkin, “Inventing an American Public: Paine, the ‘Pennsylvania Magazine,’ and American Revolutionary Discourse,” Early American Literature 33, no. 3 (1998): 250–76, esp. 254, 257, 261; and Robert A. Ferguson, “The Commonalities of Common Sense,” William and Mary Quarterly 57, no. 3 (July 2000): 465–504, esp. 487–89, 502.

  36.Thomas Slaughter, ed., Common Sense and Related Writings by Thomas Paine (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2001), 79; Thomas Paine, “Agrarian Justice, Opposed to Agrarian Law, and to Agrarian Monopoly,” (1797), in Shapiro and Calvert, Selected Writings of Thomas Paine, 555, 557.

  37.On his theory of commerce and nations, he wrote, “It is the commerce and not the conquest of America, by which England is to be benefited, and that would in a great measure continue, were the countries independent of each other as France and Spain; because many articles, neither can go to a better market”; see Slaughter, ed., Common Sense, 89–90, 110.

  38.Slaughter, Common Sense, 86, 89, 100, 113. Adam Smith offered a similar rebuke of the English financial system, highlighting its enormous debts and repeated engagement in costly wars in The Wealth of Nations (1776).

  39.See Slaughter, Common Sense, 89, 100, 102–4. On Pennsylvania selling wheat and flour to southern Europe, see T. H. Breen, “An Empire of Goods: The Anglicization of Colonial America, 1760–1776,” Journal of British Studies 25, no. 4 (October 1986): 467–99, esp. 487. The magazine for which Paine became the chief editor, the Pennsylvania Magazine; or, American Monthly Museum, published a chart of exports (tonnage and value) from Philadelphia’s port for the years 1771 to 1773; see Pennsylvania Magazine; or, American Monthly Museum (February 1775), 72.

  40.Paine wrote, “The mercantile and reasonable part in England, will be still with us; because peace with trade, is preferable to war without it”; see Slaughter, Common Sense, 114. On the debates in the Continental Congress on free trade in 1775 and 1776, see Staughton Lynd and David Waldstreicher, “Free Trade, Sovereignty, and Slavery: Toward an Economic Interpretation of the American Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly 68, no. 4 (October 2011): 597–630, esp. 610, 624–30. The British “friends of America” who supported independence did so because they wanted to ensure that a strong alliance was sustained between Great Britain and America, for both economic and political reasons. See Eliga H. Gould, The Persistence of Empire: British Political Culture in the Age of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 165.

  41.See Thomas Paine, “A Dialogue Between the Ghost of General Montgomery Just Arrived from the Elysian Fields; and an American Delegate, in the Wood Near Philadelphia” (1776), which was published in newspapers and in a later edition of Common Sense; see Philip Foner, ed., The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine, 2 vols. (New York: Citadel, 1945), 2:91. He expanded on this notion of commercial transatlantic alliances in his later writing; see Thomas Paine, Rights of Man, Part the Second. Combining Principle and Practice, second edition (London, 1792), 82–88; and Thomas C. Walker, “The Forgotten Prophet: Tom Paine’s Cosmopolitanism and International Relations,” International Studies Quarterly 44, no. 1 (March 2000), 51–72, esp. 59–60. Paine also explored the nature of mutual affections and voluntary commerce through the analogy of American Indian marriages; and the detrimental influence of titles in encouraging the “over-awed superstitious vulgar”; see “Reflections on Titles,” Pennsylvania Magazine; or, American Monthly Museum (May 1775), 209–210; and “The Old Bachelor, No. IV. Reflections on Unhappy Marriages,” Pennsylvania Magazine; or, American Monthly Museum (June 1775), 263–65.

  42.Slaughter, Common Sense, 112–14. Paine noted that there were three ways for the rebellion to go: declaring independence by “the legal voice of the people in Congress; by military power; by a mob: It may not always happen that our soldiers are citizens, and the multitude are reasonable men.”

  43.Slaughter, Common Sense, 79, 83–84, 102, 105; Keane, Tom Paine, 74.

  44.Paine’s ship docked in Philadelphia on November 30, 1774. He published the first run of Common Sense on January 10, 1776. See Keane, Tom Paine, 84; also see “To the Honorable Benjamin Franklin, Esq.,” March 4, 1775, in Foner, Complete Writings, 1132. Paine recommended Goldsmith’s History of the World to his readers in the Pennsylvania Magazine, and he included a poem and portrait of the Irish writer; see “List of New Books,” and “Retaliation; a Poem, by Dr. Goldsmith,” Pennsylvania Magazine; or, American Monthly Museum (January 1775), 40, 42; also see Oliver Goldsmith, History of Earth and Animated Nature; abridged. By Mrs. Pilkington (Philadelphia, 1808), 16–22. The first edition of Goldsmith’s book appeared in eight volumes, published in London in 1774.

  45.Linné first published his General System in 1735, where he simply laid out the four groups of Homo sapiens based on continents and colors; by 1758, he ascribed a series of traits. The 1735 edition was only eleven folio pages long; the 1758 edition was over three thousand pages. Buffon in his Histoire Naturalle (1749) preferred “race” to Linné’s more stagnant “variety.” Buffon viewed human races as particular stocks, lineages, in which traits were passed down through succeeding generations. See Sir Charles Linné, A General System of Nature, Through the Three Grand Kingdoms of Animals, Vegetables, and Minerals; Systematically Divided into Their Several Classes, Orders, Genera, Species, and Varieties, with Their Habitations, Manners, Economy, Structure, and Peculiarities, trans. William Turton, M.D. (London, 1802), 1; also see Nicholas Hudson, “From ‘Nation’ to ‘Race’: The Origins of Racial Classification in Eighteenth-Century Thought,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 29, no. 3 (1996): 247–64, esp. 253.

  46.See Joseph Priestley, An Address to Protestant Dissenters of All Denominations, on the Approaching Election of Members of Parliament, with Respect to the State of Public Liberty in General, and of American Affairs in Particular (London, 1774), 9; “Free Thoughts on Monarchy and Political Superstition,” St. James Chronicle or the British Evening Post, January 22–25, 1774; and for the reprint of this piece in American newspapers, see Dunlap’s Pennsylvania Packet or, the General Advertiser, April 25, 1774; it also appeared in The Norwich Packet and the Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Rhode Island Weekly Advertiser, May 12, 1774. For Franklin’s friendship with Priestley, see Verner W. Crane, “The Club of Honest Whigs: Friends of Liberty and Science,” William and Mary Quarterly 23, no. 2 (April 1966): 210–33, esp. 231.

  47.Slaughter, Common Sense, 87–90, 94, 99, 104, 110; James V. Lynch, “The Limits of Revolutionary Radicalism: Tom Paine and Slavery,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 123, no. 5 (July 1999): 177–99.

  48.Slaughter, Common Sense, 88, 90, 92–93, 99; Keane, Tom Paine, 42–45. On Canada, see Paine, Letter Addressed to the Abbe Raynal, on the Affairs of North America: in Which the Mistakes in the Abbe’s Account of the Revolution of
America Are Corrected and Cleared Up (1782), in Foner, Complete Writings, 2:258.

  49.Slaughter, Common Sense, 100, 104–5.

  50.Ibid., 87–88, 93–94, 110; and for the legal precept of waste on a pending lawsuit, see Book 2, chapter 14, “Of Waste,” in Sir William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England (London, 1765–66).

  51.Slaughter, Common Sense, 113–14.

  52.See Paine, “A Dialogue Between the Ghost of General Montgomery” (1776) and Letter Addressed to the Abbe Raynal, on the Affairs of North America (1782), in Foner, Complete Writings, 2:92, 243. Paine also published the dialogue in Dunlap’s Pennsylvania Packet, February 19, 1776.

  Chapter Four: Thomas Jefferson’s Rubbish: A Curious Topography of Class

  1.For Jefferson’s use of the phrases “empire of liberty” and “empire for liberty,” see Thomas Jefferson to George Rogers Clark, December 25, 1780, Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Julian Boyd et. al., 40 vols. to date (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1950–), 4:237; Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, April 27, 1809, in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson: Retirement Series, ed. J. Jefferson Looney, 11 vols. to date (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005–), 1:69. Hereafter cited as PTJ and PTJ-R. Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg, Madison and Jefferson (New York: Random House, 2010), 388–90. Also see John Murrin, “The Jeffersonian Triumph and American Exceptionalism,” Journal of the Early Republic 20, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 1–25.

  2.John E. Selby, The Revolution in Virginia, 1775–1783 (Williamsburg, VA: Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, 1988), 26–32; Michael McDonnell, “Jefferson’s Virginia,” in A Companion to Thomas Jefferson, ed. Francis D. Cogliano (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 16–31, esp. 21–22. On Jefferson’s slaves, see Lucia Stanton, “Those Who Labor for My Happiness”: Slavery at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012), 56. Jefferson grew tobacco and wheat, but tobacco was his principal cash crop; see Barbara McEwan, Thomas Jefferson: Farmer (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 1991), 2–3, 39–42, 45–46.