White Trash

by Nancy Isenberg

  75.For the contrasting portraits of “country crackers” listening to a speech by George McDuffie, see Augusta Chronicle and Georgia Advertiser, August 18, 1827. Henry Clay was attacked for calling settlers “squatters,” which meant a “term, denoting infamy of life or station”; see “Distinctive Features of Democracy—Outlines of Federal Whiggism—Conservative Peculiarities,” Arkansas State Gazette, October 19, 1842.

  76.For a story of President John Quincy Adams meeting a “backwoodsman,” see “Letter to the Editor of the New-York Spectator,” Connecticut Courant, January 27, 1826; and James Fenimore Cooper, Notions of the Americans; Picked up by a Traveling Bachelor, 2 vols. (London, 1828), 1:87.

  77.Sarah Brown, “‘The Arkansas Traveller’: Southwest Humor on Canvas,” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 40, no. 4 (Winter 1987): 348–75, esp. 349–50. For a similar perspective, in which poor Georgia crackers are entertained with barbecues but remain trapped in a life of destitution and ignorance, see “A Georgia Cracker,” Emancipator, March 26, 1840.

  Chapter Six: Pedigree and Poor White Trash: Bad Blood, Half-Breeds, and Clay-Eaters

  1.One of the earliest uses of “poor white trash” appeared in 1822 from Georgetown, DC. This was a report on a “very novel and whimsical trial [that] came on in our Circuit court on Thursday last, Nancy Swann a lady of color whose might powers of witchcraft have made de black niggers, and the poor white trash tremble”; see Bangor [ME] Register, August 1, 1822. In the earliest printed reference, the writer remarked that he had never heard “white trash” used in this way; see “From the Chronicle Anecdotes,” [Shawnee] Illinois Gazette, June 23, 1821. The argument that poor whites were more miserable than slaves emerged in debates over the Missouri Compromise; see “Slavery in the New States,” Hallowell [ME] Gazette, December 8, 1819. And for poor white laboring classes as “rude and uncultivated than slaves themselves,” also see “Maryland,” Niles Weekly Register, December 15, 1821. For a satirical piece in which a black man is horrified to hear that white trash are marrying into free black circles, see Baltimore Patriot and Mercantile Advertiser, April 12, 1831. For the description of poor white trash at the funeral of Andrew Jackson in Washington City, see New York Herald, June 30, 1845.

  2.Emily P. Burke, Reminiscences of Georgia (Oberlin, OH, 1850), 205–6; “Sandhillers of South Carolina,” Christian Advocate and Journal, August 1, 1851; “The Sandhillers of South Carolina,” Ohio Farmer, January 1, 1857; “Clay for Food,” Ballou’s Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion, July 1, 1858; “Clayeaters. From Miss Bremer’s ‘Homes of the New World,’” Youth’s Companion (September 21, 1854): 88; “Poor Whites of the South,” Freedom’s Champion, April 11, 1863; “Poor Whites in North Carolina,” Freedom’s Record, November 1, 1865.

  3.George M. Weston, The Poor Whites of the South (Washington, DC, 1856), 5; Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970; rev. ed., 1995), 42, 46–47.

  4.Daniel Hundley, Social Relations in Our Southern States, ed. William J. Cooper Jr. (1860; reprint ed., Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979), xv, 251, 254, 258.

  5.Harriet Beecher Stowe, Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp, ed. Robert S. Levine (1856; reprint ed., Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 106–7, 109, 190–91, 400; also see Allison L. Hurst, “Beyond the Pale: Poor Whites as Uncontrolled Contagion in Harriet Beechers Stowe’s Dred,” Mississippi Quarterly 63, no. 3–4 (Summer/Fall 2010): 635–53; and Hinton Rowan Helper, The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It, ed. George M. Fredrickson (1857; reprint ed., Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1968), ix, 32, 44–45, 48–49, 89, 110, 381. The Impending Crisis sold 13,000 copies in 1857; a new and enlarged version was published in 1860, and it sold over 100,000 copies, and Helper reported that it sold as many as 137,000 copies by May 1860. See David Brown, Southern Outcast: Hinton Rowan Helper and “The Impending Crisis of the South” (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006), 1, 130, 148, 182.

  6.The treaty with Mexico added 339 million acres, Oregon 181 million, and the Gadsden Purchase 78 million. On the war, see Thomas Hietala, Manifest Design: American Exceptionalism and Empire, rev. ed. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), 2, 10, 36, 40–42, 49, 52–53, 81–83, 200–201, 230–31, 251; Amy Greenberg, A Wicked War: Clay, Polk, and Lincoln and the 1846 Invasion of Mexico (New York: Knopf, 2012), 25, 55, 61–63, 67, 78–79, 84–85, 95, 100, 104, 259–61; Jesse S. Reeves, “The Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo,” American Historical Review 10, no. 2 (January 1905): 309–24; Jere W. Robinson, “The South and the Pacific Railroad, 1845–1855,” Western Historical Quarterly 5, no. 2 (April 1974): 163–86.

  7.On the increasing popularity of this ideology, see Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 183, 208–9, 224–28, 236–37. Franklin’s theory still carried weight in the antebellum period. One writer claimed that the rate of increase doubles every twenty-three years, though what made the argument different from Franklin was the insistence that out of a population of seventeen million, “14,000,000 were of the Anglo-Saxon race.” See “America,” Weekly Messenger (December 7, 1842): 1502–3; also see “Progress of the Anglo-Saxon Race,” Literary World (July 26, 1851): 72–73; and for Anglo-Saxons (United States and Great Britain) conquering the world by their population and their language, see “The Anglo-Saxon Race,” Christian Observer, March 22, 1860.

  8.“The Education of the Blood,” American Monthly Magazine (January 1837): 1–7, esp. 4.

  9.See “Spurious Pedigrees” and “American Blood,” American Turf Register and Sporting Magazine (June 1830 and November 1836): 492–94 and 106–7; John Lewis, “Genealogical Tables of Blooded Stock,” Spirit of the Times: A Chronicle of the Turf, Agriculture, Field Sports, Literature and the Stage (January 14, 1837): 380; and “From Our Armchair: The Races,” Southern Literary Journal and Magazine of Arts (March 1837): 84–86.

  10.Alexander Walker’s book was republished in Philadelphia in 1853; also see “Intermarriage,” British and Foreign Medical Review or Quarterly Journal of Practical Medicine and Surgery 7 (April 1839): 370–85. Orson Fowler echoed Jefferson, writing, “Farmers take extra pains to see that their sheep, calves, colts, and even pigs, should be raised from first rate stock, yet pay no manner of regard to the parentage of their prospective children.” Fowler also divided the races, and he argued that both the Indian and African would naturally succumb to the superior Caucasian race. See Orson Squire Fowler, Hereditary Descent: Its Laws and Facts Applied to Human Improvement (New York, 1848), 36, 44, 66–69, 80, 92, 100, 125, 127, 135. For another example of this new advice literature, see Dr. John Porter, Book of Men, Women, and Babies: The Laws of God Applied to Obtaining, Rearing, and Developing of Natural, Healthful, and Beautiful Humanity (New York, 1855), 25, 28–29, 73, 79, 110, 193; also see “Remarks on Education,” American Phrenological Journal, November 1, 1840; and for the same language of “attending to pedigree” used for cattle breeding, see “Essay upon Livestock,” Farmer’s Register; a Monthly Magazine, February 28, 1838; also see “Our Anglo-Saxon Ancestry,” Philanthropist, December 8, 1841; and for hereditary thinking in general, see Charles Rosenberg, No Other Gods: On Science and American Social Thought (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1961), 28, 31–32, 34, 40, 42; also see Robyn Cooper, “Definition and Control: Alexander Walker’s Trilogy on Woman,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 2, no. 3 (January 1992): 341–64, esp. 343, 345, 347–48.

  11.Lawrence published Lecture on Physiology, Zoology, and the Natural History of Man in 1819. On the different schools of thought to which Lawrence and Nott belonged, see John Haller Jr., “The Species Problem: Nineteenth-Century Concepts on Racial Inferiority in the Origins of Man Controversy,” American Anthropologist 72 (1970): 1319–29. For Nott’s argument on m
ulattoes as hybrids, and his insistence that the present-day “Anglo-Saxon and negro races” are “distinct species,” see J. C. Nott, “The Mulatto a Hybrid—Probable Extermination of the Two Races If the Whites and Blacks Are Allowed to Intermarry,” Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, August 16, 1843; also see Reginald Horsman, Josiah Nott of Mobile: Southerner, Physician, and Racial Theorist (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987).

  12.See “Literary Notices,” Northern Light, September 2, 1844; Horsman, “Scientific Racism and the American Indian at Mid-Century,” American Quarterly 27, no. 2 (May 1975): 152–68.

  13.“Inaugural Address 1836,” in First Congress—First Session. An Accurate and Authentic Report of the Proceedings of the House of Representatives. From the 3d of October to the 23d of December, by M. J. Favel (Columbia, TX, 1836), 67; Sam Houston to Antonio Santa Anna, March 21, 1842, in Writings of Sam Houston, 1813–1863, eds. Amelia W. Williams and Eugene C. Barker, 8 vols. (Austin, TX, 1938), 2:253; also see Charles Edward Lester, Sam Houston and His Republic (New York, 1846), 103.

  14.For Houston’s inauguration ceremony and speech, see First Congress—First Session. An Accurate and Authentic Report of the Proceedings of the House of Representatives, 57, 65–69. There were negative reports of Houston as a “base, and lost man,” living in exile with Indians, until the Texas Revolution; see “General Houston,” Rural Repository, July 16, 1836. Colonel Mirabeau Lamar, a former Georgia politician, was also praised in the press as “a statesman, a poet, and a warrior,” and the “beau ideal of Southern chivalry”; see “A Modern Hero of the Old School,” Spirit of the Times, June 18, 1836. Lamar called for “an exterminating war upon their warriors, which will admit no compromise and have no termination except in their total extinction.” He had no intention of waiting until nature took its course. See Gary Clayton Anderson, The Conquest of Texas: Ethnic Cleansing in the Promised Land, 1820–1875 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2005), 174; also see Mark M. Carroll, Homesteads Ungovernable: Families, Sex, Race and the Law in Frontier Texas, 1823–1860 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001), 23–24, 33–38, 43; Peggy Pascoe, What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 18, 21.

  15.On Gideon Lincecum, see Mark A. Largent, Breeding Contempt: The History of Coerced Sterilization in the United States (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011), 11–12.

  16.Carroll, Homesteads Ungovernable, 3–5, 11–13, 17–19.

  17.Ibid., 42, 46. For the speeches of James Buchanan and Levi Woodbury, see appendix to Congressional Globe, Senate, 28th Congress, 1st Session, June 1844, 726, 771. Also see Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny, 217. And for the mongrel notion that the “Spaniards grafted themselves on the conquered and debased aborigines, and the mongrel blood became dull and indolent,” see Brantz Mayer, Mexico as It Was and as It Is (New York, 1844), 333.

  18.William W. Freehling, The Road to Disunion: Secessionists at Bay, 1776–1854 (New York: Oxford University Press), 419; Greenberg, A Wicked War, 69–70; Hietala, Manifest Design, 5, 26–34, 40–43, 50. For Benjamin Rush’s theory, see chapter 5 of this book. For Robert Walker’s speech on Texas annexation, see appendix to Congressional Globe, Senate, 28th Congress, 1st Session, June 1844, 557; Robert Walker, Letter of Mr. Walker, of Mississippi, Relative to the Annexation of Texas (Washington, DC, 1844), 14–15; Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny, 215–17; and Stephen Hartnett, “Senator Robert Walker’s 1844 Letter on Texas Annexation: The Rhetorical Logic of Imperialism,” American Studies 38, no. 1 (Spring 1997): 27–54, esp. 32–33. For Nott’s misuse of census data, see C. Loring Brace, “The ‘Ethnology’ of Josiah Clark Nott,” Journal of Urban Health 50, no. 4 (April 1974): 509–28; and Albert Deutsch, “The First U.S. Census of the Insane (1840) and Its Use as Pro-Slavery Propaganda,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 15 (1944): 469–82.

  19.Speech on Texas annexation by alexander Stephens, Appendix of Congressional Globe, 28th Congress, 2nd Session, House of Representatives, January 25, 1845, 313. Walker turned Texas into an organic body, with “veins and arteries,” that had to be reunited with the United States to heal the wounds of a “mutilated state.” See Letter of Mr. Walker, 9; Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny, 218.

  20.On marital annexations, see Nancy Isenberg, Sex and Citizenship in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 140; James M. McCaffrey, Army of Manifest Destiny: The American Soldier in the Mexican War, 1846–1848 (New York: New York University Press, 1992), 200; and on Cave Johnson Couts, see Michael Magliari, “Free Soil, Unfree Labor: Cave Johnson Couts and the Binding of Indian Workers in California, 1850–1867,” Pacific Historical Review 73, no. 3 (August 2004): 349–90, esp. 359, 363–65. On Polk’s relationship with Couts, see Greenberg, A Wicked War, 69. The war unleashed a flood of racist propaganda; see Lota M. Spell, “The Anglo-Saxon Press in Mexico, 1846–1848,” American Historical Review 38, no. 1 (October 1932): 20–31, esp. 28, 30.

  21.On Texas riffraff, see Carroll, Homesteads Ungovernable, 4, 79, 84–86. For half-breeds and “mongrel dandyism,” see Charles Winterfield, “Adventures on the Frontier of Texas and California: No. III,” The American Review; A Whig Journal of Politics, Literature, Art and Science (November 1845): 504–17. Americans described the population of California as a “mongrel race,” a composite of the worst traits of the “arrogance of the Spanish and the laziness of Indians”; see “California in 1847 and Now,” Ballou’s Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion, February 6, 1858.

  22.For Native Americans used as indentured servants, see Margliari, “Free Soil, Unfree Labor,” 349–58. On using Indians as slave and servant labor, see “California—Its Position and Prospects,” United States Magazine and Democratic Review (May 1849): 412–27. The same kinds of appeals were made to recruit marriageable women to Florida; see New Bedford Mercury, September 4, 1835. Novelist Eliza Farnham wrote promotional literature for recruiting women to California; see her California, Indoor and Outdoor, How We Farm, Mine, and Live Generally in the Golden State (New York, 1856); also see Nancy J. Taniguchi, “Weaving a Different World: Women and the California Gold Rush,” California History 79, no. 2 (Summer 2000): 141–68, esp. 142–44, 148. For the French caricature, see Le Charivari, ca. 1850, Picture Collection, California State Library. On importing women to California ending spinsterhood, see “A Colloquial Chapter on Celibacy,” United States Magazine and Democratic Review (December 1848): 533–42, esp. 537. On the sex ratio imbalance in California, claiming there were three hundred men to every woman, see “Letters from California: San Francisco,” Home Journal, March 3, 1849.

  23.See Sucheng Chan, “A People of Exceptional Character: Ethnic Diversity, Nativism, and Racism in the California Gold Rush,” California History 79, no. 2 (Summer 2000): 44–85; Hinton Rowan Helper, The Land of Gold: Reality Versus Fiction (Baltimore, 1855), 264.

  24.Helper, Land of Gold, 264; Brown, Southern Outcast, 25–26.

  25.Helper, Land of Gold, 166, 214, 221–22, 268, 272–73, 275. Helper also used the old allusion to Indians disappearing like melting snow; see Laura M. Stevens, “The Christian Origins of the Vanishing Indian,” in Mortal Remains: Death in Early America, eds. Nancy Isenberg and Andrew Burstein (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 17–30, esp. 18.

  26.Helper, Land of Gold, 38–39, 47, 92, 94, 96, 111.

  27.Ibid., 121–30. Helper’s description of the defeated bull becomes a model for how he described defeated poor whites in the southern states. He wrote that in the South the free white laborer is “treated as if he was a loathsome beast, and shunned with utmost disdain . . . he is accounted as nobody, and would be deemed presumptuous, if he dared open his mouth, even so wide to give faint utterance to a three-lettered monosyllable, like yea or nay, in the presence of the august knight of the whip and the lash”; see The Impending Crisis, 41.

  28.Helper
, Land of Gold, 150, 152–60, 180–82, 185; Helper, The Impending Crisis, 42, 49, 89, 102–3, 101–11.

  29.Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men, 166; Richard H. Sewell, A House Divided: Sectionalism and Civil War, 1848–1865 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 52–55; also see John Bigelow, Memoir of the Life and Public Services of John Charles Fremont (New York, 1856), 50–53.

  30.On poor whites as refugees and exiles, see “Slavery and the Poor White Man,” Philanthropist, May 31, 1843. On slavery depopulating the earth of her white inhabitants, and creating a class and political hierarchy in the South between the slaveowners and the “vassels to slaveowners,” see “Slavery and the Poor White Men of Virginia,” National Era, January 11, 1849. On “land-sharks,” see Helper, The Impending Crisis, 151.

  31.On David Wilmot, see Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men, 60, 116; Jonathan H. Earle, Jacksonian Antislavery and the Politics of Free Soil, 1824–1854 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 1–3, 27–37, 123–39; also see “Slavery,” Workingman’s Advocate, June 22, 1844; and “Progress Towards Free Soil,” and “The Homestead,” Young America, January 17, February 21, 1846. On the defeat of the Homestead Bill of 1854, see Gerald Wolff, “The Slavocracy and the Homestead Problem of 1854,” Agricultural History 40, no. 2 (April 1966): 101–12.