White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America

by Nancy Isenberg

he now charged that the Georgians who fled to South Carolina preferred “whipping Negroes” to regular work. Oglethorpe pointed to those settlers who were not afraid of labor, who knew how to “subsist comfortably” without clamoring for slaves. They were the Scottish Highlanders and German settlers who had petitioned the trustees to keep slavery out of the colony. Oglethorpe felt that these folks were hardier and their predisposition to work was superior to that of Englishmen. But the truth lay in an ability to work collectively, a desire to understand and appreciate the demands of subsistence farming—a commitment to long-term survival in a sparsely settled colony. Many English settlers were unwilling to work hard, because they lacked any background in farming. Apothecaries, cheese mongers, tinkers, wig makers, and weavers abounded. There were too few who could cultivate the soil. Patrick Tailfer, who drafted one of the petitions in support of slaveholding, refused to cultivate a single acre of the land he had been granted.51

When it came to common impressions of the despised lower class, the New World was not new at all.

Bastards were a Franklin family tradition.

Franklin also believed that slavery taught children the wrong lessons: “White Children become proud, disgusted with Labour, and being educated in Idleness, are rendered unfit to get a Living by Industry.”

Franklin changed the above equation: slavery corrupted all white men, rich and poor alike.

The quintessential self-made man was not self-made. The very idea is ludicrous given the inescapable network of patron-client relationships that defined the world of Philadelphia. To cushion his rise, Franklin relied on influential patrons, who provided contacts and loans that enabled him to acquire the capital he needed to set up his print shop and invest in costly equipment.

Native Americans were not just savages to Buffon; they were a constitutionally enfeebled breed, devoid of free will and “activity of mind.”

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.

Obsquatulate, To mosey, or to abscond. —“Cracker Dictionary,” Salem Gazette (1830)

Early republican America had become a “cracker” country.

“Crackers” first appeared in the records of British officials in the 1760s

the people called “crackers” were “great boasters,” a “lawless set of rascals on the frontiers of Virginia, Maryland, the Carolinas and Georgia, who often change their places of abode.” As backcountry “banditti,” “villains,” and “horse thieves,” they were dismissed as “idle strag[g]lers” and “a set of vagabonds often worse than the Indians.”

Overkill was their code of justice.11

A “louse cracker” referred to a lice-ridden, slovenly, nasty fellow.

American crackers were aggressive. Their “delight in cruelty” meant they were not just cantankerous but dangerous.

The persistence of the squatter and cracker allows us to understand how much more limited social mobility was along the frontier than loving legend has it. In the Northwest (Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin Territories), the sprawling upper South (Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri, and Arkansas Territories), and the Floridas (East and West), classes formed in a predictable manner. Speculators and large farmers—a mix of absentee land investors and landowning gentry—had the most power and political influence, and usually had a clear advantage in determining how the land was parceled out. The middling landowners had personal or political connections to the large landowning elite. In new trans-Appalachian towns such as Lexington, Kentucky, dubbed the “Athens of the West,” with the addition of roads came commercial growth between 1815 and 1827, so that a new merchant middle class took root. Such towns as Lexington also supported small farmers, who had less security in retaining their land, given the fluctuations in the market, while artisans of the meaner sort hung about the town.17

By 1850, in what became a common pattern in new southwestern states, at least 35 percent of the population owned no real estate. There was no clear path to land and riches among the lower ranks. Tenants could easily be reduced to landless squatters. In the Northwest, land agents courted buyers and actively discouraged tenancy. Federal laws for purchasing land were weighted in favor of wealthier speculators. The landless west of the Appalachians were more likely to pull up stakes and move elsewhere than they were to stay in one place and work their way upward.20

They came to be associated with five traits: (1) crude habitations; (2) boastful vocabulary; (3) distrust of civilization and city folk; (4) an instinctive love of liberty (read: licentiousness); and (5) degenerate patterns of breeding. Yet even with such unappealing traits, the squatter also acquired some favorable qualities: the simple backwoodsman welcomed strangers into his cabin, the outrageous storyteller entertained them through the night. Squatters, then, were more than troublesome, uncouth rascals taking up land they didn’t own.

Americans tend to forget that Andrew Jackson was the first westerner elected president. Tall, lanky, with the rawboned look of a true backwoodsman, he wore the harsh life of the frontier on his face and literally carried a bullet next to his heart. Ferocious in his resentments, driven to wreak revenge against his enemies, he often acted without deliberation and justified his behavior as a law unto himself. His controversial reputation made him the target of attacks that painted him as a Tennessee cracker. His wife Rachel’s backcountry divorce and her recourse to both cigar and corncob pipe confirmed the couple as Nashville bumpkins, at least in the eyes of their eastern detractors.21 Jackson and his supporters worked on a different image.

There were many like Wilson who placed squatters below the naked savage on the social scale. At least American Indians belonged in the woods. The poor squatter’s backcountry still carried the association of a rubbish heap. There was no real social ladder emerging in the western territories, no solid foundation for mobility under construction there, not much rising from the bottomless basement that oozed human refuse.

Using a racially charged slur, the poet identified the children as “Hoosieroons”—a class variation of the mixed-race quadroons.

In Crockett’s backcountry class hierarchy, there was the free white male landowner, the squatter, the black man, the dog, and then, if his language was to be taken seriously, the party man.38

Everywhere they are just alike, possess pretty much the same characteristics, the same vernacular, the same boorishness, and the same habits . . . everywhere, Poor White Trash. —Daniel Hundley, “Poor White Trash” in Social Relations in Our Southern States (1860)

“white trash” appeared in print as early as 1821, the designation gained widespread popularity in the 1850s.

White trash southerners were classified as a “race” that passed on horrific traits, eliminating any possibility of improvement or social mobility.

Poor whites were not simply a danger to the integrity of the Old South. The unloved class conjured a special fear, that they would spread their unique contagion into the vast domain of the West.

Sheer demographic superiority was reinforced by the second ruling premise of the new thinking: national greatness rested on the laws of bloodlines and hereditary transmission. Learned traits such as a love of liberty, and racial exclusivity, were now assumed to be passed from one generation to the next.

By the 1850s, poor whites had become a permanent class.

The one-flesh marital trope had both a racial and a sexual dimension, presenting the desirable image of a distinct breed.

Wars are battles of words, not just bullets.

In all societies, “there must be a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life.” With fewer skills and a “low order of intellect,” the laboring class formed the base of civilized nations. Every advanced society had to exploit its petty laborers; the working poor who wallowed in the mud allowed for a superior class to emerge on top. This recognized elite, the crème de la crème, was the true society and the source of all “civilization, progress, and refinement.” In Hammond’s mind, menial laborers were, almost literally, “mudsills,” stuck in the mud, or perhaps in a metaphoric quicksand, from which none would emerge.12

If all societies had their mudsills, then, Hammond went on to argue, the South had made the right choice in keeping Africa-descended slaves in this lowly station. As a different race, the darker-pigmented were naturally inferior and docile—or so he argued. The North had committed a worse offense: it had debased its own kind. The white mudsills of the North were “of your own race; you are brothers of one blood.”

“rich man’s war and poor man’s fight”

Generals Ulysses S. Grant and William T. Sherman, as well as many Union officers, believed they were fighting a war against a slaveholding aristocracy, and that winning the war and ending slavery would liberate not only slaves but also poor white trash.

the “twenty slave law,” which granted exemptions to planters with twenty or more slaves.

“usufruct.”

Union men had a way of identifying “white trash” with the dual bogeymen of southern poverty and elite hypocrisy.

Darwin himself endorsed eugenics, and he drew on the familiar trope of animal husbandry to make the case: “Man scans with scrupulous care the pedigree of his horses, cattle and dogs before he mates them; but when it comes to his marriage, he rarely, or never, takes such care.”

Pseudoscience, masquerading as hereditary science, provided Americans with a convenient way to naturalize class and racial differences. The appeal of this language, which

Both Republicans, who wanted to rebuild the South in the image of the North, and Democrats, who wished to restore elite white rule, saw the grand scope of national reunion as part of a larger evolutionary struggle. And so Darwin’s “survival of the fittest” became the watchword of politicians and journalists. They invoked a vocabulary that highlighted unnatural breeding, unfit governance, and the degenerate nature of the worst stocks. At the center of the argument was the struggle that pitted poor whites against freed slaves.

emancipated in fact, yet treated as resident aliens, bearing rights but still denied the franchise.

white trash republic.

More than tallow-colored skin, it was the permanent mark of intellectual stagnation, the “inert” minds, the “fumbling” speech, and the “stupid, moony glare, like that of the idiot.” They were, it was said, of the “Homo genus without the sapien.” Hardworking blacks were suddenly the redeemed ones, while white trash remained undeveloped, evolutionarily stagnant creatures.16

Here is how the new narrative went: When ill-bred men of suspect origins assumed power, virtue in government declined.

As early as 1867, secret societies began to form, like the Knights of the White Camelia, which first organized in Louisiana. Members swore to marry a white woman, and they agreed to do everything in their power to prevent the “production of a bastard and degenerate progeny.”24

When southern Democrats called for a “White Man’s Government,” they did not mean all white men.

“redneck”

The “redneck” could be found in the swamps. He could be found in the mill towns. He was the man in overalls, the heckler at political rallies, and was periodically elected to the state legislature. He was Guy Rencher, a Vardaman ally,

sharecropper’s rhythmic chant (circa 1917): “I’d druther be a Nigger, an’ plow ole Beck, Dan a white Hill Billy wid his long red neck.”36

LeRoy Percy, best expressed the class anger. Recalling how he surveyed the surly crowd, wondering if Vardaman’s army would launch rotten eggs at his father, Percy wrote: They were the sort of people that lynch Negroes, that mistake hoodlumism for wit, and cunning for intelligence, that attend revivals and fight and fornicate in the bushes afterwards. They were undiluted Anglo-Saxons. They were the sovereign voter. It was so horrible it seemed unreal.