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.
