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

by Nancy Isenberg

In fact, the Carolinians proved resistant to religion and reform. As Byrd noted, the men had an abiding “aversion” to labor of any kind. They slept (and snored) through most of the morning. On waking, they sat smoking their pipes. Rarely did they even peek outside their doors, and during the cooler months, those who did quickly returned “shivering to their chimney corners.” In milder weather they got as far as thinking about plunging a hoe into the ground. But thinking turned to excuses, and nothing was accomplished. The unmotivated Carolina folk preferred, he said, to “loiter away their lives, like Solomon’s sluggards.” The little work that actually got done was performed by the female poor.34 Carolina obliged William Byrd to adjust his broader vision of America’s destiny. For his example of the “wretchedest scenes of poverty” he had ever seen in “this happy part of the world,” he isolated a rusticated man named Cornelius Keith, who had a wife and six children yet lived in a home without a roof. The Keiths’ dwelling was closer to a cattle pen, he said, than to any human habitation. At night the family slept in the fodder stack. Byrd found it especially odd that the husband and father was more interested in protecting feed for his animals than the safety of his family. Keith had chosen this life, and that was what most shocked the wealthy explorer from Virginia. Here was a man with a skilled trade, possessing good land and good limbs, who nevertheless preferred to live wor...