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

by Nancy Isenberg

Morton’s New England landscape contained “ripe grapes” supported by “lusty trees,” “dainty fine round rising hillocks,” and luscious streams that made “so sweet a murmuring noise to hear as would ever lull the senses with delightful sleep.” He connected fertility to pleasure in the prevailing medical context: women, it was said, were more likely to conceive if they experienced sexual satisfaction. Morton was so consumed with the fertility of the physical environment that he marveled at the apparent ease with which Indian women became pregnant. The region’s animals were especially generative too, with wild does bearing two or three fawns at a time. With fewer women and a shorter history, New England had produced more children than Virginia, at least according to Morton. He could not resist including in his New English Canaan the strange story of the “barren doe,” a single woman from Virginia who was unable to conceive a child until she traveled north.59 As compelling as these passages are, Morton was actually stealing from earlier accounts. Ralph Hamor had written apocryphally in 1614 that in Virginia, lions, bears, and deer usually had three or four offspring at a time. This was the fulfillment of Hakluyt’s claim that Raleigh’s bride Virginia would “bring forth new and most abundant offspring.” Others would repeat similar claims. In A New Voyage to Carolina (1709), John Lawson contended that “women long married without children in other places, have removed to Carolina and...