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

by Nancy Isenberg

Colonial commanders such as Swiss-born colonel Henry Bouquet in Pennsylvania treated them all as expendable troublemakers, but occasionally employed them in attacking and killing so-called savages. Like the vagrants rounded up in England to fight foreign wars, these colonial outcasts had no lasting social value. In 1759, Bouquet argued that the only hope for improving the colonial frontier was through regular pruning. For him, war was a positive good when it killed off the vermin and weeded out the rubbish. They were “no better than savages,” he wrote, “their children brought up in the Woods like brutes, without any notion of Religion, [or] Government.” Nothing man could devise “improved the breed.”9 “Squatter” or “squat” carried a range of disreputable meanings. The term suggested squashing, flattening out, or beating down; it conjured images of scattering, spinning outward, spilling people across the land. Those who recurred to the term revived the older, vulgar slur of human waste, as in “squattering a soft turd.” By the late eighteenth century, in the time of the influential Buffon, squatting was uniformly associated with lesser peoples, such as the Hottentots, who reportedly convened their political meetings while squatting on the ground. During the Seven Years’ War, British forces used the tactic of squatting down and hiding when fighting Native Americans—essentially imitating their foe’s ambushes. Lest we overlook the obvious, squatting—sitting down—was the exact op...