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

by Nancy Isenberg

Over the two decades leading up to Andrew Jackson’s election as president, the squatter and cracker gradually became America’s dominant poor backcountry breed. Not surprisingly, it was their physical environment that most set them apart. In 1810, the ornithologist and poet Alexander Wilson traveled along the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers from Pittsburgh to New Orleans, cataloguing not only the sky-bound birds but also the earth-hugging squatters, whom he found to be an equally curious species. Writing for a Philadelphia magazine, Wilson identified their “grotesque log cabins” that scarred the otherwise picturesque wilderness. Weeds surrounded the cabins and huts that the naturalists happened upon. The land showed no sign of toil. Wilson described these questionable homes in mocking poetry as a “cavern’d ruin,” which “frown’d a fouler cave within.” The entire family slept on a single bed, or as Wilson put it, “where nightly kennel’d all.” Kittens crawled into a broken chest, a pig took shelter in a pot, and a leaky roof let in the rain. The squatter patriarch stared from beneath his tattered hat, wearing a shirt “defiled and torn,” his “face inlaid with dirt and soot.”23 For the transplanted Scotsman Wilson, habitat was the measure of a man, marking his capacity for progress or likelihood of decay. If every man’s home was his castle, then America’s backcountry squatters were worse than peasants. With cruel irony, Wilson termed the squatter cabin as a “specimen of the first or...