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March 12 - April 29, 2021
Franklin also believed that slavery taught children the wrong lessons: “White Children become proud, disgusted with Labour, and being educated in Idleness, are rendered unfit to get a Living by Industry.”
Franklin was not sympathetic to the plight of the poor.
Sad.
Most men wanted a “life of ease,” Franklin concluded, and “freedom from care and labor.” Sloth was in itself a form of pleasure. This was why he contended that the only solution to poverty was some kind of coercive system to make the indigent work: “I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it.”
For most Americans of the eighteenth century, it was assumed impossible for a servant to shed his lowly origins;
The circumstance of superior beauty is thought worthy of attention in the propagation of our horses, dogs, and other domestic animals; why not in that of man? —Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (1787)
Thomas Jefferson looks like an idiot in this book.
Eighteenth-century Virginia was both an agrarian and a hierarchical society. By 1770, fewer than 10 percent of white Virginians laid claim to over half the land in the colony; a small upper echelon of large planters each owned slaves in the hundreds.
Historically hailed as a democrat, Thomas Jefferson was never able to escape his class background. His privileged upbringing inevitably colored his thinking.
Jefferson’s proposal to lift up the bottom ranks, granting men without any land of their own fifty acres and the vote, was dropped from the final version of the constitution.12
Like the long-standing British practice of colonizing the poor, the Virginians sought to quell dissent, raise taxes, and lure the less fortunate west. This policy did little to alter the class structure. In the end, it worked against poor families. Without ready cash to buy the land, they became renters, trapped again as tenants instead of becoming independent landowners.
Public education accompanied land reforms. In bill no. 79, for the “General Diffusion of Knowledge,” Jefferson laid out a proposal for different levels of preparation: primary schools for all boys and girls, and grammar schools for more capable males at the public expense. For the second tier, he called for twenty young “geniusses” to be drawn from the lower class of each county. Rewarding those with merit, he devised a means of social mobility in a state where education was purely a privilege of wealthy families.
Wow!
The society initially granted hereditary privileges to the sons of veteran officers and awarded medals as badges of membership in the highly selective club.
Jefferson may have hated artificial distinctions and titles, but he was quite comfortable asserting “natural” differences. With nature as his guide, he felt there was no reason not to rank humans on the order of animal breeds.
Careful breeding was one solution to slavery. In his Revisal of the Laws, Jefferson calculated how a black slave could turn white: once a slave possessed seven-eighths “white” blood, the “taint” of his or her African past was deemed gone.
WTF?
On his plantation, Jefferson had little difficulty in breeding slaves as chattel. He counted slave children in cold terms as “increase,” and considered his female slaves to be more valuable than males.
Adams returned to this favorite theory that men are driven by vanity and ambition. Put a hundred men in a room, he conjectured, and soon twenty-five will use their superior talents, their cunning, to take control.
Economic prosperity had actually declined for most Americans in the wake of the Revolution.
As civilization approached, the backwoodsman was expected to lay down roots, purchase land, and adjust his savage ways to polite society—or move on.
Kris Kristofferson’s classic lyric resonates here: when it came to the cracker or squatter, freedom was just another word for nothing left to lose.
Slang tends to enter the vocabulary well after the condition it describes has existed.
This is interesting for my EFL classes.
Americans tend to forget that Andrew Jackson was the first westerner elected president.
In 1818, General Andrew Jackson invaded Florida without presidential approval; as president, he supported the forced removal of the Cherokees from the southeastern states and willfully ignored the opinion of the Supreme Court.
Women and children were important symbols of civilization—or the absence of it. Officers stationed in Florida in the 1830s identified “ye cracker girls” as brutes, with manners no better than sailors, and often seen smoking pipes, chewing and spitting tobacco, and cursing. Seeing their slipshod dress, dirty feet, ropy hair, and unwashed faces, one lieutenant from the Northeast dismissed them all as no better than prostitutes.
Sexual behavior was another crucial marker of class status.
Instead, poor Indiana squatters produced a degenerate dozen of dirty yellow urchins.29
What makes the historic David Crockett interesting is that he was self-taught, lived off the land, and (most notably for us) became an ardent defender of squatters’ rights—for he had been a squatter himself. As a politician he took up the cause of the landless poor.32
The real Crockett was often eclipsed by the tall tales of the untutored backwoodsman. An entire cottage industry of Crockett stories were published that he never authorized. Davy Crockett’s Almanack of 1837 contains a crude engraving of a corn cracker, who appears unshaven, is dressed in buckskin, and holds a rifle in his hand.
In Crockett’s backcountry class hierarchy, there was the free white male landowner, the squatter, the black man, the dog, and then, if his language was to be taken seriously, the party man.38
“Old Sug” in Streaks of Squatter Life (1847) is a comic character whose poverty is rendered harmless. He represented a softened image of actual squatters known for brawling, drinking, and swearing at political events in the backcountry.
Sug.
So while some journalists defended the “country crackers” as the “bone and sinew of the country,” others continued to see the cracker as a drunken fool who, as one writer put it, elevated a favorite stump speaker into a “demigod of beggars.”
If whiteness was not an automatic badge of superiority, a guarantee of the homogeneous population of independent, educable freemen, as Jefferson imagined, then the ideals of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness were unobtainable.
slave economy monopolized the soil, while closing off opportunities for nonslaveholding white men to support their families and advance in a free-market economy.
In his 1860 Social Relations in Our Southern States, Alabamian Daniel Hundley denied slavery’s responsibility for the phenomenon of poverty, insisting that poor whites suffered from a corrupt pedigree and cursed lineage.
“They retire before the axe and plough like the forests they once inhabited. The atmosphere of the white man is their poison. They cannot exist among us.”
RUN TO THE HILLS!
The United States Magazine and Democratic Review prophesied that if prospective wives were shipped off to California at the rate they were needed, the institution of spinsterhood would become extinct in America.22
Uh, yeah.
By the 1850s, poor whites had become a permanent class. As nonslaveholders, they described themselves as “farmers without farms.”
Six years later, the Richmond Enquirer restated the increasingly popular view that slavery should not be a matter of complexion but of lineage and habits.
Wow!
Let us put it plainly: on the path to disunion, the roadside was strewn with white trash.
Like many other proslavery advocates, Davis was convinced that slavery had elevated poor whites by ensuring their superiority over blacks. He was wrong: in the antebellum period, class hierarchy was more extreme than it ever had been.10
Confederate ideology converted the Civil War into a class war.
class mobility was possible for nonslaveholders who scrimped and saved to buy a slave, especially a breeding female slave, whose offspring were “heirlooms”
Yuck!
The aristocracy would be washed away in a flood of northern mudsills and liberated slaves. Their own homegrown white trash were a problem as well. Presumably, without total victory, landless laborers and poor farmers might outbreed the elite class, and if corrupted by northern democratic ideas, they might overwhelm the planter elite at the ballot box.28
In this way, North and South each saw class as the enemy’s pivotal weakness and a source of military and political vulnerability.
Union men had a way of identifying “white trash” with the dual bogeymen of southern poverty and elite hypocrisy.
Little separated northern mudsills from southern trash. Neither class gained much when reduced to cannon fodder.
Vardaman called Roosevelt the “coon-flavored miscegenationist,” describing a White House “so saturated with the odor of the nigger that the rats have taken refuge in the stables.”
Terrible!
He saw himself as the defender of poor whites. In his run for the governorship in 1903, Vardaman pitted poor whites against all blacks.
Thus furthering racism.
This 1929 chart from a Kansas fair states unequivocally that heredity determines every person’s destiny. Its message is clear: unfitness must be “bred out” of the national stock. Scrapbook, American Eugenic Society Papers, American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
YIKES!
Carrie Buck and her mother, Emma (1924). Carrie, her mother, and Carrie’s illegitimate daughter were all put on trial in Buck v. Bell (1927). Their crime was one of pedigree—a defective breed perpetuated over three generations. Arthur Estabrook Collection, M. E. Grenander Department of Special Collections and Archives, University of Albany Libraries, Albany, New York
Sickening!
“Can a nation call itself free if it finds itself periodically on the verge of bankruptcy and starvation in the face of the fact that it possesses all the materials of the good life?”
Changing the South required shifting the balance of power—his agency would enable poor whites to challenge the status quo.
