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

by Nancy Isenberg

Throughout its history, the United States has always had a class system. It is not only directed by the top 1 percent and supported by a contented middle class. We can no longer ignore the stagnant, expendable bottom layers of society in explaining the national identity.

We know what class is. Or think we do: economic stratification created by wealth and privilege. The problem is that popular American history is most commonly told—dramatized—without much reference to the existence of social classes. It is as though in separating from Great Britain, the United States somehow magically escaped the bonds of class and derived a higher consciousness of enriched possibility.

The hallowed American dream is the gold standard by which politicians and voters alike are meant to measure quality of life as each generation pursues its own definition of happiness unfettered by the restraints of birth (who your parents are) or station (the position you start out from in the class system). Our cherished myths are at once bolstering and debilitating. “All men are created equal” was successfully employed as a motto to define the promise of America’s open spaces and a united people’s moral self-regard in distinguishing themselves from a host of hopeless societies abroad. The idea of America was presented by its chief promoters with great panache, a vision of how a modern republic might prove itself revolutionary in terms of social mobility in a world dominated by monarchy and fixed aristocracy. All that is bolstering. However, the reality on the ground was and is considerably different. In the most literal terms, as we shall see, British colonists promoted a dual agenda: one involved reducing poverty back in England, and the other called for transporting the idle and unproductive to the New World.

Long before they were today’s “trailer trash” and “rednecks,” they were called “lubbers” and “rubbish” and “clay-eaters” and “crackers”—and

'Cracker' is still in use, though as a mild slur against white people.

The idea of settlement had to be sold to wary investors; the planting of New World American colonies had to serve Old World purposes. In grand fashion, promoters imagined America not as an Eden of opportunity but as a giant rubbish heap that could be transformed into productive terrain. Expendable people—waste people—would be unloaded from England; their labor would germinate a distant wasteland. Harsh as it sounds, the idle poor, dregs of society, were to be sent thither simply to throw down manure and die in a vacuous muck. Before it became that fabled “City upon a Hill,” America was in the eyes of sixteenth-century adventurers a foul, weedy wilderness—a “sinke hole” suited to ill-bred commoners.

We all know what imagery springs to mind when patriots of our day seek confirmation that their country is and was always an “exceptional” place: modest Pilgrims taught to plant by generous Indians; Virginia Cavaliers entertaining guests at their refined estates along the James River. Because of how history is taught, Americans tend to associate Plymouth and Jamestown with cooperation rather than class division. And it gets ever more misty-eyed from there, because disorder and discord serve no positive purpose in burgeoning national pride.

Even now, the notion of a broad and supple middle class functions as a mighty balm, a smoke screen. We cling to the comfort of the middle class, forgetting that there can’t be a middle class without a lower.

Selective memory allows us to romanticize a golden age that functions as a timeless talisman of American identity. For Charles Murray, who ignores the country’s long history, the golden age is 1963, when the essence of the American creed was somehow captured in a Gallup poll in which respondents refused to self-identify as either poor or rich: approximately half said that they were working class, while the other half perceived themselves as middle class. As if a single statistic could possibly tell a comprehensive story, the social scientist writes, “Those refusals reflected a national conceit that had prevailed from the beginning of the nation: America didn’t have classes, or, to the extent that it did, Americans should act as if we didn’t” (emphasis added). Murray’s fable of class denial can only exist by erasing a wealth of historical evidence that proves otherwise. The problem is, the evidence has never been effectively laid out, allowing gross misrepresentations to stand.2 By gaining first a better understanding of the colonial context and, next, charting the steps by which modern definitions of class were established, we will be able to see how ideas and ideals combined over time. By acknowledging the ongoing influence of older English definitions of poverty and class, we will come to recognize that class identity was apparent in America—profoundly so—long before George Gallup saw it as a creature of public opinion;

And, even if that single stat was somehow influential, it wouldn't change the fact that even if people refuse to acknowledge a truth that doesn't change the fact of its existence. Reality doesn't change because someone (or even lots of someones) want it to.

Historical mythmaking is made possible only by forgetting. We have to begin, then, with the first refusal to face reality: most colonizing schemes that took root in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British America were built on privilege and subordination, not any kind of proto-democracy.

Monuments imperfectly record the past, as we all know. There is strange discrepancy between the chiseled female form (which could appear almost anywhere) and the event being recalled.

The compression of history, the winnowing of history, may seem natural and neutral, but it is decidedly not. It is the means by which grade school history becomes our standard adult history. And so the great American saga, as taught, excludes the very pertinent fact that after the 1630s, less than half came to Massachusetts for religious reasons. The tall tales we unthinkingly absorb when young somehow remain within; the result is a narrowly conceived sense of national belonging productive of the most uncompromising of satisfying myths: “American exceptionalism.” We are unique and different, and the absence of class is one of our hallmarks.

Stories of unity tamp down our discontents and mask even our most palpable divisions. And when these divisions are class based, as they almost always are, a pronounced form of amnesia sets in. Americans do not like to talk about class. It is not supposed to be important in our history. It is not who we are.

Even though it actually is, and we just don't want to admit it.

Attaching “empty” as a metaphor to a mysterious land served the legal purposes of the English state. Without recognized owners, the territory was available and waiting to be taken. Even for the bookish cleric Hakluyt, the trope of conquest he used presented America as a lovely woman waiting to be wooed and wed by the English. They would become her rightful owners and deserving custodians.

The English were obsessed with waste, which was why America was first and foremost a “wasteland” in their eyes. Wasteland meant undeveloped land, land that was outside the circulation of commercial exchange and apart from the understood rules of agricultural production. To lie in waste, in biblical language, meant to exist desolate and unattended; in agrarian terms, it was to be left fallow and unimproved. Wasteland was idle land. Arable tracts of desirable property could only be associated with furrowed fields, rows of crops and fruit trees, golden waves of grain, and pasture for cattle and sheep. John Smith embraced the same ideological premise with a precise (if crude) allusion: the Englishman’s right to the land was ensured by his commitment to carpeting the soil with manure. An English elixir of animal waste would magically transform the Virginia wilderness, making untilled wasteland into valuable English territory. Waste was there to be treated, and then exploited. Waste was wealth as yet unrealized.8 In his “Discourse of Western Planting,” Hakluyt confidently described the entire continent as that “waste firm of America.” Not terra firma, but waste firm. He saw natural resources as raw materials that could be converted into valuable commodities. Like other Englishmen of his day, he equated wastelands with commons, forests, and fens—those lands that sixteenth-century agrarian improvers eyed for prospective profits.

Whatever else their lives entailed, vagrants, children of beggars, and ex-soldiers who might be transported to the New World and transplanted onto its soil were thought to be fertilizing wasteland with their labor. Their value was calculated not in humane (or even human) terms, but as a disembodied commercial force. If that proposition seems cold and calculating, it was. In death, they were, to use the operative modern phrase, collateral damage. They had more value to the realm as dead colonists than as idle waste in England.

Among the more insidious practices in the colony, wives and children were held accountable for their husband’s or father’s indentured period of labor. After the Natives attacked in 1622, a colonist named Jane Dickenson was held by them in captivity for ten months. When she returned to Jamestown, she was told that she owed 150 pounds of tobacco to her husband’s former master. Unable to pay, she would be forced to work off her dead husband’s unmet obligations. She appealed to the governor, writing that her treatment was identical to the “slavery” she experienced among the “cruel savages.” Had English civilization been sacrificed in this colonial wasteland? That was Dickenson’s unspoken message. Nor was her treatment unusual. John Smith acknowledged in his Generall Historie that “fatherless children” were left “in little better condition than slaves, for if their Parents die in debt, their children are made bondmen till the debt be discharged.”35 The leaders of Jamestown had borrowed directly from the Roman model of slavery: abandoned children and debtors were made slaves. When indentured adults sold their anticipated labor in return for passage to America, they instantly became debtors, which made their orphaned children a collateral asset. It was a world not unlike the one Shakespeare depicted in The Merchant of Venice, when Shylock demanded his pound of flesh. Virginia planters felt entitled to their flesh and blood in the forms of the innocent spouses and offspring of dea...

The colony needed to shed its image as a penal colony and to plant firmer roots. It needed more than tobacco. It needed herds of cattle, fields of crops, and improved relations between masters and servants. Most of all, it needed many more marriageable women. In 1620 the Virginia Company sent to the colony fifty-seven “young, handsome, and honestlie educated Maides.” Over the next three years, 157 more women made the crossing. They were thought of as emissaries of a new moral order. Company records hint at something else as well: the “greatest hindrances” to “Noble worke” rested on “want of comforts”; men deserved to “live contentedlie.” The transportation of female cargo would “tye and roote the Planters myndes to Virginia by the bonds of wives and children.” Sexual satisfaction and heirs to provide for would make slothful men into more productive colonists. All that was required of the women was that they marry. Their prospective husbands were expected to buy them, that is, to defray the cost of passage and provisions. Each woman was valued at 150 pounds of tobacco, which was the same price exacted from Jane Dickenson when she eventually purchased her freedom. Not surprisingly, then, with their value calculated in tobacco, women in Virginia were treated as fertile commodities. They came with testimonials to their moral character, impressing on “industrious Planters” that they were not being sold a bad bill of goods. One particular planter wrote that an earlier shipment o...

😰🤢🤮 Gross

Class divisions were firmly entrenched. The ever-widening gap in land ownership elevated large planters into a small, privileged faction. At the same time, the labor system reduced servants to debt slaves, and, living so far from home, they had little recourse to demand better treatment. Isolation, then, increased the potential for abuse. The only liberty for colonial servants came with their feet—by running away.

Who can blame them? Their world and whole life experience sucked.

During its first decade, the Bay Colony received some twenty-one thousand settlers, only about 40 percent of whom came from East Anglia and the coastal towns where a high percentage of Puritan converts lived. For every religious dissenter in the exodus of the 1630s, there was one commercially driven emigrant from London or other areas of England.

Inequality was a given in the “Citty upon a Hill,” submission was regarded as a natural condition of humankind. In “A Model of Christian Charity,” Winthrop declared that some were meant to rule, others to serve their betters: “God Almightie in his most holy and wise providence hath soe disposed the Condition of mankind, as in all times some must be rich some poore, some highe and eminent in power and dignitie; others meane and in subjeccion.” Lest there be any doubt, Governor Winthrop despised democracy, which he brusquely labeled “the meanest and worst of all forms of Government.” For Puritans, the church and state worked in tandem; the coercive arm of the magistracy was meant to preserve both public order and class distinctions.42

Well, there goes one of the most cherished pieces of early american folklore, dashed by words straight from the mouth of an early founder.

One had to know his or her place in Puritan Massachusetts. Church membership added a layer of privilege before the courts and elsewhere to an already hierarchical regime. Expulsion from the church carried a powerful stigma. Heretics such as Anne Hutchinson and Mary Dyer were physically banished, cut off and ostracized.

Where can I find biographies of these women?

Anne Hutchinson was excommunicated from the Boston congregation and expelled from the Bay Colony in 1638 for refusing to bend to the authority of the town fathers. She was sternly advised: “You have rather been a Husband than a Wife and a preacher than a Hearer, and a Magistrate than a Subject.” Hutchinson had held religious classes in her home, and had acquired a large following. Turning the social order upside down, she had undermined the carefully orchestrated moral geography of the Puritan meetinghouse. Male dominance was unquestioned, and ranks so clearly spelled out, that no one could miss the power outlined in something so simple as a seating chart.

Especially this woman.

Husbanding fertile women remained central to colonial concepts of class and property. This dictate became even more fixed as Virginians began to regulate the offspring of slave women. In a law passed in 1662, a slave was defined not only by place of origin, or as a heathen, but also for being born to an enslaved woman. In the wording of the statute, a law without any British precedent, “condition of the mother” determined whether a child was slave or free. It was Roman law that provided the basis for treating slave children as the property of masters; the English law of bastardy served as a model for children following the condition of the mother. It was the case that a slave followed the condition of the mother as far back as Saint Thomas Aquinas. The analogy Aquinas used associated the womb with the land: if a man visited the island of another man, and sowed his seed in another man’s land, the owner still had a right to the produce. The 1662 Virginia law could as easily have been based on a breeder’s model: the calves of the cow were the property of the owner, even if the male bull belonged to someone else.73

*more retching*

North Carolina, which came to be known as “Poor Carolina,” went in a very different direction from its sibling to the south. It failed to shore up its elite planter class. Starting with Albemarle County, it became an imperial renegade territory, a swampy refuge for the poor and landless. Wedged between proud Virginians and upstart South Carolinians, North Carolina was that troublesome “sinke of America” so many early commentators lamented. It was a frontier wasteland resistant (or so it seemed) to the forces of commerce and civilization. Populated by what many dismissed as “useless lubbers” (conjuring the image of sleepy and oafish men lolling about doing nothing), North Carolina forged a lasting legacy as what we might call the first white trash colony.

Governor Spotswood of Virginia lashed out against Albemarle County as a “common Sanctuary for all our runaway servants,” and censured its “total Absence of Religion.” He echoed a previous Virginia governor when he denounced the place as the “sinke of America, the Refuge of Renegadoes.” He meant by this a commercial sinkhole, and with the loaded term “renegadoes,” a bastion of lawless, irreligious men who literally renounced their national allegiance as well as their Christian faith. Though there were but few ministers to guide them, the real apostasy of the people was said to be their refusal to be good taxpaying Britons.30

An Anglican minister named John Urmston reported that his poor white charges loved their hogs more than they did their minister. They let the hogs into their churches to avoid the heat, leaving “dung and nastiness” on the floor.

Well, yeah. The hogs are at least useful for their survival. The church, not so much.

Proslavery Georgians were not above accusing Oglethorpe of running a prison colony.50 Oglethorpe was unmoved by their demands. Just as he had earlier called press gangs “little tyrants” with “great sticks” when they forcibly turned poor men into sailors, he now charged that the Georgians who fled to South Carolina preferred “whipping Negroes” to regular work. Oglethorpe pointed to those settlers who were not afraid of labor, who knew how to “subsist comfortably” without clamoring for slaves. They were the Scottish Highlanders and German settlers who had petitioned the trustees to keep slavery out of the colony. Oglethorpe felt that these folks were hardier and their predisposition to work was superior to that of Englishmen. But the truth lay in an ability to work collectively, a desire to understand and appreciate the demands of subsistence farming—a commitment to long-term survival in a sparsely settled colony. Many English settlers were unwilling to work hard, because they lacked any background in farming. Apothecaries, cheese mongers, tinkers, wig makers, and weavers abounded. There were too few who could cultivate the soil. Patrick Tailfer, who drafted one of the petitions in support of slaveholding, refused to cultivate a single acre of the land he had been granted.51 We should make clear that Oglethorpe was not a modern egalitarian. He did not imagine his colony as a multiracial community, nor did he surmount common prejudices with respect to Africans. He permitted t...

In 1750, settlers were formally granted the right to own slaves.58 A planter elite quickly formed, principally among transplants from the West Indies and South Carolina. By 1788, Carolinian Jonathan Bryan was the most powerful man in Georgia, with thirty-two thousand acres and 250 slaves. He set up shop there in 1750, the very year slavery was made legal, and his numerous slaves entitled him to large tracts of lands. But to build his empire he had to pull the strings of Georgia’s Executive Council, whose chief duty was distributing land. A long tenure on the council ensured that he acquired the most fertile land, conveniently situated along major trade routes. By 1760, only 5 percent of white Georgians owned even a single slave, while a handful of families possessed them in the hundreds. Jonathan Bryan was the perfect embodiment of the “Slave Merchants” who Oglethorpe had warned would dominate the colony.59

The purest expression of Franklin’s reproductive philosophy came in his 1747 satire “The Speech of Miss Polly Baker.” Appearing before a judge, Polly was found guilty of having borne an illegitimate child for the fifth time. Speaking in her own defense, Miss Baker described herself as an industrious woman: “I have brought Five fine Children into the World, at the Risque of my Life; I have maintain’d them well by my own Industry, without burthening the Township.” Her self-confidence was bolstered by the knowledge of her patriotic service. She had added to the “Number of the King’s Subjects, in a new Country that really wants People.” She should be praised, not punished, was the message. Baker’s plight was not of her own doing. She wanted to be married; she wanted to display the “Industry, Frugality, Fertility, and Skill in Oeconomy, appertaining to a good Wife’s Character.” Was it her fault that bachelors abounded? she pleaded. How could her action be considered sinful when one gazed on the “admirable workmanship” of God in creating her beautiful children? Had she not fulfilled her higher duty, “the first and great Command of Nature, and of Nature’s God, Encrease and Multiply?” As Franklin saw it, God and nature were on the side of Miss Baker, and foolish laws and outdated church sanctions on the other. To make his point, he added a humorous coda: the judge who heard her speech was convinced and he married her himself the next day.9 Franklin’s offbeat story touched on all t...

Franklin’s own experiences belied his optimism as to the ease with which colonists moved from one place to another. As a teenager, he had run away from Boston to Philadelphia, cutting short the full term of an apprenticeship he had been contracted to serve with his elder brother. A fugitive and vagrant, he was part of the large class of servants on the lam. His movement, like so many others, was haphazard, less methodical than the ants he studied. William Moraley, who arrived in Philadelphia in the same decade as young Franklin and wrote a memoir about his experiences, may have said it best when he described himself as a “Tennis-ball of fortune,” bouncing from one new master to the next. Despite his literary skills, training as a law clerk and watchmaker, the un-Franklinesque Moraley seemed to migrate in circles and never up the social ladder. There was no guarantee that restlessness ensured social mobility.15

The quintessential self-made man was not self-made. The very idea is ludicrous given the inescapable network of patron-client relationships that defined the world of Philadelphia. To cushion his rise, Franklin relied on influential patrons, who provided contacts and loans that enabled him to acquire the capital he needed to set up his print shop and invest in costly equipment.

Class was about more than wealth and family name; it was conveyed through appearances and reputation. Franklin understood this. The first portrait of him, painted in 1746, did not show him in his leather apron setting print type; nor was he pushing a wheelbarrow along the street, as he described himself—a dutiful tradesman—in his Autobiography. He was wearing a respectable wig and a fine ruffled shirt, and assumed all the airs of the “Better Sort.”21

So, for all the rhetoric and idealizing, he was well aware of the realities of the circumstances because he lived in and bowed to them.

The “middling people” of Pennsylvania were, he had written, the “Tradesmen, Shopkeepers, and Farmers.” He had no desire to eliminate the “Better Sort,” of course, but he rejected the idea that if some were “better,” everyone else was automatically “the meaner Sort, i.e., the Mob, or the Rabble.” In a pamphlet of 1747, “Plain Truth,” he demonstrated that the middle had a crucial role to play for the colony. That year Delaware was invaded by an irregular French and Spanish force. Franklin wrote to warn his fellow Philadelphians, especially the Quakers, that the same fate awaited them unless they organized a voluntary militia. He called for a “militia of FREEMEN,” by which he meant men of the better and middling sorts, working together to defend their property and their colony.27 To rally support for his militia plan, he cast the dangers of a foreign invasion in terms of class warfare. Who, he posed, could be expected to lead the attack on a civilized people? It would be those “licentious Privateers,” the dregs of society: “Negroes, Mulattoes, and others of the vilest and most abandoned of Mankind.” He insisted that no indentured servants would be allowed to join the army of freemen. Besides advocating for defense of the colony, what was Franklin up to? Simple. He was redrawing class lines, bringing industrious middling men up the social ladder and refortifying the line that separated the middling from the meaner sort.28

To reinforce the idea of class as a good thing for what we would today call the middle class by giving them someone else to look down on. Pay no attention to those above you who profit from inattention or docility, just those meaner sorts who are worth less than yourself.

Franklin understood that maintaining class differences had its own appeal. In the Pennsylvania Gazette, the newspaper he edited, an article was published in 1741 that exposed why people preferred having a class hierarchy to having none. Hierarchy was easily maintained when the majority felt there was someone below them. “How many,” the author asked, “even of the better sort,” would choose to be “Slaves to those above them, provided they might exercise an arbitrary and Tyrannical Rule over all below them?” There was something desirable, perhaps even pleasurable, to use Franklin’s utilitarian axiom, in the feeling of lording over subordinate classes. To alter that measure of satisfaction required a drastic rewiring of the eighteenth-century mind.

The twenty-first century mind as well, unfortunately. For all that we've made a lot of progress in the last several centuries, we've also made none at all.

Paine is actually an odd choice for modern Americans to celebrate as a Revolutionary symbol. He was an Englishman born and bred; better put, an Englishman in exile. When Common Sense was published in January 1776, he had been in Philadelphia for little more than a year. He had arrived with a letter of introduction from Franklin, which landed him a job editing the Pennsylvania Magazine; or American Monthly Museum, a venture committed to everything American, despite its unmistakable London design and English editor. Adding to the irony of the situation, he had been an exciseman in England, and tax collectors did not fare well in the protests leading up to the Revolution. Though his pamphlet did not sell the 150,000 copies he claimed, it did win over George Washington, and it did reach audiences in New England, New York, Baltimore, and Charleston.

That is, in large part, likely due to the fact that hardly anybody actually knows much about Thomas Paine beyond what they vaguely remember from middle school social studies or high school history classes. I can say I didn't learn anything about Paine's background, and even Common Sense wasn't read, only explained as a famous pamphlet that stirred popular support for the Revolution. Like 95+% of the US public, I've never actually read Common Sense. When when barely amounts to a biographical sketch is known about someone, it's very easy to lionize or demonize them and attribute to them whatever one pleases. It's hardly surprising that such has happened with Paine and Common Sense.

Paine knew that class tensions existed. He understood that revolutions stirred up resentments. In Common Sense, he adopted an ominous tone at a key point in his argument, warning readers that the time was ripe to declare independence and form a stable government. Or else. In the current state of things, “the mind of the multitude is left at random,” he wrote, and “the property of no man is secure.” Therefore, if the leadership class did not seize hold of the narrative, the broad appeal to political independence would be supplanted by an incendiary call for social leveling. Landless mobs were waiting in the wings if colonial leaders failed to act. For Paine, “common sense” meant preserving the basic structure of the class order, and preventing the whole from descending into a mob mentality and eventual anarchy.42

As he wrote in 1813, “the spontaneous energies of the earth are a gift of nature,” but man must “husband his labor” in order to reap its greatest benefits. In Jefferson’s larger scheme of things, class was a creature of topography; it was shaped by the bond forged between producers and the soil. By producers, of course, he meant husbandmen and landowners—not tenants, not slaves.8

As early as 1775, landless tenants in Loudoun County, Virginia, voiced a complaint that was common across the sprawling colony: there was “no inducement for the poor man to Fight, for he had nothing to defend.”

Virginia’s freehold republic failed to instill virtue among farmers, the effect that Jefferson had fantasized. The majority of small landowners sold their land to large planters, mortgaged their estates, and continued to despoil what was left of the land. They looked upon it as just another commodity, not a higher calling. Jefferson failed to understand what his predecessor James Oglethorpe had seen: the freehold system (with disposable land grants) favored wealthy land speculators. Farming was arduous work, with limited chance of success, especially for families lacking the resources available to Jefferson: slaves, overseers, draft animals, a plough, nearby mills, and waterways to transport farm produce to market. It was easy to acquire debts, easy to fail. Land alone was no guarantee of self-sufficiency.14

Dangers lurked for Americans who were too close to the wilderness, or for those too enamored with the commercial luxuries of the Old World. In one of his dreamier moments in 1785, he wrote of the hope that America would be like China, completely cut off from European commerce and manufacturing and other entanglements: “We should thus avoid all wars, and all our citizens would be husbandmen.” He wished for a middle zone, between the two extremes.23

While Jefferson was more than willing to attack a pseudo-aristocracy, he wore rose-colored glasses when it came to acknowledging class turmoil arising from below. British papers had published reports of the mutinies and riots in the United States, which Jefferson dismissed as inconsequential. In 1784, he declared in a published response that not a single beggar could be seen “from one end to another of the continent.” Poverty and class strife simply did not exist. He wrote this just a year before the Virginia bill to round up vagabonds finally passed.30

“No distinction between man and man has ever been known in America,” he insisted. Among private individuals, the “poorest labourer stood on equal ground with the wealthiest Millionary,” and the poor man was favored when the rights of the rich and poor were contested in the courts. Whether the “shoemaker or the artisan” was elected to office, he “instantly commanded respect and obedience.” With a final flourish, Jefferson declared that “of distinctions by birth or badge,” Americans “had no more idea than they had of existence in the moon or planets.”33 Though Jefferson sold Europeans on America as a classless society, no such thing existed in Virginia or anywhere else. In his home state, a poor laborer or shoemaker had no chance of getting elected to office. Jefferson wrote knowing that semiliterate members of the lower class did not receive even a rudimentary education. Virginia’s courts meticulously served the interests of rich planters. And wasn’t slavery a “distinction between man and man”? Furthermore, Jefferson’s freehold requirement for voting created “odious distinctions” between landowners and poor merchants and artisans, denying the latter classes voting rights.34 One has to wonder at Jefferson’s blatant distortion, his desire to paint the Society of Cincinnati as so otherworldly to Americans that only extraterrestrials could appreciate it. He failed to recognize that many elite Americans were fond of the trappings of aristocracy.

Given everything, I'm less inclined to think that Jefferson didn't recognize that he was lying and more likely to think that he was very deliberately and knowingly fooling himself. 'It's different' even though it definitely was not and 'I have a reputation to maintain' and 'people won't want to come here if it sounds the same as where they already are' are all justifications that I think played a role.

Americans not only scrambled to get ahead; they needed someone to look down on. “There must be one, indeed, who is the last and lowest of the human species,” Adams concluded, and even he needed his dog to love him.

Unfortunately, it's still true.

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. In 1813, he explained to a young Massachusetts lawyer how the formula worked: “It is understood in Natural history that a 4th cross of one race of animals gives an issue of equivalent for all sensible purposes to the original bloods.” This was the same formula Jefferson used in breeding an original stock of merino sheep.

Yikes. And his many times political descendants didn't get the memo. Up until the Civil Rights Movement, and eighth black meant that someone counted as black under the (probably discriminatory) law.

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. Men might raise food, but it was quickly consumed; women produced children that could be sold as stock. He did not shrink from saying, “I consider the labor of a breeding woman as no object, and a child raised every 2. years is of more profit than the crop of the best laboring man.” Women were meant to breed, for “providence has made our interests & duties coincide perfectly.”43

🤢🤮 Ugh

On the bottom rung he put “the lowest feculum of beings called Overseers, the most abject, degraded and unprincipled race.” Overseers were tasked to keep slaves engaged in labor on southern plantations. By pitting the honest yeomanry against the “feculum” of overseers, Jefferson harshly invoked the old English slur of human waste. That wasn’t enough. He portrayed overseers as panderers, with their “cap in hand to the Dons”; they were vicious men without that desirable deposit of virtue, who feigned subservience in order to indulge the “spirit of domination.” Jefferson endowed his Virginia class of overseers with the same vices that he attributed to those toiling in manufacturing. The twirling distaff at the workbench had been replaced with the slave driver’s whip.47 In this strange sleight of hand, slaves became invisible laborers outside his tripartite social ranking. Jefferson made them victims of overseers, not of their actual owners.

National greatness depended as much as anything upon the class of settlers that was advancing into the new territories. Would the West be a dumping ground for a refuse population? Or would the United States profit from its natural bounty and grow as a continental empire more equitably? There was much uncertainty.1 The western territories were for all intents and purposes America’s colonies.

Despite the celebratory spirit in evidence each Fourth of July beginning in 1777, many anxieties left over from the period of the English colonization revived. Patriotic rhetoric aside, it was not at all clear that national independence had genuinely ennobled ordinary citizens. Economic prosperity had actually declined for most Americans in the wake of the Revolution. Those untethered from the land, who formed the ever- expanding population of landless squatters heading into the trans-Appalachian West, unleashed mixed feelings. To many minds, the migrant poor represented the United States’ re-creation of Britain’s most despised and impoverished class: vagrants.

As Americans looked west, and many moved farther away from cities and plantations along the East Coast, they discovered a sparsely settled wasteland. In place of Jefferson’s sturdy yeoman on his cultivated fields, they found the ragged squatter in his log cabin.3 The presumptive “new man” of the squatter’s frontier embodied the best and the worst of the American character. The “Adam” of the American wilderness had a split personality: he was half hearty rustic and half dirk-carrying highwayman. In his most favorable cast as backwoodsman, he was a homespun philosopher, an independent spirit, and a strong and courageous man who shunned fame and wealth. But turn him over and he became the white savage, a ruthless brawler and eye-gouger. This unwholesome type lived a brute existence in a dingy log cabin, with yelping dogs at his heels, a haggard wife, and a mongrel brood of brown and yellow brats to complete the sorry scene.

To be lower class in rural America was to be one of the landless. They disappeared into unsettled territory and squatted down (occupied tracts without possessing a land title) anywhere and everywhere. If land-based analogies were still needed, they were not to be divided into grades of soil, as Jefferson had creatively conceived, but spread about as scrub foliage or, in bestial terms, mangy varmints infesting the land.4