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

by Nancy Isenberg

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

For most Americans of the eighteenth century, it was assumed impossible for a servant to shed his lowly origins; the

the poor were expendable.

He was an Englishman born and bred; better put, an Englishman in exile. When Common Sense was published in January 1776,

Thomas Paine

His overarching argument was that European-descended Americans were a new race in the making, one specially bred for free trade

Oliver Goldsmith’s History of Earth and Animated Nature (1774).

The other aimed to prove that Americans were a distinct people, a lineage based not on superstition but on science.

the Unitarian cleric and scientist Joseph Priestley, who argued in 1774 that British subjects were comparable to the “livestock on a farm,” being passively transferred from “one worn out royal line to another.”

British kings were exalted above everyone else for no logical reason.

antiauthoritarian

turned a blind eye to slavery.

Paine

Philadelphia had a slave auction outside the London Coffee House, at the center of town on Front and Market Streets,

England belonged to Europe, he contended, and America belonged to none but herself.

he obscured other forms of injustice.

The Louisiana Territory, as he envisioned it, would encourage agriculture and forestall the growth of manufacturing and urban poverty—

By 1770, fewer than 10 percent of white Virginians laid claim to over half the land in the colony;

Land, slaves, and tobacco remained the major sources of wealth in Jefferson’s world, but the majority of white men did not own slaves.

owned at least 187 slaves,

Jefferson owned...

gentleman farmer.

Jefferson owned 37,000 acres and almost 200 slaves but his farms were mostly a failure.

Jefferson’s approach to improving American farming was decidedly English,

In his perfect world, lower-class farmers could be improved, just like their land. If they were given a freehold and a basic education, they could adopt better methods of husbandry and pass on favorable habits and traits to their children.

His privileged upbringing inevitably colored his thinking.

cultivator.

Jeffersonian-style classes were effectively strata that mimicked the different nutritive grades within layers of the soil.

I dont understand Jefferson's model of class.

Revolutionary Virginia was hardly a place of harmony, egalitarianism, or unity.

“no inducement for the poor man to Fight, for he had nothing to defend.”

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

eliminating primogeniture and entail,

It was easy to acquire debts, easy to fail.

Land alone was no guarantee of self-sufficiency.14

anyone squatting on unclaimed land in western Virginia and Kentucky could claim a preemption right to buy it.

1776

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.16

raking the muck of a bad crop.

All of Jefferson’s early reforms were less about promoting equality or democracy than moderating extremes.

French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, the Comte de Buffon,

Jefferson fundamentally agreed with Buffon’s science. He did not abandon the Frenchman’s ruling premise that the physical surroundings were crucial in cultivating races and classes of people,

the hope that America would be like China, completely cut off from European commerce and manufacturing and other entanglements:

He insisted that no hereditary titles be recognized in the Northwest, and after 1800 slavery and involuntary servitude would be permanently banned there.

soil,

Echoes of the Nazis chanting "Blood and soil."

He was not promoting a freewheeling society or the rapid commercial accumulation of wealth; nor was he advocating a class system marked by untethered social mobility.

Jefferson thought of importing German immigrants, who were known to be superior laborers, and to place them on adjacent fifty-acre plots opposite slaves,

Wealth was being transferred upward, from the tattered pockets of poor farmers and soldiers to the bulging purses of a nouveau riche of wartime speculators and creditors—a new class of “moneyed men.”28

Aftermath of the debt accrued by states during the Revolutionary war.

he wore rose-colored glasses when it came to acknowledging class turmoil arising from below.

Shays’ Rebellion

1786

He envisioned rebellion as a process of regeneration, removed from human agency and, most important, devoid of class anger.

“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,”

Though Jefferson sold Europeans on America as a classless society, no such thing existed in Virginia or anywhere else.

the subordinate positions of wives, children, servants, and slaves were left safely intact.36

Jefferson may have hated artificial distinctions and titles, but he was quite comfortable asserting “natural” differences.

Class was a permanent fixture in America.