The poor of colonial America were not just waste people, not simply a folk to be compared to their Old World counterparts. By reproducing their own kind, they were, to contemporaneous observers, in the process of creating an anomalous new breed of human. A host of travelers in Carolina in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries believed that class structure was tied to geography and rooted in the soil. Explorers, amateur scientists, and early ethnologists like William Byrd all assumed—and unabashedly professed—that inferior or mismanaged lands bred inferior, ungovernable people.
