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April 22 - June 27, 2020
“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.” The poor’s instinct of being “uneasy in rest” had been impaired; so what they needed was a jolt (of electricity?) to work again.26
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
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.”
the solution lay in a radical process of spreading people so far apart and in such sparsely settled territory that they would forget who was once above or below them.
This is why Paine was careful to downplay the distinction between the rich and the poor. He wanted his American readers to focus on distant kings, not local grandees. He wanted them to break with the Crown, not to disturb the class order. For like reasons, he turned a blind eye to slavery.
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.
In British tradition, the American elite expected the lower classes to fight their wars.
During the Revolution, General Washington stated that only “the lower class of people” should serve as foot soldiers.
Shays’ Rebellion broke out across western Massachusetts.
Though Jefferson sold Europeans on America as a classless society, no such thing existed in Virginia or anywhere else.
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?
By 1850, in what became a common pattern in new southwestern states, at least 35 percent of the population owned no real estate. There was no clear path to land and riches among the lower ranks. Tenants could easily be reduced to landless squatters.
supported the forced removal of the Cherokees from the southeastern states and willfully ignored the opinion of the Supreme Court.
It portrayed him as an outsider, a man of natural talents drawn from the “native forests,” who was capable of cleaning up the corruption in Washington.
Indeed, it was not the United States, but Liberia, a country founded by the British and former American slaves, that first established universal suffrage for adult men, in 1839.
Stowe’s second work told a different story. In Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1856), she described poor whites as a degenerate class, prone to crime, immorality, and ignorance.
This fascination with blood was pervasive in antebellum literature. Southerners were enamored with horse breeding as reflected in the periodical American Turf Register and Sporting Magazine. In 1834, it recorded that “American blood” (i.e., “American thoroughbreds”) had achieved a quality of blood as excellent as any in the world. Avid readers knew the pedigree of the most celebrated American horses, learned the long list of sires, while breeders kept and published the records of the “American stud book” to avoid a spurious issue.9
Horses and humans were identical in this regard. Scottish physiologist Alexander Walker revived the debate between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson over whether human beings should breed to “improve the race.” In Intermarriage (1838), he strongly encouraged the practice of choosing spouses according to the same natural laws that applied to horse breeding.
The rallying cry in this new advice literature extended to “hygienic” marriages: the selection of sexual partners with healthy skin, good teeth, well-formed and vigorous bodies. One had to steer clear of the “ill-born,” who produced nothing but “poor and feeble stock.”
In 1849, Dr. Gideon Lincecum introduced a memorial before the Texas legislature hoping to ensure “good breeders.” His solution was to castrate criminals in the manner of gelding bulls, thus literally cutting off the bloodline in order to prevent inferior people from reproducing. “Like breeds like” was the basic rule of animal breeding, and degraded stocks of animals were no different than humans.
Future eugenic policies built upon his blueprint for filtering out bad seeds from America’s human breeding stock.
The Mexicans subscribed to a racial class and caste system, but were accustomed to racial mixing. At the top were the descendants of the old Spanish families, those claiming to have pure Castilian blood in their veins; next came the criollos (creoles), the locally born colonists of Spanish heritage, who could possess up to one-eighth Indian blood; the lower castes were composed of mestizos (of mixed Spanish and Indian background), Indians, and Africans. American men who married wellborn women were warmly embraced by Mexican society.
but the admission of too many Mexicans into an expanded Union could undermine America’s racial stock.
Lincoln and a slew of purportedly “liberal” politicians preferred: emancipation and colonization. Freed slaves would have to be expelled from the United States.
ending slavery would require exporting slaves elsewhere, recolonizing them in Africa, the Caribbean islands, or South America.
All across Kentucky, the proud homes of freemen were being replaced by plantations and cattle.
“There ought to be hunting parties got up to chase them down, and exterminate ’em, just as we do rats.” The author depicted a white trash woman and her children as wounded animals hiding in the forest:
Only a minority of southerners were like William Gregg, who considered training poor white trash for factory labor.
What’s more, the North’s unflattering genealogy began in the “bogs and fens” of Ireland and England, where they were spawned from vagabond stock and swamp people.
We tend to forget that an estimated three hundred thousand white southerners, many from the border states, fought for the Union side, and that four border states never seceded.
Davis was convinced that slavery had elevated poor whites by ensuring their superiority over blacks. He was wrong: in the antebellum period,
Generals Ulysses S. Grant and William T. Sherman, as well as many Union officers, believed they were fighting a war against a slaveholding aristocracy, and that winning the war and ending slavery would liberate not only slaves but also poor white trash.
One odious feature of the draft was the “twenty slave law,” which granted exemptions to planters with twenty or more slaves. The provision shielded the already pampered rich man and his valuable property. Some nonslaveholders refused to fight for the protection of slavery, while others thought the wealthy should pay higher taxes to subsidize a war that benefited
A community in Mississippi seceded from the Confederacy, creating the “Free State of Jones” in the middle of a swamp; it was, quite literally, a white trash Union sanctuary in President Davis’s home state.
“traitorous aristocrats.”
Sherman contended that there was no absolute right to private property, and that proud planters only held their real estate in usufruct—that is, on the good graces of the federal government.
The southern oligarchy would be shorn of its land and class privilege. The only way for elite Confederates to protect their wealth was to submit to federal law.
Wars in general, and civil wars to a greater degree, have the effect of exacerbating class tensions, because the sacrifices of war are always distributed unequally, and the poor are hit hardest.
Pseudoscience, masquerading as hereditary science, provided Americans with a convenient way to naturalize class and racial differences.
Many northern thinkers had never for a moment bought into the old Cavalier myth of southern superiority. As one insisted in 1864, most southerners traced their lineage to the “scum of Europe,” to lowly descendants of “brothels and bridewells,” and could therefore dub themselves a “plebeian aristocracy” at best.
“While this rebellion has emancipated a great many negroes,” he said, “it has emancipated still more white men.” He would elevate the “poor white man” who struggled to till barren, sandy soil for subsistence, and who were looked down upon by the Negro and elite planter alike.
The twin evils of poverty and vagrancy were a permanent fixture among the white population.
A writer for the Atlantic Monthly asked: why should government “disfranchise the humble, quiet, hardworking negro” and leave the North vulnerable to the vote of the “worthless barbarian”—the “ignorant, illiterate, and vicious” poor white?15
Hardworking blacks were suddenly the redeemed ones, while white trash remained undeveloped, evolutionarily stagnant creatures.
During Reconstruction, Republicans designated white trash as a “dangerous class”
Unimpressed by southern whites, and valuing hardworking black men, he did nothing to protect the latter’s right to vote.
Alexander Graham Bell imagined rearing “human thoroughbreds,” saying four generations of superior parents would produce one thoroughbred.
By 1931, twenty-seven states had sterilization laws on the books, along with an unwieldy thirty-four categories delineating the kinds of people who might be subject to the surgical procedure.
In 1908, a concerned female teacher in Louisiana started “better baby” contests, in which mothers allowed their offspring to be examined and graded. This program expanded into “fitter family” competitions at state fairs. The contests were held in the stock grounds, and families were judged in the manner of cattle. The winners received medals, not unlike prize bulls.
In 1910, Henry Goddard, who ran a testing laboratory at the school for feeble-minded boys and girls in Vineland, New Jersey, invented a new eugenic classification: the moron.
