White Trash

by Nancy Isenberg

  If inventive, Franklin was a man of his time, expressing a natural discomfort with unrestrained social mobility. For most Americans of the eighteenth century, it was assumed impossible for a servant to shed his lowly origins; the meaner sort, as one newspaper insisted, could never “wash out the stain of servility.” There were fears that the meaner sort were treading too close on the heels of those above them.30

  Franklin certainly never endorsed social mobility as we think of it today, despite his own experience. To be accurate, he fantasized that the continent would flatten out classes, but it was clear that this condition was contingent upon keeping poor people in perpetual motion. Franklin’s militia plan expressed a conservative impulse. Giving the accomplished middling sort a feeling of public respect and a sense of civic duty would yield them the solid contentment of happy mediocrity. Contentment might actually reduce the desire of more ambitious men to rise up the social ladder too quickly or recklessly.

  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. Again, for Franklin, 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. But did it make sense that the rich would sacrifice their class advantage and not hire laborers or bring along slaves as they headed west? Or was his theory premised on the belief that only the poor would seek out new habitations?31

  Franklin knew the frontier he was theorizing was an imaginary place. But it served his purposes. As a political argument, he offered a strong defense for British North America as the demographic stronghold of the empire. Here were the breeders of British subjects, and a fast-growing pool of consumers of manufacturing goods. His demographic science also concealed the deep contempt he felt for the poor. The coercive forces of nature were more palatable than the workhouse or almshouse. As late as 1780, he warned his grandson that society divided people into “two Sorts of People,” those who “live comfortably in Good Houses” and those who “are poor and dirty and ragged and vicious and live in miserable Cabins and garrets,” and “if they are idle, they must go without or starve.” While the foregoing assessment of an uncensored Franklin was harsh, it reminds us of the prevailing sentiment: the poor were expendable. On the frontier, too, in “miserable Cabins,” poverty and hopelessness abounded.32

  Franklin knew about white Indians, the English who were taken captive as children and never really readjusted after returning to English settlements. A wealthy young man, a former Indian captive whom Franklin claimed to know, gave up his estate, taking nothing but a gun and coat when he made his way back to the wilderness. With this parable, Franklin acknowledged that freedom from care, and laziness, would always be a temptation for some. Relying on his demographic figures, the law of averages, nevertheless made the occasional outlier less of a worry.33

  Franklin was not blind to the fact that North America’s frontier settlers would not be composed solely of the finest British stock. He was quick to call those who inhabited the Pennsylvania backcountry the “refuse” of America. But at the same time, he hoped that the forces of nature would carry the day, that the demands of survival would weed out the slothful, and that the better breeders would supplant the waste people. That was his wish, at least.34

  • • •

  Franklin’s theory had traction because it was built upon the prevalent English thinking of his time. He was less an innovator than he was an ingenious popularizer. His fame was such that his ideas about demographic expansion found fertile ground as the American Revolution arrived, when the iconic propagandist Thomas Paine presented a variation of Franklin’s American breed to a receptive audience. Like Franklin, Paine imagined a people forged from unique conditions of its land and resources. The American breed was endowed with an instinctive, youthful, and forward-directed spirit.

  Paine’s pamphlet Common Sense (1776) is heralded for having captured the spirit of the Revolution, replete with a potent language of natural rights and an economic justification for independence. For Paine, the unique character of America’s empowered white inhabitants, supported by the unquestioned majesty of an extensive continent, was evidence of the irresistible sway of nature’s law. He emphasized free trade and America’s potential as a commercial empire. He celebrated the power of a burgeoning continent over the reach of distant kings, as he employed the rhetorical device of unnatural breeding to disavow monarchy. He forecast that independence would end the waste and idleness that prevailed under the colonial regime.

  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 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. Like his sponsor Franklin, Paine was fascinated by facts and figures, the stuff of political arithmetic and useful knowledge, yet at the same time he was not above quoting Aesop’s fables. His pamphlet spoke a familiar language, a distinctly British language of commerce, employing a simple and direct style capable of reaching readers beyond the educated elite.35

  Paine’s writing is equally as revealing for what he does and doesn’t say about class. He would not tackle the monopoly of land and wealth until 1797, after watching the French Revolution unfold, when he declared in Agrarian Justice that everyone had an equal and divine right to the ownership of the earth. In Common Sense, he pushed class, poverty, and other social divisions aside. Though he acknowledged the “distinctions of rich, of poor,” he directly dismissed the “harsh ill-sounding names” that exacerbated class conflict. In two breezy paragraphs, he coupled the distinctions of class and sexual difference as phenomena beyond present political concern. They were differences derived from nature, effects that had come about by accident. They simply were. Class disparities did not rise to the level of justifying revolution.36

  Paine’s sleight of hand in concealing class reflected his preference for talking about breeds. His overarching argument was that European-descended Americans were a new race in the making, one specially bred for free trade instead of the state machinery of imperial conquest. His critique of the British political economy was centered on the enormous debts it incurred through expensive military adventures, which he blamed on the frivolous ambitions of English royalty. Over time, kings and queens had become wasteful heads of state, in and of themselves a social liability.37

  He accused the monarchy of “engrossing the commons,” that is, destroying the representative nature of the House of Commons, the one branch that embodied the will of the rising merchant class in England. The American colonies, meanwhile, were being “drained” of their collective manpower and wealth, merely to underwrite new overseas wars. Independence would allow America to “begin the world over again,” Paine declared dramatically. The new nati
on would signal a new world order. Unburdened by constant debt and a large military, it would be a vibrant continental power erected on the ideals of free trade and global commerce.38

  As a promoter on the order of the Hakluyts, Paine conceived of America as an experimental society through which to adjust, or recalibrate, the very meaning of empire. Like past commentators, he extolled the natural resources of America: timber, tar, iron, and hemp. Corn and other agricultural goods would give America a leading role in feeding Europe. North America’s major cash crop, tobacco, was starkly missing from his discussion—he used grain-producing Pennsylvania as his model, not Virginia.39

  Most important, he insisted that independence would benefit both America and the British nation. Free trade (as he imagined it) did not discriminate; it knew no bounds. He even assured his American readers that English merchants would be on their side, wanting to protect and advance trade with America rather than plunge the government of Great Britain into another costly war. He was right about some merchants, but dead wrong about the war.40

  It was Paine’s theory of human nature that led him to emphasize commercial alliances over class divisions. His mantra was: commerce was natural, monarchy was unnatural. In many of his writings, he argued that commerce emerged from mutual affections and shared survival impulses, while monarchy rested on plunder and overawing the “vulgar” masses. Ultimately, kings benefited no one but themselves. “Your dependence upon the crown is no advantage,” he told his readers in another essay, “but rather an injury to the people of Britain, as it increases the power and influence of the King. They benefited only by trade, and this they have after you are independent of the crown.” In this way, Paine saw commerce as the balm that smoothed over class differences and united the interests of British and American merchants alike.41

  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

  An effective system of commerce needed a stable class system, but what it didn’t need was dull-witted kings running the show. The practice of “exalting one man so greatly above the rest” was contrary to common sense and nature. Not only were the “ignorant and unfit” routinely elevated to kings, so were ennobled infants, as yet lacking reason. A “king worn out by age and infirmity” could not be legitimately removed from power. Here was nature out of control, deformed, perverted. Paine mocked the idea that English royalty were “some new species,” a “race of men” worthy of infallible stature. History did not justify any claim that the “present race of kings” had honorable (let alone divine) origins. William the Conqueror was a “French Bastard,” an invader with his “armed Banditti,” a “usurper,” a “ruffian,” Paine scoffed.43

  In the course of desacralizing the British monarchy as an effete if not defunct breed, Paine repeated what other enlightened critics had already said. Recall that Paine had only been in America for thirteen months in January 1776, when the first edition of Common Sense was published, and he had not yet traveled outside of Philadelphia. His knowledge of America was based mostly on newspapers and books, the squibs and scraps he collected from the storehouse of public knowledge in circulation in England and America. Paine asked Franklin (who was still in England as war approached) for a copy of Oliver Goldsmith’s History of Earth and Animated Nature (1774). Goldsmith, Franklin, and Paine all embraced the popular science of natural history, which divided the continents into distinct breeds or races of people.44

  On this basis, Paine pursued two powerful arguments about breeding. One highlighted the notion that Britain’s monarchy was rooted in antiquated thinking and political superstition. The other aimed to prove that Americans were a distinct people, a lineage based not on superstition but on science. The widely regarded theories of Linnaeus (1707–78) and Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707–88), which influenced Goldsmith’s treatise, divided the world into varieties and races shaped by the environment unique to each major continent. The Swedish botanist Carl von Linné, better known to history as Linnaeus, organized all of plant and animal life, and divided Homo sapiens, the word he coined for humans, into four varieties. The European type he said was sanguine, brawny, acute, and inventive; the American Indian he deemed choleric and obstinate, yet free; the Asian was melancholic and greedy; and the African was crafty, indolent, and negligent. This grand (and ethnocentric) taxonomy served Paine’s purpose in justifying the American Revolution. To “begin the world over again,” Americans of English and European descent had to be a new race in the making—perhaps a better one—as they laid claim to North America.45

  In Paine’s simple formulation, breeding was either conditioned by nature or it was corrupted through superstition. The first possibility allowed a people’s fullest potential to be unleashed, while the latter only reduced their ability to grow and improve themselves. Again, he was not alone in equating monarchy with bad breeding. Paine echoed another of Franklin’s friends, 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.” Even more telling, a newspaper article published in both London and Philadelphia in 1774 pointed out that the worship of kings was “absurd and unnatural” and defied “common sense.” This unnamed writer sarcastically contended that “simpering Lords” in England would worship a goose if it had been endowed with all the royal trappings. The line that would have caught Paine’s eye was this: that kings were “made to propagate, to supply the state with an hereditary succession of the breed.”46

  But there was nothing sacred about a royal breed. Blind allegiance to what enlightened critics had reduced to a barnyard custom exposed how an intelligent, civilized people might lose their grip on reality. The natural order was greatly out of alignment: British kings were exalted above everyone else for no logical reason. Americans had a unique opportunity to break free from the relics of the past and to set a true course for a better future, one unburdened by the deadweight of kings and queens.

  It was this antiauthoritarian idea that made Paine’s pamphlet most radical. If kings could be seen as “ignorant and unfit,” then why not royal governors, Quaker proprietors, or the “Better Sort” riding in their carriages? If monarchy was not what it was supposed to represent, other customary forms of power could be questioned too. Class appearances might be similarly seen as mere smoke and mirrors. 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. Paine’s America was above all else an “asylum” for future-directed Europeans. No one else need apply. He argued against the inherited notion that America was a dumping ground for lesser humans. It was only a sanctuary for able, hardworking men and women. This overly sanguine portrait cleaned up class and ignored what was unpleasant to look at. Indentured servitude and convict labor were still very much in evidence as the Revolution neared, and slavery was a fact of life. Philadelphia had a slave auction outside the London Coffee House, at the center of town on Front and Market Streets, which was directly across from Paine’s lodgings. In Common Sense, the propagandist men
tioned “Negroes” and “Indians” solely to discredit them for being mindless pawns of the British, when they were incited to harass and kill white Americans and to undermine the worthy cause of independence. The English military had “stirred up Indians and Negroes to destroy us.” Us against them. Civilized America was being pitted against the barbarous hordes set upon them by the “hellish” power of London.47

  Paine’s purpose was to remind his readers of America’s greatness, drawing on the visual comparison of the continent in its size and separation from the tiny island that ruled it. “In no instance hath nature made the satellite larger than its primary planet,” he declared, magnifying Newtonian optics. The existing scheme did nothing but “reverse the common order of nature.” England belonged to Europe, he contended, and America belonged to none but herself. Canadians would demand their freedom too, because according to Paine’s taxonomic portrait they were more American than English. They were as much the offspring of the North American continent as their forward-looking southern siblings, endowed with the same traits and ambitions.48

  As he conjured an embryonic people, Paine gave consideration to one more element that impinges on our study of class. He was thoroughly convinced that independence would eliminate idleness. Like Franklin, he projected a new continental order in which poverty was diminished. “Our present numbers are so happily proportioned to our wants,” he wrote, “that no man need be idle.” There were enough men to raise an army and engage in trade: enough, in other words, for self-sufficiency. The land would only continue to be wasted if “lavished by a king on his worthless dependents.” (Here, Paine did take a swipe at the old Pennsylvania proprietors.) With room to grow, the infant nation would reach new heights by displaying a manly, youthful spirit of commerce that Londoners once possessed but had since lost. The Revolution would end petty quarrels between colonies that had been nurtured in a culture of imperial dependence. Only through independence could America achieve its natural potential for commercial growth.49