White Trash

by Nancy Isenberg

  All of Jefferson’s early reforms were less about promoting equality or democracy than moderating extremes. Like the farmer’s use of marl soil or peat, his approach was closer to breaking up clumps or concentrations of wealth and poverty. Virginia’s social order was stagnant; it was weighed down by a top-heavy planter class and an increasingly immobile class of landless families. His powerful words, “raked from the rubbish,” captured his philosophy in an unmistakable, visually compelling way. Raking was comparable to ploughing, the process of turning over tired and barren topsoil and unearthing new life from the layers below. Such improvements, though gradual in spreading benefits, promised a stronger crop of citizens in the future.

  • • •

  Jefferson’s influential survey of class (as a product of topography) appeared in his Notes on the State of Virginia. Mostly written during his governorship of Virginia in 1780–81, the book was not published until several years later, when he was serving as the U.S. minister to France. Jefferson had been encouraged to put his ideas to paper by a series of questions posed by François Barbé-Marbois, the secretary of the French Legation in Philadelphia. His Notes became a kind of diplomatic intervention, offering European readers a combined defense of his home state and his new nation.

  Notes offered a natural history of race and class, replete with Jefferson’s own empirical observations, from facts and figures he had compiled. It was part travel narrative in the tradition of Hakluyt, and part legal brief. He imagined the opposing counsel to be the acclaimed French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, the Comte de Buffon, who had offered up a highly unappealing portrait of the American continent as a backward place cursed with widespread degeneracy. In Notes, the only book Jefferson ever wrote, he stripped away the ugliness and replaced it with a Virginia of natural beauty and bounty. Here, in Jefferson’s version of the New English Canaan, the continent promised unmatched resources for commercial wealth. Class was significant. The rich topography afforded a home for his “cultivators of the earth,” an American breed that represented the world’s best hope.

  Buffon’s work was troubling for a number of reasons. In his Histoire Naturelle, first published in 1749, he had reduced the New World to one giant and nefarious Dismal Swamp. All of America, as it were, had become North Carolina. A suffocating mixture of moisture and heat had produced stagnant waters, “gross herbiage,” and miasmas of the air, which retarded the size and diversity of species. Buffon sounded at times like the colorful William Byrd, complaining of the “noxious exhalations” in America that blocked the sun, which made it impossible to “purify” the soil and air. Swamp creatures multiplied in this environment: “moist plants, reptiles, and insects, and all animals that wallow in the mire.” Domestic animals shrank in size in comparison to their European counterparts, and their flesh was less flavorful. Only Carolina’s prized critter, the hog, thrived in such a godforsaken terrain.19

  Native Americans were not just savages to Buffon; they were a constitutionally enfeebled breed, devoid of free will and “activity of mind.” As the forgotten stepchildren of Mother Nature, they lacked the “invigorating sentiment of love, and the strong desire for multiplying their species.” They were “cold and languid,” spending their days in “stupid repose,” without the strong affective bonds that united people into civilized societies. Buffon had converted Indians into quasi-reptilian swamp monsters. They lurked in marshes, hunting prey, ignorant of the fate of their offspring, concerned only with the next meal or battle. The desire to reproduce, Buffon contended, was the “spark” of life and the fire of genius. This essential quality was missing from their constitution—all because they languished amid a debilitating environment.20

  In contesting Buffon, Jefferson had to wipe the canvas clean of the swamp monsters and paint a very different, eco-friendly picture. He conjured another America, a sublime place of endless diversity. His Blue Ridge Mountains were majestic; the Mississippi River was alive with birds and fish in a way comparable to the Nile—the birthplace of Western civilization. Native Americans existed in an uncultivated state, he admitted, yet they were endowed with a manly ardor and displayed a noble mind. America was not plagued with pathetic stocks of animals or people. On the contrary, the young continent heralded one of the greatest scientific discoveries of the age: the bones of the woolly mammoth, ranked as the largest species known to man, which according to Jefferson still roamed the forests. English and European settlers had excelled, not suffered. That rare spark of genius, nurtured in Washington, Franklin, and David Rittenhouse, the Philadelphia astronomer, was solid proof, to his mind, of the invigorating and regenerative natural landscape.21

  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, or that land could be either regenerative or degenerative. Buffon’s theory wasn’t wrong then; his observations were incomplete. As Jefferson argued in 1785, in a letter to the Marquis de Chastellux, who had visited Monticello three years earlier, Native Americans were not feeble. Over time they had developed muscles to make them fleet of foot for warfare. Euro-Americans were equally adaptable to the congenial American environment. They drew upon an inbred strength passed down from generations of ancestors who had labored in the fields. Cultivation was in their blood, Jefferson was saying, and they were already engaged in transforming the land and making it their own.22

  Jefferson’s ideas of topography went beyond the natural environment. He was equally concerned with human chorography—the way humans adapted to the land, exploited its fertility, and built social institutions. Husbandry itself was a crucial stage that elevated human societies beyond the rudiments of savagery and barbarism. The American cultivator needed some safeguards. Degeneracy was certainly possible, Jefferson admitted, but not on Buffon’s scale. 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

  Jefferson was not above social engineering, believing that manners could be cultivated. His scheme for the Northwest Territory built upon his reforms for Virginia. As the chair of two congressional committees, he assumed a leading role in shaping how the land would be distributed and governed. In his report on the Land Ordinance of 1784, he devised a grid plan that would have divided the land into perfectly formed rectangles, offering individual lots, the basic unit of the family farm. He wanted the area divided into ten potential states, and gave them names. And not just any names: Sylvania, Cherronesus, Assenisipia, Metropotamia, Pelispia, to name a few. He chose fanciful names, with pseudo-classical or agrarian meanings, suggesting that in this act of state building, Congress was engaged in the regeneration or rebirth of Western civilization. He insisted that no hereditary titles be recognized in the Northwest, and after 1800 slavery and involuntary servitude would be permanently banned there. Following in the footsteps of Oglethorpe, Jefferson envisioned a free-labor zone.24

  What was Jefferson up to? One goal was to forestall the growth of manufacturing, which in Notes he described as a canker on the body politic. The grid system resembled rows of garden plots, something that would have made sense to his fellow naturalist J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, author of Letters from an American Farmer (1782). A French-born migrant who spent years in New York’s Hudson Valley, and a devotee of Buffon, Crèvecoeur celebrated an “intermediary space,” which created a “separate and distinct class.” “Men are like plants,” he believed, and the seeds of classes could be planted and cultivated. The typical class of cultivators whom he imagined filling this middle zone owned a 371-acre farm; they were not tenants or squatters, nor
were they overseas merchants importing English manufactured goods. Crèvecoeur’s perfect farmer turned the fields into a classroom, placing his son on the plough, having him feel the up-and-down rhythm as it moved through the soil.25

  Jefferson, too, wanted Americans tied to the land, with deep roots to their offspring, to future generations. Agrarian perfection would germinate: a love of the soil, no less than a love of one’s heirs, instilled amor patriae, a love of country. 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’s husbandmen were of a new kind of birthright station, passed from parents to children. They were not to be an ambitious class of men on the make.26

  Jefferson’s idealized farmers were not rustics either. They sold their produce in the marketplace, albeit on a smaller scale. There was room enough for an elite gentry class, and gentleman farmers like himself. Using the latest husbandry methods, improving the soil, the wealthier farmers could instruct others, the less skilled beneath them. Education and emulation were necessary to instill virtue. American farmers required an apprenticeship of a sort, which was only possible if they were planted in the right kind of engineered environment. The Northwest Territory served that purpose, as a free-labor zone that cultivated middling aspirations and was safely decontaminated of any noxious influences. The relics of noble titles were gone, slavery was prohibited, and commercial impulses were subdued.

  In one of his most ambitious plans for reform, sketched out in 1789, Jefferson thought of importing German immigrants, who were known to be superior laborers, and to place them on adjacent fifty-acre plots opposite slaves, who would be “brought up, as others, in the habits of foresight and property.” At the same time, he contemplated the recruitment of Germans just to improve the caliber of Virginia’s poor white farmers. The Anglo-Virginians were supposed to intermingle with and learn from the better German farmers around them.27

  Of course, Jefferson was not always honest about the class system that surrounded him. He preferred to project an America of “tranquil permanent felicity” than confront the unpleasant reality that persisted. His most extreme statements describing the United States as the land of unparalleled opportunities usually came as responses to criticism. As he had done in Notes, he saw himself as a public sentry, the intellectual defender of the reputation of a rising young country.

  He had a lot to defend in the aftermath of the American Revolution. The war years had taken their toll. A postwar depression created widespread suffering. States had acquired hefty debts, which caused legislatures to increase taxes to levels far higher, sometimes three to four times higher, than before the war. Most of these tax dollars ended up in the hands of speculators in state government securities that had been sold to cover war expenses. Many soldiers were forced to sell their scrip and land bounties to speculators at a fracture of the value. 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

  The officers of the Continental Army had staged a mutiny in Newburgh, New York, in 1783, threatening to disband if Congress did not grant them full pensions. During the same year, army officers organized the Society of Cincinnati, a fraternal organization, accused of laying the foundation for a hereditary aristocracy. The society initially granted hereditary privileges to the sons of veteran officers and awarded medals as badges of membership in the highly selective club. Jefferson’s prohibition on titles in the Northwest Territory was a not-so-subtle rebuke of the society’s flagrant pretentions. It also explains why he banned badges previously worn by vagrants in Virginia.29

  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

  Jefferson had a different opinion in 1786, when Shays’ Rebellion broke out across western Massachusetts. Rising taxes and mounting debts among middle-class and poor farmers had fueled a class war. Captain Daniel Shays had served in the Continental Army, and whether or not it was an accurate description, he was called the “Generalissimo” of the uprising. Shays had acquired over two hundred acres of land, only to see half of his holdings lost during the postwar depression. His supporters closed down courts that were auctioning off farms and homes, forming an ad hoc army that attempted to take over the armory in Springfield. Similar protests took place as far south as Virginia. Writing from France, Jefferson did not deny the existence of the rebellion, but treated it as a naturally recurring, even therapeutic phenomenon. In an odd twist, he calculated that such political tempests would most likely happen every thirteen years. A “little rebellion” was analogous to “storms in the physical environment”; temporarily jarring, it would settle back down, leaving society’s core principles refreshed.31

  Jefferson’s language betrayed him. He envisioned rebellion as a process of regeneration, removed from human agency and, most important, devoid of class anger. For her part, Abigail Adams had little sympathy for the Shaysites. “Ferment and commotions,” she curtly observed in a letter to Jefferson, had brought forth an “abundance of Rubbish.” Others agreed. Captain Shays was described in newspapers as an ignorant leader, a pathetic man living in a “sty,” his fellow insurgents nothing more than “brutes.” Critics compared them to “Ragamuffins of the earth,” lowly vagabonds who owed more than they were worth. To the naturalist Jefferson, they belonged to the sedimentary debris unearthed and let loose across the human terrain.32

  In the same year, he wrote lengthy comments on an article entitled “Etats Unis,” meant for publication in the famed Encyclopédie Méthodique. After summarizing the history of the Society of Cincinnati, Jefferson offered a curious explanation for the convulsions it caused. “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.

  Under the administration of George Washington, the Federalists established a “Republican Court,” with rules of protocol, displays of genteel etiquette, and formal weekly levees—visits by invitation only extended to the national elite to meet with the president. Martha Washington held her drawing-room salons, and around the president emerged a cult of adulation that imitated certain a
spects of royal pageantry. Powerful families in Philadelphia established dynastic marriages with European peers. Elizabeth Patterson, the daughter of a wealthy Baltimore merchant, became an international celebrity when in 1803 she married the brother of Napoleon Bonaparte. At the time, President Jefferson wrote his minister in France to inform Napoleon that his sibling had married into a family whose social rank was “with the first of the United States.”35

  In 1789, when Vice President John Adams proposed before the U.S. Senate that the president required a more daunting title, such as “Majesty,” he accepted that political distinctions needed to be dressed up in pomp and circumstance. Unlike Franklin, Adams felt that the “passion for distinction” was the most powerful driving human force, above hunger and fear. 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. He also sarcastically acknowledged that while Jefferson and his brand of republicans might disdain titles and stations, they had no intention of disturbing private forms of authority; the subordinate positions of wives, children, servants, and slaves were left safely intact.36

  Jefferson was not above his own brand of political stagecraft. Unlike Washington and Adams, who rode in fancy carriages to their inauguration ceremonies, Jefferson rode his own horse back to the President’s House after delivering his inaugural address. He dispensed with the levees and greeted diplomats and guests at the executive mansion while wearing an old vest and worn slippers. He was known for his casual attire—not while he was in France, but upon his return.37