White Trash

by Nancy Isenberg

  The backwoods personality could be found as far north as Maine, as far south as Florida, and across the Northwest and Southwest Territories. They acquired localized names, such as Mississippi screamers, for their cracker-style Indian war whoop or love of squealing; Kentucky corn crackers, for their poor diet of cracked corn; and Indiana Hoosiers, for the poor in that state. “Hoosier” is a word no linguistic scholar can define with any precision. Even so, the class descriptor was the same. A Hoosier man ran off at the mouth, lied, boasted, and remained ready to harm anyone who insulted his ugly wife. They were as prone to a down-and-dirty fight as any southern cracker. Hoosier gals were no more refined than their Florida sisters. A Hoosier gal’s courtship ritual, it was said, involved a lot of kicking and hair pulling.28

  Sexual behavior was another crucial marker of class status. In a well-known poem of the era, “The Hoosier’s Nest” (1833), the author harkened back to the vocabulary of the Scottish naturalist Wilson. Here again, the cabins were wild nests, a half-human, half-animal retreat perfect for indiscriminate breeding. Using a racially charged slur, the poet identified the children as “Hoosieroons”—a class variation of the mixed-race quadroons. Under their leaky roofs were none of the hearty pioneer stock. Instead, poor Indiana squatters produced a degenerate dozen of dirty yellow urchins.29

  Filthy cabins, a lack of manners, and rampant breeding combined to make crackers and squatters a distinct class, as verified by their patterns of speech. Backwoods patois constituted a rural American version of the lower-class English cockney. In 1830, there was even a “Cracker Dictionary,” preserving their vintage slang. One was “Jimber jawed,” whose mouth was constantly moving, who couldn’t stop talking. The cracker’s protruding lower jaw carried over into his style of talking. A “ring tailed roarer” was a violent type; the descriptive “chewed up” literally referred to having one’s ear, nose, or lip bitten off.30

  But one polysyllabic word may have best captured their identity. The verb “obsquatulate” was a cracker conjugation of “squat,” conveying the idea of moseying along or absconding. For a people who wouldn’t settle in one place, “obsquatulate” gave an activity of sorts to the American heirs of English vagrants. They might flee like an absconding servant or amble at a slow pace without a destination in mind, but in either case it was their dirty feet and slipshod ways that defined them.31

  • • •

  Jackson was not the only Tennessean to become a national celebrity. Though by the 1830s he would come to be known as a bear hunter and “Lion of the West,” David Crockett was a militia scout and lieutenant, justice of the peace, town commissioner, state representative, and finally a U.S. congressman. He was first elected to the House of Representatives in 1827. What makes the historic David Crockett interesting is that he was self-taught, lived off the land, and (most notably for us) became an ardent defender of squatters’ rights—for he had been a squatter himself. As a politician he took up the cause of the landless poor.32

  Crockett was born in the “state of Franklin,” a state that was not legally a state. It had declared its independence from North Carolina in 1784 and remained unrecognized. Franklin was later incorporated into Tennessee and became a battleground as speculators and squatters scrambled to control the most arable tracts. Their activities triggered an endless series of skirmishes with the Cherokees, exacerbated by blatant treaty violations. The first governor of Tennessee territory, the prodigious land speculator William Blount, was given the Cherokee nickname “Dirt Captain.” From 1797 to 1811, the federal government periodically sent troops into Tennessee to remove squatters, which only increased these ornery men’s natural hostility toward Washington. To Crockett, a man of humble roots willing to stand his ground, was attributed a simple philosophy: “It’s grit of a fellow that makes a man.” But it wasn’t grit alone that counted; an untamed physicality and fecundity was thought to be the most American of attributes. In 1830, in an unprecedented move, Crockett petitioned Congress to grant a resident of his state a tract of public land—not because of hard work, but because his wife had given birth to triplets.33

  As that particular brand of American, the lovable outcast, Crockett acquired a reputation for spinning outrageous tall tales. In a speech he purportedly delivered in Congress (but probably never did give in these exact words) he called himself the “savagest critter you ever did see.” Endowed with superhuman powers, he could “run like a fox, swim like a eel, yell like an Indian,” and “swallow a nigger whole”—an absurd, racist comment that was probably meant to convey his hostility toward great slaveowning planters who pushed poor squatters off their land. The real Crockett owned slaves himself, yet in Congress he opposed large planters’ engrossment of vast tracts of land. He championed a bill that would have sold land directly from the federal government to squatters at low prices. He also opposed the practice of having courts hire out insolvent debtors to work off fees—an updated variation on indentured servitude. Crockett spoke “Cracker” fluently, as was demonstrated in the 1830 dictionary that gave him full credit for coining the phrase “ring-tale roarer” to describe a violent man.34

  Crockett’s boasting carried unambiguous class accents. In 1828, he claimed that he could “wade the Mississippi with a steamboat on his back” and “whip his weight in wild cats.” The one thing he said he couldn’t do was to give a standard speech in Congress—which felt odd to him, given that he otherwise believed he could whip any man in the House. He lacked the eloquence that was taught, the argumentation that the educated class possessed. His humorous speeches gained public notoriety, but for many observers he remained the “harlequin,” provoking laughter. According to one newspaper, queer stories and quaint sayings turned Crockett into a dancing bear, dressed up in “coat and breeches,” performing a vulgar sideshow.35

  The real Crockett was often eclipsed by the tall tales of the untutored backwoodsman. An entire cottage industry of Crockett stories were published that he never authorized. Davy Crockett’s Almanack of 1837 contains a crude engraving of a corn cracker, who appears unshaven, is dressed in buckskin, and holds a rifle in his hand. He is topped off with a grisly-looking coonskin cap, the animal’s head still attached (see page 121). In another engraving, Davy’s daughter is mounted on a giant alligator’s back, riding the thirty-seven-foot beast like a rodeo star. Whether he fights modern-day dragons or accomplishes magical feats in a surreal hinterland, Crockett’s savage instincts seem appropriate to a mock-chivalric epic. His ghostwriters and hack biographers made Crockett into a wild man and an ill-educated braggart, and yet they equally relished his over-the-top swagger in outmaneuvering steamboats, bears, and slippery town folk.36

  His boastfulness was never seen in purely heroic terms. He might jump higher and “squat lower” than “all the fellers either side of the Alleghany hills,” but his comic character actually served to mute a legitimate political voice. Representative Crockett may have compared speculators to sneaky coons in an 1824 speech before the Tennessee House, but he never lost sight of the legal ploys used to trick poorer settlers out of their land warrants. In the end, the man, not the legend, did a better job of exposing class conflict in the backcountry, where real speculators were routinely pitted against real squatters.37

  David Crockett was an avid backer of Andrew Jackson in the 1828 election, but soon enough abandoned the imperious general. Crockett’s Land Bill made enemies back in Tennessee, and he disapproved of the Indian Removal Bill, which allowed for forced expulsion of the Cherokees and other “civilized tribes” from the southeastern states. Indian removal went along with the unfair treatment of squatters, who were expelled from the public domain and were barred from securing land that they had settled and improved. Jackson’s allies responded to Crockett’s defection by calling him unsavory and uneducated.

  Crockett accused Jackson of going back on his principles, and refused to go along with the partisan dog pack. In 1831, he wrote that he “would not wear a co
llar round my neck, with ‘my dog’ on it, and the name of ANDREW JACKSON on the collar.” Three years later he made submission to party into an ugly slur, saying he would rather “belong to a nigger, and be a raccoon dog, as the partisan of any man.” In Crockett’s backcountry class hierarchy, there was the free white male landowner, the squatter, the black man, the dog, and then, if his language was to be taken seriously, the party man.38

  • • •

  Democrat Andrew Jackson’s stormy relationship with Crockett was replicated again and again with any number of contemporaries over the course of a career that was built on sheer will and utter impulse. Most of his loyal supporters eventually ended up on the opposition side of the partisan divide, joining the Whig Party. Controversy, large and small, seemed to follow the man. Because Jackson had relatively little experience holding political offices, his run for the presidency drew even more than the normal amount of attention to his personal character. A biography written for campaign purposes filled in the gaps in his generally combative résumé. Whether supporters portrayed him as the conquering hero or his enemies labeled him King Andrew I, all focused on his volatile emotions. He certainly lacked the education and polite breeding of his presidential predecessors.39

  As an outsider to Washington, save for a brief, unproductive stint in Congress, his qualifications came from the field of war, where his record sparked heated criticism. His ardent backers claimed him as the spiritual successor to the sainted General Washington, but Jackson’s origins lay far from the Potomac, beyond the Appalachian Mountains. Old Hickory had made his home in places where the population was thin and the law fungible. He was a slaveholding planter whose reputation situated him not in the halls of power but among the common stock. In the Tennessee backcountry, where settlement came much later than it did on the East Coast, landowning and class stations ostensibly had shallower roots. As one New England journalist wondered aloud during Jackson’s first run for president in 1824, who precisely were these “hardy sons of the West”?40

  In the popular imagination, Jackson was inseparable from a wild and often violent landscape. After his celebrated victory at the Battle of New Orleans in 1815, he was identified as a “green backwoodsman” who had bested the “invincible” British foe. To another, he was “Napoleon of the woods.” His political rise came through violence, having slaughtered the Red Stick faction of the Creek Nation in the swamps of Alabama in 1813–14, while leaving hundreds of British soldiers dead in the marshes of New Orleans in January 1815. Jackson bragged about the British death toll, as did American poets. One extolled, “Carnage stalks wide o’er all the ensanguin’ plain.” And it was no exaggeration. Bodies floated in rivers and streams, and bones of the vanquished were found by travelers decades later.41

  Jackson did not look or act like a conventional politician, which was a fundamental part of his appeal. When Jackson arrived in Philadelphia from Tennessee to take his seat in the U.S. Senate in 1796, Pennsylvania congressman Albert Gallatin described a “tall, lank, uncouth-looking personage, with long locks hanging over his face, and a queue down his back tied in eel skin.” In later years, the gaunt general struck observers as stiff in carriage, and weatherworn. Backwater diseases stalked him. Saying nothing of his external appearance, Thomas Jefferson perceived in Jackson a man of savage instincts. Once he observed him so overcome with anger that he was left speechless. (Speechlessness was the classic signifier of primitive man and untamed beast.)42

  His fiery temper and lack of scholarly deportment permanently marked him. A sworn enemy put it best: “Boisterous in ordinary conversation, he makes up in oaths what he lacks in arguments.” Not known for his subtle reasoning, Jackson was blunt in his opinions and quick to resent any who disagreed with him. Shouting curses put him in the company of both common soldiers and uncouth crackers. In “A Backwoodsman and a Squatter” (1821), one satirist captured such frontier types, folks known to “squale loose jaw and slam an angry oath.”43

  Jackson’s aggressive style, his frequent resorting to duels and street fights, his angry acts of personal and political retaliation seemed to fit what one Frenchman with Jacksonian sympathies described as the westerner’s “rude instinct of masculine liberty.” By this code, independence came from clearing the land of potential threats. The threat could come from Native Americans, rival squatters, political adversaries, or what the corn cracker in Davy Crockett’s Almanack of 1837 described as “eel-skin” easterners who used fancy words to get what they wanted. The cracker’s survivalist ethos invariably trumped legal niceties or polite decorum. It was these traits that shaded Jackson’s public image in the cracker mold.44

  After New Orleans, Jackson led his army into Spanish Florida in 1818. He began by raising troops in Tennessee without waiting for the governor’s approval, then invaded East Florida under the guise of arresting a handful of Seminole Indians who were accused of attacking American settlers. When he attacked the fortified Spanish at Pensacola, what had begun as a foray to capture Indians quickly turned into a full-scale war and occupation.45

  In Encounter Between a Corncracker and an Eelskin from Davy Crockett’s Almanack of 1837, the backwoods squatter defends his gal from the slippery, seductive words of the trader from town.

  Davy Crockett’s Almanack of 1837, American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts

  Jackson went beyond squatting on Spanish soil. He violated his orders and ignored international law. After overtaking several Florida towns and arresting the Spanish governor, he executed two British citizens without real cause. The British press had a field day, calling the U.S. major general a “ferocious Yankee pirate with blood on his hands.” In a devastating caricature, Jackson appeared as a swarthy, swaggering bandit flanked by a corps of militiamen who were no more than ragged, shoeless brutes, beating drums with bones and wearing skulls instead of hats.46

  The pirate who doubled as a backcountry cracker bruiser was unrestrained and unrestrainable. In the Florida invasion, he was reportedly aided by squatters dressed up as “white savages,” who may in fact have been the true catalyst behind Jackson’s controversial action. The Florida conflict had all the signs of a squatters’ war. Soldiers reported that Seminole warriors only attacked “cracker houses,” leaving those of British or northern settlers untouched.47

  Prominent critics insisted on a congressional investigation. The powerful Speaker of the House, Henry Clay, demanded the rogue general’s censure. Jackson went to Washington, damned the established legal authorities, and told Secretary of State John Quincy Adams that the entire matter of Florida was between President Monroe and himself—and no one else. Confirmed rumors circulated that Jackson had threatened to cut off the ears of some senators because they had dared to investigate—and humiliate—him on the national stage.48

  In Jackson’s crude lexicon, territorial disputes were to be settled by violent means, not by words alone. He explained his Indian policy as the right of “retaliatory vengeance” against “inhumane bloody barbarians.” In 1818, he was heralded in a laudatory biography as a kind of backcountry Moses, administering justice with biblical wrath. To those who protested his lack of regard for international law or constitutional details, defenders claimed that he was “too much a patriot in war, to suffer the scruples of a legal construction.” Yet even the most devoted fans of the general had to admit he had a fiery temper. In 1825, Henry Clay’s highly publicized comment that Jackson was a mere “military chieftain” suggested something tribal, primitive, and wholly unrepublican about him. When he sought the presidency in 1824 and 1828, the Seminole War remained front and center.49

  Few of Jackson’s critics were buying the chivalrous portrait his defenders presented. He was not protecting women and children so much as opening up Florida lands to squatters and roughs and other uncivilized whites. But unlike Crockett, Jackson was never a champion of squatters’ rights. When ordered to remove them, he used the military to do the jo
b. Yet at the same time he favored white possession of the land in the same way squatters had always defended their claims: those who cleared and improved the land were worthy occupants. Jackson’s thinking shaped his Indian removal policy as president. He argued that Indians should not be treated as sovereign nations with special claims on the public domain, but as a dependent class. Like squatters, if Indians failed to assimilate or proved incapable of improving the land and securing land titles, they could be forcibly removed. As president, he was more than willing to use force to remove poor trespassers. Only when squatters resisted removal, as they did in Alabama in 1833, and state officials supported them, was President Jackson willing to back down and negotiate more favorable terms for white settlers.50

  It was almost too easy for Jackson critics to publicize a counternarrative to the official campaign biography. In 1806, he had shot and killed a young lawyer named Charles Dickinson in a duel, which left him with a bullet next to his heart. While the victim’s body was still warm, he made an ungentlemanly fuss when financial assistance was extended to Dickinson’s widow: in his mind, the scoundrel’s identity had to be permanently erased. According to the retelling of this episode in 1824, Jackson had withheld his shot, stood and watched the offending lawyer tremble, called him a “damn coward,” aimed calmly, and shot him dead at close range. Another incident followed in 1813, when Jackson was party to an impromptu “O.K. Corral” gunfight with his former aide Thomas Hart Benton and his brother Jesse at the Nashville Hotel. In the election year 1828, Thomas Benton made news when he published an account about the near-fatal encounter.51