White Trash

by Nancy Isenberg

  11.Hubbard, “The Smith-Pocahontas Story,” 279–85. Smith mentioned the rescue briefly in his first book, published in 1608, but only elaborated on the episode in his 1624 Generall Historie of Virginia, New England, and the Summer Isles . . .; see Karen Ordahl Kupperman, ed., Captain John Smith: A Select Edition of His Writings (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 57–73. Ralph Hamor described her as “one of rude education, manners barbarous and cursed generation,” and he saw the union as “meerely for the good and honour of the Plantation”; see Hamor, A True Discourse of the Present State of Virginia (London, 1615; reprint ed., Richmond: Virginia Historical Society, 1957), 24, 63. On the popular Scottish ballad, see Rayna Green, “The Pocahontas Perplex: The Image of Indian Women in American Culture,” Massachusetts Review 16, no. 4 (Autumn 1975): 698–714, esp. 698–700.

  12.Buscombe, “What’s New in the New World?,” 36; Murphy, “Pocahontas: Her Life and Legend,” 270.

  13.Nancy Shoemaker, “Native-American Women in History,” OAH Magazine of History 9, no. 4 (Summer 1995): 10–14; and Green, “The Pocahontas Perplex,” 704.

  14.On the use of coercion and punishment to uphold the lower ranks of labor force (mostly children and adolescents) in New England, see Barry Levy, Town Born: The Political Economy of New England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 61–72. Even William Bradford in his Of Plymouth Plantation attempted to erase the dead by using political arithmetic to show that the “increase” of children outnumbered the dead; see Donegan, Seasons of Misery, 119, 135–36, 138, 153–54; Richard Archer, Fissures in the Rock: New England in the Seventeenth Century (Hanover and London: University of New Hampshire Press, 2001), 44, 50, 59–63.

  15.Donegan, Seasons of Misery, 70, 74–76, 78, 100–103 (cannibalism), 108–10. On the English sharing the Spanish desire for gold, see Constance Jordan, “Conclusion: Jamestown and Its North Atlantic World,” in Envisioning an English Empire: Jamestown and the Making of the North Atlantic World, eds. Robert Appelbaum and John Wood Sweet (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 280–81.

  16.François Weil, “John Farmer and the Making of American Genealogy,” New England Quarterly 80, no. 3 (September 2007): 408–34, esp. 431; Francesca Morgan, “Lineage as Capital: Genealogy in Antebellum New England,” New England Quarterly 83, no. 2 (June 2010): 250–82, esp. 280–82; Michael S. Sweeney, “Ancestors, Avotaynu, Roots: An Inquiry into American Genealogical Discourse” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Kansas, 2010), 41.

  17.Francis J. Bremer, “Remembering—and Forgetting—Jonathan Winthrop and the Puritan Founders,” Massachusetts Historical Review 6 (2004): 38–69, esp. 39–42. On legal standing, see Christopher Tomlins, Freedom Bound: Law, Labor, and Civic Identity in Colonizing English America, 1580–1865 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 119–20. On the new City Hall, see David Glassberg, “Public Ritual and Cultural Hierarchy: Philadelphia Civic Celebration at the Turn of the Century,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 107, no. 3 (July 1983): 421–48, esp. 426–29. On Plymouth Rock, see Abrams, The Pilgrims and Pocahontas, 6; and Gomes, “Pilgrims and Puritans,” 6. In his 1820 oration, the lawyer Daniel Webster described the rock as the “first lodgement, in a vast extent of country, covered with a wilderness, and peopled by roving barbarians”; see John Seelye, Memory’s Nation: The Place of Plymouth Rock (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 75.

  18.On English notions of eliminating the poor, see E. P. Hutchinson, The Population Debate: The Development of Conflicting Theories up to 1900 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967), 37, 44, 52, 123–24; Timothy Raylor, “Samuel Hartlib and the Commonwealth of Bees,” in Culture and Cultivation in Early Modern England, eds. Michael Leslie and Timothy Raylor (New York: St. Martin’s, 1992), 106.

  19.Abbot Emerson Smith, Colonists in Bondage: White Servitude and Convict Labor in America, 1607–1776 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1947): 5, 7, 12, 20, 67–85, 136–51; A. Roger Ekirch, “Bound for America: A Profile of British Convicts Transported to the Colonies, 1718–1775,” William and Mary Quarterly 42, no. 2 (April 1985): 184–222; Abbott Emerson Smith, “Indentured Servants: New Light on Some of America’s ‘First’ Families,” Journal of Economic History 2, no. 1 (May 1942): 40–53; A. L. Beier, Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England, 1560–1640 (London: Methuen, 1985), 162–64; Tomlins, Freedom Bound, 21, 76–77; Farley Grubb, “Fatherless and Friendless: Factors Influencing the Flow of English Emigrant Servants,” Journal of Economic History 52, no. 1 (March 1992): 85–108. On “Egyptian bondage,” see Marilyn C. Baseler, “Asylum for Mankind”: America, 1607–1800 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), 99–101. On “Little Bess” Armstrong, see Emma Christopher, A Merciless Place: The Fact of British Convicts After the American Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 32.

  20.Baseler, “Asylum for Mankind,” 35–40, 75; Tomlins, Freedom Bound, 504; Beier, Masterless Men, 95; Sir Josiah Child, A Discourse on Trade (London, 1690), 172–73; John Combs, “The Phases of Conversion: A New Chronology for the Rise of Slavery in Virginia,” William and Mary Quarterly 68, no. 3 (July 2011): 332–60.

  Chapter One: Taking Out the Trash: Waste People in the New World

  1.See Peter C. Mancall, Hakluyt’s Promise: An Elizabethan’s Obsession for an English America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 3, 6–8, 25, 31, 38, 40, 102.

  2.Ibid., 8, 63, 76–77; D. B. Quinn, ed., The Voyages and Colonizing Enterprises of Sir Humphrey Gilbert, 2 vols. (London: Hakluyt Society, 1940), 1:102; Kenneth R. Andrews, Trade, Plunder and Settlement: Maritime Enterprise and the Genesis of the British Empire, 1480–1630 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 30–31, 200–201, 218, 294–99.

  3.Mancall, Hakluyt’s Promise, 3–4, 92–100, 158, 184–94, 218, 221–31; E. G. R. Taylor, “Richard Hakluyt,” Geographical Journal 109, no. 4–6 (April–June 1947): 165–71, esp. 165–66; Kupperman, Captain John Smith, 3–4, 267. On Smith’s borrowing from Hakluyt, see David B. Quinn, “Hakluyt’s Reputation,” in Explorers and Colonies: America, 1500–1625 (London and Ronceverte, WV: Hambledon Press, 1990), 19.

  4.Mancall, Hakluyt’s Promise, 72, 92, 128–29, 139, 183–84; David B. Quinn and Alison M. Quinn, eds., A Particular Discourse Concerning the Greate Necessite and Manifolde Commodyties That Are Like to Growe to This Realm of Englande by the Westerne Discoveries Lately Attempted. Written in the Year 1584. By Richard Hackluyt of Oxforde. Known as Discourse of Western Planting (London: Hakluyt Society, 1993), xv, xxii. Hereafter cited as “Discourse of Western Planting.”

  5.Hakluyt, “Discourse of Western Planting,” 8, 28, 31, 55, 116, 117, 119. Michel de Montaigne’s “Of Cannibals” (1580) was translated into English in 1603; see Lynn Glaser, America on Paper: The First Hundred Years (Philadelphia: Associated Antiquaries, 1989), 170–73; and Scott R. MacKenzie, “Breeches of Decorum: The Figure of a Barbarian in Montaigne and Addison,” South Central Review, no. 2 (Summer 2006): 99–127, esp. 101–3.

  6.For Virginia as Raleigh’s bride, see “Epistle Dedicatory to Sir Walter Ralegh by Richard Hakluyt, 1587,” in The Original Writings and Correspondence of the Two Richard Hakluyts, ed. E. G. R. Taylor, 2 vols. (London: Hakluyt Society, 1935), 2:367–68; also see Mary C. Fuller, Voyages in Print: English Travel to America, 1576–1624 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 75.

  7.Tomlins, Freedom Bound, 114–18, 135–38, 143–44; and John Smith, Advertisements: Or, The Pathway to Experience to Erect a Plantation (1831), in The Complete Works of Captain John Smith (1580–1631), ed. Philip L. Barbour, 3 vols. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 3:290.

  8.For the manure reference, see Smith, The Generall Historie of Virginia, New England, and the Summer Isles . . . (1624) and John Smith, Advertisements for the Unexperienced Planters of New England, or Any Where (1631) in Barbour, The Complete Works of Captain J
ohn Smith, 2:109; 3:276. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “waste” when connected to the land meant several things: (1a) uninhabited or desolate region, desert, or wilderness; (1b) a vast expanse of water, empty space in the air, or land covered with snow; (2) a piece of land not cultivated or used for any purpose, lying in common (not owned privately); and (3) a devastated region. The legal definition is “any unauthorized act of a tenant for a freehold estate not of inheritance, or for any lesser interest, which tends to the destruction of the tenement, or otherwise to the injury of the inheritance.” This means a tenant, not an owner of the land, who damages the property and decreases its value. “Wasteland” referred to land in its uncultivated or natural state, or land (usually surrounded by developed land) “not used or unfit for cultivation or building and allowed to run wild.”

  9.Hakluyt, “Discourse of Western Planting,” 115. For the language of agrarian improvement, see Andrew McRae, God Speed the Plough: The Representation of Agrarian England, 1500–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 13, 116, 136–37, 162, 168.

  10.Hakluyt, “Discourse of Western Planting,” 28; also see the elder Hakluyt’s “Inducements to the Liking of the Voyage Intended Toward Virginia” (1585), in Taylor, The Original Writings, 2:331; and McRae, God Speed the Plough, 168. Timothy Sweet, “Economy, Ecology, and Utopia in Early Colonial Promotional Literature,” American Literature 71, no. 3 (September 1999): 399–427, esp. 407–8. Hakluyt’s list of tasks (down to plucking and packing feathers) was borrowed from George Peckham’s A True Reporte of Late Discoveries and Possession, Taken in the Right of the Crowne of Englande of the Newfound Landes: By That Valiant and Worthye Gentleman, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, Knight. Hakluyt later included the relevant passage: Richard Hakluyt, The Principall Navigations Voiages and Discoveries of the English Nation (London, 1589), eds. David Beers Quinn and Raleigh Ashlin Skelton, 2 vols. (reprinted facsimile, London: Cambridge University Press, 1965), 2:710–11.

  11.Hakluyt, “Discourse of Western Planting,” 28, 120, 123–24. On using the colonies to unburden England of idle children of the poor, see Hakluyt the elder, “Inducements for Virginia,” in Taylor, The Original Writings, 2:330; Gilbert, “A Discourse of a Discoverie for a New Passage to Cataia” (London, 1576), in Quinn, The Voyages and Colonizing Enterprises of Sir Humphrey Gilbert, 1:161; and Peckham, “A True Report,” in Hakluyt, Principall Navigations, 2:710–11.

  12.Hakluyt, “Discourse of Western Planting,” 28.

  13.John Cramsie, “Commercial Projects and the Fiscal Policy of James VI and I,” Historical Journal 43, no. 2 (2000): 345–64, esp. 350–51, 359.

  14.Walter I. Trattner, “God and Expansion in Elizabethan England: John Dee, 1527–1583,” Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 25, no. 1 (January–March 1964): 17–34, esp. 26–27; Beier, Masterless Men, 56, 149–50, 168.

  15.Hakluyt, “Discourse of Western Planting,” 28. Gilbert made the same argument of settling needy men instead of sending them to the gallows; see “A Discourse of a Discoverie for a New Passage to Cataia,” in Quinn, The Voyages and Colonizing Enterprises of Sir Humphrey Gilbert, 1:160–61. Under Roman law, men, women, and children could become slaves if they were captives of war. Captives were given their lives in return for serving as slaves; see Peter Temin, “The Labor Market of the Early Roman Empire,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 34, no. 4 (Spring 2004): 513–38, esp. 534. A French scholar has noted that in English ethnography, the term “rubbish men” was used to describe debt slavery; see Alain Testart, “The Extent and Significance of Debt Slavery,” Revue Française de Sociologie 43, no. 1 (2002): 173–204, esp. 199.

  16.Hakluyt, “Discourse of Western Planting,” 31–32, 120. On the children of beggars being put into service, see A. L. Beier, “‘A New Serfdom’: Labor Laws, Vagrancy Statutes, and Labor Discipline in England, 1350–1800,” in Cast Out: Vagrancy and Homelessness in Global Perspective, eds. A. L. Beier and Paul Ocobock (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2009), 47.

  17.Beier, Masterless Men, 158–60; C. S. L. Davies, “Slavery and Protector Somerset: The Vagrancy Act of 1547,” Economic History Review 19, no. 3 (1966): 533–49.

  18.See William Harrison, “Chapter IX: Of Provisions Made for the Poor” (1577 and 1857), in Elizabethan England: From “A Description of England,” by William Harrison (in “Holinshed’s Chronicles”), edited by Lothrop Withington, with introduction by F. J. Furnivall (London: The W. Scott Publishing Co., 1902), 122–29, esp. 122; and Patrick Copland, Virginia’s God Be Thanked, or A Sermon of Thanksgiving for the Happie Successe of the Affayres in Virginia This Last Yeare. Preached by Patrick Copland at Bow-Church in Cheapside, Before the Honourable Virginia Company, on Thursday, the 18. of April 1622 (London, 1622), 31.

  19.Beier, Masterless Men, 43; Copland, Virginia’s God Be Thanked, 31; John Donne, A Sermon upon the Eighth Verse of the First Chapter of the Acts of the Apostles. Preached to the Honourable Company of the Virginia Plantation, 13, November 1622 (London, 1624), 21. Though John White tried to counter this negative image, he acknowledged that it was widely believed the “Colonies ought to be Emunctories or Sinkes of States; to drayne away the filth”; see John White, The Planters Plea, or the Grounds of Plantations Examined and Usuall Objections Answered (London, 1630), 33. For the elder Hakluyt’s phrase of “offals of our people,” see his “Letter of Instruction for the 1580 Voyage of Arthur Pet and Charles Jackman,” in Hakluyt, Principall Navigations, 1:460. The idea of draining off the poor into the colonies can be traced back to ancient Rome. Cicero described the poor as “‘dordem urbis et faecem, the poverty stricken scum of the city,’ who should be ‘drained off to the colonies’”; see Paul Ocobock, introduction in Beier and Ocobock, Cast Out, 4.

  20.Harrison, Elizabethan England, 122. Harrison’s allusion to the poor as unbounded and haphazardly dispersed matched how the English thought of wastelands. A writer in 1652 described “those many and wild vacant Wast-Lands scattered up and down this Nation, be not suffered to lye longer (like deformed Chaos) to our discredit and disprofit”; see Wast Land’s Improvement, or Certain Proposals Made and Tendered to the Consideration of the Honorable Committee Appointed by Parliament for the Advance of Trade, and General Profits of the Commonwealth . . . (London, 1653), 2.

  21.William Harrison contended that while some believe that a “brood of cattle” was far better than the “superfluous augmentation” of the poor, he pointed out that the poor were necessary in times of war. They alone would form a “wall of men” if England was invaded. See Harrison, Elizabethan England, 125; Beier, Masterless Men, 75–76.

  22.Nicholas P. Canny, “Ideology of English Colonization: From Ireland to America,” William and Mary Quarterly 30, no. 4 (October 1973): 575–90, esp. 589–90; and Canny, “The Permissive Frontier: The Problem of Social Control in English Settlements in Ireland and Virginia,” in The Western Enterprise: English Activities in Ireland, the Atlantic, and America, 1480–1650, eds. K. R. Andrews, N. P. Canny, and P. E. H. Hair (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1979), 17–44, esp. 18–19. Also see Linda Bradley Salamon, “Vagabond Veterans: The Roguish Company of Martin Guerre and Henry V,” in Rogues and Early Modern English Culture, eds. Craig Dionne and Steve Mentz (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), 261–93, esp. 265, 270–71; and Roger B. Manning, “Styles of Command in Seventeenth Century English Armies,” Journal of Military History 71, no. 3 (July 2007): 671–99, esp. 672–73, 687.

  23.Craig Dionne, “Fashioning Outlaws: The Early Modern Rogue and Urban Culture,” and Salamon, “Vagabond Veterans,” in Dionne and Mentz, Rogues and Early Modern English Culture, 1–2, 7, 33–34, 267–68, 272–73; Harrison, Elizabethan England, 127–28; Beier, Masterless Men, 93–94; Claire S. Schen, “Constructing the Poor in Early Seventeeth-Century London,” Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies 32, no. 3 (Autumn 2000): 450–63, esp. 453.

  24.As Hakluyt wrote, “If frontier wars there
chance to arise, and if thereupon we shall fortify, yet will occasion the training up of our youth in the discipline of war and make a number fit for the service of the wars and for the defense of our people there and at home”; see “Discourse of Western Planting,” 119–20, 123. Other colonial promoters argued that colonial service was a substitute for military service and that it would provide the necessary discipline for the idle poor. Christopher Carleill made this argument based on his own military experience in the Low Country wars; see Carleill, A Breef and Sommarie Discourse upon the Entended Voyage to the Hethermoste Partes of America: Written by Captain Carleill in April 1583 (1583), 6. For soldiers as cannon fodder, see Salamon, “Vagabond Veterans,” 271; and Sweet, “Economy, Ecology, and Utopia in Early Colonial Promotional Literature,” 408–9.

  25.No scholar has recognized the connection between training the children of the poor and treating them as recycled waste.

  26.On the laws passed against defecating in the streets and punishments for blasphemy and stealing vegetables, see “Articles, Lawes, and Orders, Divine, Politique, and Martiall for the Colony of Virginia: First Established by Sir Thomas Gates. . . . May 24, 1610,” in For the Colonial in Virginia Britannia. Lavves, Diuine, Morall, and Martiall, &c. Alget qui non Ardet. Res nostrae subinde non sunt, quales quis optaret, sed quales esse possunt (London, 1612), 10–13, 15–17; also see Kathleen M. Brown, Foul Bodies: Cleanliness in Early America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 61–64. On the man murdering and eating his wife, see A True Declaration of the Estate of the Colonie in Virginia, with a Confutation of Such Scandalous Reports as have Tended to the Disgrace of So Worthy an Enterprise (London, 1610), 16; and John Smith, The Generall Historie of Virginia, New England, and the Summer Isles . . . (1624), in Barbour, The Complete Works of Captain John Smith, 2:232–33; Donegan, Seasons of Misery, 103.