White Trash

by Nancy Isenberg

  27.Donne, A Sermon upon the Eighth Verse of the First Chapter of the Acts of the Apostles, 19.

  28.Karen Ordahl Kupperman, “Apathy and Death in Early Jamestown,” Journal of American History 66, no. 1 (June 1979): 24–40, esp. 24–27, 31; and Wesley Frank Craven, The Virginia Company of London, 1606–1624 (Williamsburg: Virginia 350th Anniversary Celebration Corporation, 1957), 22–28, 32–34. On the promise of finding gold, see David Beers Quinn, England and the Discovery of America, 1481–1620 (New York: Knopf, 1974), 482–87. For a popular satire about the lure of quick riches and gold chamber pots to be found in the New World, see George Chapman, Eastward Hoe (London, 1605; reprint, London: The Tudor Facsimile Texts, 1914), 76. For “sluggish idlenesse,” see A True Declaration of the Estate of the Colonie (1610), 19. For “beastiall sloth” and “idleness,” see Virginia Company, A True and Sincere Declaration of the Purpose and End of the Plantation Begun in Virginia (London, 1610), 10.

  29.Hakluyt, “Discourse on Western Planting,” 28. Hakluyt took this idea from Gilbert, who advised having the children of the poor trained in “handie craftes” so they could make “trifles” to be sold to the Indians; see Gilbert, “A Discourse of a Discoverie for a New Passage to Cataia” (1576), in Quinn, The Voyages and Colonial Enterprises of Sir Humphrey Gilbert, 1:161. Also see Canny, “The Permissive Frontier,” 25, 27–29, 33. And on prohibitions against gaming, rape, and trading with sailors, see “Articles, Lawes, and Orders . . . Established by Sir Thomas Gates,” 10–11, 13–14.

  30.On Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), see Joan Thirsk, “Making a Fresh Start: Sixteenth-Century Agriculture and the Classical Inspiration,” in Michael Leslie and Timothy Raylor, eds., Culture and Cultivation in Early Modern England: Writing and the Land (Leicester and London: Leicester University Press, 1992), 22.

  31.On Rolfe and tobacco, see Philip D. Morgan, “Virginia’s Other Prototype: The Caribbean,” in The Atlantic World and Virginia, 1550–1624, ed. Peter C. Mancall (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 362; and Edmund S. Morgan, “The Labor Problem at Jamestown, 1607–1618,” American Historical Review 76, no. 3 (June 1971): 595–611, esp. 609.

  32.See Manning C. Voorhis, “Crown Versus Council in the Virginia Land Policy,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 3, no. 4 (October 1946): 499–514, esp. 500–501; and Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: Norton, 1975), 93–94, 171–73. Morgan quotes Jamestown planter John Pory, who wrote that “our principall wealth . . . consisteth in servants.” See Morgan, “The First American Boom,” William and Mary Quarterly 28, no. 2 (1971): 169–98, esp. 176–77.

  33.See Tomlins, Freedom Bound, 31–36, 78–81; Mary Sarah Bilder, “The Struggle over Immigration: Indentured Servants, Slaves, and Articles of Commerce,” Missouri Law Review 61 (Fall 1996): 758–59, 764; and Warren M. Billings, “The Law of Servants and Slaves in Seventeenth Century Virginia,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 99, no. 1 (January 1991): 45–62, esp. 47–49, 51.

  34.Morgan, “The First American Boom,” 170, 185–86, 198; Schen, “Constructing the Poor in Early Seventeenth-Century London,” 451; Billings, “The Law of Servants and Slaves,” 48–49. On high death tolls for indentured servants, see Martha W. McCartney, Virginia Immigrants and Adventurers: A Biographical Dictionary (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Company, 2007), 14; and Smith, The Generall Historie of Virginia, New England, and the Summer Isles . . . , in Barbour, The Complete Works of Captain John Smith, 2:255.

  35.Dr. John Pott paid the ransom for her release from the Indians with a few pounds of trade beads; he also claimed that her dead husband owed him three years of work on his indenture. See McCartney, Virginia Immigrants and Adventurers, 258; and “The Humble Petition of Jane Dickenson Widdowe” (1624), in Records of the Virginia Company of London, ed. Susan M. Kingsbury, 4 vols. (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1906–35), 4:473; also see Canny, “The Permissive Frontier,” 32.

  36.Smith, The Generall Historie of Virginia, New England, and the Summer Isles . . . (1624), in Barbour, The Complete Works of Captain John Smith, 2:388. The Merchant of Venice was published in 1600. Under Roman law, not only war captives but debtors and abandoned children could be made slaves. Children born to slaves could be slaves too. In Jamestown, children born to debtors could be made slaves. See Temin, “The Labor Market of the Early Roman Empire,” 513–38, esp. 524, 531.

  37.See David R. Ransome, “Wives for Virginia, 1621,” William and Mary Quarterly 48, no. 1 (January 1991): 3–18, esp. 4–7. The sex ratio was roughly four to one during the early years of Virginia; see Virginia Bernhard, “‘Men, Women, and Children’ at Jamestown: Population and Gender in Early Virginia, 1607–1610,” Journal of Southern History 58, no. 4 (November 1992): 599–618, esp. 614–18. On the shipping of cattle and cows as emissaries of Englishness, see Virginia DeJohn Anderson, “Animals into the Wilderness: The Development of Livestock Husbandry in the Seventeenth-Century Chesapeake,” William and Mary Quarterly 59, no. 2 (April 2002): 377–408, esp. 377, 379. The idea of sending women as breeders to the colonies was not new. In 1656, Cromwell had shipped off two thousand young women of England to Barbados in “order that by their breeding they should replenish the white population.” See Jennifer L. Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 74–75.

  38.William Berkeley, A Discourse and View of Virginia (London, 1663), 2, 7, 12.

  39.Samuel Eliot Morrison, “The Plymouth Company and Virginia,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 62, no. 2 (April 1954): 147–65; Donegan, Seasons of Misery, 119.

  40.Tomlins, Freedom Bound, 23, 54–56; Alison Games, Migration and Origins of the English Atlantic World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 25, 48, 53; T. H. Breen and Stephen Foster, “Moving to the New World: The Character of Early Massachusetts Migration,” William and Mary Quarterly 30, no. 2 (April 1973): 189–222, esp. 194, 201; Nuala Zahedieh, “London and the Colonial Consumer in the Late Seventeenth Century,” Economic History Review 42, no. 2 (May 1994): 239–61, esp. 245.

  41.See his “General Observations” (1629), in John Winthrop Papers, 6 vols. (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1928–), 2:111–15; Edgar J. A. Johnson, “Economic Ideas of John Winthrop,” New England Quarterly 3, no. 2 (April 1930): 235–50, esp. 245, 250; Francis J. Bremer, John Winthrop: America’s Forgotten Founder (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 152–53, 160–61, 174–75, 181, and footnote 9 on 431–32.

  42.John Winthrop, “A Model of Christian Charity” (1630), Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 3rd ser., 7 (Boston, 1838), 33; Scott Michaelson, “John Winthrop’s ‘Modell’ Covenant and the Company Way,” Early American Literature 27, no. 2 (1992): 85–100, esp. 90; Lawrence W. Towner, “‘A Fondness for Freedom’: Servant Protest in Puritan Society,” William and Mary Quarterly 19, no. 2 (April 1962): 201–19, esp. 204–5.

  43.Norman H. Dawes, “Titles of Symbols of Prestige in Seventeenth-Century New England,” William and Mary Quarterly 6, no. 1 (January 1949): 69–83; David Konig, Law and Society in Puritan Massachusetts: Essex County, 1629–1692 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979), 18–19, 29–30, 92; John Winthrop Papers, 4, 54, 476; Bremer, John Winthrop, 355.

  44.Towner, “‘A Fondness for Freedom,’” 202; Tomlins, Freedom Bound, 254–55; Bremer, John Winthrop, 313.

  45.Tomlins, Freedom Bound, 56, 255–56, 258. Fourteen was the age of discretion in Massachusetts law, and most did not arrive at adulthood until the age of twenty-one. See Ross W. Beales Jr., “In Search of the Historical Child: Adulthood and Youth in Colonial New England,” American Quarterly 27, no. 4 (April 1975): 379–98, esp. 384–85, 393–94, 397. Massachusetts first required youth to reside in families and work for them without compensation when land grants were distributed in 1623; laws were pas
sed in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island that “all single persons had to reside with families.” See William E. Nelson, “The Utopian Legal Order of Massachusetts Bay Colony, 1630–1686,” American Journal of Legal History 47, no. 2 (April 2005): 183–230, esp. 183; and Archer, Fissures in the Rock, 106.

  46.Tomlins, Freedom Bound, 307, 310; Philip Greven, Four Generations: Population, Land, and Family in Colonial Andover, Massachusetts (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1970), 75, 81–83, 125, 132, 135, 149.

  47.Winthrop’s first two wives died in childbirth. His last wife gave birth a year before he died. Bremer, John Winthrop, 90–91, 102–3, 115, 314, 373.

  48.Cotton Mather, A Good Master Well Served (Boston, 1696), 15–16, 35–36, 38; Towner, “‘A Fondness for Freedom,’” 209–10; Robert Middlekauf, The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596–1728 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 195.

  49.William Perkins, “On the Right, Lawful, and Holy Use of Apparel” in The Whole Treatise of the Cases of Conscience Distinguished into Three Books (Cambridge, England, 1606); Louis B. Wright, “William Perkins: Elizabethan Apostle of ‘Practical Divinity,’” Huntington Library Quarterly 2, no. 2 (January 1940): 171–96, esp. 177–78; Stephen Innes, Creating the Commonwealth: Economic Culture of Puritan New England (New York: Norton, 1998), 101–3. In 1651, officials in Massachusetts Bay Colony declared their “utter detestation & dislike that men and women of meane condition, education & callings should take upon theme the garb of the gentlemen”; see Leigh Eric Schmidt, “‘A Church-Going People Are a Dress-Loving People’: Clothes, Communication, and Religious Culture in Early America,” Church History 58, no. 1 (March 1989): 36–51, esp. 38–39. During King Philip’s War, the court charged “38 wives and maids and 30 young men . . . for wearing silk and that in a flaunting manner”; see Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth (New York: Knopf, 2001), 125; and Konig, Law and Society in Puritan Massachusetts, 148. And on the anxiety over parents and masters indulging children and servants, see Edmund Morgan, The Puritan Family: Religious and Domestic Relations in Seventeenth-Century New England (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1966), 149.

  50.For the privileges that church members had in court proceedings, see Thomas Haskell, “Litigation and Social Status in Seventeenth-Century New Haven,” Journal of Legal Studies, no. 2 (June 1978): 219–41. On Mary Dyer, see Carla Gardina Pestana, “The Quaker Executions as Myth and History,” Journal of American History 80, no. 2 (September 1992): 441–69, esp. 441, 460–64; and David D. Hall, Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 172–74, 186. Excommunication in England could result in severe penalties of barring the person from receiving an inheritance or restricting the right to sue. In New England, at least initially, excommunication only led to disenfranchisement. In 1638, the courts established harsher punishments: if a person did not repent or seek readmission within six months of excommunication, he or she could be fined, jailed, banished, or “further.” See Konig, Law and Society in Puritan Massachusetts, 32.

  51.Archer, Fissures in the Rock, 44, 50, 59–63, endnote 5, 180; Robert J. Dinkin, “Seating the Meetinghouse in Early Massachusetts,” New England Quarterly 43, no. 3 (September 1970): 450–64, esp. 453–54.

  52.Kathryn Zabelle Derounian, “The Publication, Promotion, and Distribution of Mary Rowlandson’s Indian Captivity Narrative in the Seventeenth Century,” Early American Literature 23, no. 3 (1988): 239–62. On Rowlandson’s embrace of English class and material symbols, see Nan Goodman, “‘Money Answers All Things’: Rethinking Economic Cultural Exchange in the Captivity Narrative of Mary Rowlandson,” American Literary History 22, no. 1 (Spring 2010): 1–25, esp. 5.

  53.Mary Rowlandson, The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, Together with the Faithfulness of His Promises Displayed: Being a Narrative of Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson and Related Documents, ed. Neil Salisbury (Boston: Bedford Books, 1997), 1, 16, 26, 75, 79, 83, 86, 89, 96–97, 103; Ulrich, The Age of Homespun, 59; Teresa A. Toulouse, “‘My Own Credit’: Strategies of (E)valuation in Mary Rowlandson’s Captivity Narrative,” American Literature 64, no. 2 (December 1992): 655–76, esp. 656–58; Tiffany Potter, “Writing Indigenous Femininity: Mary Rowlandson’s Narrative of Captivity,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 36, no. 2 (Winter 2003): 153–67, esp. 154.

  54.See Increase Mather, Pray for the Rising Generation, or a Sermon Wherein Godly Parents Are Encouraged, to Pray and Believe for Children (Boston, 1678), 12, 17; Hall, Worlds of Wonder, 148–55; Gerald F. Moran, “Religious Renewal, Puritan Tribalism, and the Family in Seventeenth-Century Milford, Connecticut,” William and Mary Quarterly 36, no. 2 (April 1979): 236–54, esp. 237–38, 250–54; Bremer, John Winthrop, 314–15; Lewis Milton Robinson, “A History of the Half-Way Covenant” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Illinois, 1963).

  55.Hakluyt wrote two different dedications: one emphasized Virginia as a nubile bride, and the other as a child, with Queen Elizabeth as her godmother overseeing the gossips (midwives) assisting in the birth of a child. Samuel Purchas repeated the same marital allusion, writing that Virginia’s “lovely looks” were “worth the wooing and loves of the best husband.” See “Epistle Dedicatory to Sir Walter Ralegh by Richard Hakluyt, 1587,” De Orbe Novo Petri Martyris, in Taylor, The Original Writings, 2:367; and “To the Right Worthie and Honourable Gentleman, Sir Walter Ralegh,” in A Notable Historie Containing four Voyages Made by Certayne French Captaynes into Florida (London, 1587), [2]. Raleigh used a similar allusion about Guiana, that she hath “yet to lose her Maidenhead.” See Sir Walter Ralegh, The Discovery of the Large, Rich, and Beautiful Empire of Guiana, with a relation of the Great and Golden City of Manoa (which the Spaniards call El Dorado), etc. performed in the Year 1595, edited by Sir Robert H. Schomburgk (London, 1848), 115; also see Louis Montrose, “The Work of Gender in the Discourse of Discovery,” Representations 33 (Winter 1991): 1–41, esp. 12–13; Fuller, Voyages in Print, 75; and Morgan, “Virginia’s Other Prototype,” 360.

  56.See Rachel Doggett, Monique Hulvey, and Julie Ainsworth, eds., New World Wonders: European Images of the Americas, 1492–1700 (Washington, DC: Folger Shakespeare Library/Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1992), 37; Edward L. Bond, “Sources of Knowledge, Sources of Power: The Supernatural World of English Virginia, 1607–1624,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 108, no. 2 (2000): 105–138, esp. 114.

  57.See Jack Dempsey, ed., New England Canaan by Thomas Morton of “Merrymount” (Scituate, MA: Digital Scanning, 2000), 283–88; Karen Ordahl Kupperman, “Thomas Morton, Historian,” New England Quarterly 50, no. 4 (December 1977): 660–64; Michael Zukerman, “Pilgrims in the Wilderness: Community, Modernity, and the May Pole at Merrymount,” New England Quarterly 50, no. 4 (December 1977): 255–77; John P. McWilliams Jr., “Fictions of Merry Mount,” American Quarterly 29, no. 1 (Spring 1977): 3–30.

  58.He was first marooned on the Isle of Shoals (New Hampshire) after his arrest in 1628, and then shipped back to England. He returned to New England in 1629 and was banished again to England in 1630. He returned once more in 1643, only to be arrested the next year; he was released in 1645 on the condition that he go out of the jurisdiction, so he headed to Maine and died soon after. For the best overview of his life, see Jack Dempsey, Thomas Morton of “Merrymount”: The Life and Renaissance of an Early American Poet (Scituate, MA: Digital Scanning, 2000).

  59.Morton believed that special water used by the Indians (the “crystal fountain”) cured barrenness; see Dempsey, New English Canaan, 7, 26–27, 53–55, 70, 90, 92, 120–21, 135–36, 139. For the best analyses of Morton’s writings, see Michelle Burnham, “Land, Labor, and Colonial Economics in Thomas Morton’s New English Canaan,” Early American Literature 41, no. 3 (2006): 405–28, esp. 408, 413–14, 418, 421, 423–24; and Edith Murphy,
“‘A Rich Widow, Now to Be Tane Up or Laid Downe’: Solving the Riddle of Thomas Morton’s ‘Rise Oedipeus,’” William and Mary Quarterly 55, no. 4 (October 1996): 755–68, esp. 756, 759, 761–62, 765–67.

  60.Hamor, A True Discourse of the Present State of Virginia, 20; Hakluyt, “Epistle Dedicatory to Sir Walter Ralegh by Richard Hakluyt, 1587,” 2:367–68. Lawson also emphasized the “wonderful increase” of sheep and cattle, which he described as “fat”—another word used to describe their abundant fertility; see John Lawson, A New Voyage to Carolina, with introduction by Hugh Talmage Lefler (reprint of 1706 London ed., Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1967), 87–88, 91, 196. John Smith repeated this notion that Indian women “are easily delivered of childe.” See Smith, The Generall Historie of Virginia, New England, and the Summer Isles . . . (1624) 2:1165. On New World images of fertility in general, see Parrish, “The Female Opossum and the Nature of the New World,” 475–514, esp. 502–6, 511. The Romans claimed that barbarian and nomadic women “give birth with ease,” and this idea readily translated to Native women in the New World. See Morgan, Laboring Women, 16–17.

  61.Tomlins, Freedom Bound; Alsop also referred to Mary-land as having a “natural womb (by her plenty),” which gave forth several different kinds of animals. The land’s “superabounding plenty” he compared to a woman’s pregnant belly. If “copulative marriage” involved women coming to “market with their virginity,” Alsop contrasted virgins with prostitutes or doxies, who “rent out” their wombs, and to spinsters who had let their wombs become “mouldy”; see George Alsop, A Character of the Province of Maryland (London, 1666), in Narratives of Early Maryland, 1633–1684, ed., Clayton G. Hall (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1910), 340–87, esp. 343–44, 348, 358. Also see A Brief Description of the Province of Carolina on the Coasts of Floreda (London, 1666), 9–10.