White Trash

by Nancy Isenberg

  3.Thomas Jefferson to John Jay, August 23, 1785, and Thomas Jefferson to Francis Willis, July 15, 1796, PTJ, 8:426, 29:153; and Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, ed. William Peden (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1955), 164–65. For an excellent overview of Jefferson’s troubled career as a farmer, see Lucia Stanton, “Thomas Jefferson: Planter and Farmer,” in Cogliano, A Companion to Thomas Jefferson, 253–70.

  4.See Thomas Jefferson to Thomas Leiper, February 23, 1801, PTJ, 8:210–12, 33:50. On Jefferson’s design for the moldboard plough, see Thomas Jefferson to Sir John Sinclair, March 23, 1798, PTJ 30: 197–209; the original memorandum, “Description of a Mouldboard of the Least, & of the Easiest and Most Certain Construction,” is located at the Massachusetts Historical Society, along with an undated drawing of the plough, MSi5 [electronic edition]. Thomas Jefferson Papers: An Electronic Archive, Boston, MA: Massachusetts Historical Society, 2003, thomasjeffersonpapers.org; and August C. Miller Jr., “Jefferson as an Agriculturalist,” Agricultural History 16, no. 2 (April 1942): 65–78, esp. 70, 71–72, 75.

  5.On English notions of husbandry and improvement, see Joan Thirsk, “Plough and Pen: Writers in the Seventeenth Century,” Social Relations and Ideas: Essays in Honour of R. H. Hilton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 295–318, esp. 297–98, 316; Benjamin R. Cohen, Notes from the Ground: Science, Soil, and Society in the American Countryside (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 18, 20, 25. On early modern English husbandry, see McRae, God Speed the Plough, 203–4, 206, 208, 210; George Washington to William Pierce, 1796, in The Writings of Washington from the Original Manuscript Sources, 1744–1799, ed. John C. Fitzpatrick, 39 vols. (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1931–44), 34:451; and Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 85; Miller, “Jefferson as an Agriculturalist,” 69, 71–72.

  6.Jefferson described slaves as “confined to tillage”; see Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 139.

  7.See Kevin J. Hayes, “The Libraries of Thomas Jefferson,” in A Companion to Thomas Jefferson, 333–49; Burstein and Isenberg, Madison and Jefferson, 558. On Jefferson’s literary training and epicureanism, see Andrew Burstein, The Inner Jefferson: Portrait of a Grieving Optimist (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1995), 16–17, 32, 34, 129, 133; and Burstein, Jefferson’s Secrets: Death and Desire at Monticello (New York: Basic Books, 2005), 162, 165–66. On his purchase of wines and luxuries in France, see Herbert E. Sloan, Principle and Interest: Thomas Jefferson and the Problem of Debt (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1995), 25, and note 84 on 259–60, and Jefferson’s Memorandum Books: Accounts, with Legal Records and Miscellany, 1767–1826, eds. James A. Bear Jr. and Lucia C. Stanton (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 671, 686, 717, 724, 728, 734, 741–42, 807. On training his slave James Hemings as a French chef, see Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (New York: Norton, 2008), 164–65, 209.

  8.Thomas Jefferson to Charles Wilson Peale, April 17, 1813, PTJ-R, 6:69.

  9.On cultivators having a “deposit for substantial and genuine virtue,” see Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 164.

  10.Michael A. McDonnell, The Politics of War: Race, Class, and Conflict in Revolutionary Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 27, 93, 95, 109, 119, 227–29, 258–61, 275, 277–78, 306–7, 389–94; John Ferling, “Soldiers for Virginia: Who Served in the French and Indian War?,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 94, no. 3 (July 1986): 307–28; Thomas Jefferson to Richard Henry Lee, June 5, 1778, PTJ, 2:194.

  11.Thomas L. Humphrey, “Conflicting Independence: Land Tenancy and the American Revolution,” Journal of the Early Republic 28, no. 2 (Summer 2008): 159–82, esp. 170; L. Scott Philyaw, “A Slave for Every Soldier: The Strange History of Virginia’s Forgotten Recruitment Act of 1 January 1781,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 109, no. 4 (2001): 367–86, esp. 371.

  12.Stanley Katz, “Thomas Jefferson and the Right to Property in Revolutionary America,” Journal of Law and Economics 19, no. 3 (October 1976): 467–88, esp. 470–71.

  13.Holly Brewer, “Entailing Aristocracy in Colonial Virginia: ‘Ancient Feudal Restraints’ and Revolutionary Reform,” William and Mary Quarterly 54, no. 2 (April 1997): 307–46; Christopher Michael Curtis, Jefferson’s Freeholders and the Politics of Ownership in the Old Dominion (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 21–26, 56, 72, 75–76.

  14.Curtis, Jefferson’s Freeholders, 56, 72.

  15.Humphrey, “Conflicting Independence,” 180–81.

  16.The bill was first presented in 1778, again in 1780, and in 1785, where it passed the House but died in the Senate. See “A Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge” (1778), PTJ, 2:526–35; and Jennings L. Wagoner Jr., Jefferson and Education (Charlottesville, VA: Monticello Monograph Series, 2004), 34–38.

  17.Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 146. Bunyan had two references to muck; one was the muck-rake, which was an emblem for covertness, the other was that of a bad crop turned into muck in his Book for Boys and Girls. See Roger Sharrock, “Bunyan and the English Emblem Writers,” Review of English Studies 21, no. 82 (April 1945): 105–16, esp. 109–10, 112.

  18.“A Bill for Support of the Poor,” PTJ, 2:419–23. This bill was not passed until 1785.

  19.Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, Natural History, General and Particular, by the Count de Buffon, Translated into English, 8 vols. (2nd. ed., London, 1785), 3:104, 134–36, 190.

  20.Ibid., 3:57–58, 61–62, 129–30, 192–93.

  21.Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 7–8, 10, 19, 21–22, 43–54, 58–65, 79, 226–31, 253–54.

  22.Thomas Jefferson to the Marquis de Chastellux, June 7, 1785, PTJ, 8:185–86.

  23.Thomas Jefferson to G. K. van Hogendorp, October 13, 1785, and Thomas Jefferson to John Jay, August 23, 1785, PTJ, 8:426, 633; on chorography, see McRae, God Speed the Plough, 231–261.

  24.“Report of the Committee, March 1, 1784,” PTJ, 6:603; C. Albert White, A History of the Rectangular Survey System (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1983), 11, 512; William D. Pattison, Beginnings of the American Rectangular Land Survey System, 1784–1800 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), 42–45, 63–65; Peter Onuf, “Liberty, Development, and Union: Visions of the West in the 1780s,” William and Mary Quarterly 43, no. 2 (April 1986): 179–213, esp. 184.

  25.J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer, ed. Susan Manning (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), xi–xiii, 15, 25, 27–28, 41–42, 45–47. For the excerpt of the farmer placing his son on the plough, see “Pleasing Particulars in Husbandry &c. [From Letters from J. Hector St. John, a Farmer in Pennsylvania, to his Friend in England],” Boston Magazine (July 1986), 285–91, esp. 285; also see Thomas Philbrick, “Crevecoeur as New Yorker,” Early American Literature 11, no. 1 (Spring 1976): 22–30; and St. John Crèvecoeur to Thomas Jefferson, May 18, 1785, PTJ, 8:156–57.

  26.Answers to Démeunier’s First Queries, January 24, 1786, PTJ, 10:16.

  27.On importing Germans into Virginia, see Thomas Jefferson to Richard Claiborne, August 8, 1787, PTJ, 16:540. On using Germans to train slaves, see Thomas Jefferson to Edward Bancroft, January 26, 1789, PTJ, 14:492, 35:718–21.

  28.McDonnell, The Politics of War, 439, 455, 480–82; Woody Holton, “Did Democracy Cause the Recession That Led to the Constitution?,” Journal of American History 92, no. 2 (September 2005): 442–69, esp. 445–46.

  29.John Ferling, Whirlwind: The American Revolution and the War That Won It (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015), 320–21; Charles Royster, A Revolutionary People at War: The Continental Army and the American Character, 1775–1783 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979), 353–57.

  30.“Jefferson’s Reply to the Representations of Affa
irs in America by British Newspapers” [before November 20, 1784], PTJ, 7:540–45; Wallace Evan Davies, “The Society of Cincinnati in New England, 1783–1800,” William and Mary Quarterly 5, no. 1 (January 1948): 3–25, esp. 3, 5.

  31.Thomas Jefferson to Abigail Adams, February 22, 1787, PTJ, 11:174–75; Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, January 30 and February 5, 1787, in The Republic of Letters: The Correspondence Between Thomas Jefferson and Madison, 1776–1826, ed. James Morton Smith, 3 vols. (New York: Norton, 1994), 1:461; Burstein and Isenberg, Madison and Jefferson, 146–48, 168; Woody Holton, Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution (New York: Hill & Wang, 2007), 145–48, 155, 159; and David P. Szatmary, Shays’ Rebellion: The Making of an Agrarian Insurrection (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980), 66.

  32.Abigail Adams to Thomas Jefferson, September 10, 1787, PTJ, 12:112. For Shays living in a sty, see “To the Printer,” American Recorder, and Charlestown Advertiser, January 19, 1787. For the description of Shaysites as “ragamuffins,” see the account of Reverend Bezaleel Howard of Springfield (September 1787), reprinted in Richard D. Brown, “Shays Rebellion and Its Aftermath: A View from Springfield, 1787,” William and Mary Quarterly 40, no. 4 (October 1983): 598–615, esp. 602. For a description of Shaysites as “Abroad in rags like wolves to roam,” see New Haven Gazette, and Connecticut Magazine, January 25, 1787.

  33.“Jefferson’s Observations on Démeunier’s Manuscript,” PTJ, 10:52.

  34.Curtis, Jefferson’s Freeholders, 97, 101.

  35.Fredrika J. Teute and David S. Shields, “The Court of Abigail Adams,” and “Jefferson in Washington: Domesticating Manners in the Republican Court,” Journal of the Early Republic 35 (Summer 2015): 227–35, 237–59, esp. 229–30, 242, 246; Charlene M. Boyer Lewis, Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte: An American Aristocrat in the Early Republic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 12, 16, 20, 23, 29.

  36.Pater Shaw, The Character of John Adams (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1976), 227, 230, 232–33.

  37.See Simon Newman, “Principles or Men? George Washington and the Political Culture of National Leadership, 1776–1801,” Journal of the Early Republic 12, no. 4 (Winter 1992): 447–507.

  38.Burstein and Isenberg, Madison and Jefferson, 262, 381; Jean Edward Smith, John Marshall: Definer of a Nation (New York: Henry Holt, 1996), 12; John C. Rainbolt, “The Alteration in the Relationship Between the Leadership and Constituents in Virginia, 1660–1720,” William and Mary Quarterly 27, no. 3 (July 1970): 411–34, esp. 418–22. Elite Virginians disliked vain displays of learning and dress as signs of the nouveau riche, which is why men like Jefferson and John Marshall dressed beneath their station. This class perspective is captured in Robert Munford’s satirical play The Candidates (1770); see Jay B. Hubbell and Douglas Adair, “Robert Munford’s ‘The Candidates,’” William and Mary Quarterly 5, no. 2 (April 1948): 217–57, esp. 233–35, 240–42; on Jefferson and his sheep, see Stanton, “Thomas Jefferson: Planter and Farmer,” 264.

  39.Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 86–87, 138–40.

  40.See “A Bill Declaring What Persons Shall Be Deemed Mulattos,” PTJ, 2:476; and Thomas Jefferson to Francis C. Gray, March 4, 1815, PTJ-R, 8:310–11. On Jefferson’s method for breeding sheep, see “Notes on Breeding Merino Sheep,” enclosure in Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, May 13, 1810, and Thomas Jefferson to William Thorton, May 24, 1810; and “Petition of Albemarle County Residents to the Virginia General Assembly” [before December 19, 1811], PTJ-R, 2:390, 2:413, 4:346; and Thomas Jefferson’s Farm Book: With Commentary and Relevant Extracts from Other Writings, ed. Edwin Morris Betts (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1999), 111–41. Jefferson’s argument was repeated in an 1816 essay by Dr. Parry; he applied the same pattern of animal crossing to humans and designated four stages of mixed-race types: the first cross produces a mulatto, the second a quadroon, the third a mestizo, and the fourth a quinteroon. He claimed that the quinteroon was an “almost perfect white” that was free of the “taint of the Negro.” He also stressed that this worked only with white men and mixed-race women. The “converse would take place in the mixture of white female with male Negroes,” that is, the children would breed back to a perfect black. See Dr. C. H. Parry, “On the Crossing the Breeds of Animals,” Massachusetts Agricultural Repository and Journal (June 1, 1816): 153–58; also Buffon, Natural History, 3:164–65; and Andrew Curran, “Rethinking Race History: The Role of the Albino in the French Enlightenment Life Sciences,” History and Theory 48 (October 2009): 151–79, esp. 171.

  41.William Short to Thomas Jefferson, February 27, 1798, PTJ, 30:150.

  42.Jefferson believed that racial mixing improved blacks. He wrote, “The improvement of the blacks on body and mind, in the first instance of their mixture with the whites, has been observed by everyone, and proves that their inferiority is not the effect merely of condition of life.” See Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 141; Stanton, “Those Who Labor for My Happiness,” 64–65, 178–79, 197, 224; and Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello, 41, 49, 80, 86, 100–101, 661–62.

  43.See Thomas Jefferson to Joel Yancy, January 17, 1819, and Thomas Jefferson to John W. Eppes, June 30, 1820, in Thomas Jefferson’s Farm Book, 43, 46. Jefferson measured the price of female slaves by their breeding capacity. In discussing a slave woman whom a relative considered selling, he described her as one who had “ceased to breed.” See Thomas Jefferson to William O. Callis, May 8, 1795, PTJ, 28:346.

  44.John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, August [14?], November 15, 1813, in The Adams-Jefferson Letters: The Complete Correspondence Between Thomas Jefferson and Abigail and John Adams, ed. Lester J. Cappon (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1959), 365–66, 397–402.

  45.Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, October 28, 1813, The Adams-Jefferson Letters, 387–88; Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 140; Burstein, Jefferson’s Secrets, 167–68.

  46.Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, October 13, 1813, The Adams-Jefferson Letters, 387–89.

  47.Thomas Jefferson to William Wirt, August 5, 1815, PTJ-R, 8:642–43. Jefferson had described the “class of artificers” as “panders,” prone to vice; see Thomas Jefferson to John Jay, August 23, 1785, PTJ, 8:426; and Notes on the State of Virginia, 165. Jefferson also used the word “yeomanry” to represent the nonelite classes in the United States; see Thomas Jefferson to James Monroe, May 5, 1793, and Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, May 5, 1793, PTJ, 25:660–61.

  48.John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, November 15, 1813, The Adams-Jefferson Letters, 401.

  Chapter Five: Andrew Jackson’s Cracker Country: The Squatter as Common Man

  1.See John R. Van Atta, Securing the West: Politics, Public Lands, and the Fate of the Old Republic, 1785–1850 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 17–18, 23.

  2.See Malcolm J. Rohrbough, The Land Office Business: The Settlement and Administration of American Public Lands, 1789–1837 (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1990), 6; Eliga H. Gould, Among the Powers of the Earth: The American Revolution and the Making of a New World Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 12.

  3.While the concept of the southern backcountry began in the colonial period, its existence as a distinct area that was different from the East Coast settlement continued after the Revolution as new frontiers emerged during the early republic. See Robert D. Mitchell, “The Southern Backcountry: A Geographical House Divided,” in The Southern Backcountry: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Frontier Communities, eds. David C. Crass, Steven D. Smith, Martha A. Zierden, and Richard D. Brooks (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1998), 1–35, esp. 27.

  4.Van Atta, Securing the West, 14, 18.

  5.For the 1815 definition of squatter, see John Pickering, “Memoir of the Present State of the English Language in the United States, with a Vocabulary Containing Various Wo
rds Which Has Been Supposed to Be Peculiar to This Country,” Memoirs of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (January 1, 1815), 523. Pickering cited the Englishman Edward Augustus Kendall for his account of how the word squatter was used in America; see Kendall, Travels Through the Northern Part of the United States in the Years 1807 and 1808 (New York, 1809), 160; also see Nathaniel Gorham to James Madison, January 27, 1788, The Papers of James Madison, 10:435–36. The Oxford English Dictionary incorrectly identifies Madison as first using the term, but Madison merely repeated verbatim in a letter to George Washington what Gorham had written to him. See also Madison to Washington, February 3, 1788, The Papers of James Madison, 10:463. For the article on Pennsylvania “squatlers,” see “Philadelphia, August 10,” The [Philadelphia] Federal, and Evening Gazette, August 10, 1790. On the Phelps-Gorham Purchase that involved around six million acres in western New York, see William H. Stiles, “Pioneering in Genesee County: Entrepreneurial Strategy and the Concept of Central Place,” in New Opportunities in a New Nation: The Development of New York After the Revolution, eds. Manfred Jonas and Robert W. Wells (Schenectady, NY: Union College Press, 1982), 35–68.

  6.See Kendall, Travels, 160–62; Alan Taylor, “‘A Kind of War’: The Contest for Land on the Northeastern Frontier, 1750–1820,” William and Mary Quarterly 46, no. 1 (January 1786): 3–26, esp. 6–9; and for the case of Daniel Hildreth in Lincoln County Supreme Court in Massachusetts, see “Various Paragraphs,” Columbian Centinel. Massachusetts Federalist, October 18, 1800.

  7.Kendall made the point that “squatters were not peculiar to Maine,” and then mentioned Pennsylvania. See Kendall, Travels, 161–62. For the various proclamations, see Proclamation, by Honorable George Thomas, Esq. Lieutenant Governor and Commander in Chief of the Province of Pennsylvania . . . (October 5, 1742); and Proclamation, by Honorable James Hamilton, Lieutenant Governor and Commander in Chief of the Province of Pennsylvania . . . (July 18, 1749); and Proclamation, by the Honorable John Penn, Esq., Lieutenant Governor and Commander in Chief of the Province of Pennsylvania (September 23, 1766); and for the emphasis on the death penalty, see Proclamation, by the Honorable John Penn, Esq., Lieutenant Governor and Commander in Chief of the Province of Pennsylvania . . . (February 24, 1768). There were the equivalent of squatters in Great Britain, vagrants who lived in forests and marshes—the wastelands of manorial estates, as well as people who lived on property they did not own after the 1666 fire in London. See the broadside warning of ejectment: This Court Taking into Consideration, the Utmost Time for Taking Down and Removing All Such Sheds, Shops, and Other Like Buildings, Which Have Been Erected Since the Late Dismal Fire . . . (London, 1673); also see A. L. Beier, Masterless Men, 9, 19, 73–74.