The Fundamental Constitutions was really a declaration of war against poor settlers. In the 1650s, even before King Charles had issued the Carolina charter, Virginia’s imperious governor, William Berkeley, had been selling land grants. The first surveyor reported that most of the Virginia émigrés in Carolina territory were not legitimate patent holders at all. They were poor squatters. The surveyor warned that the infant Carolina colony would founder if more “Rich men” were not recruited, that is, men who could build homes and run productive plantations. Landless trespassers (who were not servants) promised only widespread “leveling,” by which the surveyor meant a society shorn of desirable class divisions.10
Locke agreed. Poor Virginians threatened to drag down the entire colony. Shaftesbury, too, believed that everything should be done to discourage “Lazy or debauched” men and their families from settling in Carolina. The proprietors definitely did not want a colony overrun with former indentured servants. They did not want Virginia’s refuse. In their grand scheme, Leet-men were intended to take the place of those who lived off the land without contributing to the coffers of the ruling elite. Serfs, in short, were better than those “lazy lubbers,” meaning stupid, clumsy oafs, the word that came to describe the vagrant poor of Carolina.11
Locke’s invention of the Leet-men explains a lot. It enables us to piece together the curious history of North Carolina, to demonstrate why this colony lies at the heart of our white trash story. The difficult terrain that spanned the border with Virginia, plus the high numbers of poor squatters and inherently unstable government, eventually led Carolina to be divided into two colonies in 1712. South Carolinians adopted all the features of a traditional class hierarchy, fully embracing the institution of slavery, just as Locke did in the Fundamental Constitutions. The planter and merchant classes of South Carolina formed a highly incestuous community: wealth, slaves, and land were monopolized by a small ruling coterie. This self-satisfied oligarchy were the true inheritors of the old landgraves, carrying on the dynastic impulses of those who would create a pseudo-nobility of powerful families.12
By 1700, we should note, slaves comprised half the population of the southern portion of the Carolina colony, an imbalance that widened to 72 percent by 1740. Beginning in 1714, a series of laws required that for every six slaves an owner purchased, he had to acquire one white servant. Lamenting that the “white population do not proportionally multiply,” South Carolina lawmakers had one more reason to wish that a corps of Leet-men and women had actually been formed. Encouraged to marry and multiply, tied to the land, they might have provided a racial and class barrier between the slaves and the landed elites.13
North Carolina, which came to be known as “Poor Carolina,” went in a very different direction from its sibling to the south. It failed to shore up its elite planter class. Starting with Albemarle County, it became an imperial renegade territory, a swampy refuge for the poor and landless. Wedged between proud Virginians and upstart South Carolinians, North Carolina was that troublesome “sinke of America” so many early commentators lamented. It was a frontier wasteland resistant (or so it seemed) to the forces of commerce and civilization. Populated by what many dismissed as “useless lubbers” (conjuring the image of sleepy and oafish men lolling about doing nothing), North Carolina forged a lasting legacy as what we might call the first white trash colony. Despite being English, despite having claimed the rights of freeborn Britons, lazy lubbers of Poor Carolina stood out as a dangerous refuge of waste people, and the spawning ground of a degenerate breed of Americans.14
The rivalry between the dueling Carolinas was only part of the story. The original charter of Carolina would eventually be divided three ways, when Georgia was parceled out of the original territory in 1732. This last southern colony was the most unusual of Britain’s offspring. An ex-military man, James Oglethorpe, was its guiding force, and he saw this venture as a unique opportunity to reconstruct class relations. It was a charitable endeavor, one meant to reform debtors and rescue poor men, by offering society a decidedly more humane alternative to Locke’s servile Leet-men. Georgia provided an advantageous venue for the “right disposing of the Poor” in the colonies, which would “breed up and preserve our own Countrymen,” one advocate insisted. In refusing to permit slavery, the Georgia colony promised that “free labor” would replace a reliance on indentured servants as well as African bondsmen.15
But Georgia meant something more. Even as South Carolinians jealously eyed the new territory as a place where they might sell slaves and control the land, the colony of free laborers offered a ready boundary (and slave-free zone) that would protect the vulnerable planter class from Native tribes and Spanish settlers in Florida, who might otherwise offer a haven to their runaway slaves. Georgia, as we shall see, was a remarkable experiment.
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North Carolina’s physical terrain was crucial in shaping the character of its people. Along the boundary between Virginia and Carolina was a large and forbidding wetland known as the Dismal Swamp. The word “swamp” was derived from Low German and Dutch, though it was first used by English setters in Virginia and New England. “Dismal,” on the other hand, conjured the superstitious lore of medieval times. The word was associated with cursed days, Egyptian plagues, sinister plots, and inauspicious omens. For William Shakespeare, it evoked a netherworld, as in the “dark dismal-dreaming night.”16
Virginians viewed the twenty-two-hundred-square-mile wetland as a danger-filled transitional zone. The seemingly endless quagmire literally overlapped the two colonies. There were no obvious routes through its mosquito-ridden cypress forests. In many places, travelers sank knee-deep in the soggy, peaty soil, and had to wade through coal-colored, slimy water dotted with gnarled roots.17
Little sunshine penetrated the Dismal Swamp’s trees and thickets, and the air gave off noxious fumes, which were colorfully described as “Noisome exhalations,” arising from a “vast body of mire and nastiness.” This statement comes from the travelogue of a wealthy Virginian, William Byrd II, who trekked through the bowels of the Virginia-Carolina borderland in 1728. A witty, English-educated planter, Byrd crafted a dark tale of an inhospitable landscape and weighed in on Carolina’s oafish inhabitants. Thus he was the first of many writers to draw a jaded portrait of the swampy origins of white trash rural life.18
This bleak region became a symbol of the young North Carolina colony. The Great Dismal Swamp divided civilized Virginia planters from the rascally barbarians of Carolina. Swamps rarely have fixed borders, and so the northern dividing line was continually a point of contention during the first sixty-five years of Carolina’s existence. Virginia repeatedly challenged the boundary as set forth in Carolina’s 1663 charter. Jurisdictional disputes created a political climate of legal uncertainty and social instability.19