White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America

Alas, Oglethorpe was fighting a losing battle. Many of the men demanding slaves were promised credit to buy slaves from South Carolinian traders. Slaves were a lure, dangled before poorer men in order to persuade them to put up their land as collateral. That is why Oglethorpe believed that a slave economy would have the effect of depriving vulnerable settlers of their land. Keeping out slavery went hand in hand with preserving a more equitable distribution of land. If the colony allowed settlers to have “fee simple” land titles (so they could sell their land at will), large-scale planters would surely come to dominate. He predicted in 1739 that, left to their own devices, the “Negro Merchants” would gain control of “all the lands in the Colony,” leaving nothing for “all the laboring poor white Men.”56

German Lutherans, who established a community in 1734, also saw the dangers of Georgia becoming like South Carolina. Without encouragement from Oglethorpe, Reverend Bolzius of their contingent observed that “a Common white Laborer in Charles Town” earned no greater wage than “a Negroe.” Africans were encouraged to “breed like animals,” and slaveowners would do everything possible to increase their stock. Merchants and other gentlemen hoarded the best land near the coast or along the commercial rivers, and poorer men were forced to possess remote, less desirable land. South Carolina was a poor white family’s worst nightmare.57

Oglethorpe left the colony in 1743, never to return. Three years earlier, a soldier had attempted to murder him, the musket ball tearing through his wig. He survived, but his dream for Georgia died. Over the next decade, land tenure policies were lifted, rum was allowed to flow freely, and slaves were sold surreptitiously. In 1750, settlers were formally granted the right to own slaves.58

A planter elite quickly formed, principally among transplants from the West Indies and South Carolina. By 1788, Carolinian Jonathan Bryan was the most powerful man in Georgia, with thirty-two thousand acres and 250 slaves. He set up shop there in 1750, the very year slavery was made legal, and his numerous slaves entitled him to large tracts of lands. But to build his empire he had to pull the strings of Georgia’s Executive Council, whose chief duty was distributing land. A long tenure on the council ensured that he acquired the most fertile land, conveniently situated along major trade routes. By 1760, only 5 percent of white Georgians owned even a single slave, while a handful of families possessed them in the hundreds. Jonathan Bryan was the perfect embodiment of the “Slave Merchants” who Oglethorpe had warned would dominate the colony.59

Oglethorpe’s ideas did not entirely disappear. Both Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson agreed that slaveowning corrupted whites. The idea of promoting a free white labor buffer zone went into Jefferson’s draft of what became the Northwest Ordinance (1787), a blueprint for the admission of new states to the Union. Franklin and Jefferson were equally passionate about mobilizing the forces of reproduction. They saw population growth as a sign of national strength. Slavery, too, was to be measured as a numbers game. As Reverend Bolzius had observed, if slaves were encouraged to “breed like animals,” then poor whites could not reproduce at the same rate and hold on to their land or their freedom.

It was already apparent that slavery and class identity were intertwined. Oglethorpe had connected free labor to the idea of a vital, secure, (re)productive society. Free white laborers, while adding to the military strength of a colony, could not compete economically with a class of land-engrossing slaveholders. What had been considered “peculiar” about Georgia—the banning of slavery—would ironically come to mean the precise opposite when in the nineteenth century slavery became the “peculiar institution” of the American South.

All the while, the deeply ingrained English disgust for idleness persisted. The rural poor, though seen as a liability, became an unbanishable part of the American experience. Not only did free laborers exist in contrast to imported African slaves, but they also stood apart from useless white lubbers. Land was the principal source of wealth, and remained the true measure of liberty and civic worth. Hereditary titles may have gradually disappeared, but large land grants and land titles remained central to the American system of privilege. When it came to common impressions of the despised lower class, the New World was not new at all.





CHAPTER THREE


    Benjamin Franklin’s American Breed





The Demographics of Mediocrity


Can it be a Crime (in the Nature of Things I mean) to add to the Number of the King’s Subjects, in a new Country that really wants People?

—Benjamin Franklin, “The Speech of Miss Polly Baker” (1747)


Like every educated Englishman, Benjamin Franklin was obsessed with idleness. In his Poor Richard’s Almanack of 1741, he offered familiar advice that echoed the talk of Hakluyt, Winthrop, and Byrd: “Up sluggard, and waste not life; in the grave will be sleeping enough.” There was utterly nothing new in his pitch for hard work as the way to wealth.1

By the 1740s and 1750s, Franklin was well positioned to contribute to the ongoing debate on class and American colonization. Born to a modest tradesman, he had established himself as a successful printer, publishing the Pennsylvania Gazette since 1729. His first in a series of profitable annual almanacs rolled off the presses three years later. As a public wit, he had mastered the art of ventriloquism on the page, mimicking colonial characters. The teenage Franklin had pretended to be a mature Boston widow in his “Silence Dogood” letters; Dingo, an African slave, was another of his personae. Poor Richard Saunders, the figure featured in his almanacs, was the cuckold tradesman whose pert proverbs never matched his whining over the daily struggle to make ends meet. So successful was Franklin in expanding his printing business, taking on partners, and honing his literary disguises that he retired from day-to-day management of all commercial concerns in 1748.2

Freed from work, he was elected to the Pennsylvania Assembly in 1751, and remained active in promoting civic enterprise. He helped to found a hospital and a young men’s academy in Philadelphia. During the same decade, his electrical experiments made a strong impression in Europe. He was awarded the prestigious Copley Medal of the Royal Society of London. Honorary degrees from Harvard, Yale, and the College of William and Mary quickly followed. Appointed deputy postmaster general, he introduced reforms for improving communication among the colonies. At the Albany Congress in 1754, he proposed an intercolonial governing body aimed at shoring up military defenses and promoting western expansion. Though approved at the Albany Congress, the plan of union was never ratified by the colonies.3

As the colonies’ leading man of science, Franklin popularized the latest theories. Of primary interest here are his efforts to apply scientific knowledge to that most perplexing of all subjects: the creation of classes. It was an article of faith in eighteenth-century British thought that civilized societies usually formed out of the fundamental human need for security to ensure survival, but the same societies were gradually corrupted by a preoccupation with luxuries, which resulted in decadence. The rise and fall of the Roman Empire stood behind such theorizing; what Franklin did was to shift the focus to human biology. Underneath all human endeavors were gut-level animal instincts—and foremost for Franklin was the push and pull of pain and pleasure. Too much pleasure produced a decadent society; too much pain led to tyranny and oppression. Somewhere in between was a happy medium, a society that channeled humanity’s better animal instincts.4

Nancy Isenberg's books