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

Writing of his plan in Notes on the State of Virginia, his wide-ranging natural history of his state, he chose a rather unsavory allusion to describe the reform. His handful of lucky scholars would be “raked from the rubbish,” leaving the majority to wallow in ignorance and poverty. “Rubbish” was his alliterative variation on the ever-present theme of waste people. He wasn’t anticipating Teddy Roosevelt’s Bunyanesque allusion to muckraking journalists, but rather was invoking the older, Elizabethan meaning of raking the muck of a bad crop. The “rubbish” designation showed contempt for the poor, a sad reminder that very few were capable of escaping the refuse heap. But the bill failed to pass: the Virginia gentry had no desire to pay for it. They had no interest in raising up a few stray kernels of genius from the wasteland of the rural poor.17

The education reform bill had little chance of passing, but its companion piece for funding workhouses did. As was the case with England’s poor laws, the bill penalized those who “waste their time in idle and dissolute courses,” loitering and wandering or deserting their wives and children: such people were “deemed vagabonds.” The solution for poor children was not education, but hiring them out as apprentices. Jefferson made a minor change to the existing law, which dated to 1755: the poor would no longer wear identifying badges. But vagrants would still be punished, and their children would pay the price for their idleness in a way that was reminiscent of the exploited orphans of dead servants at Jamestown. They may have been a less visible class without badges, but they remained a powerful symbol of vice and sloth.18

All of Jefferson’s early reforms were less about promoting equality or democracy than moderating extremes. Like the farmer’s use of marl soil or peat, his approach was closer to breaking up clumps or concentrations of wealth and poverty. Virginia’s social order was stagnant; it was weighed down by a top-heavy planter class and an increasingly immobile class of landless families. His powerful words, “raked from the rubbish,” captured his philosophy in an unmistakable, visually compelling way. Raking was comparable to ploughing, the process of turning over tired and barren topsoil and unearthing new life from the layers below. Such improvements, though gradual in spreading benefits, promised a stronger crop of citizens in the future.

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Jefferson’s influential survey of class (as a product of topography) appeared in his Notes on the State of Virginia. Mostly written during his governorship of Virginia in 1780–81, the book was not published until several years later, when he was serving as the U.S. minister to France. Jefferson had been encouraged to put his ideas to paper by a series of questions posed by Fran?ois Barbé-Marbois, the secretary of the French Legation in Philadelphia. His Notes became a kind of diplomatic intervention, offering European readers a combined defense of his home state and his new nation.

Notes offered a natural history of race and class, replete with Jefferson’s own empirical observations, from facts and figures he had compiled. It was part travel narrative in the tradition of Hakluyt, and part legal brief. He imagined the opposing counsel to be the acclaimed French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, the Comte de Buffon, who had offered up a highly unappealing portrait of the American continent as a backward place cursed with widespread degeneracy. In Notes, the only book Jefferson ever wrote, he stripped away the ugliness and replaced it with a Virginia of natural beauty and bounty. Here, in Jefferson’s version of the New English Canaan, the continent promised unmatched resources for commercial wealth. Class was significant. The rich topography afforded a home for his “cultivators of the earth,” an American breed that represented the world’s best hope.

Buffon’s work was troubling for a number of reasons. In his Histoire Naturelle, first published in 1749, he had reduced the New World to one giant and nefarious Dismal Swamp. All of America, as it were, had become North Carolina. A suffocating mixture of moisture and heat had produced stagnant waters, “gross herbiage,” and miasmas of the air, which retarded the size and diversity of species. Buffon sounded at times like the colorful William Byrd, complaining of the “noxious exhalations” in America that blocked the sun, which made it impossible to “purify” the soil and air. Swamp creatures multiplied in this environment: “moist plants, reptiles, and insects, and all animals that wallow in the mire.” Domestic animals shrank in size in comparison to their European counterparts, and their flesh was less flavorful. Only Carolina’s prized critter, the hog, thrived in such a godforsaken terrain.19

Native Americans were not just savages to Buffon; they were a constitutionally enfeebled breed, devoid of free will and “activity of mind.” As the forgotten stepchildren of Mother Nature, they lacked the “invigorating sentiment of love, and the strong desire for multiplying their species.” They were “cold and languid,” spending their days in “stupid repose,” without the strong affective bonds that united people into civilized societies. Buffon had converted Indians into quasi-reptilian swamp monsters. They lurked in marshes, hunting prey, ignorant of the fate of their offspring, concerned only with the next meal or battle. The desire to reproduce, Buffon contended, was the “spark” of life and the fire of genius. This essential quality was missing from their constitution—all because they languished amid a debilitating environment.20

In contesting Buffon, Jefferson had to wipe the canvas clean of the swamp monsters and paint a very different, eco-friendly picture. He conjured another America, a sublime place of endless diversity. His Blue Ridge Mountains were majestic; the Mississippi River was alive with birds and fish in a way comparable to the Nile—the birthplace of Western civilization. Native Americans existed in an uncultivated state, he admitted, yet they were endowed with a manly ardor and displayed a noble mind. America was not plagued with pathetic stocks of animals or people. On the contrary, the young continent heralded one of the greatest scientific discoveries of the age: the bones of the woolly mammoth, ranked as the largest species known to man, which according to Jefferson still roamed the forests. English and European settlers had excelled, not suffered. That rare spark of genius, nurtured in Washington, Franklin, and David Rittenhouse, the Philadelphia astronomer, was solid proof, to his mind, of the invigorating and regenerative natural landscape.21

Jefferson fundamentally agreed with Buffon’s science. He did not abandon the Frenchman’s ruling premise that the physical surroundings were crucial in cultivating races and classes of people, or that land could be either regenerative or degenerative. Buffon’s theory wasn’t wrong then; his observations were incomplete. As Jefferson argued in 1785, in a letter to the Marquis de Chastellux, who had visited Monticello three years earlier, Native Americans were not feeble. Over time they had developed muscles to make them fleet of foot for warfare. Euro-Americans were equally adaptable to the congenial American environment. They drew upon an inbred strength passed down from generations of ancestors who had labored in the fields. Cultivation was in their blood, Jefferson was saying, and they were already engaged in transforming the land and making it their own.22

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