The presidential campaign of 1840 appears to be the moment when the squatter morphed into the colloquial common man of democratic lore. Both parties now embraced him. Partisans of Whig presidential candidate William Henry Harrison claimed that he was from backwoods stock. This was untrue. Harrison was born into an elite Virginia planter family, and though he had been briefly a cabin dweller in the Old Northwest Territory, by the time he ran for office that cabin had been torn down and replaced with a grand mansion. Kentuckian Henry Clay, who vied with him for the Whig nomination, celebrated his prizewinning mammoth hog—named “Corn Cracker,” no less. The new class politics played out in trumped-up depictions of log cabins, popular nicknames, hard-cider drinking, and coonskin caps. This imagery explains why westerners and the poorer voters never fully embraced Jackson’s favorite, Martin Van Buren, who was seen as a dandyish eastern bachelor. In one Whig-inspired campaign song, the Dutch-descended New Yorker was blasted as a “queer little man . . . mounted on the back of the sturdy Andy Jack.”70
The squatter all at once became a romantic figure in popular culture. This was true in St. Louis newspaperman John Robb’s Streaks of Squatter Life. In one of the stories in the collection, Robb introduced a poor white Missouri squatter named Sugar. Though he was dressed in rags, his personal influence over local elections was hypnotic. At the polling place, “Sug” came with a keg of whiskey, which he sweetened with brown sugar. As members of the crowd lined up for his special concoction, he told them, based on his honest opinion of the speeches he had heard, whom they should vote for. Sug had lost his girl and his farm, and yet as a landless squatter he somehow gained respect. He represented the new common man, a simple fellow who couldn’t be misled by fancy rhetoric.71
Sug was not simply a leveling character. He actually represented a reformed, even middle-class solution to the larger debate over class and respectability. His qualities suggested a reasonable man who handed out a little whiskey and dispensed meaningful advice. He wasn’t running for office. He wasn’t brawling or bartering whiskey for votes. He wasn’t threatening the life of a rival bidder over a tract of land. Sug knew his place as the neighborhood purveyor of common sense.72
“Old Sug” in Streaks of Squatter Life (1847) is a comic character whose poverty is rendered harmless. He represented a softened image of actual squatters known for brawling, drinking, and swearing at political events in the backcountry.
John Robb’s Streaks of Squatter Life (1847), American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts
The squatter may have been tamed, at least in the minds of some, but political equality did not come to America in the so-called Age of Jackson. Virginia retained property qualifications for voting until 1851; Louisiana and Connecticut until 1845; North Carolina until 1857. Tennessee did not drop its freehold restriction until 1834—after Jackson had already been elected to a second term. Eight states passed laws that disenfranchised paupers, the urban poor. Meanwhile many towns and cities adopted stricter suffrage guidelines for voting than their state legislatures did. This was true for Chicago, and for towns in Crockett’s Tennessee and pro-Jackson Alabama. He could vote for a member of Congress, but in John Robb’s St. Louis, his fictional pal Sug would have been denied the right to vote in municipal elections.73
The heralded democrat Andrew Jackson (as it was pointed out in the 1828 campaign) had actually helped draft suffrage restrictions for the Tennessee constitution in 1796. He made no effort to expand the electorate in his state—ever. As the territorial governor of Florida in 1822, he was perfectly comfortable with the new state’s imposing property requirements for voting. Jackson’s appeal as a presidential candidate was not about real democracy, then, but instead the attraction to a certain class of land-grabbing whites and the embrace of the “rude instinct of masculine liberty.” He did not stand for universal male suffrage. Indeed, it was not the United States, but Liberia, a country founded by the British and former American slaves, that first established universal suffrage for adult men, in 1839.74
In the end, the cracker or squatter never resolved his paradoxical character. He could free himself of responsibility, take to the road, and start over. He could boast and brag and pelt anyone who dared to insult his favorite candidate. As many have pointed out, whiskey drinking at the polls was often more important than listening to long-winded speeches. So while some journalists defended the “country crackers” as the “bone and sinew of the country,” others continued to see the cracker as a drunken fool who, as one writer put it, elevated a favorite stump speaker into a “demigod of beggars.” As late as 1842, “squatter” was still considered a “term, denoting infamy of life or station,” of a lesser rank than the class-neutral “settler.”75
Thus, the cracker or squatter was never the poster child of political equality. As a figure of popular caricature, he was a vivid illustration of class distinction more than he ever was a sign of respect for the lower class. No one pretended that Sug was the equal of John Quincy Adams, William Henry Harrison, or even his local congressman. At best, a backcountry citizen might get a chance to meet President Adams, but shaking hands (in the now familiar, post-bowing fashion) did not result in an elevation in social rank. In 1828, James Fenimore Cooper observed that democratic boasting was a “cheap price” to pay for ensuring that real social leveling did not erode set-in-stone class divisions.76
There was one bit of lore that concerned the squatter that did take hold. He had to be wooed for his vote. He had no patience for a candidate who refused to speak his language. That was the moral of another famous squatter story of 1840, “The Arkansas Traveller,” in which an elite politician canvassing in the backcountry asks a squatter for refreshment. The squatter, seated on a whiskey barrel before his run-down cabin, ignores the man’s request. For a brief interlude (because it was election season), the politician was obliged to bring himself down to the level of the common man. To get his drink and the squatter’s vote, the politician had to dismount his horse, grab the squatter’s fiddle, and show that he could play his kind of music. Once the politician returned to his mansion, however, nothing had changed in the life of the squatter, nor for his drudge of a wife and his brood of dirty, shoeless brats.77
Part II
DEGENERATION OF THE AMERICAN BREED
CHAPTER SIX
Pedigree and Poor White Trash
Bad Blood, Half-Breeds, and Clay-Eaters
Everywhere they are just alike, possess pretty much the same characteristics, the same vernacular, the same boorishness, and the same habits . . . everywhere, Poor White Trash.
—Daniel Hundley, “Poor White Trash” in Social Relations in Our Southern States (1860)
The sectional crisis that led to America’s Civil War dramatically reconfigured the democratic language of class identity. The lowly squatter remained the focus of attention, but his habitat had changed: he was now, singularly, a creature of the slave states. The terminology for poor southern whites changed too. Neither squatter nor cracker was the label of choice anymore. Dirt-poor southerners living on the margins of plantation society became even more repugnant as “sandhillers” and pathetic, self-destructive “clay-eaters.” It was at this moment that they acquired the most enduring insult of all: “poor white trash.” The southern poor were not just lazy vagrants; now they were odd specimens in a collector’s cabinet of curiosities, a diseased breed, and the degenerate spawn of a “notorious race.” A new nomenclature placed the lowly where they would become familiar objects of ridicule in the modern age.