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

Morton’s New England landscape contained “ripe grapes” supported by “lusty trees,” “dainty fine round rising hillocks,” and luscious streams that made “so sweet a murmuring noise to hear as would ever lull the senses with delightful sleep.” He connected fertility to pleasure in the prevailing medical context: women, it was said, were more likely to conceive if they experienced sexual satisfaction. Morton was so consumed with the fertility of the physical environment that he marveled at the apparent ease with which Indian women became pregnant. The region’s animals were especially generative too, with wild does bearing two or three fawns at a time. With fewer women and a shorter history, New England had produced more children than Virginia, at least according to Morton. He could not resist including in his New English Canaan the strange story of the “barren doe,” a single woman from Virginia who was unable to conceive a child until she traveled north.59

As compelling as these passages are, Morton was actually stealing from earlier accounts. Ralph Hamor had written apocryphally in 1614 that in Virginia, lions, bears, and deer usually had three or four offspring at a time. This was the fulfillment of Hakluyt’s claim that Raleigh’s bride Virginia would “bring forth new and most abundant offspring.” Others would repeat similar claims. In A New Voyage to Carolina (1709), John Lawson contended that “women long married without children in other places, have removed to Carolina and become joyful mothers.” They had an “easy Travail in their child-bearing, in which they are so happy, as seldom miscarry.” The argument went that happy, healthy European women moved closer to nature in America. Like deer in the wild, women in the New World became instinctive, docile breeders.60

Breeding had a place in more than one market. In Virginia and elsewhere in the Chesapeake region in the early seventeenth century, a gender imbalance of six to one among indentured servants gave women arriving from England an edge in the marriage exchange. Writing of Maryland in 1660, former indentured servant George Alsop claimed that women just off the boat found a host of men fighting for their attention. Females could pick and choose: even servants had a shot at marrying a well-heeled planter. Alsop called such unions “copulative marriage,” through which women sold their breeding capacity to wealthy husbands. In language that was decidedly uninhibited, he wrote that women went to “market with their virginity.” Another promoter, writing about Carolina, went so far as to say that a woman could find a husband in America no matter what she looked like. If, newly arrived, she appeared “Civil” and was “under 50 years of Age,” some man would purchase her for his wife.61

“Copulative marriage” was one option, remarriage another. Men of Jamestown found they could increase their acreage and add to the sum of laborers by marrying a widow whose husband had bequeathed land to her. In the scramble to get land and laborers during the tobacco boom, members of the council devised various means to get their hands on land—and not always ethically. One man married a woman because her first husband shared the last name of a wealthier dead man. He scammed the system by confusing the two names in order to get title to the more desirable property. Widows were obvious conduits of wealth and land, and with high mortality rates prevailing throughout the seventeenth century, those who survived rampant disease would likely have married two or three times.62

Battles over class interests, land, and widows came naturally to Virginians, and at times grew quite deadly. Bacon’s Rebellion of 1676 was one of the greatest conflicts the colony witnessed. It pitted a stubborn governor, William Berkeley, against Nathaniel Bacon, a recent immigrant of some means but also of frustrated ambition. Historians still debate the causes of the crisis and its ultimate meaning, but there is ample evidence to show that the participants made it about class warfare. Bacon wanted Berkeley to launch attacks on a tribe of Indians who ostensibly threatened the more socially vulnerable people of Virginia’s frontier, and he made himself a leader of the disaffected. A power struggle ensued.

To the governor in Jamestown, only the meanest of men, those who had recently “crept” out of indentured servitude, could find common cause with the rebels. Berkeley dismissed Bacon as an upstart and a demagogue. Other prominent supporters of the governor called the rebels “ye scum of the country” and—here is where the language gets especially evocative—“offscourings” of society. “Offscourings” (human fecal waste) was one of the most common terms of derision for indentured servants and England’s wandering vagrants. Meanwhile, landholders who sided with Bacon were summarily dismissed as “Idle” men, whose “debauchery” and “ill husbandry” had led them into debt. The rebels were directly compared to swine rooting around in the muck.63

Slaves and servants joined Bacon’s force too, being promised their freedom after the expected showdown with Berkeley. Nothing like this had occurred in Virginia before. Slavery had been slow to take hold, with only around 150 slaves counted in 1640, and barely 1,000 out of a total population of 26,000 in 1670. Massachusetts and English possessions in the Caribbean, not Virginia, were the first colonies to codify slave law. By the time of Bacon’s Rebellion, there were some 6,000 servants in the southern colony, and roughly one-third of all freeholders, many of them former indentured servants, were barely scraping by, weighed down by debts and unfair taxes. Indeed, Governor Berkeley had thought even before Bacon’s challenge that a prospective foreign invasion or large-scale attack by Indians would automatically devolve into class warfare. The “Poor Endebted Discontented and Armed” would, he wrote, use the opportunity to “plunder the Country” and seize the property of the elite planters.64

The struggle also was concerned as well with the status of friendly Indians residing in the sprawling colony. Bacon claimed that Berkeley and the men around him were protecting their own lucrative trade with preferred tribes instead of saving frontier settlers from raids and reprisals. Taxing colonists for forts made of mud were not only useless, the rebels held, but were yet another means for Berkeley’s “Juggling Parasites” in the Assembly to increase taxes without offering meaningful protection in return. Virginians living farther from the capital (and coast) felt they were not reaping the same advantages from the land that the wealthier planters in older parts of the colony were. As one drifted west from the seat of power, class identity felt less secure.65

It is likely that a fair number among Bacon’s following wanted to push the Indians off desirable lands, or felt an impulse to lash out against them in retaliation for recent frontier attacks. There is little doubt that a sizable number of Bacon’s men were frustrated by declining tobacco prices amid an economic downturn that made it more difficult to acquire good land. Valuable acreage was hoarded by those whom one contemporary called the “Land lopers,” who bought up (or lopped off) large tracts without actually settling them. The “lopers” had inside connections to the governor. Discontent was unavoidable when men were unable to support their families on the little land they had.66

Nancy Isenberg's books