If Franklin thought of class as principally conditioned by demography— the human compulsion to seek pleasure and avoid pain—Jefferson subscribed to a different philosophy. Though equally drawn to numbers and political arithmetic, he saw human behavior as conditional, plastic, adaptable; across generations, it would conform to shifts in the physical and social environment. If the hand of nature bestowed merit on some, so did local surroundings and the choice of a mate. But above all, what divided people into recognizable stations was the intimate relationship between land and labor. As he wrote in 1813, “the spontaneous energies of the earth are a gift of nature,” but man must “husband his labor” in order to reap its greatest benefits. In Jefferson’s larger scheme of things, class was a creature of topography; it was shaped by the bond forged between producers and the soil. By producers, of course, he meant husbandmen and landowners—not tenants, not slaves.8
The occupation he loved, the descriptor that most delighted him, was cultivator. This word meant more than one who earned his bread through farming; it drew upon the eighteenth-century idiom that arose from the popular study of natural history. To cultivate meant to renew, to render fertile, which thus implied extracting real sustenance from the soil, as well as good traits, superior qualities, and steady habits of mind. Cultivation carried with it rich associations with animal breeding and the idea that good soil led to healthy and hearty stocks (of animals or people). Proficiency in tapping the land’s productive potential had the added benefit of improving the moral sense, which was what Jefferson meant when he described that “peculiar deposit of genuine and substantial virtue” found in the breast of every true cultivator. In this way, the soil could be regenerative, much like a deposit of calcium-rich marl, which educated farmers used to restore nutrients to the land.9
In Jefferson’s taxonomy, then, class was less about Franklin’s commercialized language of “sorts,” whereby people and goods were readily equated and valued. Instead, Jeffersonian-style classes were effectively strata that mimicked the different nutritive grades within layers of the soil. To this bookish Virginian, idealizing rural society, classes were to be regarded as natural extrusions of a promising land, flesh-and-blood manifestations of an agrarian topography.
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Revolutionary Virginia was hardly a place of harmony, egalitarianism, or unity. The war effort exacerbated already simmering tensions between elite Patriots and those below them. In British tradition, the American elite expected the lower classes to fight their wars. In the Seven Years’ War, for example, Virginians used the infamous practice of impressment to round up vagabonds to meet quotas. During the Revolution, General Washington stated that only “the lower class of people” should serve as foot soldiers. Jefferson believed that class character was palpably real. As a member of the House of Delegates, he came up with a plan to create a Virginia cavalry regiment specifically for the sons of planters, youths whose “indolence or education, has unfitted them for foot-service.”10
As early as 1775, landless tenants in Loudoun County, Virginia, voiced a complaint that was common across the sprawling colony: there was “no inducement for the poor man to Fight, for he had nothing to defend.” Many poor white men rebelled against recruitment strategies, protested the exemptions given to the overseers of rich planters, and were disappointed with the paltry pay. Such resistance led to the adoption of desperate measures. In 1780, Virginia assemblymen agreed to grant white enlistees the bounty of a slave as payment for their willingness to serve until the end of the war. Here was an instant bump up the social ladder. Here was the social transfer of wealth and status from the upper to the lower class. But even this gruesome offer wasn’t tempting enough, because few took the bait. Two years later when the Battle of Yorktown decided the outcome of the war, the situation was unchanged. Of those fighting on the American side, only a handful hailed from Virginia.11
There were other attempts to mollify poor white farmers. In drafting a new constitution in 1776, Virginia rebels embraced freehold suffrage: adult white men who were twenty-one and who had a freehold of twenty-five acres of cultivated land were awarded the right to vote. Yet the same Revolutionaries were stingy when it came to redressing landlessness and poverty. Jefferson’s proposal to lift up the bottom ranks, granting men without any land of their own fifty acres and the vote, was dropped from the final version of the constitution.12
Appointed to a committee to revise Virginia’s laws, Jefferson tried another tactic that aimed to shift the balance of class power in the state. He succeeded in eliminating primogeniture and entail, two legal practices that kept large amounts of land in the hands of a few powerful families. His purpose was for land to be distributed equally to all children in a family, not just vested in the eldest male. Entail, which restricted the sale of land, would be replaced with privately owned land grants. Meanwhile, the committee considered a proposal granting each freeborn child a tract of seventy-five acres as an incentive to encourage poorer men to marry and have children. Jefferson’s freeholders needed children to anchor them to the land and as an incentive to turn from idleness.13
But reform did not take easily. Virginia’s freehold republic failed to instill virtue among farmers, the effect that Jefferson had fantasized. The majority of small landowners sold their land to large planters, mortgaged their estates, and continued to despoil what was left of the land. They looked upon it as just another commodity, not a higher calling. Jefferson failed to understand what his predecessor James Oglethorpe had seen: the freehold system (with disposable land grants) favored wealthy land speculators. Farming was arduous work, with limited chance of success, especially for families lacking the resources available to Jefferson: slaves, overseers, draft animals, a plough, nearby mills, and waterways to transport farm produce to market. It was easy to acquire debts, easy to fail. Land alone was no guarantee of self-sufficiency.14
If the ruling elite at the Virginia constitutional convention were unwilling to grant poor men fifty acres to become freehold citizens, they were quite content to dump the poor into the hinterland. With the opening up of the land office in 1776, a new policy was adopted: anyone squatting on unclaimed land in western Virginia and Kentucky could claim a preemption right to buy it. Like the long-standing British practice of colonizing the poor, the Virginians sought to quell dissent, raise taxes, and lure the less fortunate west. This policy did little to alter the class structure. In the end, it worked against poor families. Without ready cash to buy the land, they became renters, trapped again as tenants instead of becoming independent landowners.15
Public education accompanied land reforms. In bill no. 79, for the “General Diffusion of Knowledge,” Jefferson laid out a proposal for different levels of preparation: primary schools for all boys and girls, and grammar schools for more capable males at the public expense. For the second tier, he called for twenty young “geniusses” to be drawn from the lower class of each county. Rewarding those with merit, he devised a means of social mobility in a state where education was purely a privilege of wealthy families.16