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

Jackson partisans were routinely chastised for their lack of taste and breeding. At a gathering in Philadelphia in 1828, drinkers lifted their glasses in violent toasts: “May the hickory ramrods ram down the powder of equality into our national guns, and wadded well with the voices of the people to blow Clay in the mud.” Another toastmaster wished that an “Adamite head was a drum head, and me to beat it, till I would beat it in.” Defending Jackson seemed to require threats that celebrated physical prowess over mental agility. If anyone dared insult the “jineral,” went the story told of one Jackson fan, he would give him a “pelt.” Fighting and boasting was paramount in lower-class Jacksonian circles. Or as one cracker candidate pledged as war whoops arose from his anti-Adams audience, “If so I’m elected, Gin’ral government shall wear the print of these five knuckles.”60

In 1828, though two years in the grave, Thomas Jefferson was resurrected to prove that Jackson was of the wrong stock. Jefferson’s former neighbor and longtime secretary of James Madison, Illinois governor Edward Coles, recalled Jefferson’s nasty quip as the 1824 election neared: “One might as well make a sailor a cock, or a soldier a goose, as a President of Andrew Jackson.” High executive office was beyond the reach of Jackson, whose questionable breeding clearly disqualified him.61

The candidate’s private life came under equal scrutiny. His irregular marriage became scandalous fodder during the election of 1828. His intimate circle of Tennessee confidants scrambled to find some justification for the couple’s known adultery. John Overton, Jackson’s oldest and closest friend in Nashville, came up with the story of “accidental bigamy,” claiming that the couple had married in good conscience, thinking that Rachel’s divorce from her first husband had already been decreed. But the truth was something other. Rachel Donelson Robards had committed adultery, fleeing with her paramour Jackson to Spanish-held Natchez in 1790. They had done so not out of ignorance, and not on a lark, but in order to secure a divorce from her husband. Desertion was one of the few recognized causes of divorce.62

In the ever-expanding script detailing Jackson’s misdeeds, adultery was just one more example of his uncontrolled passions. Wife stealing belonged to the standard profile of the backwoods aggressor who refused to believe the law applied to him. In failing to respect international law, he had conquered Florida; in disregarding his wife’s first marriage contract, he simply took what he wanted. Jackson invaded the “sanctity of his neighbor’s matrimonial couch,” as the Ohio journalist Charles Hammond declared.63

All sorts of vicious names were used in demeaning Rachel Jackson. She was called an “American Jezebel,” “weak and vulgar,” and a “dirty black wench,” all of which pointed to her questionable backwoods upbringing. It was pro-Adams editor James G. Dana of Kentucky who luridly painted her as a whore. She could no more pass in polite company, he said with racist outrage, than a gentleman’s black mistress, even if the black wench wore a white mask. Her stain of impurity would never be tolerated among Washington’s better sort. Another unpoliced critic made a similar argument. Her crude conduct might belong in “every cabin beyond the mountains,” he wrote, but not in the President’s House.64

Even without the marriage scandal, Rachel Jackson had the look of a lower-class woman. One visitor to the Jacksons’ home in Tennessee thought she might be mistaken for an old washerwoman. Another described her as fat and her skin tanned, which may explain the “black wench” slur. Whiteness was a badge of class privilege denied to poor cracker gals who worked under the sun. Critics laughed at Mrs. Jackson’s backcountry pronunciation; they made fun of her favorite song, “Possum Up a Gum Tree.” She smoked a pipe. Alas, Rachel Jackson succumbed to heart disease shortly before she was meant to accompany her husband to Washington and take up her duties as First Lady. Her death only intensified the incoming president’s hatred for his political enemies.65

? ? ?

To be sure, even beyond class issues, Jackson’s candidacy changed the nature of democratic politics. One political commentator noted that Jackson’s reign ushered in the “game of brag.” Jacksonians routinely exaggerated their man’s credentials, saying he was not just the “Knight of New Orleans,” the country’s “deliverer,” but also the greatest general in all human history. Another observer concluded that a new kind of “talkative country politician” had arisen, who could speak for hours before having finally “exhausted the fountain of his panegyric on General Jackson.”66

Bragging had a distinctive class dimension in the 1820s and 1830s. In a satire published in Tennessee, a writer took note of the strange adaptations of the code of chivalry in defense of honor. The story involved a duel between one Kentucky “Knight of the Red Rag” and a “great and mighty Walnut cracker” of Tennessee. The nutcracker gave himself an exalted title: “duke of Wild Cat Cove, little and big Hog Thief Creek, Short Mountain, Big Bore Cave and Cuwell’s Bridge.” So what did this kind of posturing mean? Like certain masters of gangsta rap in the twenty-first century, crackers had to make up for their lowly status by dressing themselves up in a boisterous verbal garb. In the Crockett manner, lying and boasting made up for the absence of class pedigree. This, too, was Andrew Jackson. He used duels, feuds, and oaths to rise in the political pecking order in the young state of Tennessee.67

While Jackson had little interest in squatters’ rights, his party did shift the debate in their favor. Democrats supported preemption rights, which made it easier and cheaper for those lacking capital to purchase land. Preemption granted squatters the right to settle, to improve, and then to purchase the land they occupied at a “minimum price.” The debate over preemption cast the squatter in a more favorable light. For some, he was now a hardworking soul who built his cabin with his own hands and had helped to clear the land, which benefited all classes. The Whig leader Henry Clay found himself on the losing side of the debate. In 1838, Clay joked in the Senate that the preemptioner might take his newfound rights and squat down in the spacious White House occupied by one “little man”—Jackson’s handpicked successor, Martin Van Buren.68

Thomas Hart Benton, in quitting Tennessee and moving to Missouri, buried the hatchet with Jackson. As an eminent senator during and after Jackson’s two terms in office, he pushed through preemption laws, culminating in the “Log Cabin Bill” of 1841. But Benton’s thinking was double-edged: yes, he wished to give squatters a chance to purchase a freehold, but he was not above treating them as an expendable population. In 1839, he proposed arming squatters, giving them land and rations as an alternative to renewing the federal military campaign against the Seminoles in Florida. By this, Benton merely revived the British military tactic of using squatters as an inexpensive tool for conquering the wilderness.69

Nancy Isenberg's books