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

Built tall and rail thin, Helper must have stood out among the motley assortment of émigrés. He spent three long years in California and came away hating the state. Despite all the harsh things he had to say about almost everyone he met, he was obliged to admit that most imported women had little choice but prostitution if they wished to survive in the unruly town of San Francisco.24

For Helper, the Digger Indians were “filthy and abominable,” living like “carnivorous animals,” and far worse than either “niggers” or “dogs.” White men in the Golden State killed off Indians as if dispatching squirrels. The Nicaraguans Helper encountered on his return voyage to North Carolina were “feeble” and “dwarfed”—accordingly, one Kentuckian was the equal of four or five of these “hybrid denizens of the torrid zone.” Free blacks likewise lived in “filth and degradation.” Helper echoed Walker’s racist migration theory: someday blacks would be drawn toward the equator and deposited (like waste) in the “receptacles” of South American countries.25

Helper complained about Californians, drawing on animal analogies whenever possible. Americans, English, French, Chinese, Indians, Negroes, and “half-breeds” could never find common cause over a gold mine any more than a panther, lion, tiger, or bear could in hovering over the body of a fresh-slain deer. The Chinese provoked contempt, for they had the gall to imagine that they were superior to Anglo-Saxons. These “semi-barbarians” shared the fate of the southern Negro: both the “copper of the Pacific” and the “ebony of the Atlantic” were destined to be permanently enslaved.26

As much as he was a passionate proponent of racial purity, Helper imagined himself something of a sociologist-anthropologist too. He compared the gold craze to the cotton South’s single-crop economy. The conclusions drawn from his study on California reemerged in his 1857 critique of southern society. From his description of elite Californios (residents of Spanish descent), he found a western version of the cruel and self-satisfied aristocratic southern planter. The Spanish indulgence in the horror show of the bullfight struck Helper as cousin to the southern planter’s wielding of his lash. The barbarous matador was akin to the “august knight” planter who lorded over slaves and poor white men. By 1857, poor white trash had taken on the traits of slain bulls, defeated beings, wallowing without hope in a state of “illiteracy and degradation” that was “purposely and fiendishly perpetuated” by callous planters.27

Helper easily transferred his perspective on California miners to the southern poor. The gold diggers were an updated version of squatters: they lived in squalid tents, wearing their hair long and donning scraggly beards. The majority of white men who swarmed into California became “poverty-stricken dupes.” They were no different, in this way, from southern poor whites, “so basely duped, so adroitly swindled, and so damnably outraged.” For Helper, economies dependent on one source of wealth created extreme class conditions. California mining was worshipped in the same way that cotton and slavery had become the false deities of the South.28

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In Land of Gold, Helper actually defended slavery. But less than two years later, in The Impending Crisis (1857), he called for its abolition—in the same form that Abraham Lincoln and a slew of purportedly “liberal” politicians preferred: emancipation and colonization. Freed slaves would have to be expelled from the United States. The rise of the Free Soil Party in 1848, and the Republican Party in 1854, did not imply that an antislavery position was devoid of anxiety over pedigree, unnatural mixtures, and degenerate breeds. The first Republican presidential candidate was Colonel John Frémont, a man born and raised in the South who made his reputation crossing the Rockies. Like Helper, he converted to abolition in the interest of protecting the white race.29

Free Soil rhetoric fed the belief that freemen could not coexist with slaves—just as Anglo-Saxons could not live side by side with Indians. Slavery was a dangerous contagion spreading death and decay, and feeding a class/demographic war by “depopulating” the nation of its white inhabitants. As one clever essayist pointed out as early as 1843, poor southern whites were being forced from their homes, and pushed into exile like refugees, because they were unable to compete with those Helper called slaveowning “land-sharks.” It was unfair to divest them of their land and rob them of their posterity’s rightful inheritance. With “haggard features” and “emaciated forms,” the poor southern families that headed west represented a new class of poverty, worse than any seen before. By “banishing her sons,” the essayist of 1843 concluded, slaveowners were “warring against the vital interest of the entire nonslaveholding population in the South.”30

Free Soilers imagined three possible scenarios in eliminating slavery. First, if the West was to remain uncontaminated, slavery had to be kept out of all new territories. Second, by prohibiting the migration of slavery into western territories and states, it seemed plausible to some that the institution would gradually die off in the Old South. Third, as in Helper’s case, ending slavery would require exporting slaves elsewhere, recolonizing them in Africa, the Caribbean islands, or South America.

The Free Soil banner moved to the center of national politics in 1846. That year, Pennsylvania Democrat David Wilmot introduced a proviso in Congress, which stipulated that all territory gained from the Mexican War must remain free soil—slavery prohibited. The wording was taken verbatim from Jefferson’s 1784 draft banning slavery from the Northwest Territory. It went hand in hand with the Homestead Bill, which would have granted all men a free homestead of 160 acres. Freedom—which of course meant freedom for all whites—was only ensured through land ownership and the ability to reap sustenance from the soil. Unlike previous land policies that granted squatters preemption rights (the right to buy land they had staked out and cultivated), the new campaign turned the squatter into an entitled freeman. To be a homesteader was to be of the American people—who collectively owned as their inalienable “birthright” all the public land in the territories. Unfortunately, blocked by southern votes in Congress, the “inalienable homestead” would not become law until 1862, after secession.31

Free Soil politics served to underscore a class-inflected theme: southern planters were spreading slavery to the detriment of freemen. Former Kentucky congressman Benjamin Hardin captured the theme of class warfare in 1841, when he claimed that slavery was depopulating his state of the sons of its early pioneers. Recalling Daniel Boone, the most benign symbol of the old pioneer-squatter, he observed that the great man could never have imagined that his descendants were to be “driven into exile and poverty.” All across Kentucky, the proud homes of freemen were being replaced by plantations and cattle. On the “turf where once sported freeborn children,” “unsightly stocks” of domesticated animals and slaves now existed. Free soil revived the fight between squatters and speculators, and converted squatters into honest freemen of a “landed democracy” who stood proud against a slaveholding oligarchy.32

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