Hundley claimed that genuine southern gentlemen were of Cavalier blood, an invented royal lineage superior to ordinary Anglo-Saxons. He even reduced Jefferson to a half-breed of sorts: royal Cavalier on his mother’s side, hearty Anglo-Saxon on his father’s. Hundley’s archetypal southern gentleman was akin to an Arabian horse: six feet tall, strong and athletic, at home hunting and roaming the countryside. In his taxonomy, the white classes were divided into a descending order of bloodlines: Cavalier gentry sat at the top, Anglo-Saxons filled the middle and yeoman classes, and those he called “southern bullies” and “white trash” sat feebly at the bottom. These lowest forms traced their lineage only to the convicts and indentured servants of Jamestown; they were the befouled heirs of poor vagrants, or those from the back alleys of old London.43
For her part, in the plot of her novel Dred, Stowe divided poor southern whites into three classes. Vicious (mean) whites, like Hundley’s southern bullies, were licentious beings, wallowing in a continual drunken stupor while dreaming of possessing a slave to order around. Beneath the vicious were the white trash who lived as scared animals, objects of disgust. But the most interesting class in Stowe’s book were her half-breeds. The character Miss Sue was one of the Virginia Peytons (“good blood”), whose family “degenerated” as a consequence of losing its wealth. Impetuously, Sue married John Cripps, a poor white, but thanks to pedigree, their children could be saved: they were “pretty” and wore their biological inheritance on their faces, with “none of the pronunciation or manners of wild white children.” After Sue’s death, they were further improved in New England, attending the best schools. A healthy combination of circumstances enabled them to reassert their mother’s superior class lineage.44
In popular depictions, poor white trash were, above all, “curious” folks whose habits were as “queer” as “any description of Chinese or Indians.” Or, as a New Hampshire schoolteacher observed of clay-eaters in Georgia, the children were prematurely aged. Even at ten years old, “their countenances are stupid and heavy and they often become dropsical and loathsome to sight.” Nothing more dramatically signified a dying breed than the decrepitude of wrinkled and withered children.45
Commentators repeatedly emphasized the odd skin color: “unnatural complexions” of a “ghastly yellowish white,” or as Hundley observed, skin the color of “yellow parchment.” There were “cotton-headed or flaxen-headed” children, whose unhealthy whiteness resembled the albino. There were poor white, dirt-eating urchins who bore a “cadaverous, bloodless look”; their hair, identified as “crops,” took on the appearance of the soil-depleting cotton that surrounded them. The women were a “wretched specimen of maternity” rather than ideal breeders. Nor did they care properly for their offspring. The “tallow-faced gentry,” as one Kansas newspaper disapprovingly labeled them, routinely stuffed their infants’ mouths with clay. The words describing poor white trash had not been quite so pronounced since the seventeenth century.46
“Like breeds like” continued to serve as the guiding principle etched into these damning portraits. Diarist Mary Boykin Chesnut, of a wealthy South Carolina family, offered one of the most repellent of midcentury snapshots. A woman from her neighborhood, one Milly Trimlin, was thought a witch by poor whites. “Superstitious hordes” had her bones dug up and removed from consecrated ground three times and scattered elsewhere. Despised by her own kind and living off charity, she was, Chesnut wrote, a “perfect specimen of the Sandhill tacky race.” (Tacky was a degenerate breed of horse that lived in the Carolina marshlands.) Trimlin looked the part: “Her skin was yellow and leathery, even the whites of her eyes were bilious in color. She was stumpy, strong, and lean, hard-featured, horny-fisted.”47
Few were concerned about, much less offered any solution to, their terrible poverty. Regarded as specimens more than cognitive beings, white trash sandhillers and clay-eaters loomed as abnormalities, deformities, a “notorious race” that would persist, generation after generation, unaffected by the inroads being made by social reformers. Only a minority of southerners were like William Gregg, who considered training poor white trash for factory labor. Defenders of slavery had come to argue that the system of unpaid labor was natural and necessary, and actually superior to free labor. In 1845, former governor James Henry Hammond of South Carolina insisted that slavery should be the cornerstone of all relations, and that class subordination was just as natural. Jefferson’s “all men are created equal” was, Hammond insisted without shame, a “ridiculously absurd” concept. Now a circle of influential southern intellectuals were openly insisting that freedom was best achieved when people remained within their proper station.48
The “intellectual Caucasian” had arrived. In 1850, Professor Nathaniel Beverley Tucker of the College of William and Mary averred that this type possessed traits in the “highest perfection” and was naturally prepared for rule over both blacks and inferior whites. Six years later, the Richmond Enquirer restated the increasingly popular view that slavery should not be a matter of complexion but of lineage and habits. Thus it is not surprising that Harriet Beecher Stowe had slaveholders wishing for a new class of poor whites—a class of white slaves. “Like other nomadic races,” Hundley wrote, white trash should “pass further and further westward and southward, until they eventually become absorbed and lost among the half-civilized mongrels who inhabit the plains of Mexico.” Outward migration was the saving grace for the new elitists.49
Pedigree was the centerpiece of Supreme Court chief justice Roger B. Taney’s majority opinion in the Dred Scott decision (1857). Though this case assessed whether a slave taken into a free state or federal territory should be set free, its conclusions were far more expansive. Addressing slavery in the territories, the proslavery Marylander dismissed Jefferson’s prohibition of slavery in the Northwest Ordinance as having no constitutional standing. He constructed his own version of the original social contract at the time of the Revolution, the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitutional Convention: only the free white children of the founding generation were heirs to the original agreement; only pedigree could determine who inherited American citizenship and whose racial lineage warranted entitlement and the designation “freeman.” Taney’s opinion mattered because it literally made pedigree into a constitutional principle. In this controversial decision, Taney demonstrably rejected any notion of democracy and based the right of citizenship on bloodlines and racial stock. The chief justice ruled that the founders’ original intent was to classify members of society in terms of recognizable breeds.50
The vagrant, the squatter, had been redrawn, yet qualitatively he/she remained the same: a piece of white trash on the margins of rural society. Observers recognized how the moving mass of undesirables in the constantly expanding West challenged democracy’s central principle. California was a wake-up call. Anxious southerners focused attention not only on their slave society and slave economy, but on the ever-growing numbers of poor whites who made the permanently unequal top-down social order perfectly obvious. Who really spoke of equality among whites anymore? No one of any note. Let us put it plainly: on the path to disunion, the roadside was strewn with white trash.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Cowards, Poltroons, and Mudsills
Civil War as Class Warfare
You have shown yourselves in no respect to be the degenerate sons of our fathers. . . . It is true you have a cause which binds you together more firmly than your fathers. They fought to be free from the usurpations of the British Crown, but they fought against a manly foe. You fight against the offscourings of the earth.
—President Jefferson Davis, January 1863