As Nancy Isenberg writes, in her book, White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (Viking, 2016), "The English were obsessed with waste, which is why America was first and foremost a 'wasteland" in their eyes. Wasteland meant undeveloped land, land that was outside the circulation of commercial exchange and apart from the understood rules of agricultural production" (Isenberg, p. 19).
Moreover, in Haklyut's view, the American wasteland required English "waste people" to improve that land. He had in mind "paupers, vagabonds, convicts, debtors, and lusty young men without employment" to "cut down the trees, beat the hemp (for making rope), gather honey, salt and dry fish, dress raw animal hides, dig the earth for minerals, raise olives and silk, and sort and pack bird feathers" (Ibid., p 20).
Greedy elites like Haklyut had created many of these waste people when they decided to deprive them of their livelihood by "enclosing" their land. "Meant to increase profits by rationalizing estates, enclosure fenced in large tracts of land and fenced out most of their former inhabitants" (Taylor, p. 120). When these dispossessed, impoverished, homeless, and hungry wandering vagrants gravitated to cities like London and became a nuisance or committed crimes, these same greedy elites who created the problem became alarmed, "fearing imminent collapse into violent anarchy" (Ibid., p. 122). First, they "authorized local authorities to whip, brand, and even hang vagrants who returned where they were unwanted" (Ibid). Subsequently, they sought to solve their new problem by shipping the "sturdy beggars" to America.
"[T[he waste people could be converted into economic assets" (Isenberg, p. 21), and their subsequent consignment and delivery to America marks the beginning of Great Britain's contribution to what became America's population of White trash.
Unlike the Chesapeake colonies and those further south, where they proliferated, Puritan New England accepted few waste people. As David Hackett Fischer tells us in his groundbreaking classic, Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America, (Oxford, 1989, and from which I borrow extensively, especially pages 13 to 205), the Calvinists who arrived on the flagship Arbella (including future leader, John Winthrop), were but a small part of the passengers on the 17 ships that arrived in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630, and an even smaller part of the great migration, of nearly 200 ships - each carrying approximately 100 passengers -- that arrived before 1641.
Many emigrants arrived as families and were from the middling strata of English society. Three-fourths had the means to pay their own way to the New World (Fischer, p. 28). Significantly, most came from East Anglia and successfully imposed East Anglia's culture on the colony.
First and foremost was their strong work ethic, unique in all of the British colonies, which was based upon their belief that their work was a "calling." As Professor Fischer notes, "every Christian had two callings - a general calling and a specific calling. The first was a Christian's duty to live a godly life in the world. The second was mainly his vocation" (Ibid., p. 156).
Thanks to their East Anglian roots, they spoke with what became known as the Yankee twang (i.e., Harvard became Haa-v'd), dressed in "sadd" colors, and often ate cold baked beans and stale bread with their dark English beer, because cooking was prohibited on the Lord's Day. Their dull cuisine was enhanced by a variety of delicious pies. Invariably, they sat in often freezing meetinghouses bereft of adornments, except for one large eye staring out from the pulpit. There, they were bombarded by university trained ministers; pedants launching polysyllabic diatribes upon their bowed heads.
They lived in clusters of wooden, standardized salt-box houses. They seldom bathed, but they used toothpaste that was a "strenuous" mixture of brimstone, butter and gunpowder (Ibid., p. 144). They were healthy and energetic - and looked forward to meeting fellow townsmen on the Sabbath.
They taxed themselves more heavily than other English colonists and their wealth distribution was more egalitarian than elsewhere in the colonies. We should have such progressive policies today.
Arrogantly, their Massachusetts Bay Company emblam falsely depicted an Indian, with arms outstretched, asking the Puritans to come to their land to help them. They believed they were God's chosen people. Thus, arrogantly, John Winthrop proclaimed the now tired cliche' of American Exceptionalism: "We shall be as a City upon a Hill" (Ibid., p. 18). Arrogantly, they asserted their right to seize territory owned by the Indians, because it was, as Haklyut called it, mere open wasteland until it was enclosed and assiduously worked. "In fact, Indian cultivation was more efficient" (Taylor, p. 189). And, arrogantly, they all-too-readily asserted their Christian obligation to use violence to defend THEIR land. Their military assaults were designed to exterminate the Indians whenever they resisted such encroachments.
Thus, they fought two wars in the seventeenth century, the Pequot War of 1636-37 and King Philip's War of 1675-76. During the early 1630s, the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay and Plymouth "openly bullied the various Indian bands, demanding their formal submission and the payment of a tribute in wampum" (Ibid., p. 194). In 1636, after the Pequot refused yet another Puritan demand for wampum and children (to hold as hostages), the Puritans declared war and enlisted the Narragansett and Mohegan peoples as allies. Thanks to the tracking skills of the Natives, the Puritans were able to attack a Pequot village on the Mystic River, that contained about seventy wigwams and four hundred inhabitants, mostly women, children, and old men" (Ibid., p. 195). To the horror of their Narragassant and Mohegan allies, the Puritan leaders ordered the sleeping village to be set ablaze. Only about five survived the fire, guns, and swords. Governor William Bradford praised God for the massacre.
Apparently, however, God was not amused. For what came out of the massacre was a determination by the Indians to adopt the Puritan way of war - a war of extermination. "During the summer and fall of 1675 the Indians assailed 52 of the region's 90 towns, destroying twelve. Drawing upon the grim lesson of total war taught by the colonists in the Pequot War, the Indians often killed entire colonial families, including women and children. When the colonists counterattacked, the Indians took refuge in swamps and repelled their foes, inflicting heavy losses. Or they surprised and ambushed retreating colonists unfamiliar with the paths through the forests. The Indian [primarily Wampanoag and Narragansett] victories bolstered their confidence while shocking and demoralizing the New English"it became increasingly difficult to recruit colonial soldiers for the grim business of of losing an Indian war" (Ibid., p. 200).
The Indians ultimately lost the war, after it was transformed into a largely Indian civil war, and after they had exhausted their food and ammunition. But only after they had killed and mutilated men, women, children and livestock, while desecrating and destroying their meetinghouses, homes, fences and fields (Ibid.). The conflict killed at least one thousand English and approximately three thousand Indians. (Ibid., p. 202). Moreover, "In a long series of wars between 1689 and 1760, the refugees and their descendants guided French raids that repeatedly devastated the frontier settlements of New England" (Ibid.).
The Puritans were extremely flawed human beings, and they knew it. "The fabled 'Five Points' of New England's Calvinist orthodoxy insisted that the natural condition of humanity was total depravity, that salvation was beyond mortal striving, that grace was predestined only for a few, that most mortals were condemned to suffer eternal damnation, and no earthly effort could save them" (Fischer, p. 112).
According to Charles C. Mann, "Time and again Europeans described the People of the First Light as strikingly healthy specimens. Eating an incredibly nutritious diet, working hard but not broken by toil, the people of New England were taller and more robust than those who wanted to move in" (1491, p. 50).
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