Symbolic Boundaries and Cultural Conflict: Lubbers and Crackers in the Colonial South

Symbolic boundary theory has begun to emerge as an increasingly influential area of research

across the disciplines. Boundary theory presents a useful set of theoretical tools with which to examine

various cultural processes of social differentiation and to analyze and confront the social inequalities that

attend social differentiation. As it is has developed within sociology and anthropology, boundary theory

distinguishes between symbolic boundaries—those conceptual, cognitive, and rhetorical devices humans

use to categorize and classify people, events, and all manner of phenomena—and social boundaries. The

latter are symbolic boundaries that have become objectified and institutionalized in society and that serve

as barriers to equal access to social resources and opportunities (Lamont and Molnàr 2002). Boundary

theory attempts to understand the mechanisms—the “boundary-work” (Gieryn 1983)—by which symbolic

boundaries are formed and transformed in culture and society. Symbolic boundary theorists have argued

persuasively that boundaries operate not merely as expressions or reflections of power, but as forms of

power in and of themselves. Recent scholarship on symbolic boundaries has focused on boundaries that

mark off individual and group identities (such as race, class, gender, and citizenship) and those that mark

off particular kinds of behavior; i.e., moral and legal boundaries (for a recent overview, see Lamont and

Molnàr 2002).

Symbolic boundary theory has deeply interested cultural sociologists because symbolic boundaries

are a major element in the making and remaking of culture. Culture, as a complex field of symbolic

meanings and distinctions, bears an indexical relationship to structural relations of domination and

inequality found in the domain of political economy. Like a fingerprint, the contours, whorls, and ridges of

culture can be read and the otherwise invisible mark of power observed, identified, and analyzed.

Furthermore, culture has come to be recognized as a social force that leaves its own invisible marks on both

the economic and the political. This, to investigate symbolic boundaries is to investigate the cultural

dimension of social power.

In researching historical social inequalities, the use of symbolic boundary theory presents at least

two definite advantages over the more familiar analytics of class, race, and gender. First, rather than being
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stable categories of identity, class, race, and gender are themselves contingent, shifting categories. They

can and do mean decidedly different things—they can and do hold different levels of social salience—in

different historical periods and geographic locales. Our twenty-first century ideas of race and class cannot

simply be projected onto the past without introducing the most obvious kinds of presentist perspectives into

our research accounts. And while it is possible to draw reasonably accurate inferences about what, for

instance, “class” or “race” may have meant to an eighteenth century colonist in Virginia, we are far better

served by an approach that involves observing the historical construction of bounded group identities and

then asking what those boundaries meant, for whom they held meaning, and what actions followed from

those meanings (i.e., how were those boundaries acted upon, were they institutionalized and if so how,

etc.). Such an approach can help us avoid reading present meanings into the past, avoid projecting present

social structures onto the past, and avoid transporting present identities into the past. Second, the approach

to using symbolic boundaries that I have in mind enables us to better observe the intersection and

simultaneity of various aspects of social identity. This approach does not state in advance—this was a

conflict about gender roles, this was a conflict about class, and this one about race. Instead, the approach I

take here directs us to observe the historical construction of an identity boundary and then to observe how

that same boundary may serve as a foundation for a particular gender/sex regime, a particular class

structure, or a particular ethno-racial category. This approach goes against the grain of some existing

historical research where the goal has been to carefully observe the social construction of gender, or race,

or class, as if these were autonomous processes of social differentiation. They are not, as recent efforts to

focus on “intersectionality” and have shown (Glenn 2002). They each draw heavily upon and interact with

each other and with other types of social differentiation such as citizenship, sexuality, and religious

identity. They are each subsumed under the larger autonomous process of social differentiation that is a

universal feature of human social experience. It is towards observing and understanding this larger process

that symbolic boundary theory can direct us. Furthermore, boundary theory directs us to attend to the

relational nature of categories; i.e., the ways in which

In this paper, I attend to the boundary work performed by some of the many designations used to

identify southern poor rural whites from roughly 1720 to 1820. These terms—lubber, cracker, and poor

white—form a relatively unexplored segment of stigmatizing slang. (Allen 1990, 1993). My intent here is
 Wray, Ur-Trash 3

to recover some of the meanings of lubber, cracker, and poor white in order to ask what they may tell us

about the social conflicts and changing social relationships that emerged in the antebellum south. My goal

is to observe the dynamic interactions of symbolic and social boundaries and to expose how they are joined

together in an articulated fashion. By this I mean to suggest that movements and shifts in symbolic

meanings have effects on social boundaries and vice versa.

The difficulties for the historically minded sociologist are many. In trying to reconstruct a history

of the social and cultural meanings of words, one cannot hope to capture the full universe of their

significations. However, we can begin to get a fuller sense of meaning if we are able to unearth some of the

symbolic boundaries that lie buried in the textual archives. Although the terms are treated here in order of

their historical appearance, the shifts from one set of meanings to the next are in no way simply linear or

progressive. Earlier meanings and connotations often co-existed with later meanings of the term and

serious problems of definition and interpretation arise amidst this echo chamber of multiple associations

and resonances. Interpretation is made even more difficult due to the different social registers (sociolects)

and regional and historical dialects in which their meanings operated. In short, these terms can hardly be

described as sharing a stable referent.

However, my argument is not that the terms share a stable referent—that they occur and recur in

different times and different places is persuasive evidence that they do not. Nor are the terms united by a

common linguistic locus—these words appear in many different forms of communication, from everyday

speech, to personal writings such as letters and diaries, and in journalistic accounts and literature. Instead,

what unites the terms is that they are all expressive symbols of social relations of conflict and inequality.

The terms designate and set apart a group that is somehow perceived as a threat. They attempt to articulate

and signify—to symbolically create—a relationship of domination and subordination between namer and

named and they do so by erecting a symbolic boundary between the subject who speaks and the object

spoken of. The terms enable, describe, and perform a series of invidious distinctions within human

identity. More specifically, they are key terms in the symbolic process of “Othering” lower class whites.

Lubber, cracker, and poor white form part of a nuanced social taxonomy—most of which is now lost to

historical memory—that stigmatized and delegitimized poor whites from the eighteenth century onwards.

The terms discussed below helped to naturalize the materially and culturally disadvantaged condition of
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lower status whites in the colonial and early national period and provided elites with a valuable cultural

resource in their efforts to build and maintain their hegemonic status.

I. “These Indolent Wretches”: Lubbers and the Shifting Borderlands of Colonial Identity

In 1727, William Byrd of Westover, patriarch of a wealthy and most powerful Virginian

plantation family, set out with a team of surveyors to settle a long-standing boundary dispute between

North Carolina and Virginia. Reflecting on his experiences a year later, he wrote about the poor whites who

inhabited the borderlands of the colonies of Virginia and North Carolina. “I am sorry to say it,” he notes,

“but Idleness is the general character of the men of the Southern parts of this Colony [Virginia] as well as

in North Carolina. Surely there is no place in the world where the inhabitants live with less labor than in

N[orth] Carolina. It approaches nearer to the description of Lubberland than any other, by the great felicity

of the climate, the easiness of raising provisions, and the slothfulness of the people…” (Byrd, 1929 [1728]:

92). Byrd’s references to Lubberland and lubbers—terms he borrowed from English popular culture—

imaginatively linked the region and its lazy inhabitants to a land of fantastic idleness and abundance, a

peasant utopia that had existed in the cultural imagination of Western Europe since at least the middle ages,

when it was known as the Land of Cockaigne.1 During the middle ages, tens of thousands of now lost texts

made reference to Cockaigne, a dreamworld where, as one medievalist has described it, “work was

forbidden….and food and drink appeared spontaneously in the form of grilled fish, roast geese, and rivers

of wine. One only had to open one’s mouth and all that delicious food practically jumped inside…there was

the added bonus of a whole range of amenities: communal possessions, lots of holidays, no arguing or

animosity, free-sex with ever willing partners, a fountain of youth, beautiful clothes for everyone, and the

possibility of earning money while one slept.” (Pleij 2001: 3). Cockaigne represented not just any sort of

utopia, but one that specifically resonated with the disenfranchised and the dispossessed, with the

downtrodden and the marginalized (although the image no doubt attracted admirers among the upper

classes as well).
 Wray, Ur-Trash 5

For the English and English-educated colonial elites who were Byrd’s intended readers,

Lubberland/Cockaigne was a place of unimpeded libidinal energies and uninterrupted flows of carnal

desire—a place that like all proper utopias, could not actually exist. From our present perspective, we can

see that as comically fantastic as Lubberland may have been at the time, any place that really approximated

such social conditions would have been something of a symbolic and moral threat to a nascent, rather

fragile colonial order (Greenblatt 1988). Lubberland symbolized a place of relaxed, lusty ease that stood in

sharp contrast to the disciplined, ordered, and morally upright universe of the eighteenth century tidewater

planter. Lubberland and it lazy lubbers stood as imaginative indictments of the overly repressive and

regimented world of the English colonial elites who espoused the ideal that virtue came only from honest

work and labor (Beverley 1974 [1705]).

In eighteenth century English colonies, “idleness” was considered a terrible sin (Bertelson 1967;

Jordan 1968; McClintock 1995). To level the charge of idleness or laziness was to express the highest

degree of contempt and moral condemnation. As Anne McClintock has noted, since at least the sixteenth

century, the English had associated slothfulness with moral corruption and poverty and by the eighteenth

century, Puritans had articulated an elaborate set of moral, political, and social boundaries based on their

conceptions of industriousness versus idleness (McClintock 1995). These boundaries separating those who

worked hard from those who didn’t not only drew distinctions among desirable and undesirable laborers,

they also operated as important cultural resources in the colonial struggle to transform labor regimes and

enforce labor discipline upon unruly natives and truculent colonists (Stoler 1989). Such cultural

inducements to labor were propagated by colonial elites with missionary-like fervor and the reputation of

the colonies as places where the poor, the indigent, and the criminal could be redeemed through hard work

became a major ideological justification for the entire enterprise.

Keeping this historical perspective in mind, we can see how Byrd’s comments of 1728 mark

something of a shift: While once the colonies had been advertised as a place where the poor could be

redeemed through honest labor, poor whites were now seen by the elite as lubbers, confirmed in their

lifelong dispositions towards laziness. The change in attitudes towards the poor may be attributed to the

shifts that were taking place in patterns of colonization and slavery, around the time of Byrd’s writing.

Changes in class structure wrought by the increase in the number of African slaves and the growth of the
 Wray, Ur-Trash 6

poor white freedmen class gave rise to a new social structure that required new methods of social control.

The growing class of poor whites was increasingly frustrated and discontent. For some, perhaps for very

many, the lack of opportunity for social advancement led to opting out of the social structure completely,

removing themselves to the borderlands and frontier, and establishing alternative ways of life. Some of the

members of this group of disenfranchised whites set themselves apart from the class structure. As Native

Americans and black slaves were excluded, some poor whites excluded themselves rather than face highly

restricted mobility and limited opportunities within the strictures of white colonial society.

Lubbers as a Class Boundary

I have suggested how and why the boundary lines between colonists began to be drawn, but who

exactly were these lubbers and why did they so fascinate Byrd and his contemporaries?2 In order to begin

to answer this question, one must first offer an account of the emergent social structure in the mid-

seventeenth English colonies. As colonial historians have shown, the total population may be divided into

six groups. The first group, outside the labor structure, were the relatively few remaining Native

Americans, mostly confined to areas at the edges and frontiers of colonial settlements. A second group was

comprised of African slaves, held to the bottom by their status as property, and, again, few in number. A

third group was composed of indentured servants of various European nationalities who were working off

the terms of their temporary bondage. While their social status continues to be the subject of considerable

debate among historians, these indentured servants were more numerous than slaves and had yet to achieve

the status of freemen (Smith 1947; Galenson 1981; Morgan 2001). A fourth group consisted of freemen,

servants, white and black, who had completed their terms of servitude. Above them, in the fifth group were

the so-called yeomen, the smallholders with property consisting of small land holdings and a few servants

or slaves. At the top end of the structure were the elites, men who held vast estates, numerous slaves, and

lucrative public offices (Morgan 1975; Kulikoff 1986; Morgan 2001). Whether and how these different

groups were observed at the time and what status was accorded to each is hard to reconstruct, but the

consensus among historians is that this is an accurate description of the social hierarchy.

Several historians have noted that it was the fourth group, wedged between the servant class and

the smallholders, that proved to be the most dynamic (Allen 199 ; Morgan 1975; Takaki ). Between 1650
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and 1700, the number of indentured servants rose precipitously due to a number of factors: worsening

economic conditions in England; a “head right system” that subsidized indentured servitude by granting

planters 50 acres for each servant they brought over; and the decline of the heavy mortality rates that had

plagued the earliest settlements. But there were two other far more important factors at work. First, there

was an intentional limiting of the size and power of smallholder class by the elites. In some areas these

smallholders, who like planters grew tobacco for export, had begun to grow in size and influence and to

pose a threat to the oligopoly of the elites. Smallholders were reaping some of the tobacco profits for

themselves. Beginning in 1658, the planter elite of Virginia began to take deliberate steps to minimize the

size and influence of this group, imposing longer periods of indenture and servitude through a series of

laws and doing what they could to limit access to land (land that was shrinking in availability due in part to

the head right system. See Morgan 1975 and Allen 1994). We can readily understand this maneuver as a

classic example of Weberian “closure,” whereby a group strives to monopolize resources and opportunities

for itself (Weber 1978; Parkin 1974). But, by attending to the narrative depiction Byrd constructs about

lubbers, we can also observe the cultural machinations of the elites as they sought to legitimize this

maneuver.

The second and crucial important factor was the increasing reliance on African slave labor. It

rendered superfluous the labor of freemen and produced a social group who were laboring neither for the

planter elite, nor for themselves.

The decision by elites to shut off upward mobility for recently freedmen coupled with the decision

(“unthinking” or not-see the contentious debate between Handlin [19 ]. Jordan [19 , and Allen [1994]) to

shift towards a reliance on African slave labor created a politically volatile and socially unstable situation

where more and more freemen where chasing fewer and fewer plots of desirable land. Although theirs was

the most rapidly growing social group and while under colonial law they were legally entitled to set up

households of their own, they found it almost impossible to do so. These recently freed men perceived

themselves as simply unable to compete with the established smallholders and elites. This situation recalls

Ellemers (1993) observation that when lower status groups perceive group boundaries as rigid and

unyielding, they are more likely to agitate for social change as a group than they are to simply pursue

individual opportunities for mobility. Ellemers observation clearly did not hold true for some recently
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freedmen, however, as they ventured out to the frontier borderlands and took to squatting, subsisting, and

communalizing with the other outcasts of the colonies.

By the latter half of the seventeenth century, the class of poor, landless freemen had vastly

increased in size. Given these difficulties, many freemen (just how many we will never know) chose to

settle the unsettled colonial frontiers and outlying zones. There they often encountered Native Americans

and often these encounters resulted bloody frontier clashes. But perhaps just as often, these former

indentured servants—now freemen—joined Native Americans, escaped African slaves and runaway

servants in forming cooperative communities, communities that have long fascinated historians of early

America and anthropologists due to the relative absence of racial animosity (Craven 1971; Nash 1974;

Shuffleton 1993).3 In such frontier communities, freedmen of European descent joined with other outcasts

and enemies of the colonial order to lead lives that were socially, culturally, and politically distinct from

that of the colonial elites. It was these people, I argue, that Byrd observed as he surveyed the murky bounds

of his colony. Rather than assimilate to or emulate the culture of colonial tobacco plantation elites, these

people planted a corn and raised hogs and cattle, or perhaps lived the lives of nomadic herdsmen, squatting,

hunting, and subsisting on lands where boundaries of ownership and jurisdiction were largely undetermined

and often in dispute. In a process quite familiar to sociologists, the particular social and economic

conditions confronting the lubbers gave rise to a distinct set of cultural practices that were then derided and

delegitimized by elites.4

Colonial elites regarded these recently freed bondsmen and the prospect of their harmonious

intermixture with Indians and former slaves with some measure of anxiety and fear. Their small numbers

and precarious position at the top of the social hierarchy made the potential of rebellion by a coalition of

the much more numerous dispossessed a constant worry, especially in times of economic downturn and

social discontent. In 1676, their worst fears were realized when Nathaniel Bacon led his army of white

settlers and African slaves against local Indian tribes, then quickly turned on the colonial government and

burned Jamestown. Bacon’s Rebellion marked a turning point in colonial policy towards the social control

of the lower classes of poor whites, Native Americans, and the African slaves. Henceforth, the colonial

elite would do everything in their power to divide blacks from whites, discouraging labor and class

solidarity by introducing legal and economic privileges for even the poorest whites. As the seventeenth
 Wray, Ur-Trash 9

century gave way to the eighteenth, colonial society was becoming even more sharply divided along lines

of both class and race, making for, from the elite point of view, a more stable social order. Recent historical

scholarship has identified this period from the late 1600s to the early 1700s as the origins of racial

inequality and the moment when whiteness as a privileged social category began to be institutionalized in

law (Allen 1993). In other words, it is the historical moment when the symbolic category of white begins

to take distinct shape as a racial category with a particular set of legal privileges. The newly emerging

colonial society once divided primarily by English conceptions of class, now became increasingly divided

by race as well.

Lubbers as a Racialized Boundary

Throughout his writings, Byrd frequently employs a rhetorical strategy of comparing lubbers to Indians and

lubbers emerge from his narratives not just as a distinct class or lower status group, but also as a group that

shared specific characteristics with other low status groups. His repeated characterizations of the lubber as

“just like the Indian” confirms the idea that lubbers were seen not just as a distinctive group, but as one that

bore distinct similarities to a social group already racialized in the minds of the colonists.5 Indeed, the

racial status of these fringe dwellers seems to have been a constant source of confusion for Byrd, as the

following passage suggests:

[W]e were told that on the south shore, not far from the inlet, dwelt a Marooner, that

modestly called himself a hermit, tho’ he forfeited that name by suffering a wanton

female to cohabit with him. His habitation was a bower, covered with bark after the

Indian fashion... Like the Ravens, he neither plowed nor sowed, but subsisted chiefly

upon oysters... Sometimes too, for a change of diet, he sent [the woman] to drive up the

neighbor’s cows, to moisten their mouths with a little milk. Thus did the wretches live in

a dirty state of nature, and were mere Adamites, innocence only excepted (Byrd 46).

These mixed-bloods were a curiosity for Byrd, since “like Indians” they were content to lead a hunter and

gatherer lifestyle (an existence which, given his allegiance to plantation capitalism, must have seemed

hopelessly backward to Byrd). However, unlike Indians, whom Byrd romanticized as living in harmony
 Wray, Ur-Trash 10

with Nature, the Marooner and his “wanton female” companion were “wretches,” living in a degraded,

“dirty state of nature.” What else, in Byrd’s mind, separated these border dwellers from their Indian

counterparts? Was it their thievery? Was it their (possibly) mixed ancestry? They were outside of

dominant economic relations, it was true. But perhaps they could become part of the productive

smallholder/yeoman class if they learned industry and gave up their lazy and immoral ways. They were

perceived as sharing some habits and cultural characteristics with Native Americans, and Byrd judges them

by the standard colonial discourse on idleness, but their precise social status remains troubling and

ambiguous. At times, Byrd seems to place them below Native Americans on his scale and order of being,

but on the question of where they stood n relation to black slaves and servants, Byrd is silent. Were they, in

Byrd’s eyes, white? Or is their status as white is thrown into question by their possible mixed descent, their

seeming preference for herding and nomadism over agricultural work and plantation life, their dirty

appearance, their disregard for property, their reversed and confused gender roles, and their deviation from

sexual mores and norms?

Lubbers as a Gendered and Sexualized Boundary

Byrd compares poor whites to Indians on the basis of the supposed fact that in both cultures the women are

forced to do all the work. He consistently portrays the females of both Indians and poor whites he

encountered as industrious and hard-working, directing his scorn and dismissive humor towards the men.

That he should do so says something about the way he imagined Indian and poor white women might

somehow hold the keys to redeeming both these groups for socially useful labor. Women, not men, are

seen as the bearers of cultural value and socially useful labor. The passage above is also notable for Byrd’s

brief commentary on the gender relations between the poor white men and women. For Byrd, these roles

undoubtedly seemed perverse. The plantation ideal of womanhood was one where the women were

protected from and spared physical labor—her domain was the house; her husband’s, the field and market.

The work of the plantation was done by white servants and African slaves, and in the case of smallholders,

by the men who owned the farms and their sons. For men to stay at home by the hearth while women went

out to work was a near perfect reversal of the gender codes of the plantation elite (Bynum 19Brown 1996).
 Wray, Ur-Trash 11

Byrd’s depictions of the lazy lubber articulate and reflect the class interests of the white colonial

elites against whites of low social standing.6 The cultural content of Byrd’s ??? is embodied in the many

moral distinctions his narratives strive to uphold. Byrd’s firm belief in industriousness and hard work,

religiosity and good Christian practice, health, cleanliness and order as the hallmarks of an upright life are

ideals that are recorded on virtually every page of HDL. The spiritual value of these habits of industry were

the reason Byrd kept a diary in the first place—to provide for posterity a daily account by which

industriousness and religious commitment might be judged. These ideals and values are thrown into sharp

and precise relief by the depictions of lubbers as lazy, irreligious, filthy, and diseased. The lubber in

Byrd’s account is the perfect foil for the self-aggrandizing colonial elite. The boundary lines are drawn

quite clearly in the following passage:

The men, for their parts, just like the Indians, impose all the work upon the poor women.

They make their wives rise out of their beds early in the morning, at the same time that

they lye and snore, ‘til the sun has run one third of his course, and dispersed all the

unwholesome damps. Then, after stretching and yawning for half an hour, they light

their pipes, and, under the protection of a cloud of smoke, venture out into the open air;

tho’, if it happens to be never so little cold, they quickly return shivering into the chimney

corner. When the weather is mild, they stand leaning with both their arms upon the corn-

field fence, and gravely consider whether they had best go and take a small heat at the

hoe; but generally find reasons to put it off until another time. Thus they loiter away their

lives, like Solomon’s sluggard, with their arms across, and at the winding up of the year

scarcely have bread to eat (Byrd 92).

Here, the cultural difference Byrd encounters is rendered as a morally inferior perversion of

gender roles.

In Byrd’s influential account of his adventures among the lubbers, we can see the earliest contours

of the comic stereotype of the poor white in the Americas: ignorant, immoral, dirty, sexually perverse, and

above all, lazy. In surveying the boundary line between North Carolina and Virginia, Byrd was also

engaged (less self-consciously, to be sure) in an effort to establish boundaries or identity. His accounts are
 Wray, Ur-Trash 12

valuable for what they tell us about the secret history of the symbolic dividing lines he drew between good

whites and bad whites, between himself and the landless poor white folk he encountered in the shady and

swampy borders of the early American colonies. They are also suggestive and prescient of the ways in

which the unlaboring, uncontrolled, and unclean bodies of poor rural whites on the margins began to

presents problems for the colonial elite. The coercive imposition by elites of symbolic and social

boundaries to divide and disunite were crucial weapons in the struggle to establish not only a stable

mechanism for orderly labor exploitation, but also a cultural system that would legitimize and naturalize

that exploitation. As such, these boundaries were met with small, individual, and isolated acts of

transgressions—the disorganized, infrapolitical refusals and resistances Byrd encountered among the

lubbers. However, as the pressures on the groups of middling status grew, these resistances would soon

take on a more organized and explicitly political form.

II. Georgia Crackers and the Criminality of Poor Whites

Lubber is in many ways the least notable and certainly the least durable epithet to be employed

against the poor inhabitants of the colonial borderlands. The term does not seem to have been very widely

adopted, nor is there much evidence of its use after the mid-eighteenth century. Why did it not become

popular? Why did it pass so quickly into obsolescence? Undoubtedly, there are many reasons, but as this

part of the paper will show, a major reason was the changing perception of the level of social threat

presented by this group. Within a few decades, the risible lubber had been replaced by a different and

much less amusing figure: the cracker—a specter of social disorder.

According to Mathews (1959), cracker was the first pejorative term to be widely and popularly

applied to poor white in the British colonies. Mathews writes: “The term in the sense of ‘a poor white’ was

first used and explained in a June 27, 1766 letter by Gavin Cochrane to the Earl of Dartmouth.” Mathews

quotes from Cochrane’s letter at length:

Reported complaints came from the Cherokees that white people came into their hunting

grounds and destroyed their beavers which they said was everything to them.... I [sent]

orders to have those Beaverers made prisoners....[I] thought it my duty to act for the

public good; everything succeeded as I could have wished; the Officer at Fort Prince
 Wray, Ur-Trash 13

George told the Indians the orders he had received and bid them seize the Beaverers and

bring them to him without hurting them. They brought three of the lawless people called

crackers, who behaved with the greatest insolence and told the Officer they neither

valued him nor the Lieutenant Gov[ernor].... I should explain to your Lordship what is

meant by crackers; a name they got from being great boasters; they are a lawless set of

rascals on the frontiers of Virginia, Maryland, the Carolinas, and Georgia, who often

change their places of abode. They steal horses in the southern provinces and sell them

in the northern and those from the Northern they sell in the southern. They get merchants

by degrees to trust them with more and more goods to trade with the Indians and at first

make returns till they have established some credit, then leave those that trusted them in

the lurch, return no more but go to some other place to follow the same practice. Some of

them stay in the Indian country and are perpetually endeavoring to stir up a war by

propagating idle stories that they may join them and share in the plunder. They delight in

cruelty which they often practice even to one another (1959: 126-7).

Mathews concludes from the letter that the term crackers was used in the mid-eighteenth century to refer to

the white outlaws who flourished in the wake of the French and Indian War of 1754-1763. These outlaws

were groups of backwoods men who stole goods and perhaps operated organized crime syndicates on an

intercolonial scale. As the Cochrane fragment attests, these “white people” had reputations for being ill-

mannered, arrogant, and treacherous, stealing from Indians and propertied white colonialists alike. They

stole through outright thievery as well as through elaborate confidence games, leaving merchants holding

worthless credit slips. They were all the more dangerous for their transience and nomadic ways and had a

reputation for being especially cruel and vicious. Clearly, they had no respect for the laws of the land and

feared little the powers of the colonial state. From Cochrane’s description, Mathews infers that “these

crackers were the thin outer fringe of the first organized band of criminals that ever operated in this

country.” (Mathews 126-7).7

Unlike Byrd’s droll portrayals of 1728, Cochrane’s letter of 1766 makes explicit the ways in

which these poor marginal whites were viewed by colonial elites as dangerous, cruel, and threatening.
 Wray, Ur-Trash 14

Their reputation for lawlessness made them enemies both to the colonial government and to the local

Cherokees. Cochrane’s report details how the colonial government intervened on behalf of the Cherokee,

hoping to secure the hunting rights of the natives over against the poaching practices of the “crackers,” and

hoping no doubt, to secure at the same time the continued loyalty of the Cherokees. As the closing lines of

the letter suggest, the threat of an Indian and “cracker” alliance against the landholders was apparently

perceived as quite grave. Nearly a century after Bacon’s Rebellion, fear of colonial rebellion remained

intensely alive.

Historical dictionaries cite numerous references to cracker after 1766. It appeared with regularity

in letters, diaries, travel writings, and the popular press, and always carried some but not all of the

pejorative connotations described above. Richard Thornton’s historical dictionary claims the derivation is

a reference to the “use of whips with a piece of buckskin at the end”8 and records a 1772 usage as follows:

“Persons who have no settled habitation, and live by hunting and plundering the industrious Settlers... The

people I refer to are really what you and I understand by Crackers.” Thornton’s revised dictionary of 1939

adds a 1784 example from The London Chronicle, with reference to Maryland: “...that hardy banditti well

known by the name of crackers.” (Thornton 199-200). The reference to “banditti” lends support to

Mathews’ thesis, as the language suggests that the colonial and planter elites feared potential uprisings or

random attacks from these criminally-minded white crackers.

Unlike the lazy lubbers, whose idleness and torpor amused Byrd and his readers, these crackers

apparently constituted something of a threat to both colonial order and to property, the white “criminal

underclass” of the colonial period. The new emphasis on the criminality of poor rural whites marks a

significant shift in meaning. While lubber connoted idleness and squalor, filth and perversity, perhaps

evoking pathos, scorn, and laughter in readers, but not fear, cracker represented a dangerous and volatile

class, a despised group, one not to be trifled with, one posing a distinct threat to the security of property and

the stability of the colonial social order.

Just one year after Cochrane wrote his report to the Earl of Dartmouth, who was then the colonial

Secretary of State of South Carolina, a new form of violence broke out in the colony. A mixed group of

Piedmont planters and yeomen smallholders, most of whom held less than 400 acres of land and owned no

slaves, joined forces and declared themselves “the Regulators,” the first organized group of vigilantes in
 Wray, Ur-Trash 15

American history (Brown 1963; Stock 199 ) Situated as they were between the fertile lowcountry and the

“backcountry” frontier that bordered on Cherokee country, these Piedmont smallholders were subject to

frequent Indian raids and attacks by “the lower sort” of whites––the poor, landless squatters who

sometimes made common cause with Indians and escaped slaves (Lockley 1997, 2001) Tiring of the non-

responsiveness of the colonial leaders, who were mainly concerned with protecting the interests of the

wealthier planters in the lowcountry, and the ineffectiveness of a judicial system too weak to offer legal

protections, the Regulators took matters into their own hands. Throughout the fall of 1767, the Regulators

rampaged throughout the backcountry, burning the cabins of known outlaws, capturing others and their

families and subjecting them to public whippings, and hunting down escaped slaves, sometimes executing

them on the spot.9 Elite planters in the south Carolina lowcountry were shocked and disturbed by the

blatant vigilantism and demanded that the Regulators desist. However, the vigilantes, having rid the

backcountry of all the known outlaws through murder and intimidation, chose a new set of victims. They

turned their gun sights on poor whites, “those who failed to measure up to respectable standards of morality

and industry.” These “Rogues and other Idle, worthless, vagrant People,” who stole from gardens and

orchards and subsisted “on the Stocks and Labors of the Industrious Planter” were, in the eyes of the

Regulators, no more than “Indolent, unsettled, roving Wretches.”10 The reference to “Indolent Wretches,”

is a precise echo of Byrd’s complaint of 1728, but here the context of criminality causes the term to

resonate in a quite different register. In this instance, the term operated, in effect, as a call to arms and

Regulators responded with an extraordinary degree of violence to the perceived threat to social order posed

by these “non-productive” poor whites. As Catherine McNicol Stock has written, Regulators

victimized people, for example, who had chosen a subsistence or nomadic lifestyle that

conflicted with the emerging tenants of market production or who refused to work for

wages despite the labor shortage. “Having no property or visible way of living,” hunting

on public land without a permit, squatting, drifting, owing money and not paying up,

these behaviors separated the poorest settlers from the rest of frontier society and made

them potential victims of the Regulation. (Stock 94).

 Wray, Ur-Trash 16

By the end of 1768, a newly established “Congress of Regulators” passed a vagrancy law “that forced

landless [white] men to work six days a week or be flogged. To clean up the backcountry and to get free

labor at the same time was a deal that most settlers simply could not resist.”(Stock 94). Thus, a small,

middling class of white yeomen rose up against the poorest whites, some of whom had been outlaw

crackers,11 but most of whom were peaceful, and expropriated their labor in the name of moral order and

justice.

The social conditions in the antebellum period that gave rise to the terms discussed here and the

racial and class arrangements of which these terms are an expression are still subject to debate. Much too

little is known about the history and social relations of the poor rural white.12 In part, this gap in historical

knowledge reflects a larger problem facing American historians: very little is known about the everyday

lives of rural peoples in the nineteenth century United States (Hahn and Prude 1985). The great masses of

rural white folks, many of whom were illiterate, did not leave behind letters, diaries, journals, or

autobiographical writings. Social historians of the nineteenth century have tended to focus on

industrialism, urbanization, and the development of the working and middle classes, or they have focused

on plantation life of elite whites in the South, ignoring the majority of whites. Thus, the precise nature of

the class structure of the antebellum south is still an open question, as is the nature of class and race

consciousness among poor whites.

In particular, the question of why the poorest whites seemed to accept the plantation system and

slavery has never been adequately settled.13 While previous generations of historians have assumed that

poor rural whites were uniformly complicit with and supportive of plantation slavery, recent historians of

the South have highlighted numerous examples of common whites’ resistance to planter elite rule. In

addition, these historians have offered new evidence of the complexity and regional variability of class

structures and class cultures among whites in the South.14 While new historians agree with older

generations of historians on many points, such as the fact that that vast majority of whites (by most

estimates, seventy-five percent or more) were not slaveholders, large or small, and that they have been all
 Wray, Ur-Trash 17

but ignored by the vast number of commentators on the colonial and antebellum South, they differ

significantly in their attention to the uneven development of the plantation system and the uneven

emergence of markets during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As the new historians show,

white inhabitants of the South were not uniformly incorporated into the economic and social conditions

precipitated by shifting market forces and this unevenness gave rise to local contestations of planter

hegemony and to class struggles that were place-specific. These contests may have also been contests over

who could be considered respectably white and who could not, as differences between whites in the vast

non-slaveholding class enabled some of those whites to appear as independent, sturdy yeomen and others

as white trash.

Of course, there were significant economic forces that limited resistance and set the terms of these

contests and struggles, including the westward expansion of slavery into the hinterlands and the old

Southwest, as well as the cotton boom that extended the plantation economy and its attendant social

relations from its origins in the lowlands into new regions in the uplands. These very same forces, Steven

Hahn points out,

also spawned areas where slavery and plantation agriculture failed to penetrate

significantly. Known variously as the upcountry, hill country, pine barrens, and piney

woods, and inhabited primarily by small farmers and herdsmen owning few or no slaves,

these locales presented the planters with thorny political problems.15

This process of uneven development—this “inconstant geography of capitalism” (Storper and Walker

1989)—offers a clear and compelling explanation for why there was a marked proliferation of derogatory

names for poor whites during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The uneven but insistent

expansion and development of the economic and agricultural forces of cotton throughout the South

produced groups who were then symbolically herded into the category of “poor white.” Having been

uprooted and dislocated from fertile, arable lands, they were then pushed further into the barren sandy

hillsides, the acidic pine forests, and the swampy, depleted lowlands of the coastal plains. As time wore on,

this process repeated itself in each new region that fell under cotton cultivation and planter control and each

new wave of regional transformation created distinctive collectives of newly marginalized poor whites.
 Wray, Ur-Trash 18

While the lubber and cracker of the colonial period was descriptive of the recently freed white

servants brought in to ease the labor shortages of the early colonial period, and who in the wake of

increased dependence upon slavery, were seen as surplus labor and were pushed to the colonial frontier, the

poor whites of the antebellum period were failed and displaced small farmers, those whose lands were

swallowed up by the aggressively acquisitive cotton elites. Unlike crackers, it was not their criminality,

but their poverty and their degraded position on the margins (or outside) of the labor system that marked

them out from other whites.

* * *

From the seventeenth century to the twentieth, the language of race and the language of class were

not nearly as distinct as we are accustomed to think. Symbolically, they shared, among other things, a

preoccupation with boundary maintenance (often symbolized through dirt) and behavior, particularly

behaviors regarding work. The lower classes of all races and the lower races of all classes alike are seen as

posing a threat to the social codes regarding cleanliness and labor. For much of the eighteenth and

nineteenth centuries, the language used to describe poor rural whites and Native Americans and African

Americans was strikingly similar. Like African Americans and Native Americans, poor whites were

depicted as lazy, filthy, uncivilized, and stupid. As in all forms of racial discourse, the language used in

these depictions privileged corporeal distinctiveness as the index of difference.

Negative stereotypes of poor rural whites as comical, grotesque, and degenerate became

extraordinarily useful to eighteenth century colonists who sought to socially marginalize, control, and

criminalize poor landless whites and to nineteenth and early twentieth century plantation and factory

owners who sought to exploit poor white labor for low wages. Compared to African Americans and Native

Americans, poor rural whites enjoyed relative freedom and a higher political status as free white citizens,

eligible to vote. Yet this relative institutional advantage did not prevent white elite and middle class

observers, along with black slaves, from viewing poor whites as pitiable, sometimes dangerous creatures,

beneath contempt. The symbolic transformation of people into lubbers, crackers, and poor whites can
 Wray, Ur-Trash 19

only be fully understood by further investigating the peculiar processes of racialized, classed, gendered, and

sexualized identity formation in the South of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries.

REFERENCES

1
According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) Lubberland originally appeared in 1598—as a
synonym for Cockaigne--and was used frequently throughout the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth
centuries, most famously by Ben Johnson in Bartholomew’s Fair (1614), a popular satirical play with
which Byrd was undoubtedly familiar. Lubber predates Lubberland by at least two centuries and may have
come from the Old French loboer meaning swindler, or parasite, meanings that clearly resonate with
lubber.
2
Byrd was not the only member of the planter elite to ruminate about the poorest colonists, nor was he the
first. Robert Beverley in 1705 and Hugh Jones in 1724 also bemoaned their laziness. In addition to
Beverley cited above, see Rev. Hugh Jones, The Present State of Virginia, From Whence is Inferred a Short
View of Maryland and North Carolina, ed. Richard Morton (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1956 [1724]).
3
The term “tri-racial isolates”--a term that was coined by eugenics researchers of the 1920s and that has
been carried over into anthropology and sociology—has been used to describe such groups. For a review of
anthropological observations of these groups, see Calvin L. Beale, “An Overview of the Phenomenon of
Mixed Racial Isolates in the United States,” American Anthropologist 74 (1972): 704-10. For an attempt to
track the derogatory labels applied to these groups, see A. R. Dunlap and C. A. Weslager, “Trends in the
Naming of Tri-Racial Mixed-Blood Groups in the Eastern United States,” American Speech 22, no. 2
(April, 1947): 81-7.
4
Whether these cultural practices were sui generis or whether they were cultural survivals from Celtic or
some other ethnic past forms an interesting point of debate (McWhiney and debate). This conflict may have
been very widespread. The intriguing and controversial research of Grady McWhiney may shed some light
on the culture of pre-Revolutionary war crackers. Through a study of patterns of immigration and
settlement, he argues that the dominant cultural influences of the South were Celtic, not English, as they
were in the North. McWhiney’s work focuses on the sharp cultural differences that animated North/South
conflict and that shaped social relations among whites in the Old South. According to this thesis, the
ancient pastoral and tribal culture of Celts persisted throughout several centuries and can be seen in the
folkways and daily life of Welsh, Irish, and Scot immigrants to the American colonies. In contrast to the
labor intensive farming and plantation cultures of the English immigrants and colonists, the indentured
class of Celtic immigrants, once freed, turned to the more leisurely lifestyle of herding. See Grady
McWhiney, Cracker Culture: Celtic Ways in the Old South (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press,
1988). Also, on this cultural conflict, see Albert H. Tillson, Gentry and Common Folk: Political Culture
on a Virginia Frontier, 1740-1789 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1991).
The historical process I describe here is consonant with either position.
5
Byrd’s comparisons of poor whites to Indians are quite numerous. For representative examples, see Byrd,
46, 54, 90-2. For a rare comparison of the poor whites to the lazy “Wild Irish,” a comparison that must
have held special resonance for Byrd’s English readers, see page 102. For early colonists attitudes towards
Native Americans, see Morgan, 6-20, 328-32; Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr., The White Man’s Indian: Images of
the American Indian from Columbus to the Present (New York: Vintage, 1979); and James Axtell After
Columbus: Essays in the Ethnohistory of Colonial North America (New York: Oxford, 1988), 125-43.
6
Indeed, Byrd had a financial stake in the matter. He was greatly interested in land acquisition and it
would be naïve to believe that he conducted the survey simply out of scientific curiosity or civic-
mindedness. The survey gave Byrd the perfect opportunity to identify the best lands for himself. Indeed,
 Wray, Ur-Trash 20

Byrd’s land holdings increased by more than 100,000 acres in the years immediately following the
completion of his survey. See Lockridge, 140.
7
Mathews’ claim is intriguing and may link crackers to English analogs explored by British historians. In
addition to Wilson, cited above, Eric Hobsbawm has surveyed the “protopolitical” acts of trespassing,
poaching, piracy, and thievery that sustained marginal communities in Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic
Forms of Social Movement in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (New York: W. W. Norton & Co.,
1959) and E. P. Thompson, Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act (New York: Pantheon, 1975).
My thanks to Howard Winant for referring me to these works.
8
In addition to Thornton, several other authorities offer the onomatopoetic etymology that crackers were
so-called because of the way they habitually cracked their buckskin whips. Others claimed the term was
short for “corn-crackers”—a reference to the notion that these folk always cracked their own corn for meal,
unable or unwilling to pay the miller to do the task, too poor to eat anything else. But the most persuasive
account of the etymology of the term indicates that the word is of Scottish extraction meaning “to boast.”
See Delma Presley, “The Crackers of Georgia,” The Georgia Historical Quarterly 60, no. 2 (Summer
1976): 102-16, esp. 112-3. While the etymology of the term remains somewhat unclear, there is wide
consensus about its geographic origins. As Cochrane’s letter suggests, it was first applied to Georgians,
then Floridians, and from there to other colonies (presumably wherever the colonial elite encountered
troubles with poor frontier whites). See Raven I. McDavid and Virginia McDavid, “Cracker and Hoosier,”
Journal of the American Name Society 21, no. 3 (September 1973): 161-7.
9
Catherine McNicol Stock, Rural Radicals: From Bacon’s Rebellion to the Oklahoma City Bombing (New
York: Penguin Books, 1996), 93.
10
From the 1767 Regulator document, as quoted in Brown, 46-7.
11
According to Brown, “The lower people…were of diverse origins and varied circumstances. Some were
“Crackers”—motley Back Country ruffians who lived on the fringes of settlement. Others were
unfortunate small planters who had settled in the bleak, infertile Sand Hills. Still others were hunters and
squatters, absconded debtors, idlers, gamblers, and unsavory refugees from the northern colonies, settlers
who had never recovered from the trauma of the Cherokee War, deserters from the military forces, and
often, mulattoes, Negroes, or people of mixed white, Indian, and Negro blood. To upstanding inhabitants
all these were a public nuisance and a menace.” Brown cites a wide array of sources to support these
assertions, including a document dated 1765 that contains the word cracker. This predates Mathews’
citation from 1766. See Brown, 28, 184 fn 36.
12
As historian Steve Hahn remarks, employing a metaphor with suggestively racial overtones, “the white
lower classes remain shadowy figures of the antebellum South.” Steve Hahn, “The Yeomanry of the
Nonplantation South: Upper Piedmont Georgia, 1850-1860,” in Orville Burton and Robert McMath, eds.,
Class, Conflict and Consensus: Antebellum Southern Community Studies (Westport, CT: Greenwood
Press, 1978) 29. However, for brief periods in the 1930s and 1940s, and more recently in the 1990s,
historians have tried to shed some light on this “shadowy figure.” For an unusually sympathetic and
nuanced view from the 1930s, see Mildred Rutherford Mell, “Poor Whites of the South,” Social Forces 17,
no. 2 (December 1938): 153-67. See also Rudolph M. Lapp, “The Antebellum Poor Whites of the South
Atlantic States,” (Ph.D. thesis, University of California, Berkeley, 1956).
13
It is, essentially, the same old question that has plagued Marxist historians in the United States ever since
the 1930s: Why the lack of class consciousness among economically exploited, lower class whites? The
Owsley thesis, that common whites were invested in and profited (both economically and culturally) from
the status quo, remained unchallenged until the mid-1970s, when historians such as Genovese offered the
alternative Gramscian view that the planter elite ruled through hegemony—that is, that lower class whites
did not challenge the planter elite because the planter elite was somehow successful in duping the lower
class whites into believing the system was just and equitable, good for the society as a whole. See Frank L.
Owsley, Plain Folk of the Old South (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1949) and Eugene D. Genovese, In Red
and Black: Marxian Explorations of Afro-American and Southern History (1971; reprint, Knoxville:
University of Tennessee Press, 1984). For a recent revival of the “plain folk” thesis, see I. A. Newby,
Plain Folk in the New South: Social Change and Cultural Persistence 1880-1915 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana
State University Press, 1989).
 Wray, Ur-Trash 21

14
For the most recent study, see Charles C. Bolton, Poor Whites of the Antebellum South: Tenants and
Laborers in Central North Carolina and Northeast Mississippi (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
1994).
15
Hahn goes on to argue that these smallholders played an important role in Populist and Independent
political opposition to the electoral parties of the planter elites and that “both pro- and anti- slavery forces
saw yeomen of the nonplantation South as decisive figures in the deepening sectional conflict” leading up
to the Civil War. Hahn, 31.