by LEWIS L. LAPHAM
Mankind before the Flood (1615). Cornelis Cornelisz (Dutch,1562-1638) IMAGE/Saatchi Gallery
Considerations of body and mind.
Jefferson was a philosopher, politician, and gentleman farmer who answered his uplifting question with the drafting of the Declaration of Independence, the founding of the University of Virginia, and the begetting of his image on those among his slaves he deemed worthy of attention. Live births to black women in his possession increased the extent and value of his property, and the master of Monticello was not alone among the founding fathers in viewing human flesh as a consumer good and service. The point bears mentioning in the context of this year’s presidential election. On the campaign roads to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump juggle the weights and measures of the flesh—its color, cost, gender, sell-by date, and stereotype—that ground the election on the divisions of race and class.
The divisions were present at the American creation. The planting of colonies in seventeenth-century America conformed to the design of Europe’s medieval socioeconomic structures, feudal arrangements of privilege and subordination, not to an originalist democracy. The aristocratic promoters of the project received land as a gift from the English king; the improvement of the property required immigrants (God-fearing or fortune-seeking) skilled as fishermen, farmers, salt makers, and mechanics. Their numbers were unequal to the tasks at hand, and in both the plantation South and merchant North the developers imported African slaves as well as “waste people” dredged from the slums of Jacobean England—vagrants, convicts, thieves, bankrupts, strumpets, vagabonds, lunatics, and bawds obliged to pay their passage across the Atlantic with terms of indentured labor on its western shore.
The prosperous gentry already settled on that shore regarded the shipments of “human filth” as night soil drained from Old World sewers to fertilize New World fields and forests. By the time the colonies declared their independence from the British crown, the newborn American body politic had been sectioned, like the carcass of a butchered cow, into the pounds and pence of prime and subprime flesh.
Few signatories to the declaration were of the opinion that all men are created equal. Maybe in the eye of God, but not in the bestowing of pews in Boston’s Old North Church, in the streets of Benjamin Franklin’s Philadelphia, on George Washington’s Mount Vernon estate. The Calvinist doctrine of predestination divided the Massachusetts flock of Christian sheep into damned and saved, Cotton Mather in 1696 reminding the servants in his midst, “You are the animate, separate, active instruments of other men…your tongues, your hands, your feet, are your masters, and they should move according to the will of your masters.”
Franklin, enlightened businessman and founder of libraries, looked upon the Philadelphia rabble as coarse material that maybe could be brushed and combed into an acceptable grade of bourgeois broadcloth. His Poor Richard’s Almanack offered a program for turning sow’s ears if not yet into silk purses then into useful tradesmen furnished with a “happy mediocrity.” For poor white children in Virginia, Jefferson proposed a scheme of public education he described as “raking from the rubbish” the scraps of intellect and talent worth the trouble of further cultivation. The majority were released into a wilderness of ignorance and poverty, their declining fortunes recalled this past summer in Nancy Isenberg’s timely book White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America. A professor of American history at Louisiana State University, she follows the trail of the unwholesome poor on the Atlantic Seaboard (in Virginia and the Carolinas, Massachusetts and New York) dispersed into the westward-moving breeds of an American underclass (“hillbilly,” “cracker,” “Okie,” “redneck”) now said to be voting for Donald Trump.
Isenberg’s story is not untold, but in our schools and opinion-making media it is seldom remembered and preferably forgotten. Black lives have always mattered less than white lives, and so have rich lives mattered more than poor lives. Jefferson had been clear on the point in a letter to John Langdon in 1810: “Money, and not morality, is the principle of commerce and commercial nations.”
At no moment in its history has America declared a lasting peace between the haves and the have-nots. Temporary cessation of hostilities but no permanent bridging of the social divide between debtor and creditor, and never has an equal value been assigned to the flesh decorating high-end capital and degrading low-end labor. Throughout most of the eighteenth century, the academic ranking of students at Yale College aligned with the social standing of their fathers; the nineteenth century’s Industrial Revolution brought with it a steady state of class warfare in New Jerusalem’s satanic mills, factories, and mines.
Lapham’s Quarterly for more