As debt slaves, they were obliged to repay the English commonwealth for their crimes by producing commodities for export. Among the first waves of workers were the convicts, who would be employed at heavy labor, felling trees and burning them for pitch, tar, and soap ash others would dig in the mines for gold, silver, iron, and copper. The land and the poor could be harvested together, to add to-rather than continue to subtract from-the nation’s wealth. And often done forcefully, as Bailyn’s book “The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675” explains in great detail.Įnglish writer Richard Hakluyt (1553-1616) envisioned America as becoming a workhouse, “a place where the surplus poor, the waste people of England, could be converted into economic assets. The poor and their ancestors remained in the underclass for the most part, and still are today.īritain saw sending the poor and criminals to distant lands as a good way to get rid of them.

It was the stigma of landlessness that would leave its mark on white trash from this day forward”.

This book makes the case that the poor arrived 500 years ago when America was first settled, and most of them never rose to the middle or upper classes because “land was the principal source of wealth, and those without any had little chance to escape servitude.

White trash 400 years