take on King’s revelations. Later, speaking for herself, Fanny declared ‘‘the
so-called pinelanders of Georgia...themostdegraded race of human
beings claiming Anglo-Saxon origin that can be found on the face of the
earth—filthy, lazy, ignorant, brutal, proud, penniless savages, without one
of the nobler attributes which have been found occasionally allied to the
vices of savage nature.’’^3
The characterizations—both King’s and Kemble’s—are ignorant and re-
flect, among other things, fear of fundamental disorder and a loathing of
the countercultural in brother Anglo-Saxons that had perplexed and dis-
gusted the planter class for generations. William Byrd II is usually credited
with invention of the ‘‘poor white trash’’ stereotype when he encountered
shiftless ‘‘lubbers’’ (as he termed them) in the Great Dismal Swamp. It was
Edmund Ruffin, however, who first published Byrd’sHistory of the Dividing
Linein hisFarmers’ Register. This was the era of a wild Southwest much cele-
brated and joked about by learned sojourners from more civilized places
—Davy Crockett in his outrageousAutobiography, for instance; Augustus
Baldwin Longstreet inGeorgia Scenes(); and later, Joseph G. Baldwin
inThe Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi().
Fullest elaboration and confirmation of Byrd’s disdain for human trash
actually awaited the twentieth century and the best-sellerdom of novelist
Erskine Caldwell. Crockett, Longstreet, Baldwin, and other antebellum tale
tellers and sketch writers may have condescended a bit, but mainly they
celebrated a rowdy, disordered southern backwoods filled with male char-
acters—poseurs, cheats, innocents (usually ‘‘Virginians’’), and boasters—
who anticipate the works of Mark Twain. Baldwin’s Ovid Bolus, Esq., is em-
blematic owing to his theatrical mendacity. As Baldwin wrote,
Some men are liars from interest; not because they have no regard for
truth, but because they have less regard for it than for gain: some are liars
from vanity, because they would rather be well thought of by others, than
have reason for thinking well of themselves: some are liars from a sort of
necessity, which overbears....Boluswasnoneofthese: he belonged to a
higher department of the fine arts, and to a higher class of professors of
this sort of Belles-Lettres. Bolus was a natural liar....Accordingly,hedid
not labor to lie: he lied with a relish: he lied with a coming appetite.... He
lied from the delight of invention and the charm of fictitious narrative.Of course Ovid Bolus was a lawyer; our eagerness to mock the profession
is timeless. But Bolus is also a representative backwoods white southerner.