Holy Land, where some people buried their dead in caves, swine broke in
and consumed corpses. How then, did European Christians diverge? Medi-
evalists conjecture, to put it simply, that Christians ate pork to demonstrate
their non-Jewishness in times of anti-Semitic hysteria—not to mention the
pig’s ubiquity in European forests as a source of protein.
Whatever, modern Christians of the American South not only consumed
mountains of barbeque, but as we have observed, the great majority of the
white population—nonslaveholding or owners of very few—built a thriv-
ing economy on swine. The economy, in turn, was founded on colonial era
laws, beginning with Virginia’s, establishing the open range. Forests, great
enemy of civilization and light, would provide not only the countless miles
of fencing to protect crops but endless shelter and nourishment for ani-
mals ranging freely. Any forest—or unfenced creek bank, meadow, savan-
nah, swamp, or other wetland—no matter if privately held, was part of the
vast commons. The commons and the pig (sometimes the cow, as well) were
in turn the ordinary person’s, especially the poor person’s, wealth. This was
so because one did not have to devote cropland to feeding stock, except
a small portion, perhaps, before slaughter and home use of pork. By the
s and s, the range had been closed in the Northeast and most of
the Old Northwest, imposing reapportionment of farm resources on small
farmers and, among the smallest among them, outright privation. Not so
in the antebellum South, despite Edmund Ruffin’s best efforts to ‘‘reform’’
fence law in Virginia, during the s. In this sense the South was clearly
the more democratic region. Ruffin and legions of other planters raged that
poor neighbors’ beasts perennially damaged their fences, crops, and pas-
tures. When planters took owners of intrusive animals to court, juries were
usually unsympathetic to the planters. Ruffin and his ilk took no pleasure
in the knowledge that many landless, shabbily dressed men actually pos-
sessed modest wealth in animals—sustained on other men’s property. That
such men had the franchise, too, meant that the range was likely to remain
open.^7
Aside from their frequent damage to fences and crops, swine surely
affected the commons profoundly, given their numbers. Like cattle, they
fouled watercourses and their banks with wastes. They consumed plant
seedlings or killed plants by devouring their roots. Native squirrels had
gathered nuts of oak, chestnut, walnut, and other mast trees immemori-
ally before Europeans deposited the first pair of pigs on a North Ameri-
can shore. Now swarms of thousands of hogs—whether galloping freely or
herded through forests—scooped up uncountable nuts. Conceivably hogs