Читать книгу The Politics of History - Howard Boone's Zinn - Страница 16

A hundred years before the Declaration of Independence, the first revolt broke out in the American colonies, not against England, but against the entrenched power of the Virginia aristocracy. A Royal Commission’s confidential report to the crown, after the rebellion had been suppressed and its leaders hanged, described the leader of the 1676 uprising, Nathaniel Bacon: ³

… a person whose lost and desperate fortunes had thrown him into that remote part of the world about fourteen months before and fram’d him fitt for such a purpose. … He was said to be about four or five and thirty yeares of age, indifferent tall but slender, black-hair’d and of an ominous, pensive, melancholly Aspect, of a pestilent and prevalent Logical discourse tending to atheisme. … he seduced the Vulgar and most ignorant people to believe (two thirds of each county being of that Sort) Soe that theire whole hearts and hopes were set now upon Bacon. Next he charges the Governour as negligent and wicked, treacherous and incapable, the Lawes and Taxes as unjust and oppressive and cryes up absolute necessity of redress. Thus Bacon encouraged the Tumult and as the unquiet crowd follow and adhere to him, he listeth them as they come in upon a large paper, writing their name circular wise, that their Ring-Leaders might not be found out. Having connur’d them into this circle, given them Brandy to wind up the charme, and enjoyn’d them by an oath to stick fast together and to him … and the oath being administered he went and infected New Kent County ripe for Rebellion.

The rebellion was a complex phenomenon, immediately stirred by the feeling of frontier farmers that the Virginia government was ignoring their needs, but its essence was a rising of a lower class against the privileges, political and economic, of a higher class. A contemporary of Bacon’s, Thomas Mathews, wrote of the debate in the Virginia Assembly over motions to inspect the tax structure, which the governor asked to be delayed, “tho’ such of that Indigent People as had no benefits from the Taxes groand under our being thus Overborn.” ⁴

Our first settlers brought with them across the ocean the class distinctions of the Old World. The American wilderness modified and complicated these distinctions, but it did not eliminate them. And the more the population grew—the greater the wealth, the more complex the society—the sharper became the differences between upper and lower classes. The white indentured servant supplied the basic lower-class labor force in the seventeenth century, the Negro slave in the eighteenth century, both supplemented by town laborers of various types. At the upper levels of society there grew a colonial aristocracy, whose way of life separated it more and more from the lower classes. The fact that in between these extremes was a fairly large middle class of independent small farmers mitigated the total amount of deprivation, and also served to block out—as this middle class has done throughout American history—the vision of a significant part of the population (about one-third of the total) in physical or economic bondage.

But even that landowning yeoman class, except for a small number who managed to push up through the social apertures, was shut off from real economic or political power. Bacon’s Rebellion, like a number of other colonial uprisings, was a spontaneous foaming of indignation on the part of this class. Nathaniel Bacon complained, a year before his revolt, in 1675: “The poverty of the country is such that all the power and sway is got into the hands of the rich, who by extortious advantages, having the common people in their debt, have always curbed and oppressed them in all manner of ways.”

By 1700, there were fifty families in Virginia with wealth equivalent to $50,000, a huge sum for those days, especially for a new frontier society. These fifty families sat at the pinnacle of a pyramid whose broad base was the labor of indentured servants and slaves. The rich families owned the plantations, sat on the governor’s council, served as local magistrates. In Maryland, where the settlers were under the rule of a semi-feudal proprietor whose right to control the whole colony had been granted by the English King, there were five revolts between 1650 and 1689 against the proprietor.

The claim that America was “born free” is sometimes traced to the fact that the new nation borrowed the ideas of John Locke. But it was Locke himself who wrote the “Fundamental Constitutions” of the Carolinas, which set up a feudal-type aristocracy, headed by eight seigniors, and eight barons, who would own 40 percent of the colony’s land. Only the head of a barony could be governor, the Fundamental Constitutions provided; and only owners of five hundred acres could be deputies in the assembly. The attempt of the proprietors to enforce these arrangements under frontier conditions led to conflict and martial law. The Fundamental Constitutions never were able to work as planned, but a small group of wealthy proprietors did run the colony as absentee landlords. A conflict over control of the land led to a revolt in 1719. While the immediate cause of the revolt was the land-hunger of five hundred poor immigrants, the uprising was taken over by the large rice planters and English merchants, who succeeded in getting rid of the proprietors in order to obtain a royal government which would favor their interests. In North Carolina, which became a separate crown colony, half a million acres were monopolized by large speculators by 1750, including all of the good farming country near the coast. Poor squatters on these lands fought all through that period over rent payments.

Similar battles with proprietors over land were fought by small farmers in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York. It was these same yeomen, constantly in debt, who battled against the colonial governments for the issuance of paper money. In Boston, debtors succeeded in issuing land bank notes worth fifty thousand pounds, and when the merchants refused to accept the paper money, farmers marched on the city. Leaders of the march were jailed, and the bank was outlawed. (Among the ruined men was the father of Sam Adams.) In Rhode Island, Newport merchants succeeded in prohibiting the wide distribution of paper money demanded by debtor-farmers.

New York was the closest thing to a feudal state in the American colonies. Under the patroonship system created by the Dutch along the Hudson River, gigantic landed baronies were created, where the barons held not only economic, but political and judicial control over the lives of their tenants. One Hudson Valley estate alone—Rensselaerswyck—included 700,000 acres. And when the British took over in 1664, the huge estates continued, with the Duke of York, as proprietor, holding the powers of a despot.

Governor Fletcher of New York gave one of his favorites, Captain John Evans, an area of close to a half-million acres, for a token annual payment of twenty shillings. Under Fletcher, three-fourths of the land in New York was granted to about thirty people. The only difference with Lord Cornbury as governor, in the early 1700’s, was that he favored groups of speculators, rather than individuals. One grant was for two million acres.

The desperate revolt in New York of Jacob Leisler and his followers, in 1689, was at bottom a class uprising against a combination of wealthy landowners and merchants, with the religious and political issues of England’s Glorious Revolution supplying a convenient starting point. Leisler was hanged, and despite the gradual introduction of some political reforms, the handing out of huge estates to a privileged few continued, sharpening the lines between very rich and very poor. The period before the American Revolution in New York was full of tenant outbreaks, whose class character was sometimes concealed by the fact that they were frequently led and used by rival groups of land speculators.

Harassed and ignored small farmers were helpless against the power of colonial land speculators, merchants, and government officials. A petition came from the town of Deerfield in 1678 to the Massachusetts General Court: “You may be pleased to know that the very principle and best of the land; the best for soile; the best for situation; as lying in ye center and midle of the town: and as to quantity, nere half, belongs unto eight or nine proprietors.…” Also within the colonial working class should be counted tens of thousands of sailors and dockworkers of various kinds—about thirty-five hundred counted in Salem and Boston alone in the early eighteenth century.

There is not much to be said here about the slaves in colonial society, except to reiterate that no account of class relationships and distribution of wealth and power in America can, in justice, leave the slaves out of the reckoning; to do so is to accept the pre-Civil War judgment of them as less than human beings. It needs to be emphasized that slaves constituted one-fifth of the entire colonial population by the time of the Revolution and were in all of the colonies, North and South, though their heaviest concentration was in Virginia and South Carolina (where they were a majority of the population). That their treatment as the bottom class was universal is shown clearly by the law passed in 1693 by the Quaker legislature of Pennsylvania, authorizing any persons “to take up Negroes, male or female, whom they shall find gadding abroad … to take them to jail, there to remain that night, and that without meat or drink, and to cause them to be publicly whipped next morning with 39 lashes, well laid on their bare backs, at which their said master or mistress shall pay 15 pence to the whipper.”

On March 28, 1771, the Virginia Gazette ran an announcement: “Just arrived at Leedstown, the Ship Justitia, with about one Hundred Healthy Servants, Men Women & Boys.… The Sale will commence on Tuesday the 2nd of April.…” Ranking just above the slave in the colonial class structure, and yet so often close to the slave in misery and deprivation that he has often been termed “a semi-slave” was the indentured servant. Indentured servants, the chief source of labor in the seventeenth century, continued to pour into the colonies in the eighteenth century; two-thirds of Pennsylvania’s immigrants, for instance, were white servants. The institution of indenture did not die out until the early part of the nineteenth century, and it is probable that more than a quarter of a million persons served as indentured servants during the colonial period. These were indigent Europeans who, in return for passage to America, signed contracts (either voluntarily or by force, for many were convicts and vagrants in England) guaranteeing five or seven years of servile labor to an American master.

To this day, the way people travel is a key to their social and economic class; in colonial times this was true to the point of death. The indentured servants were at times packed into ships much like the screaming, dying African slaves, with as many as six hundred forced into a boat meant to carry three hundred. On one trip thirty-two children were thrown into the ocean as a result of starvation and disease.^*

Indentured servants had some rights that slaves did not have, like the right to sue in court, but the court was generally friendlier to the owner than to the servant. They could not marry without permission, could be separated from their families at will, could be whipped for various offenses. Pennsylvania law in the seventeenth century said that marriage of servants “without the consent of the Masters … shall be proceeded against as for Adultery, or fornication, and Children to be reputed as Bastards.” ⁵ The great numbers of ads for runaway servants tell something about the conditions under which they lived and worked, conditions adjudicated by judges who took the word of the master, one contemporary observer noted, “ten to one.” ⁶

Returning to Germany from America in the mid-eighteenth century, Gottlieb Mittelburg wrote of the privations of his fellow Germans in servitude in Pennsylvania. He said many asked him to let others in Germany know what they were suffering so they would not be enticed into slavery. Contemporary accounts of the good living conditions of indentured servants need to be taken cautiously in view of the fact that most of these were written for the purpose of inducing immigration. They should be placed against letters like the following, written at the time: “Whoever is well off in Europe better remain there. Here is misery and distress, same as everywhere, and for certain persons and conditions incomparably more than in Europe.” And:

O Dear Father, belive what I am going to relate the words of truth and sincerity, and Ballance my former bad conduct to my sufferings here, and then I am sure you’ll pitty your Distressed Daughter, What we unfortunat English people suffer here is beyond the probability of you in England to conceive, let it suffice that I one of the unhappy Number, am toiling almost Day and Night, and very often in the Horses druggery … and then tied up and whipp’d to that Degree that you’d not serve an Annimal, scarce any thing but Indian Corn and Salt to eat and that even begrudged nay many Negroes are better used, almost naked, no shoes nor stockings to wear, and the comfort after slaving dureing Masters pleasure, what rest we get is to rap ourselve up in a Blanket and ly upon the Ground, this is the deplorable condition your poor Betty endures.…⁷

John Adams wrote about Massachusetts, as late as the Revolutionary period: “Perhaps it may be said that in America we have no distinctions of ranks …; but have we not laborers, yeomen, gentlemen, esquires, honorable gentlemen, and excellent gentlemen?” There were rich and poor in the colonies, and the distinction was clear not only in economic and political power, but in every aspect of daily living. Poor and rich lived in different kinds of houses, ate different foods, entertained themselves in different ways, were addressed with different degrees of respect, and were buried differently. An early eighteenth-century traveler stopped off at “a dirty poor house, with hardly anything in it but children, that wallowed about like so many pigs” and in another home was “forced to pig together” with ten people in a room.

By the latter part of that century, prosperous merchants and planters lived in lavish mansions with ornate Chippendale furniture and elaborate china, drank claret, port, and Madeira (while the poor drank “kill-devil” rum). Even frontier societies can support an idle aristocracy, if the differences in wealth are sharp enough. Josiah Quincy wrote about a sojourn in Maryland: “I spent yesterday chiefly with young men of fortune; they were gamblers and cockfighters, hound-breeders and horse-jockies.”

In Massachusetts, the law forbade a woman from wearing silk hoods and scarves unless her husband was worth two hundred pounds. The upper class were called Master and Mistress, the ordinary people Goodman and Goodwife. The upper class did not get whippings if they broke the law. The poor did. One-fifth to one-sixth of the population were servants in seventeenth-century Massachusetts.

In a study of five important colonial towns—Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Newport, Charles Town—Carl Bridenbaugh concludes: “The colonists who came to settle in the villages brought with them the social order then existing in England or Holland, and sought with considerable success to set up a similar system in America.” They “were thoroughly indoctrinated with prevailing ideas of social inequality.… and they certainly had never heard of a classless society.” ⁸ His work enables us to give quick sketches of the class society in these five towns.

BOSTON: “The leaders of early Boston were gentlemen of considerable wealth who, in association with the clergy, eagerly sought to preserve in America the social arrangements of the Mother Country. By means of their control of trade and commerce, by their political domination of the inhabitants through church and Town Meeting, and by careful marriage alliances among themselves, members of this little oligarchy laid the foundations for an aristocratic class in seventeenth century Boston.” ⁹ Rich merchants erected mansions, persons “of Qualitie” traveled in coaches or sedan chairs, had their portraits painted, wore periwigs, and filled themselves with rich food and Madeira. At times of crisis, the maldistribution of wealth brought food shortages, and one night in 1713, a Bostonian recorded “the Riot Committed that night … by 200 people in the Comon, thinking to find Corn there.”

It was in that year that Cotton Mather wrote: “… the distressed Families of the Poor to which I dispense, or procure needful Relief, are now so many, and of such daily Occurrence, that it is needless for me here to mention them.” The Bostonian rich lived in “elaborate town houses, beautifully appointed, and filled with elegant furniture … a corps of servants, black and white.… Boston gentlewomen dressed in the latest and most expensive London clothese and bedecked themselves with lavish jewelry.” The rich began to spend so much money on elaborate funerals that the General Court had to pass laws against extraordinary funeral expenses.

NEWPORT: As in Boston, Bridenbaugh finds “the town meetings, while ostensibly democratic, were in reality controlled year after year by the same group of merchant aristocrats, who secured most of the important offices. …” A contemporary described the Newport merchant aristocracy: “… the men in flaming scarlet coats and waistcoats, laced and fringed with brightest glaring yellow. The Sly Quakers, not venturing on these charming coats and waistcoats, yet loving finery, figured away with plate on their sideboards.” Common sailors, warehousemen, dockworkers formed the lower strata of town society (with slaves and servants below them). In the summer of 1730 a quarrel between the “gentleman’s party” and one representing town workers led to a mob rising in the town.

NEW YORK: Negro slaves made up a much larger part of the working class in Northern towns than is generally recognized. In 1720, of New York’s population of 7000, 1600 were Negroes, and Wall Street was designated as the market place where slaveowners could hire them out by the day or the week. In the bloody Negro insurrection of 1712 in New York City, twenty-one slaves were executed.

When, in 1735, John Van Zandt horsewhipped his slave to death for having been found on the streets by the night watch, the New York City coroner’s jury said: “The Correction given by the Master was not the Cause of his Death … but it was by the visitation of God.” In 1741, another Negro insurrection in New York led to the burning to death of fifteen Negroes, the hanging of eight more.

The New York aristocracy was the most ostentatious of all. Bridenbaugh tells of: “Window hangings of camlet, japanned tables, gold-framed looking glasses, spinets and massive eight-day clocks.… richly carved furniture, jewels and silverplate.… Black house servants.” The middle classes lived fairly comfortably, but far below the style of the rich; poor laborers and free Negroes, just above the servant-slave rank, lived at the edge of poverty.

A letter to Peter Zenger’s New York Journal in 1737 spoke of the poor children in New York: “I believe it would be a very shocking Appearance to a moralized Heathen, were he to meet with an Object in Human Shape, half starv’d with Cold, with Cloathes out at the Elbows, Knees through the Breeches, Hair standing on end.… From the age about four to fourteen they spend their Days in the Streets.… then they are put out as Apprentices, perhaps four, five, or six years.…”

With variations in detail, the sharpness of class distinctions were similar in Charles Town and Philadelphia.