Читать книгу A People's History of the United States: Teaching Edition - Howard Boone's Zinn - Страница 14
ОглавлениеPersons of Mean and Vile Condition
In 1676, seventy years after Virginia was founded, a hundred years before it supplied leadership for the American Revolution, that colony faced a rebellion of white frontiersmen, joined by slaves and servants, a rebellion so threatening that the governor had to flee the burning capital of Jamestown and England decided to send a thousand soldiers across the Atlantic, hoping to maintain order among forty thousand colonists. This was Bacon’s Rebellion. After the uprising was suppressed, its leader, Nathaniel Bacon, dead and his associates hanged, was described in a Royal Commission report:
He seduced the Vulgar and most ignorant people to believe (two thirds of each county being of that Sort) Soe that their 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.
Bacon’s Rebellion began with conflict over how to deal with the Indians, who were close by, on the western frontier, constantly threatening. Whites who had been ignored when huge land grants around Jamestown were given away had gone west to find land, and there they encountered Indians. Were those frontier Virginians resentful that the politicos and landed aristocrats who controlled the colony’s government in Jamestown first pushed them westward into Indian territory and then seemed indecisive in fighting the Indians? That might explain the character of their rebellion, not easily classifiable as either antiaristocrat or anti-Indian, because it was both.
And the governor, William Berkeley, and his Jamestown crowd—were they more conciliatory to the Indians (they wooed certain of them as spies and allies) now that they had monopolized the land in the East, could use frontier whites as a buffer, and needed peace? The desperation of the government in suppressing the rebellion seemed to have a double motive: developing an Indian policy that would divide Indians in order to control them, and teaching the poor whites of Virginia that rebellion did not pay—by a show of superior force, by calling for troops from England itself, by mass hanging.
Times were hard in 1676. “There was genuine distress, genuine poverty.… All contemporary sources speak of the great mass of people as living in severe economic straits,” writes Wilcomb Washburn, who, using British colonial records, has done an exhaustive study of Bacon’s Rebellion.
Bacon himself had a good bit of land and was probably more enthusiastic about killing Indians than about redressing the grievances of the poor. But he became a symbol of mass resentment against the Virginia establishment and was elected in the spring of 1676 to the House of Burgesses. When he insisted on organizing armed detachments to fight the Indians, outside official control, Berkeley proclaimed him a rebel and had him captured, whereupon two thousand Virginians marched into Jamestown to support him. Berkeley let Bacon go, in return for an apology, but Bacon went off, gathered his militia, and began raiding the Indians.
Bacon’s “Declaration of the People” of July 1676 shows a mixture of populist resentment against the rich and frontier hatred of the Indians. It indicted the Berkeley administration for unjust taxes, for putting favorites in high positions, for monopolizing the beaver trade, and for not protecting the western farmers from the Indians.
But in the fall, Bacon, aged twenty-nine, fell sick and died, because of, as a contemporary put it, “swarmes of Vermyn that bred in his body.”
The rebellion didn’t last long after that. A ship armed with thirty guns, cruising the York River, became the base for securing order, and its captain, Thomas Grantham, used force and deception to disarm the last rebel forces. Coming upon the chief garrison of the rebellion, he found four hundred armed Englishmen and Negroes, a mixture of freemen, servants, and slaves. He promised to pardon everyone, to give freedom to slaves and servants, but when they got into the boat, he trained his big guns on them, disarmed them, and eventually delivered the slaves and servants to their masters. The remaining garrisons were overcome one by one. Twenty-three rebel leaders were hanged.
It was a complex chain of oppression in Virginia. The Indians were plundered by white frontiersmen, who were taxed and controlled by the Jamestown elite. And the whole colony was being exploited by England, which bought the colonists’ tobacco at prices it dictated and made one hundred thousand pounds a year for the king.
From the testimony of the governor himself, the rebellion against him had the overwhelming support of the Virginia population. A member of his council reported that the defection was “almost general” and laid it to “the Lewd dispositions of some Persons of desperate Fortunes” who had “the Vaine hopes of takeing the Countrey wholley out of his Majesty’s handes into their owne.” Another member of the Governor’s Council, Richard Lee, noted that Bacon’s Rebellion had started over Indian policy. But the “zealous inclination of the multitude” to support Bacon was due, he said, to “hopes of levelling.”
“Leveling” meant equalizing the wealth. Leveling was to be behind countless actions of poor whites against the rich in all the English colonies, in the century and a half before the Revolution.
The servants who joined Bacon’s Rebellion were part of a large underclass of miserably poor whites who came to the North American colonies from European cities whose governments were anxious to be rid of them. In England, the development of commerce and capitalism in the 1500s and 1600s, the enclosing of land for the production of wool, filled the cities with vagrant poor, and from the reign of Elizabeth on, laws were passed to punish them, imprison them in workhouses, or exile them.
In the 1600s and 1700s, by forced exile, by lures, promises, and lies, by kidnapping, by their urgent need to escape the living conditions of the home country, poor people wanting to go to America became commodities of profit for merchants, traders, ship captains, and eventually their masters in America.
After signing the indenture, in which the immigrants agreed to pay their cost of passage by working for a master for five or seven years, they were often imprisoned until the ship sailed, to make sure they did not run away. In the year 1619, the Virginia House of Burgesses, born that year as the first representative assembly in America (it was also the year of the first importation of black slaves), provided for the recording and enforcing of contracts between servants and masters. As in any contract between unequal powers, the parties appeared on paper as equals, but enforcement was far easier for master than for servant.
The voyage to America lasted eight, ten, or twelve weeks, and the servants were packed into ships with the same fanatic concern for profits that marked the slave ships. If the weather was bad, and the trip took too long, they ran out of food. Gottlieb Mittelberger, a musician, traveling from Germany to America around 1750, wrote about his voyage:
During the journey the ship is full of pitiful signs of distress—smells, fumes, horrors, vomiting, various kinds of sea sickness, fever, dysentery, headaches, heat, constipation, boils, scurvy, cancer, mouth-rot, and similar afflictions, all of them caused by the age and the high salted state of the food, especially of the meat, as well as by the very bad and filthy water…. Add to all that shortage of food, hunger, thirst, frost, heat, dampness, fear, misery, vexation, and lamentation as well as other troubles.… On board our ship, on a day on which we had a great storm, a woman about to give birth and unable to deliver under the circumstances, was pushed through one of the portholes into the sea.…
Indentured servants were bought and sold like slaves. An announcement in the Virginia Gazette, March 28, 1771, read:
“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.”
Against the rosy accounts of better living standards in the Americas one must place many others, like one immigrant’s letter from America: “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.”
Beatings and whippings were common. Servant women were raped. In Virginia in the 1660s, a master was convicted of raping two women servants. He also was known to beat his own wife and children; he had whipped and chained another servant until he died. The master was berated by the court, but specifically cleared on the rape charge, despite overwhelming evidence.
The master tried to control completely the sexual lives of the servants. It was in his economic interest to keep women servants from marrying or from having sexual relations, because childbearing would interfere with work. Benjamin Franklin, writing as “Poor Richard” in 1736, gave advice to his readers: “Let thy maidservant be faithful, strong, and homely.”
Sometimes servants organized rebellions, but one did not find on the mainland the kind of large-scale conspiracies of servants that existed, for instance, on Barbados in the West Indies.
Despite the rarity of servants’ rebellions, the threat was always there, and masters were fearful. After Bacon’s Rebellion, two companies of English soldiers remained in Virginia to guard against future trouble, and their presence was defended in a report to the Lords of Trade and Plantation saying: “Virginia is at present poor and more populous than ever. There is great apprehension of a rising among the servants, owing to their great necessities and want of clothes; they may plunder the storehouses and ships.”
Escape was easier than rebellion. “Numerous instances of mass desertions by white servants took place in the Southern colonies,” reports Richard Morris (Government and Labor in Early America), on the basis of an inspection of colonial newspapers in the 1700s. “The atmosphere of seventeenth-century Virginia,” he says, “was charged with plots and rumors of combinations of servants to run away.”
The mechanism of control was formidable. Strangers had to show passports or certificates to prove they were freemen. Agreements among the colonies provided for the extradition of fugitive servants (these became the basis of the clause in the U.S. Constitution that persons “held to Service or Labor in one State…escaping into another… shall be delivered up…”).
Sometimes, servants went on strike. One Maryland master complained to the Provincial Court in 1663 that his servants did “peremptorily and positively refuse to goe and doe their ordinary labor.” The servants responded that they were fed only “Beanes and Bread” and they were “soe weake, wee are not able to perform the imploym’ts hee puts us uppon.” They were given thirty lashes by the court.
More than half the colonists who came to the North American shores in the colonial period came as servants. They were mostly English in the seventeenth century, Irish and German in the eighteenth century. More and more, slaves replaced them, as they ran away to freedom or finished their time, but as late as 1755, white servants made up 10 percent of the population of Maryland.
What happened to these servants after they became free? There are cheerful accounts in which they rise to prosperity, becoming landowners and important figures. But Abbot Smith, after a careful study (Colonists in Bondage), concludes that colonial society “was not democratic and certainly not equalitarian; it was dominated by men who had money enough to make others work for them.” And: “Few of these men were descended from indentured servants, and practically none had themselves been of this class.”
It seems quite clear that class lines hardened through the colonial period; the distinction between rich and poor became sharper. By 1700 there were fifty rich families in Virginia, with wealth equivalent to fifty thousand pounds (a huge sum in those days), who lived off the labor of black slaves and white servants, owned the plantations, sat on the governor’s council, served as local magistrates. In Maryland, the settlers were ruled by a proprietor whose right of total control over the colony had been granted by the English king. Between 1650 and 1689 there were five revolts against the proprietor.
Carl Bridenbaugh’s study of colonial cities, Cities in the Wilderness, reveals a clear-cut class system. He finds: “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.”
At the very start of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630, the governor, John Winthrop, had declared the philosophy of the rulers: “in all times some must be rich, some poore, some highe and eminent in power and dignitie; others meane and in subjection.”
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. 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 laying in ye center and midle of the town: and as to quantity, nere half, belongs unto eight or nine proprietors.…”
New York in the colonial period was like a feudal kingdom. The Dutch had set up a patroonship system along the Hudson River, with enormous landed estates, where the barons controlled completely the lives of their tenants. In 1689, many of the grievances of the poor were mixed up in the farmers’ revolt of Jacob Leisler and his group. Leisler was hanged, and the parceling out of huge estates continued. Under Governor Benjamin Fletcher, three-fourths of the land in New York was granted to about thirty people. He gave a friend a half million acres for a token annual payment of thirty shillings.
In 1700, New York City church wardens had asked for funds from the common council because “the Crys of the poor and Impotent for want of Relief are Extreamly Grevious.” In the 1730s, demand began to grow for institutions to contain the “many Beggarly people daily suffered to wander about the Streets.”
A letter to Peter Zenger’s New York Journal va. 1737 described the poor street urchin of New York as “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.…”
The colonies grew fast in the 1700s. English settlers were joined by Scotch-Irish and German immigrants. Black slaves were pouring in; they were 8 percent of the population in 1690; 21 percent in 1770. The population of the colonies was 250,000 in 1700; 1,600,000 by 1760. Agriculture was growing. Small manufacturing was developing. Shipping and trading were expanding. The big cities—Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston—were doubling and tripling in size.
Through all that growth, the upper class was getting most of the benefits and monopolized political power. In Boston, by 1770, the top 1 percent of property owners owned 44 percent of the wealth.
Everywhere the poor were struggling to stay alive, simply to keep from freezing in cold weather. All the cities built poorhouses in the 1730s, not just for old people, widows, cripples, and orphans, but for unemployed, war veterans, new immigrants. In New York, at midcentury, the city almshouse, built for one hundred poor, was housing over four hundred. A Philadelphia citizen wrote in 1748: “It is remarkable what an increase of the number of Beggars there is about this town this winter.” In 1757, Boston officials spoke of “a great Number of Poor…who can scarcely procure from day to day daily Bread for themselves & Families.”
The colonies, it seems, were societies of contending classes—a fact obscured by the emphasis, in traditional histories, on the external struggle against England, the unity of colonists in the Revolution. The country therefore was not “born free” but born slave and free, servant and master, tenant and landlord, poor and rich. As a result, the political authorities were opposed “frequently, vociferously, and sometimes violently,” according to Gary Nash. “Outbreaks of disorder punctuated the last quarter of the seventeenth century, toppling established governments in Massachusetts, New York, Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina.”
Free white workers were better off than slaves or servants, but they still resented unfair treatment by the wealthier classes. A severe food shortage in Boston in 1713 brought a warning from town selectmen to the General Assembly of Massachusetts, saying that the “threatening scarcity of provisions” had led to such “extravagant prices that the necessities of the poor in the approaching winter must needs be very pressing.” Andrew Belcher, a wealthy merchant, was exporting grain to the Caribbean because the profit was greater there. On May 19, two hundred people rioted on the Boston Common. They attacked Belcher’s ships, broke into his warehouses looking for corn, and shot the lieutenant governor when he tried to interfere.
In the 1730s, in Boston, people protesting the high prices established by merchants demolished the public market in Dock Square while (as a conservative writer complained) “murmuring against the Government & the rich people.” No one was arrested, after the demonstrators warned that arrests would bring “Five Hundred Men in Solemn League and Covenent” who would destroy other markets set up for the benefit of rich merchants.
Bostonians rioted also against impressment, in which men were drafted for naval service. They surrounded the house of the governor, beat up the sheriff, locked up a deputy sheriff, and stormed the townhouse where the General Court sat. The militia did not respond when called to put them down, and the governor fled. The crowd was condemned by a merchants’ group as a “Riotous Tumultuous Assembly of Foreign Seamen, Servants, Negroes, and Other Persons of Mean and Vile Condition.”
In New Jersey in the 1740s and 1750s, poor farmers occupying land, over which they and the landowners had rival claims, rioted when rents were demanded of them. In 1745, Samuel Baldwin, who had long lived on his land and who held an Indian title to it, was arrested for nonpayment of rent to the proprietor and taken to the Newark jail. A contemporary described what happened then: “The People in general, supposing the Design of the Proprietors was to ruin them…went to the Prison, opened the Door, took out Baldwin.”
Through this period, England was fighting a series of wars (Queen Anne’s War in the early 1700s, King George’s War in the 1730s). Some merchants made fortunes from these wars, but for most people they meant higher taxes, unemployment, poverty. An anonymous pamphleteer in Massachusetts, writing angrily after King George’s War, described the situation: “Poverty and Discontent appear in every Face (except the Countenances of the Rich) and dwell upon every Tongue.” He spoke of a few men, fed by “Lust of Power, Lust of Fame, Lust of Money,” who got rich during the war. “No Wonder such Men can build Ships, Houses, buy Farms, set up their Coaches, Chariots, live very splendidly, purchase Fame, Posts of Honour.” He called them “Birds of prey.… Enemies to all Communities—wherever they live.”
The forced service of seamen led to a riot against impressment in Boston in 1747. Then crowds turned against Thomas Hutchinson, a rich merchant and colonial official who had backed the governor in putting down the riot, and who also designed a currency plan for Massachusetts which seemed to discriminate against the poor. Hutchinson’s house burned down, mysteriously, and a crowd gathered in the street, cursing Hutchinson and shouting, “Let it burn!”
By the years of the Revolutionary crisis, the 1760s, the wealthy elite that controlled the British colonies on the American mainland had 150 years of experience, had learned certain things about how to rule. They had various fears, but also had developed tactics to deal with what they feared.
With the problem of Indian hostility and the danger of slave revolts, the colonial elite had to consider the class anger of poor whites—servants, tenants, the city poor, the propertyless, the taxpayer, the soldier and sailor. As the colonies passed their hundredth year and went into the middle of the 1700s, as the gap between rich and poor widened, as violence and the threat of violence increased, the problem of control became more serious.
What if these different despised groups—the Indians, the slaves, the poor whites—should combine? Even before there were so many blacks, in the seventeenth century, there was, as Abbot Smith puts it, “a lively fear that servants would join with Negroes or Indians to overcome the small number of masters.”
Bacon’s Rebellion was instructive: to conciliate a diminishing Indian population at the expense of infuriating a coalition of white frontiersmen was very risky. Better to make war on the Indian, gain the support of the white, divert possible class conflict by turning poor whites against Indians for the security of the elite.
Might blacks and Indians combine against the white enemy? In the Carolinas, whites were outnumbered by black slaves and nearby Indian tribes; in the 1750s, twenty-five thousand whites faced forty thousand black slaves, with sixty thousand Creek, Cherokee, Choctaw, and Chickasaw Indians in the area.
The white rulers of the Carolinas seemed to be conscious of the need for a policy, as one of them put it, “to make Indians & Negros a checque upon each other lest by their Vastly Superior Numbers we should be crushed by one or the other.” And so laws were passed prohibiting free blacks from traveling in Indian country. Treaties with Indian tribes contained clauses requiring the return of fugitive slaves. Governor Lyttle-town of South Carolina wrote in 1738: “It has always been the policy of this government to create an aversion in them [Indians] to Negroes.”
Blacks ran away to Indian villages, and the Creeks and Cherokees harbored runaway slaves by the hundreds. Many of these were amalgamated into the Indian tribes, married, produced children. But the combination of harsh slave codes and bribes to the Indians to help put down black rebels kept things under control.
It was the potential combination of poor whites and blacks that caused the most fear among the wealthy white planters. If there had been the natural racial repugnance that some theorists have assumed, control would have been easier. But sexual attraction was powerful, across racial lines. In 1743, a grand jury in Charleston, South Carolina, denounced “The Too Common Practice of Criminal Conversation with Negro and other Slave Wenches in this Province.”
What made Bacon’s Rebellion especially fearsome for the rulers of Virginia was that black slaves and white servants joined forces. All through those early years, black and white slaves and servants ran away together, as shown both by the laws passed to stop this and the records of the courts. A letter from the southern colonies in 1682 complained of “no white men to superintend our negroes, or repress an insurrection of negroes.…” A report to the English government in 1721 said that in South Carolina “black slaves have lately attempted and were very near succeeding in a new revolution…and therefore, it may be necessary… to propose some new law for encouraging the entertainment of more white servants in the future.”
This fear may help explain why Parliament, in 1717, made transportation to the New World a legal punishment for crime. After that, tens of thousands of convicts could be sent to Virginia, Maryland, and other colonies.
Racism was becoming more and more practical. Edmund Morgan, on the basis of his careful study of slavery in Virginia, sees racism not as “natural” to black-white difference, but something coming out of class scorn, a realistic device for control. “If freemen with disappointed hopes should make common cause with slaves of desperate hope, the results might be worse than anything Bacon had done. The answer to the problem, obvious if unspoken and only gradually recognized, was racism, to separate dangerous free whites from dangerous black slaves by a screen of racial contempt.”
There was still another control which became handy as the colonies grew, and which had crucial consequences for the continued rule of the elite throughout American history. Along with the very rich and the very poor, there developed a white middle class of small planters, independent farmers, city artisans, who, given small rewards for joining forces with merchants and planters, would be a solid buffer against black slaves, frontier Indians, and very poor whites.
While it was the rich who ruled Boston, there were political jobs available for the moderately well-off, as “cullers of staves,” “measurer of Coal Baskets,” “Fence Viewer.” Aubrey Land found in Maryland a class of small planters who were not “the beneficiary” of the planting society as the rich were, but who had the distinction of being called planters, and who were “respectable citizens.”
The Pennsylvania Journalwrote in 1756: “The people of this province are generally of the middling sort, and at present pretty much upon a level. They are chiefly industrious farmers, artificers or men in trade”.… To call them “the people” was to omit black slaves, white servants, displaced Indians. And the term “middle class” concealed a fact long true about this country, that, as Richard Hofstadter said: “It was…a middle-class society governed for the most part by its upper classes.”
Those upper classes, to rule, needed to make concessions to the middle class, without damage to their own wealth or power, at the expense of slaves, Indians, and poor whites. This bought loyalty. And to bind that loyalty with something more powerful even than material advantage, the ruling group found, in the 1760s and 1770s, a wonderfully useful device. That device was the language of liberty and equality, which could unite just enough whites to fight a revolution against England, without ending either slavery or inequality.
Exercises
1. What was the economic condition of Virginia in 1676?
2. What is the evidence that Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676 “had the overwhelming support of the Virginia population”?
3. Why would a European man or woman sign an indenture? Was it a “choice” or were they compelled by “historical forces”?
4. Copy and fill in the chart below. Expand the chart by adding to the given criteria of comparison.
5. What happened when servants became free?
6. Which of the following is the most accurate characterization of the colonial economy, and WHY? Consider (without limiting yourself to) the following as criteria: closeness to actual event; how far removed from witnessing the event; degree of possibility of being an isolated event; degree of safety in generalizing from the specific; relevance of detail to question; how much the detail actually says about the entire colonial society.
a. In Boston, by 1770, the top 1% of property owners owned 44% of the wealth.
b. In New York [around 1750], the city almshouse, built for 100 poor, was housing over 400.
c. In 1757, Boston officials spoke of “a great Number of Poor…who can scarcely procure from day to day daily Bread for themselves & Families.”
d. According to the present day historian Gary Nash, “Outbreaks of disorder punctuated the last quarter of the seventeenth century [1675–1700], toppling established governments in Massachusetts, New York, Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina.”
e. In Boston in 1713, a town selectmen said that the “threatening scarcity of provisions” had led to such “extravagant prices that the necessities of the poor in the approaching winter must needs be very pressing.”
f. In New Jersey in 1745, Sam Baldwin was arrested for nonpayment of rent. “The People in general, supposing the Design of the Proprietors was to ruin them…went to the Prison, opened the Door, took out Baldwin.”
7. What experiences besides economic deprivation or hardship might have caused colonists to resent their local or state governments?
8. What was the greatest threat to the elite’s control over the colonists—a fear that was realized in Bacon’s Rebellion? What tactics did the wealthy elite/rich rulers adopt to prevent another Bacon’s Rebellion?
Activity: Reenact a Virginia Company stockholders meeting, in London, England, circa 1678.
