Читать книгу A People's History of the United States: Teaching Edition - Howard Boone's Zinn - Страница 15
ОглавлениеAround 1776, certain important people in the English colonies made a discovery that would prove enormously useful for the next two hundred years. They found that by creating a nation, a symbol, a legal unity called the United States, they could take over land, profits, and political power from favorites of the British Empire. In the process, they could hold back a number of potential rebellions and create a consensus of popular support for the rule of a new, privileged leadership.
When we look at the American Revolution this way, it was a work of genius, and the Founding Fathers deserve the awed tribute they have received over the centuries. They created the most effective system of national control devised in modern times and showed future generations of leaders the advantages of combining paternalism with command.
Starting with Bacon’s Rebellion in Virginia, by 1760 there had been eighteen uprisings aimed at overthrowing colonial governments. There had also been six black rebellions, from South Carolina to New York, and forty riots of various origins.
By this time also, there emerged, according to Jack Greene, “stable, coherent, effective and acknowledged local political and social elites.” And by the 1760s, this local leadership saw the possibility of directing much of the rebellious energy against England and her local officials. It was not a conscious conspiracy, but an accumulation of tactical responses.
After 1763, with England victorious in the Seven Years’ War (known in America as the French and Indian War), expelling France from North America, ambitious colonial leaders were no longer threatened by the French. They now had only two rivals left: the English and the Indians. The British, wooing the Indians, had declared Indian lands beyond the Appalachians out of bounds to whites (the Proclamation of 1763). Perhaps, once the British were out of the way, the Indians could be dealt with. Again, not a conscious, forethought strategy by the colonial elite, but a growing awareness as events developed.
With the French defeated, the British government could turn its attention to tightening control over the colonies. It needed revenues to pay for the war and looked to the colonies for that. Also, the colonial trade had become more and more important to the British economy, and more profitable: it had amounted to about 500,000 pounds in 1700 but by 1770 was worth 2,800,000 pounds.
So, the American leadership was less desirous of English rule, the English more in need of the colonists’ wealth. The elements for conflict were there.
The war with France had brought glory to the generals, death to the privates, wealth for the merchants, unemployment for the poor. There were twenty-five thousand people living in New York (there had been seven thousand in 1720) when the war ended. A newspaper editor wrote about the growing “Number of Beggers and wandering Poor” in the streets of the city. Letters in the papers questioned the distribution of wealth: “How often have our Streets been covered with Thousands of Barrels of Flour for trade, while our near Neighbors can hardly procure enough to make a Dumplin to satisfy hunger?”
Gary Nash’s study of city tax lists shows that by the early 1770s, the top 5 percent of Boston’s taxpayers controlled 49 percent of the city’s taxable assets. In Philadelphia and New York, too, wealth was more and more concentrated. Court-recorded wills show that by 1750 the wealthiest people in the cities were leaving twenty thousand pounds (equivalent to about $2.5 million today).
In Boston, the lower classes began to use the town meeting to vent their grievances. The governor of Massachusetts had written that in these town meetings “the meanest Inhabitants…by their constant Attendance there generally are the majority and outvote the Gentlemen, Merchants, Substantial Traders and all the better part of the Inhabitants.”
What seems to have happened in Boston is that certain lawyers, editors, and merchants of the upper classes, but excluded from the ruling circles close to England—men like James Otis and Samuel Adams—organized a “Boston Caucus” and through their oratory and their writing “molded laboring-class opinion, called the ‘mob’ into action, and shaped its behaviour.” This is Gary Nash’s description of Otis, who, he says, “keenly aware of the declining fortunes and the resentment of ordinary townspeople, was mirroring as well as molding popular opinion.”
We have here a forecast of the long history of American politics, the mobilization of lower-class energy by upper-class politicians, for their own purposes. This was not purely deception; it involved, in part, a genuine recognition of lower-class grievances, which helps to account for its effectiveness as a tactic over the centuries.
In 1762, Otis, speaking against the conservative rulers of the Massachusetts colony represented by Thomas Hutchinson, gave an example of the kind of rhetoric that a lawyer could use in mobilizing city mechanics and artisans:
I am forced to get my living by the labour of my hand; and the sweat of my brow, as most of you are and obliged to go thro’ good report and evil report, for bitter bread, earned under the frowns of some who have no natural or divine right to be above me, and entirely owe their grandeur and honor to grinding the faces of the poor.…
Boston seems to have been full of class anger in those days. In 1763, in the Boston Gazette, someone wrote that “a few persons in power” were promoting political projects “for keeping the people poor in order to make them humble.”
This accumulated sense of grievance against the rich in Boston may account for the explosiveness of mob action after the Stamp Act of 1765. Through this act, the British were taxing the colonial population to pay for the French war, in which colonists had suffered to expand the British Empire. That summer, a shoemaker named Ebenezer Macintosh led a mob in destroying the house of a rich Boston merchant named Andrew Oliver. Two weeks later, the crowd turned to the home of Thomas Hutchinson, symbol of the rich elite who ruled the colonies in the name of England. They smashed up his house with axes, drank the wine in his wine cellar, and looted the house of its furniture and other objects. A report by colony officials to England said that this was part of a larger scheme in which the houses of fifteen rich people were to be destroyed, as part of “a War of Plunder, of general levelling and taking away the Distinction of rich and poor.”
It was one of those moments in which fury against the rich went further than leaders like Otis wanted. Could class hatred be focused against the pro-British elite, and deflected from the nationalist elite? In New York, that same year of the Boston house attacks, someone wrote to the New York Gazette, “Is it equitable that 99, rather 999, should suffer for the Extravagance or Grandeur of one, especially when it is considered that men frequently owe their Wealth to the impoverishment of their Neighbors?” The leaders of the Revolution would worry about keeping such sentiments within limits.
Mechanics were demanding political democracy in the colonial cities: open meetings of representative assemblies, public galleries in the legislative halls, and the publishing of roll-call votes, so that constituents could check on representatives. They wanted open-air meetings where the population could participate in making policy, more equitable taxes, price controls, and the election of mechanics and other ordinary people to government posts.
During elections for the 1776 convention to frame a constitution for Pennsylvania, a Privates Committee urged voters to oppose “great and overgrown rich men…they will be too apt to be framing distinctions in society.” The Privates Committee drew up a bill of rights for the convention, including the statement that “an enormous proportion of property vested in a few individuals is dangerous to the rights, and destructive of the common happiness of mankind; and therefore every free state hath a right by its laws to discourage the possession of such property.”
In the countryside, where most people lived, there was a similar conflict of poor against rich—which political leaders would use to mobilize the population against England, granting some benefits for the rebellious poor, and many more for themselves in the process. The tenant riots in New Jersey in the 1740s, the New York tenant uprisings of the 1750s and 1760s in the Hudson Valley, and the rebellion in northeastern New York that led to the carving of Vermont out of New York State were all more than sporadic rioting. They were long-lasting social movements, highly organized, involving the creation of countergovernments.
In North Carolina, a “Regulator Movement” of white farmers was organized against wealthy and corrupt officials in the period from 1766 to 1771, exactly those years when, in the cities of the Northeast, agitation was growing against the British, crowding out class issues. The Regulators referred to themselves as “poor Industrious peasants,” as “labourers,” “the wretched poor,” “oppressed” by “rich and powerful…designing Monsters.” They resented the tax system, which was especially burdensome on the poor, and the combination of merchants and lawyers who worked in the courts to collect debts from the harassed farmers. The Regulators did not represent servants or slaves, but they did speak for small owners, squatters, and tenants.
In Orange County, North Carolina, in the 1760s, the Regulators organized to prevent the collection of taxes and the confiscation of the property of tax delinquents. Officials said “an absolute Insurrection of a dangerous tendency has broke out in Orange County,” and made military plans to suppress it. At one point seven hundred armed farmers forced the release of two arrested Regulator leaders. In another county, Anson, a local militia colonel complained of “the unparalleled tumults, Insurrections, and Commotions which at present distract this County.” At one point a hundred men broke up the proceedings at a county court.
The result of all this was that the assembly passed some mild reform legislation, but also an act “to prevent riots and tumults,” and the governor prepared to crush them militarily. In May of 1771 there was a decisive battle in which several thousand Regulators were defeated by a disciplined army using cannon. Six Regulators were hanged.
One consequence of this bitter conflict is that only a minority of the people in the Regulator counties seem to have participated as patriots in the Revolutionary War. Most of them probably remained neutral.
Fortunately for the Revolutionary movement, the key battles were being fought in the North, and here, in the cities, the colonial leaders had a divided white population; they could win over the mechanics, who were a kind of middle class, who had a stake in the fight against England, facing competition from English manufacturers. The biggest problem was to keep the propertyless people, who were unemployed and hungry in the crisis following the French war, under control.
In Boston, the economic grievances of the lowest classes mingled with anger against the British and exploded in mob violence. The leaders of the Independence movement wanted to use that mob energy against England, but also to contain it so that it would not demand too much from them.
A political group in Boston called the Loyal Nine—merchants, distillers, shipowners, and master craftsmen who opposed the Stamp Act—organized a procession in August 1765 to protest it. They put fifty master craftsmen at the head, but needed to mobilize shipworkers from the North End and mechanics and apprentices from the South End. Two or three thousand were in the procession (Negroes were excluded). They marched to the home of the stampmaster and burned his effigy. But after the “gentlemen” who organized the demonstration left, the crowd went further and destroyed some of the stampmaster’s property.
Now a town meeting was called and the same leaders who had planned the demonstration denounced the violence and disavowed the actions of the crowd. And when the Stamp Act was repealed, due to overwhelming resistance, the conservative leaders severed their connections with the rioters. They held annual celebrations of the first anti—Stamp Act demonstration, to which they invited, according to Dirk Hoerder, not the rioters but “mainly upper and middle-class Bostonians, who traveled in coaches and carriages to Roxbury or Dorchester for opulent feasts.”
When the British Parliament turned to its next attempt to tax the colonies, this time by a set of taxes which it hoped would not excite as much opposition, the colonial leaders organized boycotts. But, they stressed, “No Mobs or Tumults, let the Persons and Properties of your most inveterate Enemies be safe.” Samuel Adams advised: “No Mobs—No Confusions—No Tumult.” And James Otis said that “no possible circumstances, though ever so oppressive, could be supposed sufficient to justify private tumults and disorders.…”
The quartering of troops by the British was directly hurtful to the sailors and other working people. After 1768, two thousand soldiers were quartered in Boston, and friction grew between the crowds and the soldiers. The soldiers began to take the jobs of working people when jobs were scarce, and on March 5, 1770, grievances of ropemakers against British soldiers taking their jobs led to a fight.
A crowd gathered in front of the customhouse and began provoking the soldiers, who fired and killed first Crispus Attucks, a mulatto worker, then others. This became known as the Boston Massacre. Feelings against the British mounted quickly at the acquittal of six of the British soldiers (two were punished by having their thumbs branded and were discharged from the army). The crowd at the massacre was described by John Adams, defense attorney for the British soldiers, as “a motley rabble of saucy boys, negroes, and molattoes, Irish teagues and outlandish jack tarrs.” Perhaps ten thousand people marched in the funeral procession for the victims of the massacre, out of a total Boston population of sixteen thousand. This led England to remove the troops from Boston and try to quiet the situation.
Impressment—drafting colonists into military service—was the background of the massacre. There had been impressment riots through the 1760s in New York and in Newport, Rhode Island, where five hundred seamen, boys, and Negroes rioted. Six weeks before the Boston Massacre, there was a battle in New York of seamen against British soldiers taking their jobs, and one seaman was killed.
In the Boston Tea Party of December 1773 tea was seized from ships and dumped into Boston Harbor. The Boston Committee of Correspondence, formed a year before to organize anti-British actions, “controlled crowd action against the tea from the start,” Dirk Hoerder says. The Tea Party led to the Coercive Acts by Parliament, virtually establishing martial law in Massachusetts, dissolving the colonial government, closing the port in Boston, and sending in troops. Mass meetings rose in opposition.
Pauline Maier, who studied the development of opposition to Britain in the decade before 1776 in her book From Resistance to Revolution, emphasizes the moderation of the leadership and, despite their desire for resistance, their “emphasis on order and restraint.” She notes: “The officers and committee members of the Sons of Liberty were drawn almost entirely from the middle and upper classes of colonial society.” Their aim, however, was to broaden their organization, to develop a mass base of wage earners.
In Virginia, it seemed clear to the educated gentry that something needed to be done to persuade the lower orders to join the revolutionary cause, to deflect their anger against England.
It was a problem for which the rhetorical talents of Patrick Henry were superbly fitted. He found language inspiring to all classes, specific enough in its listing of grievances to charge people with anger against the British, vague enough to avoid class conflict among the rebels, and stirring enough to build patriotic feeling for the resistance movement.
Tom Paine’s Common Sense, which appeared in early 1776 and became the most popular pamphlet in the American colonies, did this. It made the first bold argument for independence, in words that any fairly literate person could understand: “Society in every state is a blessing, but Government even in its best state is but a necessary evil.…”
Paine disposed of the idea of the divine right of kings by a pungent history of the British monarchy, going back to the Norman conquest of 1066, when William the Conqueror came over from France to set himself on the British throne: “A French bastard landing with an armed Banditti and establishing himself king of England against the consent of the natives, is in plain terms a very paltry rascally original. It certainly hath no divinity ink.”
Paine dealt with the practical advantages of sticking to England or being separated:
I challenge the warmest advocate for reconciliation to show a single advantage that this continent can reap by being connected with Great Britain. I repeat the challenge; not a single advantage is derived. Our corn will fetch its price in any market in Europe, and our imported goods must be paid for by them where we will.…
As for the bad effects of the connection with England, Paine appealed to the colonists’ memory of all the wars in which England had involved them, wars costly in lives and money. He built slowly to an emotional pitch: “Everything that is right or reasonable pleads for separation. The blood of the slain, the weeping voice of nature cries, ‘TIS TIME TO PART’.”
Common Sense went through twenty-five editions in 1776 and sold hundreds of thousands of copies. It is probable that almost every literate colonist either read it or knew about its content. Pamphleteering had become by this time the chief theater of debate about relations with England. From 1750 to 1776 four hundred pamphlets had appeared arguing one or another side of the Stamp Act or the Boston Massacre or the Tea Party or the general questions of disobedience to law, loyalty to government, rights and obligations.
Paine’s pamphlet appealed to a wide range of colonial opinion angered by England. But it caused some tremors in aristocrats like John Adams, who were with the patriot cause but wanted to make sure it didn’t go too far in the direction of democracy. Popular assemblies needed to be checked, Adams thought, because they were “productive of hasty results and absurd judgements.”
Paine himself came out of “the lower orders” of England—a stay-maker, tax official, teacher, poor emigrant to America. But once the Revolution was under way, Paine more and more made it clear that he was not for the crowd action of lower-class people—like those militia who in 1779 attacked the house of James Wilson. Wilson was a Revolutionary leader who opposed price controls and wanted a more conservative government than was given by the Pennsylvania Constitution of 1776. Paine became an associate of one of the wealthiest men in Pennsylvania, Robert Morris, and a supporter of Morris’s creation, the Bank of North America.
Later, during the controversy over adopting the Constitution, Paine would once again represent urban artisans, who favored a strong central government. He seemed to believe that such a government could represent some great common interest. In this sense, he lent himself perfectly to the myth of the Revolution—that it was on behalf of a united people.
The Declaration of Independence brought that myth to its peak of eloquence. Each harsher measure of British control—the Proclamation of 1763, which forbade colonists to settle beyond the Appalachians, the Stamp Tax, the Townshend taxes, including the one on tea, the stationing of troops and the Boston Massacre, the closing of the port of Boston and the dissolution of the Massachusetts legislature—escalated colonial rebellion to the point of revolution. The colonists had responded with the Stamp Act Congress, the Sons of Liberty, the Committees of Correspondence, the Boston Tea Party, and finally, in 1774, the setting up of a Continental Congress—an illegal body, forerunner of a future independent government.
It was after the military clash at Lexington and Concord in April 1775, between colonial minutemen and British troops, that the Continental Congress decided on separation. They organized a small committee to draw up the Declaration of Independence, which Thomas Jefferson wrote. It was adopted by the Congress on July 2, and officially proclaimed July 4, 1776.
By this time there was already a powerful sentiment for independence. Resolutions adopted in North Carolina in May of 1776, and sent to the Continental Congress, declared independence of England, asserted that all British law was null and void, and urged military preparations. About the same time, the town of Maiden, Massachusetts, responding to a request from the Massachusetts House of Representatives that all towns in the state declare their views on independence, had met in town meeting and unanimously called for independence: “…we therefore renounce with disdain our connexion with a kingdom of slaves; we bid a final adieu to Britain.”
“When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands…they should declare the causes.…” This was the opening of the Declaration of Independence. Then, in its second paragraph, came a powerful philosophical statement:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government.…
It then went on to list grievances against the king, “a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States.” The list accused the king of dissolving colonial governments, controlling judges, sending “swarms of Officers to harass our people,” sending in armies of occupation, cutting off colonial trade with other parts of the world, taxing the colonists without their consent, and waging war against them, “transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny.”
All this, the language of popular control over governments, the right of rebellion and revolution, indignation at political tyranny, economic burdens, and military attacks, was language well suited to unite large numbers of colonists and persuade even those who had grievances against one another to turn against England.
Some Americans were clearly omitted from this circle of united interest drawn by the Declaration of Independence: Indians, black slaves, women. Indeed, one paragraph of the Declaration charged the king with inciting slave rebellions and Indian attacks:
He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.
Twenty years before the Declaration, a proclamation of the legislature of Massachusetts of November 3, 1755, declared the Penobscot Indians “rebels, enemies and traitors” and provided a bounty: “For every scalp of a male Indian brought in…forty pounds. For every scalp of such female Indian or male Indian under the age of twelve years that shall be killed…twenty pounds.…”
Thomas Jefferson had written a paragraph of the Declaration accusing the king of transporting slaves from Africa to the colonies and “suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce.” This seemed to express moral indignation against slavery and the slave trade (Jefferson’s personal distaste for slavery must be put alongside the fact that he owned hundreds of slaves to the day he died). Behind it was the growing fear among Virginians and some other southerners about the growing number of black slaves in the colonies (20 percent of the total population) and the threat of slave revolts as the number of slaves increased.
Jefferson’s paragraph was removed by the Continental Congress because slaveholders themselves disagreed about the desirability of ending the slave trade. So even that gesture toward the black slave was omitted from the American Revolution’s great manifesto of freedom.
The use of the phrase “all men are created equal” was probably not a deliberate attempt to make a statement about women. It was just that women were beyond consideration as worthy of inclusion. They were politically invisible. Though practical needs gave women a certain authority in the home, on the farm, or in occupations such as midwifery, they were simply overlooked in any consideration of political rights, any notions of civic equality.
To say that the Declaration of Independence, even by its own language, was limited to life, liberty, and happiness for white males is not to denounce the makers and signers of the Declaration for holding the ideas expected of privileged males of the eighteenth century. Reformers and radicals, looking discontentedly at history, are often accused of expecting too much from a past political epoch—and sometimes they do. But the point of noting those outside the arc of human rights in the Declaration is not, centuries late and pointlessly, to denounce the moral failures of that time. It is to try to understand the way in which the Declaration functioned to mobilize certain groups of Americans, ignoring others. Surely, inspirational language to create a secure consensus is still used, in our time, to cover up serious conflicts of interest in that consensus, and to cover up, also, the omission of large parts of the human race.
The reality behind the words of the Declaration of Independence was that a rising class of important people needed to enlist on their side enough Americans to defeat England, without disturbing too much the relations of wealth and power that had developed over 150 years of colonial history. Indeed, 69 percent of the signers of the Declaration of Independence had held colonial office under England.
When the Declaration of Independence was read, with all its flaming radical language, from the town hall balcony in Boston, it was read by Thomas Crafts, a member of the Loyal Nine group, conservatives who had opposed militant action against the British. Four days after the reading, the Boston Committee of Correspondence ordered the townsmen to show up on the common for a military draft. The rich, it turned out, could avoid the draft by paying for substitutes; the poor had to serve. This led to rioting and shouting: “Tyranny is Tyranny let it come from whom it may.”
Exercises
1. Before reading the chapter, make a time line which includes the following: the founding of Jamestown, Virginia; the passage of the first Navigation Act; Bacon’s Rebellion; the French and Indian War; the Stamp Act; the Coercive Acts; the battles of Lexington and Concord; and the battle of Yorktown.
2. On page 47: What does Zinn mean by “… the advantages of combining paternalism with command”?
3. Zinn argues that “It was not a conscious conspiracy, but an accumulation of tactical responses.”(p. 47) What is the difference between a “conscious conspiracy” and “tactical responses”?
4. Below are a series of arguments (a-k). For each argument, identify an example (detail/data) from the chapter that supports the argument (note: one example might be used to illustrate more than one of the arguments below, but try to find a different example for each argument):
a. “…they [took] over land, profits, and political power from favorites of the British Empire.”
b. “…create a consensus of popular support for the rule of a new, privileged leadership.”
c. “… mirroring as well as molding popular opinion”
d. “…mobilization of lower-class energy by upper-class politicians…”
e. “…class hatred be focused against the pro-British elite…”
f. “…class hatred be…deflected from the nationalist elite.”
g. “… they [won] over the mechanics…”
h. “…[the local elites kept] the propertyless people…under control… [by using the] mob energy against England, but also [contained] it so that it would not demand too much from them.”
i. “…language…specific enough in its listing of grievances to charge people with anger against the British, vague enough to avoid class conflict among the rebels…”
j. “…language [to] persuade even those who had grievances against one another to turn against England.”
k. “…without disturbing too much the relations of wealth and power that had developed over 150 years of colonial history.”
5. Research: What role did each of the events listed below play in causing conflict between the colonial elites and England (or their representatives in America); the colonial people (lower orders) and colonial elites; OR the colonial people (lower orders) and England (or their representatives in America)?
[NOTE: You will have to go to texts other than Zinn for some of the answers.]
a. French and Indian War
b. growth of trade between England and its American colonies
c. Proclamation Line of 1763
d. “… six black rebellions… and forty riots” all occurring between 1676 and 1760
e. Stamp Act of 1765
f. mechanics’ demand for political democracy in the cities
g. Privates Committee’s bill of rights
h. tenant riots from the 1740s through the 1760s
i. Regulator Movement
j. Townshend Acts of 1767
k. quartering of British troops in 1768
l. impressment of sailors
m. impounding of ships in admiralty courts under the specifications of the Sugar Act
n. Tea Act of 1773
o. Boston Port Act of 1773
p. Massachusetts Government Act of 1774
6. Define the “lower orders” in terms of their:
percentage of community wealth controlled
occupations
political and economic interests
social labels/epithets
7. Define the “local political and social elite” in terms of their:
percentage of community wealth controlled
occupations
political and economic interests
social labels/epithets
8. Debate Resolution: The American Revolution was a war not for independence but consolidation.
