Columbus was unimpressed. Dismissing the Natives as primitive and savage, he set the pattern for the genocide that was to decimate Native populations throughout the New World. As Zinn notes, “What Columbus did to the Arawaks of the Bahamas, Cortés did to the Aztecs of Mexico, Pizarro to the Incas of Peru, and the English settlers of Virginia and Massachusetts to the Powhatans and the Pequots.”13 The genocide continued throughout the period of westward expansion of what later became the United States.
Historians estimate that at the time Columbus arrived in 1492 some 250,000 indigenous people were living in Hispaniola, a population reduced to only about 400 persons in 1538. During the first hundred years of Spanish rule, the far larger population of Mexico was reduced by some 70 percent.14 The Native population living north of what became Mexico was ultimately reduced from as many as ten million to one million through disease, physical violence, and despair15 as waves of invading European immigrants cleared the land of the Native inhabitants with the same lack of moral reservation they brought to clearing the land of trees.
SLAVERY
I use the term slavery here in a broad sense to include all members of the working class who shared the condition that they were not at liberty 167to negotiate the terms of their labor or to leave their master. These included legally defined slaves, bonded workers, and wives considered the property of their husbands.
A 1708 census in South Carolina “counted 3,900 free whites, 4,100 African slaves, 1,400 Indian slaves, and 120 indentured whites.”16 In 1770, 20 percent of the population of the colonies lived in slavery. At the time the Declaration of Independence was issued, 75 percent of the people who lived in the territories of Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia were or had been slaves or indentured servants.17
Involuntary Conscripts
Slavery in its many forms was foundational to the colonial economies, which the ruling elites sought to staff with the cheapest and most subservient labor available. The current press to outsource U.S. jobs to the lowest-wage countries and to recruit undocumented workers for those jobs that cannot be outsourced builds on this well-established historical precedent.
Investors who sought to profit from the new land’s physical wealth through trade, resource extraction, and agriculture required cheap labor to fulfill their dreams. Getting settlers to come voluntarily to North America was difficult. Passage from Europe in small wooden sailing vessels was long, dangerous, and for most involved unspeakable crowding, filth, and starvation. Many perished along the way. The harsh conditions did not end with arrival in the new land, even for free whites. The ground was fertile, but new settlers had to construct their own shelter and clear and plant the land with the crudest of tools in unfamiliar climates. Many perished within their first year of arrival.
Supplying investors with slaves from Africa and bonded laborers from Europe to satisfy the demand for cheap labor became a major business in its own right for enterprising merchants who arranged for the collection, shipping, and sale of the unfortunates they acquired from both Europe and Africa. Rulers saw the forced emigration of prisoners as a way to reduce the expense of maintaining them in prisons. Responding to the market demand, gangs of thugs roamed the back streets and slums of London to kidnap the destitute and sell them into bondage with the tacit blessing of officials who considered the clearing of their neighborhoods of paupers, orphans, and other undesirables as something of a public service. 168
The economies of the coastal settlements evolved according to differences in soil and climate. The fertile soil, favorable growing seasons, and level topography of the South were suited to vast plantations worked by slaves to produce tobacco and cotton for export. The stony soil, harsh climates, and narrow coastal plains of the North led to smaller farms and more varied crops that required the skill and determination of experienced free farmers. Looking for more agreeable occupations than farming under such harsh conditions, the privileged classes of the North turned to industry and the sea. Shipbuilding, whaling, fishing, trading, slaving, and privateering became the favored occupations.
Desperate ‘Volunteers’
Some whites came voluntarily from Europe to join the ranks of bonded laborers, but only as a desperate last resort. Land in Europe was scarce and its ownership concentrated. Surplus labor kept wages low and unemployment high. Tales of America’s vast fertile lands and great wealth free for the taking stirred the imagination of Europeans of all classes, but especially the poor and starving whose homelands afforded them neither land nor employment.
Those unable to pay for passage agreed to commit themselves to a period of indentured service to whoever was willing on their arrival to pay their debt to the ship captain who had provided passage. Many a young woman came voluntarily to become the wife of whatever man paid the captain’s fee. Once married, a woman and all she owned, acquired, or produced became the property of her husband. Runaway wives were treated much the same as runaway slaves.18 The status of an indentured servant differed from that of an outright slave mainly in having a promised date of release.
The Race Card
Widespread hardship and servitude created significant social tension and led to periodic rebellions against the ruling elites of the day. The most famous of these was Bacon’s Rebellion of 1676, which resulted in the near total destruction of Jamestown, Virginia, and rallied a broad alliance of white and black free farmers, black and Indian slaves, white indentured servants, and members of the free white working class eager to take their revenge against Jamestown’s arrogant and brutal propertied 169ruling class. Even the Virginia governor, who was forced to flee as Jamestown burned, acknowledged that the majority of Virginia’s populace supported the rebellion. British troops eventually restored order, but the rebellion left a deep impression on the ruling elites throughout the colonies.19
Specifically, the experience awakened the propertied classes to the importance of keeping the working classes divided against one another along the lines of race, gender, and trade. Their chosen strategy centered on shifting the focus from class to race by codifying the institution of black slavery into the laws of many of the colonies and denying blacks what few rights and freedoms they had previously enjoyed—thus placing them permanently on the bottom rung of the social ladder. The Calvinists, for example, supported this injustice by declaring that blacks had no soul; thus, not being truly human, they had no claim to human rights—the same argument made down through the ages to justify the enslavement of women.
This gave poor whites a floor of failure below which they could not fall and a human target against which to direct the frustrations of their station, encouraging them to define their identity by their whiteness rather than by their class. It proved to be one of history’s most odious and successful bits of social engineering. At the same time, members of the elite class proceeded to secure their own claim to preeminent status by cultivating the social and intellectual graces of their sons, providing them personal slaves and tutors, and sending them to England for finishing at elite colleges.20
The conditions of race-based slavery became especially harsh. Virginia and other British colonies gave slaves no rights even to such basics as personal security, marriage, or even parenthood of their own children. It was not considered a felony for a Virginia master to kill his slave. After 1721 it was, however, a crime for him to set a slave free except under rare circumstances.21 Individual and collective rebellion by slaves was commonplace, and fear of the simmering volcano of the anger of black slaves left whites desperate to maintain control through a reign of terror that included torture, mutilation, and lynching.
By the time the new nation was founded, a clear geographic division of functions had been established. The South owned and managed slaves to work its vast plantations; the North procured the slaves from Africa and transported them in merchant ships for sale to the Southern plantation owners. 170
The realities of life in the English colonies on the Atlantic coast of what was to become the United State
s of America were not auspicious for the founding of a new nation based on the premise that all men are created equal with an inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The early settlements were operated as privately owned company estates ruled by their overseers. Parishes were ruled as theocracies by preachers who believed democracy to be contrary to the will of God. The colonial economies depended on slaves and bonded labor, and the family structure placed women in a condition of indentured servitude. The lands the colonies occupied were acquired by genocide, and their social structures embodied deep racial and class divisions.
This history exposes the deep cultural and institutional roots of the challenges we citizens of the United States now face in birthing the mature democracy of Earth Community. Before turning to these challenges as they are playing out in our own time, however, there is much else to be learned from our history—including the story of how a group of patriots awakened to possibilities long denied, mobilized to walk away from their king, and thereby created a new political reality.
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CHAPTER 10
People Power Rebellion
Britain was forced not to give, grant, concede, or release our independence, but to acknowledge it, in terms as clear as our language afforded, and under seal and under oath.1
John Adams
The American colonies were products of imperial expansion, and they replicated the imperial social structures of plutocracy and theocracy of the European nations that created them. From the beginning, however, there were also important counterforces at work that fostered a rebellious spirit, favored religious pluralism, and prepared the way for a people to walk away from their king, discover their common identity, and form a new nation bathed in the rhetoric of liberty and justice for all.
FORCES OF PLURALISM
There were early exceptions to the narrow and brutal Calvinist and Episcopalian sectarianism. Some settlers, particularly the Quakers, came to North America with a truly democratic consciousness tolerant of religious diversity, at least within the boundaries of the Protestant faith, and a concern for the rights of all.
William Penn, who founded Pennsylvania, was a Quaker who had spent time in prison in England for his religious beliefs. Penn populated the lands granted to him by royal charter by appealing to religious dissenters from across Europe with the promise of land and religious liberty. He attracted Quakers and Baptists from England, Huguenots from France, and Pietist and Reformed groups out of favor with Lutheran or Catholic princes in Germany. Pennsylvania and New Jersey, which were both predominantly Quaker, welcomed all persons of Protestant faith, but excluded atheists and non-Christians—a category that by their reckoning included Catholics.
172 Roger Williams, a Puritan minister from Salem who was a fierce advocate of the separation of spiritual and civil power, contended that all people are answerable only to God for their religious beliefs, not to the state. Banned from Massachusetts for his defiance of both religious and civil authority, he founded a new colony in Rhode Island that welcomed all Protestants.
Although Anglicanism was the official religion in Georgia and New York, it was much weaker in those states than in Virginia, Maryland, and the Carolinas. Both Georgia and New York guaranteed tolerance for dissenters. Georgia welcomed settlers of all faiths, including Jews.
The struggle between theocrats and religious pluralists also played out in Pennsylvania, however, as factions of Calvinists, Anglicans, and others complained that the Quakers were restricting their religious freedom by prohibiting them from making their religion the official religion to be imposed on all by law. The Quakers who dominated the legislative bodies eventually split into two factions, one of which remained committed to religious pluralism while the other called for making Quakerism the official faith.
As populations grew and exchanges between colonies and between the church parishes within the colonies became inevitable, the diversity of faiths made it increasingly difficult to maintain uniformity. In 1684, the Crown withdrew the original charter of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, in part because of its discrimination against Anglicans, and issued a new charter guaranteeing religious liberty to all Protestants.
The individual parish churches were strong enough to maintain their establishment for a time, but by the 1740s the pressures of a growing immigrant population and an increasing flow of trade began to break down the established religious boundaries. Itinerant evangelical preachers traveled from parish to parish preaching that salvation is a matter of individual conscience, not church doctrine.
Denominations fragmented and churches of diverse faiths began springing up everywhere—Congregational, Baptist, Anabaptist, Quaker, Anglican, Methodist, Presbyterian, Huguenot, and in some places even Catholic and Jewish. Within the space of little more than a generation the nation had moved from a consensus that an imposed uniformity of religious views was essential to the social and moral order to a consensus that the social order and moral order were best served by guaranteeing freedom of conscience to all people. 173
By the time the founding fathers declared the formation of a new nation independent from England’s rule, it was clear that unless the laws of the new nation prohibited the establishment of any of the competing Protestant sects as the official religion, unification would be impossible. Thus, Article VI of the U.S. Constitution established that “no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States,” and the First Amendment established that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” In a historic breakthrough of epic importance the pluralism of Earth Community prevailed over the theocratic hegemony of Empire.
A REBELLIOUS AND ITINERANT SPIRIT
In another of history’s great ironies, the imperial processes by which the American colonies were settled created a population prone to a rebellious spirit. The slaves and bonded laborers who came by force or desperation had little stake in the prevailing system of authority. Those who came in dissent against established religious authority had a history of walking away from distasteful constraints. Members of the continent’s new Cloud Minder class had become accustomed to ruling their fiefdoms largely free from English taxes and oversight and resented the arrogance of European elites who treated them as less worthy country cousins.
The passage of time also brought important changes. The conditions of life became less harsh, and communities grew less dependent on strong leadership and cultural homogeneity to hold them together. Those who had arrived as bonded laborers eventually gained freedom for themselves and their children. Even some slaves won their freedom. The children of those whose parents had come with visions of “a city upon a hill” harshly ruled by biblical law grew weary of the restraints on their own freedom of conscience. These developments fueled resentment of the continuing injustice of the deep divisions between those who enjoyed lives of privilege and pampered luxury and the free farmers, workers, and artisans who struggled in comparative hardship at the margins—to say nothing of the increasing bitterness of the slaves condemned to perpetual bondage.
Those who had come voluntarily to America to seek their fortune or their liberty demonstrated by that act a rebellious and itinerant spirit 174ready to pull up stakes and move on when things didn’t work out, a spirit that sustained a continuous westward push. The frontier promised both opportunity and liberty from the tyranny of class in return for the harsh reality of a life in which each man depended for his survival on his own wits and labor. The hardy frontiersmen were a particularly rowdy lot ill disposed to taxes and to any attempt to curtail their individual liberty. They were also skilled in the use of firearms to hunt game and protect the land they occupied.
Forerunners of contemporary America’s militiamen and libertarians, they lived by the aphorism “A fool can put on his own coat better than a wise man can do it for him.”2 The lives of these self-reliant individualists posed a stark contrast to life in the strong but socially stratif
ied communities of the coastal settlements ruled by appointed governors, corporations, landed gentry, and wealthy merchants. The frontiersmen and the coastal settlers, however, shared a deep hostility to the rules and taxes of a distant king and a parliament in which they had no representation. Together these conditions set the stage for an alliance between widely disparate elements in a call for liberty from the Crown.
WALKING AWAY FROM THE KING
In the 1750s and ‘60s, the British government began to assert greater authority over its American colonies, which by now had developed economies of sufficient consequence to attract attention as a source of taxes and trading profits. Britain began to assert stronger administrative authority and to impose new taxes on an increasingly rebellious and independent-minded people accustomed to the benign neglect of the Crown and disinclined to accept such an intrusion. Their response was, in effect, to walk away from the king. Herein lies a profound lesson in democracy.
Imperial rulers of whatever title depend on the obedience of the ruled. If the people choose en masse to ignore the king’s demands to serve in his armies, he is powerless. The power of the king, and by extension the power of Empire, resides ultimately with the people, and it is within the people’s means to withhold it.
Initial efforts by the Crown to increase tax collections through import duties largely failed, as a New England merchant class given to slave trading and piracy had no reservations about adding smuggling to their business portfolios and easily evaded the notice of a distant king’s tax 175collectors. The Crown turned to increasingly intrusive measures, and the people responded with growing defiance.
The Great Turning Page 21