Arawak men and women, naked, tawny, and full of wonder, emerged from their villages onto the
island's beaches and swam out to get a closer look at the strange big boat. When Columbus and his
sailors came ashore, carrying swords, speaking oddly, the Arawaks ran to greet them, brought them
food, water, gifts. He later wrote of this in his log:

They ... brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears and many other things, which they
exchanged for the glass beads and hawks' bells. They willingly traded everything they owned... .
They were well-built, with good bodies and handsome features.... They do not bear arms, and do
not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of
ignorance. They have no iron. Their spears are made of cane... . They would make fine servants....
With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.

      
These Arawaks of the Bahama Islands were much like Indians on the mainland, who were
remarkable (European observers were to say again and again) for their hospitality, their belief in
sharing. These traits did not stand out in the Europe of the Renaissance, dominated as it was by the
religion of popes, the government of kings, the frenzy for money that marked Western civilization
and its first messenger to the Americas, Christopher Columbus.

      Columbus wrote:

As soon as I arrived in the Indies, on the first Island which I found, I took some of the natives by
force in order that they might learn and might give me information of whatever there is in these
parts.

      
The information that Columbus wanted most was: Where is the gold? He had persuaded the king
and queen of Spain to finance an expedition to the lands, the wealth, he expected would be on the
other side of the Atlantic-the Indies and Asia, gold and spices. For, like other informed people of
his time, he knew the world was round and he could sail west in order to get to the Far East.

      
Spain was recently unified, one of the new modern nation-states, like France, England, and
Portugal. Its population, mostly poor peasants, worked for the nobility, who were 2 percent of the
population and owned 95 percent of the land. Spain had tied itself to the Catholic Church, expelled
all the Jews, driven out the Moors. Like other states of the modern world, Spain sought gold, which
was becoming the new mark of wealth, more useful than land because it could buy anything.

      
There was gold in Asia, it was thought, and certainly silks and spices, for Marco Polo and others
had brought back marvelous things from their overland expeditions centuries before. Now that the
Turks had conquered Constantinople and the eastern Mediterranean, and controlled the land routes
to Asia, a sea route was needed. Portuguese sailors were working their way around the southern tip
of Africa. Spain decided to gamble on a long sail across an unknown ocean.

      
In return for bringing back gold and spices, they promised Columbus 10 percent of the profits,
governorship over new-found lands, and the fame that would go with a new tide: Admiral of the
Ocean Sea. He was a merchant's clerk from the Italian city of Genoa, part-time weaver (the son of a
skilled weaver), and expert sailor. He set out with three sailing ships, the largest of which was the
Santa Maria, perhaps 100 feet long, and thirty-nine crew members.
      
Columbus would never have made it to Asia, which was thousands of miles farther away than he
had calculated, imagining a smaller world. He would have been doomed by that great expanse of
sea. But he was lucky. One-fourth of the way there he came upon an unknown, uncharted land that
lay between Europe and Asia-the Americas. It was early October 1492, and thirty-three days since
he and his crew had left the Canary Islands, off the Atlantic coast of Africa. Now they saw
branches and sticks floating in the water. They saw flocks of birds.
      
These were signs of land. Then, on October 12, a sailor called Rodrigo saw the early morning moon
shining on white sands, and cried out. It was an island in the Bahamas, the Caribbean sea. The first
man to sight land was supposed to get a yearly pension of 10,000 maravedis for life, but Rodrigo
never got it. Columbus claimed he had seen a light the evening before. He got the reward.

      
So, approaching land, they were met by the Arawak Indians, who swam out to greet them. The
Arawaks lived in village communes, had a developed agriculture of corn, yams, cassava. They
could spin and weave, but they had no horses or work animals. They had no iron, but they wore
tiny gold ornaments in their ears.

      
This was to have enormous consequences: it led Columbus to take some of them aboard ship as
prisoners because he insisted that they guide him to the source of the gold. He then sailed to what is
now Cuba, then to Hispaniola (the island which today consists of Haiti and the Dominican
Republic). There, bits of visible gold in the rivers, and a gold mask presented to Columbus by a
local Indian chief, led to wild visions of gold fields.

      
On Hispaniola, out of timbers from the Santa Maria, which had run aground, Columbus built a fort,
the first European military base in the Western Hemisphere. He called it Navidad (Christmas) and
left thirty-nine crewmembers there, with instructions to find and store the gold. He took more
Indian prisoners and put them aboard his two remaining ships. At one part of the island he got into
a fight with Indians who refused to trade as many bows and arrows as he and his men wanted. Two
were run through with swords and bled to death. Then the Nina and the Pinta set sail for the Azores
and Spain. When the weather turned cold, the Indian prisoners began to die.

      
Columbus's report to the Court in Madrid was extravagant. He insisted he had reached Asia (it was
Cuba) and an island off the coast of China (Hispaniola). His descriptions were part fact, part
fiction:

Hispaniola is a miracle. Mountains and hills, plains and pastures, are both fertile and beautiful ...
the harbors are unbelievably good and there are many wide rivers of which the majority contain
gold. . . . There are many spices, and great mines of gold and other metals....

      

      
The Indians, Columbus reported, "are so naive and so free with their possessions that no one who
has not witnessed them would believe it. When you ask for something they have, they never say no.
To the contrary, they offer to share with anyone...." He concluded his report by asking for a little
help from their Majesties, and in return he would bring them from his next voyage "as much gold
as they need ... and as many slaves as they ask." He was full of religious talk: "Thus the eternal
God, our Lord, gives victory to those who follow His way over apparent impossibilities."

      
Because of Columbus's exaggerated report and promises, his second expedition was given
seventeen ships and more than twelve hundred men. The aim was clear: slaves and gold. They went
from island to island in the Caribbean, taking Indians as captives. But as word spread of the
Europeans' intent they found more and more empty villages. On Haiti, they found that the sailors
left behind at Fort Navidad had been killed in a battle with the Indians, after they had roamed the
island in gangs looking for gold, taking women and children as slaves for sex and labor.

      
Now, from his base on Haiti, Columbus sent expedition after expedition into the interior. They
found no gold fields, but had to fill up the ships returning to Spain with some kind of dividend. In
the year 1495, they went on a great slave raid, rounded up fifteen hundred Arawak men, women,
and children, put them in pens guarded by Spaniards and dogs, then picked the five hundred best
specimens to load onto ships. Of those five hundred, two hundred died en route. The rest arrived
alive in Spain and were put up for sale by the archdeacon of the town, who reported that, although
the slaves were "naked as the day they were born," they showed "no more embarrassment than
animals." Columbus later wrote: "Let us in the name of the Holy Trinity go on sending all the
slaves that can be sold."

      
But too many of the slaves died in captivity. And so Columbus, desperate to pay back dividends to
those who had invested, had to make good his promise to fill the ships with gold. In the province of
Cicao on Haiti, where he and his men imagined huge gold fields to exist, they ordered all persons
fourteen years or older to collect a certain quantity of gold every three months. When they brought
it, they were given copper tokens to hang around their necks. Indians found without a copper token
had their hands cut off and bled to death.

      
The Indians had been given an impossible task. The only gold around was bits of dust garnered
from the streams. So they fled, were hunted down with dogs, and were killed.

      
Trying to put together an army of resistance, the Arawaks faced Spaniards who had armor,
muskets, swords, horses. When the Spaniards took prisoners they hanged them or burned them to
death. Among the Arawaks, mass suicides began, with cassava poison. Infants were killed to save them from the Spaniards. In two years, through murder, mutilation, or suicide, half of the 250,000
Indians on Haiti were dead.

      
When it became clear that there was no gold left, the Indians were taken as slave labor on huge
estates, known later as encomiendas. They were worked at a ferocious pace, and died by the
thousands. By the year 1515, there were perhaps fifty thousand Indians left. By 1550, there were
five hundred. A report of the year 1650 shows none of the original Arawaks or their descendants
left on the island.

      
The chief source-and, on many matters the only source-of information about what happened on the
islands after Columbus came is Bartolome de las Casas, who, as a young priest, participated in the
conquest of Cuba. For a time he owned a plantation on which Indian slaves worked, but he gave
that up and became a vehement critic of Spanish cruelty. Las Casas transcribed Columbus's journal
and, in his fifties, began a multivolume History of the Indies. In it, he describes the Indians. They
are agile, he says, and can swim long distances, especially the women. They are not completely
peaceful, because they do battle from time to time with other tribes, but their casualties seem small,
and they fight when they are individually moved to do so because of some grievance, not on the
orders of captains or kings.

      
Women in Indian society were treated so well as to startle the Spaniards. Las Casas describes sex
relations:

Marriage laws are non-existent men and women alike choose their mates and leave them as they
please, without offense, jealousy or anger. They multiply in great abundance; pregnant women
work to the last minute and give birth almost painlessly; up the next day, they bathe in the river and
are as clean and healthy as before giving birth. If they tire of their men, they give themselves
abortions with herbs that force stillbirths, covering their shameful parts with leaves or cotton cloth;
although on the whole, Indian men and women look upon total nakedness with as much casualness
as we look upon a man's head or at his hands.

      
The Indians, Las Casas says, have no religion, at least no temples. They live in

large communal bell-shaped buildings, housing up to 600 people at one time ... made of very strong wood and
roofed with palm leaves.... They prize bird feathers of various colors, beads made of fishbones, and
green and white stones with which they adorn their ears and lips, but they put no value on gold and
other precious things. They lack all manner of commerce, neither buying nor selling, and rely
exclusively on their natural environment for maintenance. They are extremely generous with their
possessions and by the same token covet the possessions of then; friends and expect the same
degree of liberality. ...

      
In Book Two of his History of the Indies, Las Casas (who at first urged replacing Indians by black
slaves, thinking they were stronger and would survive, but later relented when he saw the effects on
blacks) tells about the treatment of the Indians by the Spaniards. It is a unique account and deserves
to be quoted at length:

Endless testimonies . .. prove the mild and pacific temperament of the natives.... But our work was
to exasperate, ravage, kill, mangle and destroy; small wonder, then, if they tried to kill one of us
now and then.... The admiral, it is true, was blind as those who came after him, and he was so
anxious to please the King that he committed irreparable crimes against the Indians....

      
Las Casas tells how the Spaniards "grew more conceited every day" and after a while refused to
walk any distance. They "rode the backs of Indians if they were in a hurry" or were carried on
hammocks by Indians running in relays. "In this case they also had Indians carry large leaves to
shade them from the sun and others to fan them with goose wings."

      
Total control led to total cruelty. The Spaniards "thought nothing of knifing Indians by tens and
twenties and of cutting slices off them to test the sharpness of their blades." Las Casas tells how
"two of these so-called Christians met two Indian boys one day, each carrying a parrot; they took
the parrots and for fun beheaded the boys."

      
The Indians' attempts to defend themselves failed. And when they ran off into the hills they were
found and killed. So, Las Casas reports, "they suffered and died in the mines and other labors in
desperate silence, knowing not a soul in the world to whom they could turn for help." He describes
their work in the mines:

... mountains are stripped from top to bottom and bottom to top a thousand times; they dig, split
rocks, move stones, and carry dirt on then: backs to wash it in the rivers, while those who wash
gold stay in the water all the time with their backs bent so constantly it breaks them; and when
water invades the mines, the most arduous task of all is to dry the mines by scooping up pansful of
water and throwing it up outside....

      
After each six or eight months' work in the mines, which was the time required of each crew to dig
enough gold for melting, up to a third of the men died.

      
While the men were sent many miles away to the mines, the wives remained to work the soil,
forced into the excruciating job of digging and making thousands of hills for cassava plants.

Thus husbands and wives were together only once every eight or ten months and when they met
they were so exhausted and depressed on both sides ... they ceased to procreate. As for the newly
born, they died early because their mothers, overworked and famished, had no milk to nurse them,
and for this reason, while I was in Cuba, 7000 children died in three months. Some mothers even
drowned their babies from sheer desperation.... hi this way, husbands died in the mines, wives died
at work, and children died from lack of milk . .. and in a short time this land which was so great, so
powerful and fertile ... was depopulated. ... My eyes have seen these acts so foreign to human
nature, and now I tremble as I write. ...

      
When he arrived on Hispaniola in 1508, Las Casas says, "there were 60,000 people living on this
island, including the Indians; so that from 1494 to 1508, over three million people had perished
from war, slavery, and the mines. Who in future generations will believe this? I myself writing it as
a knowledgeable eyewitness can hardly believe it...."

      
Thus began the history, five hundred years ago, of the European invasion of the Indian settlements
in the Americas. That beginning, when you read Las Casas-even if his figures are exaggerations (were there 3 million Indians to begin with, as he says, or less than a million, as some historians
have calculated, or 8 million as others now believe?)-is conquest, slavery, death. When we read the
history books given to children in the United States, it all starts with heroic adventure-there is no
bloodshed-and Columbus Day is a celebration.

      
Past the elementary and high schools, there are only occasional hints of something else. Samuel
Eliot Morison, the Harvard historian, was the most distinguished writer on Columbus, the author of
a multivolume biography, and was himself a sailor who retraced Columbus's route across the
Atlantic. In his popular book Christopher Columbus, Mariner, written in 1954, he tells about the
enslavement and the killing: "The cruel policy initiated by Columbus and pursued by his successors
resulted in complete genocide."

      
That is on one page, buried halfway into the telling of a grand romance. In the book's last
paragraph, Morison sums up his view of Columbus:

He had his faults and his defects, but they were largely the defects of the qualities that made him
great-his indomitable will, his superb faith in God and in his own mission as the Christ-bearer to
lands beyond the seas, his stubborn persistence despite neglect, poverty and discouragement. But
there was no flaw, no dark side to the most outstanding and essential of all his qualities-his
seamanship.

      
One can lie outright about the past. Or one can omit facts which might lead to unacceptable
conclusions. Morison does neither. He refuses to lie about Columbus. He does not omit the story of
mass murder; indeed he describes it with the harshest word one can use: genocide.

      
But he does something else-he mentions the truth quickly and goes on to other things more
important to him. Outright lying or quiet omission takes the risk of discovery which, when made,
might arouse the reader to rebel against the writer. To state the facts, however, and then to bury
them in a mass of other information is to say to the reader with a certain infectious calm: yes, mass
murder took place, but it's not that important-it should weigh very little in our final judgments; it
should affect very little what we do in the world.

      
It is not that the historian can avoid emphasis of some facts and not of others. This is as natural to
him as to the mapmaker, who, in order to produce a usable drawing for practical purposes, must
first flatten and distort the shape of the earth, then choose out of the bewildering mass of
geographic information those things needed for the purpose of this or that particular map.

      
My argument cannot be against selection, simplification, emphasis, which are inevitable for both
cartographers and historians. But the map-maker's distortion is a technical necessity for a common
purpose shared by all people who need maps. The historian's distortion is more than technical, it is
ideological; it is released into a world of contending interests, where any chosen emphasis supports
(whether the historian means to or not) some kind of interest, whether economic or political or
racial or national or sexual.

      
Furthermore, this ideological interest is not openly expressed in the way a mapmaker's technical
interest is obvious ("This is a Mercator projection for long-range navigation-for short-range, you'd
better use a different projection"). No, it is presented as if all readers of history had a common
interest which historians serve to the best of their ability. This is not intentional deception; the
historian has been trained in a society in which education and knowledge are put forward as
technical problems of excellence and not as tools for contending social classes, races, nations.

      
To emphasize the heroism of Columbus and his successors as navigators and discoverers, and to
de-emphasize their genocide, is not a technical necessity but an ideological choice. It serves-
unwittingly-to justify what was done.
My point is not that we must, in telling history, accuse, judge, condemn Columbus in absentia. It is
too late for that; it would be a useless scholarly exercise in morality. But the easy acceptance of
atrocities as a deplorable but necessary price to pay for progress (Hiroshima and Vietnam, to save
Western civilization; Kronstadt and Hungary, to save socialism; nuclear proliferation, to save us
all)-that is still with us. One reason these atrocities are still with us is that we have learned to bury
them in a mass of other facts, as radioactive wastes are buried in containers in the earth. We have
learned to give them exactly the same proportion of attention that teachers and writers often give
them in the most respectable of classrooms and textbooks. This learned sense of moral proportion,
coming from the apparent objectivity of the scholar, is accepted more easily than when it comes
from politicians at press conferences. It is therefore more deadly.

      
The treatment of heroes (Columbus) and their victims (the Arawaks)-the quiet acceptance of
conquest and murder in the name of progress-is only one aspect of a certain approach to history, in
which the past is told from the point of view of governments, conquerors, diplomats, leaders. It is
as if they, like Columbus, deserve universal acceptance, as if they-the Founding Fathers, Jackson,
Lincoln, Wilson, Roosevelt, Kennedy, the leading members of Congress, the famous Justices of the
Supreme Court-represent the nation as a whole. The pretense is that there really is such a thing as
"the United States," subject to occasional conflicts and quarrels, but fundamentally a community of
people with common interests. It is as if there really is a "national interest" represented in the
Constitution, in territorial expansion, in the laws passed by Congress, the decisions of the courts,
the development of capitalism, the culture of education and the mass media.

      
"History is the memory of states," wrote Henry Kissinger in his first book, A World Restored, in
which he proceeded to tell the history of nineteenth-century Europe from the viewpoint of the
leaders of Austria and England, ignoring the millions who suffered from those statesmen's policies.
From his standpoint, the "peace" that Europe had before the French Revolution was "restored" by
the diplomacy of a few national leaders. But for factory workers in England, farmers in France,
colored people in Asia and Africa, women and children everywhere except in the upper classes, it
was a world of conquest, violence, hunger, exploitation-a world not restored but disintegrated.

      
My viewpoint, in telling the history of the United States, is different: that we must not accept the
memory of states as our own. Nations are not communities and never have been, The history of any
country, presented as the history of a family, conceals fierce conflicts of interest (sometimes
exploding, most often repressed) between conquerors and conquered, masters and slaves, capitalists
and workers, dominators and dominated in race and sex. And in such a world of conflict, a world of
victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, as Albert Camus suggested, not to be on
the side of the executioners.

      
Thus, in that inevitable taking of sides which comes from selection and emphasis in history, I prefer
to try to tell the story of the discovery of America from the viewpoint of the Arawaks, of the
Constitution from the standpoint of the slaves, of Andrew Jackson as seen by the Cherokees, of the
Civil War as seen by the New York Irish, of the Mexican war as seen by the deserting soldiers of
Scott's army, of the rise of industrialism as seen by the young women in the Lowell textile mills, of
the Spanish-American war as seen by the Cubans, the conquest of the Philippines as seen by black
soldiers on Luzon, the Gilded Age as seen by southern farmers, the First World War as seen by
socialists, the Second World War as seen by pacifists, the New Deal as seen by blacks in Harlem,
the postwar American empire as seen by peons in Latin America. And so on, to the limited extent
that any one person, however he or she strains, can "see" history from the standpoint of others.

      
My point is not to grieve for the victims and denounce the executioners. Those tears, that anger,
cast into the past, deplete our moral energy for the present. And the lines are not always clear. In
the long run, the oppressor is also a victim. In the short run (and so far, human history has consisted
only of short runs), the victims, themselves desperate and tainted with the culture that oppresses
them, turn on other victims.

      
Still, understanding the complexities, this book will be skeptical of governments and their attempts,
through politics and culture, to ensnare ordinary people in a giant web of nationhood pretending to
a common interest. I will try not to overlook the cruelties that victims inflict on one another as they
are jammed together in the boxcars of the system. I don't want to romanticize them. But I do
remember (in rough paraphrase) a statement I once read: "The cry of the poor is not always just, but
if you don't listen to it, you will never know what justice is."

      
I don't want to invent victories for people's movements. But to think that history-writing must aim
simply to recapitulate the failures that dominate the past is to make historians collaborators in an
endless cycle of defeat. If history is to be creative, to anticipate a possible future without denying
the past, it should, I believe, emphasize new possibilities by disclosing those hidden episodes of the
past when, even if in brief flashes, people showed their ability to resist, to join together,
occasionally to win. I am supposing, or perhaps only hoping, that our future may be found in the
past's fugitive moments of compassion rather than in its solid centuries of warfare.

      
That, being as blunt as I can, is my approach to the history of the United States. The reader may as
well know that before going on.

      
      
What Columbus did to the Arawaks of the Bahamas, Cortes 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.

      
The Aztec civilization of Mexico came out of the heritage of Mayan, Zapotec, and Toltec cultures.
It built enormous constructions from stone tools and human labor, developed a writing system and
a priesthood. It also engaged in (let us not overlook this) the ritual killing of thousands of people as
sacrifices to the gods. The cruelty of the Aztecs, however, did not erase a certain innocence, and
when a Spanish armada appeared at Vera Cruz, and a bearded white man came ashore, with strange
beasts (horses), clad in iron, it was thought that he was the legendary Aztec man-god who had died three hundred years before, with the promise to return-the mysterious Quetzalcoatl. And so they
welcomed him, with munificent hospitality.

      
That was Hernando Cortes, come from Spain with an expedition financed by merchants and
landowners and blessed by the deputies of God, with one obsessive goal: to find gold. In the mind
of Montezuma, the king of the Aztecs, there must have been a certain doubt about whether Cortes
was indeed Quetzalcoatl, because he sent a hundred runners to Cortes, bearing enormous treasures,
gold and silver wrought into objects of fantastic beauty, but at the same time begging him to go
back. (The painter Durer a few years later described what he saw just arrived in Spain from that
expedition-a sun of gold, a moon of silver, worth a fortune.)

      
Cortes then began his march of death
from town to town, using deception, turning Aztec against Aztec, killing with the kind of
deliberateness that accompanies a strategy-to paralyze the will of the population by a sudden
frightful deed. And so, in Cholulu, he invited the headmen of the Cholula nation to the square. And
when they came, with thousands of unarmed retainers, Cortes's small army of Spaniards, posted
around the square with cannon, armed with crossbows, mounted on horses, massacred them, down
to the last man. Then they looted the city and moved on. When their cavalcade of murder was over
they were in Mexico City, Montezuma was dead, and the Aztec civilization, shattered, was in the
hands of the Spaniards.

      
All this is told in the Spaniards' own accounts.

      
In Peru, that other Spanish conquistador Pizarro, used the same tactics, and for the same reasons-
the frenzy in the early capitalist states of Europe for gold, for slaves, for products of the soil, to pay
the bondholders and stockholders of the expeditions, to finance the monarchical bureaucracies
rising in Western Europe, to spur the growth of the new money economy rising out of feudalism, to
participate in what Karl Marx would later call "the primitive accumulation of capital." These were
the violent beginnings of an intricate system of technology, business, politics, and culture that
would dominate the world for the next five centuries.

      
In the North American English colonies, the pattern was set early, as Columbus had set it in the
islands of the Bahamas. In 1585, before there was any permanent English settlement in Virginia,
Richard Grenville landed there with seven ships. The Indians he met were hospitable, but when one
of them stole a small silver cup, Grenville sacked and burned the whole Indian village.

      
Jamestown itself was set up inside the territory of an Indian confederacy, led by the chief,
Powhatan. Powhatan watched the English settle on his people's land, but did not attack, maintaining
a posture of coolness. When the English were going through their "starving time" in the winter of
1610, some of them ran off to join the Indians, where they would at least be fed. When the summer
came, the governor of the colony sent a messenger to ask Powhatan to return the runaways,
whereupon Powhatan, according to the English account, replied with "noe other than prowde and
disdaynefull Answers." Some soldiers were therefore sent out "to take Revenge." They fell upon an
Indian settlement, killed fifteen or sixteen Indians, burned the houses, cut down the corn growing
around the village, took the queen of the tribe and her children into boats, then ended up throwing
the children overboard "and shoteinge owit their Braynes in the water." The queen was later taken
off and stabbed to death.

      
Twelve years later, the Indians, alarmed as the English settlements kept growing in numbers,
apparently decided to try to wipe them out for good. They went on a rampage and massacred 347
men, women, and children. From then on it was total war.

      
Not able to enslave the Indians, and not able to live with them, the English decided to exterminate
them. Edmund Morgan writes, in his history of early Virginia, American Slavery, American
Freedom:

Since the Indians were better woodsmen than the English and virtually impossible to track down,
the method was to feign peaceful intentions, let them settle down and plant their com wherever they
chose, and then, just before harvest, fall upon them, killing as many as possible and burning the
corn... . Within two or three years of the massacre the English had avenged the deaths of that day
many times over.

      
In that first year of the white man in Virginia, 1607, Powhatan had addressed a plea to John Smith
that turned out prophetic. How authentic it is may be in doubt, but it is so much like so many Indian
statements that it may be taken as, if not the rough letter of that first plea, the exact spirit of it:

I have seen two generations of my people the.... I know the difference between peace and war
better than any man in my country. I am now grown old, and must the soon; my authority must
descend to my brothers, Opitehapan, Opechancanough and Catatough-then to my two sisters, and
then to my two daughters-I wish them to know as much as I do, and that your love to them may be
like mine to you. Why will you take by force what you may have quietly by love? Why will you
destroy us who supply you with food? What can you get by war? We can hide our provisions and
run into the woods; then you will starve for wronging your friends. Why are you jealous of us? We
are unarmed, and willing to give you what you ask, if you come in a friendly manner, and not so
simple as not to know that it is much better to eat good meat, sleep comfortably, live quietly with
my wives and children, laugh and be merry with the English, and trade for their copper and
hatchets, than to run away from them, and to lie cold in the woods, feed on acorns, roots and such
trash, and be so hunted that I can neither eat nor sleep. In these wars, my men must sit up watching,
and if a twig break, they all cry out "Here comes Captain Smith!" So I must end my miserable life.
Take away your guns and swords, the cause of all our jealousy, or you may all die in the same
manner.

      
When the Pilgrims came to New England they too were coming not to vacant land but to territory
inhabited by tribes of Indians. The governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, John Winthrop,
created the excuse to take Indian land by declaring the area legally a "vacuum." The Indians, he
said, had not "subdued" the land, and therefore had only a "natural" right to it, but not a "civil
right." A "natural right" did not have legal standing.

      
The Puritans also appealed to the Bible, Psalms 2:8: "Ask of me, and I shall give thee, the heathen
for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession." And to justify their
use of force to take the land, they cited Romans 13:2: "Whosoever therefore resisteth the power,
resisteth the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation."

      
The Puritans lived in uneasy truce with the Pequot Indians, who occupied what is now southern
Connecticut and Rhode Island. But they wanted them out of the way; they wanted their land. And
they seemed to want also to establish their rule firmly over Connecticut settlers in that area. The
murder of a white trader, Indian-kidnaper, and troublemaker became an excuse to make war on the
Pequots in 1636.

      
A punitive expedition left Boston to attack the NarraganseIt Indians on Block Island, who were
lumped with the Pequots. As Governor Winthrop wrote:

They had commission to pat to death the men of Block Island, but to spare the women and children,
and to bring them away, and to take possession of the island; and from thence to go to the Pequods
to demand the murderers of Captain Stone and other English, and one thousand fathom of wampum
for damages, etc. and some of their children as hostages, which if they should refuse, they were to
obtain it by force.

      
The English landed and killed some Indians, but the rest hid in the thick forests of the island and
the English went from one deserted village to the next, destroying crops. Then they sailed back to
the mainland and raided Pequot villages along the coast, destroying crops again. One of the officers
of that expedition, in his account, gives some insight into the Pequots they encountered: "The
Indians spying of us came running in multitudes along the water side, crying, What cheer,
Englishmen, what cheer, what do you come for? They not thinking we intended war, went on
cheerfully... -"
      
So, the war with the Pequots began. Massacres took place on both sides. The English developed a
tactic of warfare used earlier by Cortes and later, in the twentieth century, even more
systematically: deliberate attacks on noncombatants for the purpose of terrorizing the enemy. This
is ethno historian Francis Jennings's interpretation of Captain John Mason's attack on a Pequot
village on the Mystic River near Long Island Sound: "Mason proposed to avoid attacking Pequot
warriors, which would have overtaxed his unseasoned, unreliable troops. Battle, as such, was not
his purpose. Battle is only one of the ways to destroy an enemy's will to fight. Massacre can
accomplish the same end with less risk, and Mason had determined that massacre would be his
objective."
      
So the English set fire to the wigwams of the village. By their own account: "The Captain also said,
We must Burn Them; and immediately stepping into the Wigwam ... brought out a Fire Brand, and
putting it into the Matts with which they were covered, set the Wigwams on Fire." William
Bradford, in his History of the Plymouth Plantation written at the time, describes John Mason's raid
on the Pequot village:

Those that scaped the fire were slaine with the sword; some hewed to peeces, others rune throw
with their rapiers, so as they were quickly dispatchte, and very few escaped. It was conceived they
thus destroyed about 400 at this time. It was a fearful sight to see them thus frying in the fyer, and
the streams of blood quenching the same, and horrible was the stincke and sente there of, but the
victory seemed a sweete sacrifice, and they gave the prayers thereof to God, who had wrought so
wonderfully for them, thus to inclose their enemise in their hands, and give them so speedy a
victory over so proud and insulting an enimie.

      

      
As Dr. Cotton Mather, Puritan theologian, put it: "It was supposed that no less than 600 Pequot
souls were brought down to hell that day."

      
The war continued. Indian tribes were used against one another, and never seemed able to join
together in fighting the English. Jennings sums up:

The terror was very real among the Indians, but in rime they came to meditate upon its foundations.
They drew three lessons from the Pequot War: (1) that the Englishmen's most solemn pledge would
be broken whenever obligation conflicted with advantage; (2) that the English way of war had no
limit of scruple or mercy; and (3) that weapons of Indian making were almost useless against
weapons of European manufacture. These lessons the Indians took to heart.

      
A footnote in Virgil Vogel's book This Land Was Ours (1972) says: "The official figure on the
number of Pequots now in Connecticut is twenty-one persons."

      
Forty years after the Pequot War, Puritans and Indians fought again. This time it was the
Wampanoags, occupying the south shore of Massachusetts Bay, who were in the way and also
beginning to trade some of their land to people outside the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Their chief,
Massasoit, was dead. His son Wamsutta had been killed by Englishmen, and Wamsuttas brother
Metacom (later to be called King Philip by the English) became chief. The English found their
excuse, a murder which they attributed to Metacom, and they began a war of conquest against the
Wampanoags, a war to take their land. They were clearly the aggressors, but claimed they attacked
for preventive purposes. As Roger Williams, more friendly to the Indians than most, put it: "All
men of conscience or prudence ply to windward, to maintain their wars to be defensive."

      
Jennings says the elite of the Puritans wanted the war; the ordinary white Englishman did not want
it and often refused to fight. The Indians certainly did not want war, but they matched atrocity with
atrocity. When it was over, in 1676, the English had won, but their resources were drained; they
had lost six hundred men. Three thousand Indians were dead, including Metacom himself. Yet the
Indian raids did not stop.

      
For a while, the English tried softer tactics. But ultimately, it was back to annihilation. The Indian
population of 10 million that lived north of Mexico when Columbus came would ultimately be
reduced to less than a million. Huge numbers of Indians would the from diseases introduced by the
whites. A Dutch traveler in New Netherland wrote in 1656 that "the Indians ... affirm, that before
the arrival of the Christians, and before the smallpox broke out amongst them, they were ten times
as numerous as they now are, and that their population had been melted down by this disease,
whereof nine-tenths of them have died." When the English first settled Martha's Vineyard in 1642,
the Wampanoags there numbered perhaps three thousand. There were no wars on that island, but by
1764, only 313 Indians were left there. Similarly, Block Island Indians numbered perhaps 1,200 to
1,500 in 1662, and by 1774 were reduced to fifty-one.

      
Behind the English invasion of North America, behind their massacre of Indians, their deception,
their brutality, was that special powerful drive born in civilizations based on private property. It
was a morally ambiguous drive; the need for space, for land, was a real human need. But in conditions of scarcity, in a barbarous epoch of history ruled by competition, this human need was
transformed into the murder of whole peoples. Roger Williams said it was

a depraved appetite after the great vanities, dreams and shadows of this vanishing life, great portions of land, land in this
wilderness, as if men were in as great necessity and danger for want of great portions of land, as
poor, hungry, thirsty seamen have, after a sick and stormy, a long and starving passage. This is one
of the gods of New England, which the living and most high Eternal will destroy and famish.

      
Was all this bloodshed and deceit-from Columbus to Cortes, Pizarro, the Puritans-a necessity for
the human race to progress from savagery to civilization? Was Morison right in burying the story of
genocide inside a more important story of human progress? Perhaps a persuasive argument can be
made-as it was made by Stalin when he killed peasants for industrial progress in the Soviet Union,
as it was made by Churchill explaining the bombings of Dresden and Hamburg, and Truman
explaining Hiroshima. But how can the judgment be made if the benefits and losses cannot be
balanced because the losses are either unmentioned or mentioned quickly?

      
That quick disposal might be acceptable ("Unfortunate, yes, but it had to be done") to the middle
and upper classes of the conquering and "advanced" countries. But is it acceptable to the poor of
Asia, Africa, Latin America, or to the prisoners in Soviet labor camps, or the blacks in urban
ghettos, or the Indians on reservations-to the victims of that progress which benefits a privileged
minority in the world? Was it acceptable (or just inescapable?) to the miners and railroaders of
America, the factory hands, the men and women who died by the hundreds of thousands from
accidents or sickness, where they worked or where they lived-casualties of progress? And even the
privileged minority-must it not reconsider, with that practicality which even privilege cannot
abolish, the value of its privileges, when they become threatened by the anger of the sacrificed,
whether in organized rebellion, unorganized riot, or simply those brutal individual acts of
desperation labeled crimes by law and the state?

      
If there are necessary sacrifices to be made for human progress, is it not essential to hold to the
principle that those to be sacrificed must make the decision themselves? We can all decide to give
up something of ours, but do we have the right to throw into the pyre the children of others, or even
our own children, for a progress which is not nearly as clear or present as sickness or health, life or
death?

      
What did people in Spain get out of all that death and brutality visited on the Indians of the
Americas? For a brief period in history, there was the glory of a Spanish Empire in the Western
Hemisphere. As Hans Koning sums it up in his book Columbus: His Enterprise:

For all the gold and silver stolen and shipped to Spain did not make the Spanish people richer. It
gave their kings an edge in the balance of power for a time, a chance to hire more mercenary
soldiers for their wars. They ended up losing those wars anyway, and all that was left was a deadly
inflation, a starving population, the rich richer, the poor poorer, and a ruined peasant class.

      
Beyond all that, how certain are we that what was destroyed was inferior? Who were these people
who came out on the beach and swam to bring presents to Columbus and his crew, who watched
Cortes and Pizarro ride through their countryside, who peered out of the forests at the first white
settlers of Virginia and Massachusetts?

      
Columbus called them Indians, because he miscalculated the size of the earth. In this book we too
call them Indians, with some reluctance, because it happens too often that people are saddled with
names given them by their conquerors.

      
And yet, there is some reason to call them Indians, because they did come, perhaps 25,000 years
ago, from Asia, across the land bridge of the Bering Straits (later to disappear under water) to
Alaska. Then they moved southward, seeking warmth and land, in a trek lasting thousands of years
that took them into North America, then Central and South America. In Nicaragua, Brazil, and
Ecuador their petrified footprints can still be seen, along with the print of bison, who disappeared
about five thousand years ago, so they must have reached South America at least that far back

      
Widely dispersed over the great land mass of the Americas, they numbered approximately 75
million people by the rime Columbus came, perhaps 25 million in North America. Responding to
the different environments of soil and climate, they developed hundreds of different tribal cultures,
perhaps two thousand different languages. They perfected the art of agriculture, and figured out
how to grow maize (corn), which cannot grow by itself and must be planted, cultivated, fertilized,
harvested, husked, shelled. They ingeniously developed a variety of other vegetables and fruits, as
well as peanuts and chocolate and tobacco and rubber.

      
On their own, the Indians were engaged in the great agricultural revolution that other peoples in
Asia, Europe, Africa were going through about the same time.

      
While many of the tribes remained nomadic hunters and food gatherers in wandering, egalitarian
communes, others began to live in more settled communities where there was more food, larger
populations, more divisions of labor among men and women, more surplus to feed chiefs and
priests, more leisure time for artistic and social work, for building houses. About a thousand years
before Christ, while comparable constructions were going on in Egypt and Mesopotamia, the Zuni
and Hopi Indians of what is now New Mexico had begun to build villages consisting of large
terraced buildings, nestled in among cliffs and mountains for protection from enemies, with
hundreds of rooms in each village. Before the arrival of the European explorers, they were using
irrigation canals, dams, were doing ceramics, weaving baskets, making cloth out of cotton.

      
By the time of Christ and Julius Caesar, there had developed in the Ohio River Valley a culture of
so-called Moundbuilders, Indians who constructed thousands of enormous sculptures out of earth,
sometimes in the shapes of huge humans, birds, or serpents, sometimes as burial sites, sometimes
as fortifications. One of them was 3 1/2 miles long, enclosing 100 acres. These Moundbuilders seem to
have been part of a complex trading system of ornaments and weapons from as far off as the Great
Lakes, the Far West, and the Gulf of Mexico.

      
About A.D. 500, as this Moundbuilder culture of the Ohio Valley was beginning to decline, another
culture was developing westward, in the valley of the Mississippi, centered on what is now St.
Louis. It had an advanced agriculture, included thousands of villages, and also built huge earthen
mounds as burial and ceremonial places near a vast Indian metropolis that may have had thirty
thousand people. The largest mound was 100 feet high, with a rectangular base larger than that of
the Great Pyramid of Egypt. In the city, known as Cahokia, were toolmakers, hide dressers, potters,
jewelry makers, weavers, salt makers, copper engravers, and magnificent ceramists. One funeral
blanket was made of twelve thousand shell beads.

      
From the Adirondacks to the Great Lakes, in what is now Pennsylvania and upper New York, lived
the most powerful of the northeastern tribes, the League of the Iroquois, which included the
Mohawks (People of the Flint), Oneidas (People of the Stone), Onondagas (People of the
Mountain), Cayugas (People at the Landing), and Senecas (Great Hill People), thousands of people
bound together by a common Iroquois language.

      
In the vision of the Mohawk chief Iliawatha, the legendary Dekaniwidah spoke to the Iroquois:
"We bind ourselves together by taking hold of each other's hands so firmly and forming a circle so
strong that if a tree should fall upon it, it could not shake nor break it, so that our people and
grandchildren shall remain in the circle in security, peace and happiness."

      
In the villages of the Iroquois, land was owned in common and worked in common. Hunting was
done together, and the catch was divided among the members of the village. Houses were
considered common property and were shared by several families. The concept of private
ownership of land and homes was foreign to the Iroquois. A French Jesuit priest who encountered
them in the 1650s wrote: "No poorhouses are needed among them, because they are neither
mendicants nor paupers.. . . Their kindness, humanity and courtesy not only makes them liberal
with what they have, but causes them to possess hardly anything except in common."

      
Women were important and respected in Iroquois society. Families were matrilineal. That is, the
family line went down through the female members, whose husbands joined the family, while sons
who married then joined their wives' families. Each extended family lived in a "long house." When
a woman wanted a divorce, she set her husband's things outside the door.

      
Families were grouped in clans, and a dozen or more clans might make up a village. The senior
women in the village named the men who represented the clans at village and tribal councils. They
also named the forty-nine chiefs who were the ruling council for the Five Nation confederacy of the
Iroquois. The women attended clan meetings, stood behind the circle of men who spoke and voted,
and removed the men from office if they strayed too far from the wishes of the women.

      
The women tended the crops and took general charge of village affairs while the men were always
hunting or fishing. And since they supplied the moccasins and food for warring expeditions, they
had some control over military matters. As Gary B. Nash notes in his fascinating study of early
America, Red, White, and Black: "Thus power was shared between the sexes and the European idea
of male dominancy and female subordination in all things was conspicuously absent in Iroquois
society."

      
Children in Iroquois society, while taught the cultural heritage of their people and solidarity with
the tribe, were also taught to be independent, not to submit to overbearing authority. They were
taught equality in status and the sharing of possessions. The Iroquois did not use harsh punishment
on children; they did not insist on early weaning or early toilet training, hut gradually allowed the
child to learn self-care.

      
All of this was in sharp contrast to European values as brought over by the first colonists, a society
of rich and poor, controlled by priests, by governors, by male heads of families. For example, the
pastor of the Pilgrim colony, John Robinson, thus advised his parishioners how to deal with their
children: "And surely there is in all children ... a stubbornness, and stoutness of mind arising from
natural pride, which must, in the first place, be broken and beaten down; that so the foundation of
their education being laid in humility and tractableness, other virtues may, in their time, be built
thereon."

      
Gary Nash describes Iroquois culture:

No laws and ordinances, sheriffs and constables, judges and juries, or courts or jails-the apparatus
of authority in European societies-were to be found in the northeast woodlands prior to European
arrival. Yet boundaries of acceptable behavior were firmly set. Though priding themselves on the
autonomous individual, the Iroquois maintained a strict sense of right and wrong.... He who stole
another's food or acted invalourously in war was "shamed" by his people and ostracized from their
company until he had atoned for his actions and demonstrated to their satisfaction that he had
morally purified himself.

      
Not only the Iroquois but other Indian tribes behaved the same way. In 1635, Maryland Indians
responded to the governor's demand that if any of them lolled an Englishman, the guilty one should
be delivered up for punishment according to English law. The Indians said:

It is the manner amongst us Indians, that if any such accident happen, wee doe redeeme the life of a
man that is so slaine, with a 100 armes length of Beades and since that you are heere strangers, and
come into our Countrey, you should rather conform yourselves to the Customes of our Countrey,
than impose yours upon us....

      
So, Columbus and his successors were not coming into an empty wilderness, but into a world
which in some places was as densely populated as Europe itself, where the culture was complex,
where human relations were more egalitarian than in Europe, and where the relations among men,
women, children, and nature were more beautifully worked out than perhaps any place in the world.

      
They were people without a written language, but with their own laws, their poetry, their history
kept in memory and passed on, in an oral vocabulary more complex than Europe's, accompanied by
song, dance, and ceremonial drama. They paid careful attention to the development of personality,
intensity of will, independence and flexibility, passion and potency, to their partnership with one
another and with nature.

      
John Collier, an American scholar who lived among Indians in the 1920s and 1930s in the
American Southwest, said of their spirit: "Could we make it our own, there would be an eternally
inexhaustible earth and a forever lasting peace."

      
Perhaps there is some romantic mythology in that. But the evidence from European travelers in the
sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, put together recently by an American specialist on
Indian life, William Brandon, is overwhelmingly supportive of much of that "myth." Even allowing
for the imperfection of myths, it is enough to make us question, for that time and ours, the excuse
of progress in the annihilation of races, and the telling of history from the standpoint of the
conquerors and leaders of Western civilization.

A black American writer, J. Saunders Redding, describes the arrival of a ship in North America in
the year 1619:

Sails furled, flag drooping at her rounded stern, she rode the tide in from the sea. She was
a strange ship, indeed, by all accounts, a frightening ship, a ship of mystery. Whether she was
trader, privateer, or man-of-war no one knows. Through her bulwarks black-mouthed cannon
yawned. The flag she flew was Dutch; her crew a motley. Her port of call, an English settlement,
Jamestown, in the colony of Virginia. She came, she traded, and shortly afterwards was gone.
Probably no ship in modern history has carried a more portentous freight. Her cargo? Twenty
slaves.

There is not a country in world history in which racism has been more important, for so long a
time, as the United States. And the problem of "the color line," as W. E. B. Du Bois put it, is still
with us. So it is more than a purely historical question to ask: How does it start?—and an even
more urgent question: How might it end? Or, to put it differently: Is it possible for whites and
blacks to live together without hatred?


      
If history can help answer these questions, then the beginnings of slavery in North America—a
continent where we can trace the coming of the first whites and the first blacks—might supply at
least a few clues.


      
Some historians think those first blacks in Virginia were considered as servants, like the white
indentured servants brought from Europe. But the strong probability is that, even if they were
listed as "servants" (a more familiar category to the English), they were viewed as being different
from white servants, were treated differently, and in fact were slaves. In any case, slavery
developed quickly into a regular institution, into the normal labor relation of blacks to whites in the
New World. With it developed that special racial feeling—whether hatred, or contempt, or pity, or
patronization—that accompanied the inferior position of blacks in America for the next 350 years
—that combination of inferior status and derogatory thought we call racism.


      
Everything in the experience of the first white settlers acted as a pressure for the enslavement of
blacks.


      
The Virginians of 1619 were desperate for labor, to grow enough food to stay alive. Among them were
survivors from the winter of 1609-1610, the "starving time," when, crazed for want of food, they roamed
the woods for nuts and berries, dug up graves to eat the corpses, and died in batches until five hundred
colonists were reduced to sixty.


      
In the Journals of the House of Burgesses of Virginia is a document of 1619 which tells of the first
twelve years of the Jamestown colony. The first settlement had a hundred persons, who had one
small ladle of barley per meal. When more people arrived, there was even less food. Many of the
people lived in cavelike holes dug into the ground, and in the winter of 1609-1610, they were

...driven through insufferable hunger to eat those things which nature most abhorred, the flesh and
excrements of man as well of our own nation as of an Indian, digged by some out of his grave after he had
laid buried there days and wholly devoured him; others, envying the better state of body of any whom
hunger has not yet so much wasted as their own, lay wait and threatened to kill and eat them; one among
them slew his wife as she slept in his bosom, cut her in pieces, salted her and fed upon her till he had
clean devoured all parts saving her head...

      
A petitionby thirty colonists to the House of Burgesses, complaining against the twelve-year
governorship of Sir Thomas Smith, said:

In those 12 years of Sir Thomas Smith, his government, we aver that the colony for the most part
remained in great want and misery under most severe and cruel laws... The allowance in those times for a
man was only eight ounces of meale and half a pint of peas for a day... mouldy, rotten, full of cobwebs
and maggots, loathsome to man and not fit for beasts, which forced many to flee for relief to the savage
enemy, who being taken again were put to sundry deaths as by hanging, shooting and breaking upon the
wheel... of whom one for stealing two or three pints of oatmeal had a bodkin thrust through his tongue
and was tied with a chain to a tree until he starved...

      
The Virginians needed labor, to grow corn for subsistence, to grow tobacco for export. They had
just figured out how to grow tobacco, and in 1617 they sent off the first cargo to England. Finding
that, like all pleasureable drugs tainted with moral disapproval, it brought a high price, the
planters, despite their high religious talk, were not going to ask questions about something so
profitable.


      
They couldn't force the Indians to work for them, as Columbus had done. They were outnumbered,
and while, with superior firearms, they could massacre Indians, they would face massacre in
return. They could not capture them and keep them enslaved; the Indians were tough, resourceful,
defiant, and at home in these woods, as the transplanted Englishmen were not.


      
White servants had not yet been brought over in sufficient quantity. Besides, they did not come out
of slavery, and did not have to do more than contract their labor for a few years to get their
passage and a start in the New World. As for the free white settlers, many of them were skilled
craftsmen, or even men of leisure back in England, who were so little inclined to work the land that
John Smith, in those early years, had to declare a kind of martial law, organize them into work
gangs, and force them into the fields for survival.


      
There may have been a kind of frustrated rage at their own ineptitude, at the Indian superiority at
taking care of themselves, that made the Virginians especially ready to become the masters of
slaves. Edmund Morgan imagines their mood as he writes in his book American Slavery,
American Freedom:

If you were a colonist, you knew that your technology was superior to the Indians'. You knew that you
were civilized, and they were savages... But your superior technology had proved insufficient to extract
anything. The Indians, keeping to themselves, laughed at your superior methods and lived from the land
more abundantly and with less labor than you did... And when your own people started deserting in order
to live with them, it was too much... So you killed the Indians, tortured them, burned their villages,
burned their cornfields. It proved your superiority, in spite of your failures. And you gave similar
treatment to any of your own people who succumbed to their savage ways of life. But you still did not
grow much corn...

      
Black slaves were the answer. And it was natural to consider imported blacks as slaves, even if the
institution of slavery would not be regularized and legalized for several decades. Because, by
1619, a million blacks had already been brought from Africa to South America and the Caribbean,
to the Portuguese and Spanish colonies, to work as slaves. Fifty years before Columbus, the
Portuguese took ten African blacks to Lisbon—this was the start of a regular trade in slaves.
African blacks had been stamped as slave labor for a hundred years. So it would have been
strange if those twenty blacks, forcibly transported to Jamestown, and sold as objects to settlers
anxious for a steadfast source of labor, were considered as anything but slaves.


      
Their helplessness made enslavement easier. The Indians were on their own land. The whites were
in their own European culture. The blacks had been torn from their land and culture, forced into a
situation where the heritage of language, dress, custom, family relations, was bit by bit obliterated
except for remnants that blacks could hold on to by sheer, extraordinary persistence.


      
Was their culture inferior—and so subject to easy destruction? Inferior in military capability, yes
—vulnerable to whites with guns and ships. But in no other way—except that cultures that are
different are often taken as inferior, especially when such a judgment is practical and profitable.
Even militarily, while the Westerners could secure forts on the African coast, they were unable to
subdue the interior and had to come to terms with its chiefs.


      
The African civilization was as advanced in its own way as that of Europe. In certain ways, it was
more admirable; but it also included cruelties, hierarchical privilege, and the readiness to sacrifice
human lives for religion or profit. It was a civilization of 100 million people, using iron
implements and skilled in farming. It had large urban centers and remarkable achievements in
weaving, ceramics, sculpture.


      
European travelers in the sixteenth century were impressed with the African kingdoms of Timbuktu
and Mali, already stable and organized at a time when European states were just beginning to
develop into the modern nation. In 1563, Ramusio, secretary to the rulers in Venice, wrote to the
Italian merchants: "Let them go and do business with the King of Timbuktu and Mali and there is
no doubt that they will be well-received there with their ships and their goods and treated well, and
granted the favours that they ask..."


      
A Dutch report, around 1602, on the West African kingdom of Benin, said: "The Towne seemeth
to be very great, when you enter it. You go into a great broad street, not paved, which seemeth to
be seven or eight times broader than the Warmoes Street in Amsterdam. ...The Houses in this
Towne stand in good order, one close and even with the other, as the Houses in Holland stand."


      
The inhabitants of the Guinea Coast were described by one traveler around 1680 as "very civil and
good-natured people, easy to be dealt with, condescending to what Europeans require of them in a
civil way, and very ready to return double the presents we make them."


      
Africa had a kind of feudalism, like Europe based on agriculture, and with hierarchies of lords and
vassals. But African feudalism did not come, as did Europe's, out of the slave societies of Greece
and Rome, which had destroyed ancient tribal life. In Africa, tribal life was still powerful, and
some of its better features—a communal spirit, more kindness in law and punishment—still
existed. And because the lords did not have the weapons that European lords had, they could not
command obedience as easily.


      
In his book The African Slave Trade, Basil Davidson contrasts law in the Congo in the early
sixteenth century with law in Portugal and England. In those European countries, where the idea
of private property was becoming powerful, theft was punished brutally. In England, even as late
as 1740, a child could be hanged for stealing a rag of cotton. But in the Congo, communal life
persisted, the idea of private property was a strange one, and thefts were punished with fines or
various degrees of servitude. A Congolese leader, told of the Portuguese legal codes, asked a
Portuguese once, teasingly: "What is the penalty in Portugal for anyone who puts his feet on the
ground?"


      
Slavery existed in the African states, and it was sometimes used by Europeans to justify their own
slave trade. But, as Davidson points out, the "slaves" of Africa were more like the serfs of Europe
—in other words, like most of the population of Europe. It was a harsh servitude, but but they had
rights which slaves brought to America did not have, and they were "altogether different from the
human cattle of the slave ships and the American plantations." In the Ashanti Kingdom of West
Africa, one observer noted that "a slave might marry; own property; himself own a slave; swear an
oath; be a competent witness and ultimately become heir to his master... An Ashanti slave, nine
cases out of ten, possibly became an adopted member of the family, and in time his descendants so
merged and intermarried with the owner's kinsmen that only a few would know their origin."


      
One slave trader, John Newton (who later became an antislavery leader), wrote about the people of
what is now Sierra Leone:

The state of slavery, among these wild barbarous people, as we esteem them, is much milder than in our
colonies. For as, on the one hand, they have no land in high cultivation, like our West India plantations,
and therefore no call for that excessive, unintermitted labour, which exhausts our slaves: so, on the other
hand, no man is permitted to draw blood even from a slave.

      
African slavery is hardly to be praised. But it was far different from plantation or mining slavery
in the Americas, which was lifelong, morally crippling, destructive of family ties, without hope of
any future. African slavery lacked two elements that made American slavery the most cruel form
of slavery in history: the frenzy for limitless profit that comes from capitalistic agriculture; the
reduction of the slave to less than human status by the use of racial hatred, with that relentless
clarity based on color, where white was master, black was slave.


      
In fact, it was because they came from a settled culture, of tribal customs and family ties, of
communal life and traditional ritual, that African blacks found themselves especially helpless when
removed from this. They were captured in the interior (frequently by blacks caught up in the slave
trade themselves), sold on the coast, then shoved into pens with blacks of other tribes, often
speaking different languages.


      
The conditions of capture and sale were crushing affirmations to the black African of his
helplessness in the face of superior force. The marches to the coast, sometimes for 1,000 miles,
with people shackled around the neck, under whip and gun, were death marches, in which two of
every five blacks died. On the coast, they were kept in cages until they were picked and sold. One
John Barbot, at the end of the seventeenth century, described these cages on the Gold Coast:

As the slaves come down to Fida from the inland country, they are put into a booth or prison... near the
beach, and when the Europeans are to receive them, they are brought out onto a large plain, where the
ship's surgeons examine every part of everyone of them, to the smallest member, men and women being
stark naked... Such as are allowed good and sound are set on one side... marked on the breast with a red-
hot iron, imprinting the mark of the French, English or Dutch companies... The branded slaves after this
are returned to their former booths where they await shipment, sometimes 10-15 days...

      
Then they were packed aboard the slave ships, in spaces not much bigger than coffins, chained
together in the dark, wet slime of the ship's bottom, choking in the stench of their own excrement.
Documents of the time describe the conditions:

The height, sometimes, between decks, was only eighteen inches; so that the unfortunate human beings
could not turn around, or even on their sides, the elevation being less than the breadth of their shoulders;
and here they are usually chained to the decks by the neck and legs. In such a place the sense of misery
and suffocation is so great, that the Negroes... are driven to frenzy.

      
On one occasion, hearing a great noise from belowdecks where the blacks were chained together,
the sailors opened the hatches and found the slaves in different stages of suffocation, many dead,
some having killed others in desperate attempts to breathe. Slaves often jumped overboard to
drown rather than continue their suffering. To one observer a slave-deck was "so covered with
blood and mucus that it resembled a slaughter house."


      
Under these conditions, perhaps one of every three blacks transported overseas died, but the huge
profits (often double the investment on one trip) made it worthwhile for the slave trader, and so the
blacks were packed into the holds like fish.


      
First the Dutch, then the English, dominated the slave trade. (By 1795 Liverpool had more than a
hundred ships carrying slaves and accounted for half of all the European slave trade.) Some
Americans in New England entered the business, and in 1637 the first American slave ship, the
Desire, sailed from Marblehead. Its holds were partitioned into racks, 2 feet by 6 feet, with leg
irons and bars.


      
By 1800, 10 to 15 million blacks had been transported as slaves to the Americas, representing
perhaps one-third of those originally seized in Africa. It is roughly estimated that Africa lost 50
million human beings to death and slavery in those centuries we call the beginnings of modern
Western civilization, at the hands of slave traders and plantation owners in Western Europe and
America, the countries deemed the most advanced in the world.


      
In the year 1610, a Catholic priest in the Americas named Father Sandoval wrote back to a church
functionary in Europe to ask if the capture, transport, and enslavement of African blacks was legal
by church doctrine. A letter dated March 12, 1610, from Brother Luis Brandaon to Father
Sandoval gives the answer:

Your Reverence writes me that you would like to know whether the Negroes who are sent to your parts have been legally captured. To this
I reply that I think your Reverence should have no scruples on this point, because this is a matter which has been questioned by the Board
of Conscience in Lisbon, and all its members are learned and conscientious men. Nor did the bishops who were in SaoThome, Cape Verde,
and here in Loando—all learned and virtuous men—find fault with it. We have been here ourselves for forty years and there have been
among us very learned Fathers... never did they consider the trade as illicit. Therefore we and the Fathers of Brazil buy these slaves for
our service without any scruple...

      
With all of this—the desperation of the Jamestown settlers for labor, the impossibility of using
Indians and the difficulty of using whites, the availability of blacks offered in greater and greater
numbers by profit-seeking dealers in human flesh, and with such blacks possible to control because
they had just gone through an ordeal which if it did not kill them must have left them in a state of
psychic and physical helplessness—is it any wonder that such blacks were ripe for enslavement?


      
And under these conditions, even if some blacks might have been considered servants, would
blacks be treated the same as white servants?


      
The evidence, from the court records of colonial Virginia, shows that in 1630 a white man named
Hugh Davis was ordered "to be soundly whipt... for abusing himself... by defiling his body in lying
with a Negro." Ten years later, six servants and "a negro of Mr. Reynolds" started to run away.
While the whites received lighter sentences, "Emanuel the Negro to receive thirty stripes and to be
burnt in the cheek with the letter R, and to work in shackle one year or more as his master shall see
cause."


      
Although slavery was not yet regularized or legalized in those first years, the lists of servants show
blacks listed separately. A law passed in 1639 decreed that "all persons except Negroes" were to
get arms and ammunition—probably to fight off Indians. When in 1640 three servants tried to run
away, the two whites were punished with a lengthening of their service. But, as the court put it,
"the third being a negro named John Punch shall serve his master or his assigns for the time of his
natural life." Also in 1640, we have the case of a Negro woman servant who begot a child by
Robert Sweat, a white man. The court ruled "that the said negro woman shall be whipt at the
whipping post and the said Sweat shall tomorrow in the forenoon do public penance for his offense
at James citychurch..."


      
This unequal treatment, this developing combination of contempt and oppression, feeling and
action, which we call "racism"—was this the result of a "natural" antipathy of white against
black? The question is important, not just as a matter of historical accuracy, but because any
emphasis on "natural" racism lightens the responsibility of the social system. If racism can't be
shown to be natural, then it is the result of certain conditions, and we are impelled to eliminate
those conditions.


      
We have no way of testing the behavior of whites and blacks toward one another under favorable
conditions—with no history of subordination, no money incentive for exploitation and
enslavement, no desperation for survival requiring forced labor. All the conditions for black and
white in seventeenth-century America were the opposite of that, all powerfully directed toward
antagonism and mistreatment. Under such conditions even the slightest display of humanity
between the races might be considered evidence of a basic human drive toward community.


      
Sometimes it is noted that, even before 1600, when the slave trade had just begun, before Africans
were stamped by it—literally and symbolically—the color black was distasteful. In England,
before 1600, it meant, according to the Oxford English Dictionary: "Deeply stained with dirt;
soiled, dirty, foul. Having dark or deadly purposes, malignant; pertaining to or involving death,
deadly; baneful, disastrous, sinister. Foul, iniquitous, atrocious, horribly wicked. Indicating
disgrace, censure, liability to punishment, etc." And Elizabethan poetry often used the color white
in connection with beauty.


      
It may be that, in the absence of any other overriding factor, darkness and blackness, associated
with night and unknown, would take on those meanings. But the presence of another human being
is a powerful fact, and the conditions of that presence are crucial in determining whether an initial
prejudice, against a mere color, divorced from humankind, is turned into brutality and hatred.


      
In spite of such preconceptions about blackness, in spite of special subordination of blacks in the
Americas in the seventeenth century, there is evidence that where whites and blacks found
themselves with common problems, common work, common enemy in their master, they behaved
toward one another as equals. As one scholar of slavery, Kenneth Stampp, has put it, Negro and
white servants of the seventeenth century were "remarkably unconcerned about the visible physical
differences."


      
Black and white worked together, fraternized together. The very fact that laws had to be passed
after a while to forbid such relations indicates the strength of that tendency. In 1661 a law was
passed in Virginia that "in case any English servant shall run away in company of any Negroes" he
would have to give special service for extra years to the master of the runaway Negro. In 1691,
Virginia provided for the banishment of any "white man or woman being free who shall intermarry
with a negro, mulatoo, or Indian man or woman bond or free."


      
There is an enormous difference between a feeling of racial strangeness, perhaps fear, and the mass
enslavement of millions of black people that took place in the Americas. The transition from one to
the other cannot be explained easily by "natural" tendencies. It is not hard to understand as the
outcome of historical conditions.


      
Slavery grew as the plantation system grew. The reason is easily traceable to something other than
natural racial repugnance: the number of arriving whites, whether free or indentured servants
(under four to seven years contract), was not enough to meet the need of the plantations. By 1700,
in Virginia, there were 6,000 slaves, one-twelfth of the population. By 1763, there were 170,000
slaves, about half the population.


      
Blacks were easier to enslave than whites or Indians. But they were still not easy to enslave. From
the beginning, the imported black men and women resisted their enslavement. Ultimately their
resistance was controlled, and slavery was established for 3 million blacks in the South. Still,
under the most difficult conditions, under pain of mutilation and death, throughout their two
hundred years of enslavement in North America, these Afro-Americans continued to rebel. Only
occasionally was there an organized insurrection. More often they showed their refusal to submit
by running away. Even more often, they engaged in sabotage, slowdowns, and subtle forms of
resistance which asserted, if only to themselves and their brothers and sisters, their dignity as
human beings.


      
The refusal began in Africa. One slave trader reported that Negroes were "so wilful and loth to
leave their own country, that they have often leap'd out of the canoes, boat and ship into the sea,
and kept under water til they were drowned."


      
When the very first black slaves were brought into Hispaniola in 1503, the Spanish governor of
Hispaniola complained to the Spanish court that fugitive Negro slaves were teaching disobedience
to the Indians. In the 1520s and 1530s, there were slave revolts in Hispaniola, Puerto Rico, Santa
Marta, and what is now Panama. Shortly after those rebellions, the Spanish established a special
police for chasing fugitive slaves.


      
A Virginia statute of 1669 referred to "the obstinacy of many of them," and in 1680 the Assembly
took note of slave meetings "under the pretense of feasts and brawls" which they considered of
"dangerous consequence." In 1687, in the colony's Northern Neck, a plot was discovered in which
slaves planned to kill all the whites in the area and escape during a mass funeral.


      
Gerald Mullin, who studied slave resistance in eighteenth-century Virginia in his work Flight and
Rebellion, reports:

The available sources on slavery in 18th-century Virginia—plantation and county records, the newspaper
advertisements for runaways—describe rebellious slaves and few others. The slaves described were lazy
and thieving; they feigned illnesses, destroyed crops, stores, tools, and sometimes attacked or killed
overseers. They operated blackmarkets in stolen goods. Runaways were defined as various types, they
were truants (who usually returned voluntarily), "outlaws"... and slaves who were actually fugitives: men
who visited relatives, went to town to pass as free, or tried to escape slavery completely, either by boarding
ships and leaving the colony, or banding together in cooperative efforts to establish villages or hide-outs
in the frontier. The commitment of another type of rebellious slave was total; these men became killers,
arsonists, and insurrectionists.

      
Slaves recently from Africa, still holding on to the heritage of their communal society, would run
away in groups and try to establish villages of runaways out in the wilderness, on the frontier.
Slaves born in America, on the other hand, were more likely to run off alone, and, with the skills
they had learned on the plantation, try to pass as free men.


      
In the colonial papers of England, a 1729 report from the lieutenant governor of Virginia to the
British Board of Trade tells how "a number of Negroes, about fifteen... formed a design to
withdraw from their Master and to fix themselves in the fastnesses of the neighboring Mountains.
They had found means to get into their possession some Arms and Ammunition, and they took
along with them some Provisions, their Cloths, bedding and working Tools... Tho' this attempt has
happily been defeated, it ought nevertheless to awaken us into some effectual measures..."


      
Slavery was immensely profitable to some masters. James Madison told a British visitor shortly
after the American Revolution that he could make $257 on every Negro in a year, and spend only
$12 or $13 on his keep. Another viewpoint was of slaveowner Landon Carter, writing about fifty
years earlier, complaining that his slaves so neglected their work and were so uncooperative
("either cannot or will not work") that he began to wonder if keeping them was worthwhile.


      
Some historians have painted a picture—based on the infrequency of organized rebellions and the
ability of the South to maintain slavery for two hundred years—of a slave population made
submissive by their condition; with their African heritage destroyed, they were, as Stanley Elkins
said, made into "Sambos," "a society of helpless dependents." Or as another historian, Ulrich
Phillips, said, "by racial quality submissive." But looking at the totality of slave behavior, at the
resistance of everyday life, from quiet noncooperation in work to running away, the picture
becomes different.


      
In 1710, warning the Virginia Assembly, Governor Alexander Spotswood said:

...freedom wears a cap which can without a tongue, call together all those who long to shake off the fetters
of slavery and as such an Insurrection would surely be attended with most dreadful consequences so I we
cannot be too early in providing against it, both by putting our selves in a better posture of defence and by
making a law to prevent the consultations of those Negroes.

      
Indeed, considering the harshness of punishment for running away, that so many blacks did run
away must be a sign of a powerful rebelliousness. All through the 1700s, the Virginia slave code
read:

Whereas many times slaves run away and lie hid and lurking in swamps, woods, and other obscure places,
killing hogs, and commiting other injuries to the inhabitants... if the slave does not immediately return,
anyone whatsoever may kill or destroy such slaves by such ways and means as he... shall think fit... If the
slave is apprehended... it shall... be lawful for the county court, to order such punishment for the said
slave, either by dismembering, or in any other way... as they in their discretion shall think fit, for the
reclaiming any such incorrigible slave, and terrifying others from the like practices...

      
Mullin found newspaper advertisements between 1736 and 1801 for 1,138 men runaways, and 141
women. One consistent reason for running away was to find members of one's family—showing
that despite the attempts of the slave system to destroy family ties by not allowing marriages and
by separating families, slaves would face death and mutilation to get together.


      
In Maryland, where slaves were about one-third of the population in 1750, slavery had been
written into law since the 1660s, and statutes for controlling rebellious slaves were passed. There
were cases where slave women killed their masters, sometimes by poisoning them, sometimes by
burning tobacco houses and homes. Punishment ranged from whipping and branding to execution,
but the trouble continued. In 1742, seven slaves were put to death for murdering their master.


      
Fear of slave revolt seems to have been a permanent fact of plantation life. William Byrd, a
wealthy Virginia slaveowner, wrote in 1736:

We have already at least 10,000 men of these descendants of Ham, fit to bear arms, and these numbers
increase every day, as well by birth as by importation. And in case there should arise a man of desperate
fortune, he might with more advantage than Cataline kindle a servile war... and tinge our rivers wide as
they are with blood.

      
It was an intricate and powerful system of control that the slaveowners developed to maintain their
labor supply and their way of life, a system both subtle and crude, involving every device that
social orders employ for keeping power and wealth where it is. As Kenneth Stampp puts it:

A wise master did not take seriously the belief that Negroes were natural-born slaves. He knew better. He
knew that Negroes freshly imported from Africa had to be broken into bondage; that each succeeding
generation had to be carefully trained. This was no easy task, for the bondsman rarely submitted
willingly. Moreover, he rarely submitted completely. In most cases there was no end to the need for
control—at least not until old age reduced the slave to a condition of helplessness.

      
The system was psychological and physical at the same time. The slaves were taught discipline,
were impressed again and again with the idea of their own inferiority to "know their place," to see
blackness as a sign of subordination, to be awed by the power of the master, to merge their interest
with the master's, destroying their own individual needs. To accomplish this there was the
discipline of hard labor, the breakup of the slave family, the lulling effects of religion (which
sometimes led to "great mischief," as one slaveholder reported), the creation of disunity among
slaves by separating them into field slaves and more privileged house slaves, and finally the power
of law and the immediate power of the overseer to invoke whipping, burning, mutilation, and death.
Dismemberment was provided for in the Virginia Code of 1705. Maryland passed a law in 1723
providing for cutting off the ears of blacks who struck whites, and that for certain serious crimes,
slaves should be hanged and the body quartered and exposed.


      
Still, rebellions took place—not many, but enough to create constant fear among white planters.
The first large-scale revolt in the North American colonies took place in New York in 1712. In
New York, slaves were 10 percent of the population, the highest proportion in the northern states,
where economic conditions usually did not require large numbers of field slaves. About twenty-
five blacks and two Indians set fire to a building, then killed nine whites who came on the scene.
They were captured by soldiers, put on trial, and twenty-one were executed. The governor's report
to England said: "Some were burnt, others were hanged, one broke on the wheel, and one hung
alive in chains in the town..." One had been burned over a slow fire for eight to ten hours—all this
to serve notice to other slaves.


      
A letter to London from South Carolina in 1720 reports:

I am now to acquaint you that very lately we have had a very wicked and barbarous plot of the designe of
the negroes rising with a designe to destroy all the white people in the country and then to take Charles
Town in full body but it pleased God it was discovered and many of them taken prisoners and some burnt
and some hang'd and some banish'd.

      
Around this time there were a number of fires in Boston and New Haven, suspected to be the work
of Negro slaves. As a result, one Negro was executed in Boston, and the Boston Council ruled that
any slaves who on their own gathered in groups of two or more were to be punished by whipping.


      
At Stono, South Carolina, in 1739, about twenty slaves rebelled, killed two warehouse guards,
stole guns and gunpowder, and headed south, killing people in their way, and burning buildings.
They were joined by others, until there were perhaps eighty slaves in all and, according to one
account of the time, "they called out Liberty, marched on with Colours displayed, and two Drums
beating." The militia found and attacked them. In the ensuing battle perhaps fifty slaves and
twenty-five whites were killed before the uprising was crushed.


      
Herbert Aptheker, who did detailed research on slave resistance in North America for his book
American Negro Slave Revolts, found about 250 instances where a minimum of ten slaves joined
in a revolt or conspiracy.


      
From time to time, whites were involved in the slave resistance. As early as 1663, indentured
white servants and black slaves in Gloucester County, Virginia, formed a conspiracy to rebel and
gain their freedom. The plot was betrayed, and ended with executions. Mullin reports that the
newspaper notices of runaways in Virginia often warned "ill-disposed" whites about harboring
fugitives. Sometimes slaves and free men ran off together, or cooperated in crimes together.
Sometimes, black male slaves ran off and joined white women. From time to time, white ship
captains and watermen dealt with runaways, perhaps making the slave a part of the crew.


      
In New York in 1741, there were ten thousand whites in the city and two thousand black slaves. It
had been a hard winter and the poor—slave and free—had suffered greatly. When mysterious
fires broke out, blacks and whites were accused of conspiring together. Mass hysteria developed
against the accused. After a trial full of lurid accusations by informers, and forced confessions,
two white men and two white women were executed, eighteen slaves were hanged, and thirteen
slaves were burned alive.


      
Only one fear was greater than the fear of black rebellion in the new American colonies. That was
the fear that discontented whites would join black slaves to overthrow the existing order. In the
early years of slavery, especially, before racism as a way of thinking was firmly ingrained, while
white indentured servants were often treated as badly as black slaves, there was a possibility of
cooperation. As Edmund Morgan sees it:

There are hints that the two despised groups initially saw each other as sharing the same predicament. It
was common, for example, for servants and slaves to run away together, steal hogs together, get drunk
together. It was not uncommon for them to make love together. In Bacon's Rebellion, one of the last
groups to surrender was a mixed band of eighty negroes and twenty English servants.

As Morgan says, masters, "initially at least, perceived slaves in much the same way they had
always perceived servants... shiftless, irresponsible, unfaithful, ungrateful, dishonest..." And "if
freemen with disappointed hopes should make common cause with slaves of desperate hope, the
results might be worse than anything Bacon had done."


      
And so, measures were taken. About the same time that slave codes, involving discipline and
punishment, were passed by the Virginia Assembly,

Virginia's ruling class, having proclaimed that all white men were superior to black, went on to offer their
social (but white) inferiors a number of benefits previously denied them. In 1705 a law was passed
requiring masters to provide white servants whose indenture time was up with ten bushels of corn, thirty
shillings, and a gun, while women servants were to get 15 bushels of corn and forty shillings. Also, the
newly freed servants were to get 50 acres of land.

      
Morgan concludes: "Once the small planter felt less exploited by taxation and began to prosper a
little, he became less turbulent, less dangerous, more respectable. He could begin to see his big
neighbor not as an extortionist but as a powerful protector of their common interests."


      
We see now a complex web of historical threads to ensnare blacks for slavery in America: the
desperation of starving settlers, the special helplessness of the displaced African, the powerful
incentive of profit for slave trader and planter, the temptation of superior status for poor whites,
the elaborate controls against escape and rebellion, the legal and social punishment of black and
white collaboration.


      
The point is that the elements of this web are historical, not "natural." This does not mean that
they are easily disentangled, dismantled. It means only that there is a possibility for something
else, under historical conditions not yet realized. And one of these conditions would be the
elimination of that class exploitation which has made poor whites desperate for small gifts of
status, and has prevented that unity of black and white necessary for joint rebellion and
reconstruction.


      
Around 1700, the Virginia House of Burgesses declared:

The Christian Servants in this country for the most part consists of the Worser Sort of the people of
Europe. And since... such numbers of Irish and other Nations have been brought in of which a great
many have been soldiers in the late warrs that according to our present Circumstances we can hardly
governe them and if they were fitted with Armes and had the Opertunity of meeting together by Musters
we have just reason to fears they may rise upon us.

It was a kind of class consciousness, a class fear. There were things happening in early Virginia,
and in the other colonies, to warrant it.

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, Bacon was described in a Royal
Commission report:

He was said to be about four or five and thirty years 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) Soc 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. 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 Ringleaders might not be found out.
Having connur'd them into this circle, given them Brandy to wind up the charme, and enjoyned
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.

            
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 which would divide Indians in order to control them (in New England at this very time,
Massasoit's son Metacom was threatening to unite Indian tribes, and had done frightening damage
to Puritan settlements in "King Philip's War"); 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.

      
Violence had escalated on the frontier before the rebellion. Some Doeg Indians took a few hogs to
redress a debt, and whites, retrieving the hogs, murdered two Indians. The Doegs then sent out a
war party to kill a white herdsman, after which a white militia company killed twenty-four Indians.
This led to a series of Indian raids, with the Indians, outnumbered, turning to guerrilla warfare. The
House of Burgesses in Jamestown declared war on the Indians, but proposed to exempt those
Indians who cooperated. This seemed to anger the frontiers people, who wanted total war but also
resented the high taxes assessed to pay for the war.

      
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.
It was a dry summer, ruining the corn crop, which was needed for food, and the tobacco crop,
needed for export. Governor Berkeley, in his seventies, tired of holding office, wrote wearily about
his situation: "How miserable that man is that Governes a People where six parts of seaven at least
are Poore Endebted Discontented and Armed."

      
His phrase "six parts of seaven" suggests the existence of an upper class not so impoverished. In
fact, there was such a class already developed in Virginia. Bacon himself came from this class, 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 formers from the Indians. Then Bacon went out to attack the friendly Pamunkey Indians,
killing eight, taking others prisoner, plundering their possessions.

      
There is evidence that the rank and file of both Bacon's rebel army and Berkeley's official army
were not as enthusiastic as their leaders. There were mass desertions on both sides, according to
Washburn. 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." A minister, apparently not a sympathizer, wrote
this epitaph:

Bacon is Dead I am sorry at my heart,

That lice and flux should take the hangmans part.

            
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 free men, servants, and slaves. He promised to
pardon everyone, to give freedom to slaves and servants, whereupon they surrendered their arms
and dispersed, except for eighty Negroes and twenty English who insisted on keeping their arms.
Grantham promised to take them to a garrison down the river, 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
100,000 pounds a year for the King. Berkeley himself, returning to England years earlier to protest
the English Navigation Acts, which gave English merchants a monopoly of the colonial trade, had
said:

... we cannot but resent, that forty thousand people should be impoverish'd to enrich little more than
forty Merchants, who being the only buyers of our Tobacco, give us what they please for it, and
after it is here, sell it how they please; and indeed have forty thousand servants in us at cheaper
rates, than any other men have slaves....

            
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."

      
"Levelling" meant equalizing the wealth. Levelling 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. The Elizabethan definition of "rogues and vagabonds" included:

... All persons calling themselves Schollers going about begging, all Seafaring men pretending
losses of their Shippes or goods on the sea going about the Country begging, all idle persons going
about in any Country either begging or using any subtile crafte or unlawful Games ... comon
Players of Interludes and Minstrells wandring abroade ... all wandering persons and comon
Labourers being persons able in bodye using loytering and refusing to worke for such reasonable
wages as is taxed or commonly given....

            
Such persons found begging could be stripped to the waist and whipped bloody, could be sent out
of the city, sent to workhouses, or transported out of the country.

      
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. Abbot Smith, in his study of indentured servitude, Colonists in Bondage, writes: "From
the complex pattern of forces producing emigration to the American colonies one stands out clearly
as most powerful in causing the movement of servants. This was the pecuniary profit to be made by
shipping them."

      
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. The sloop Sea-Flower, leaving Belfast in 1741, was at
sea sixteen weeks, and when it arrived in Boston, forty-six of its 106 passengers were dead of
starvation, six of them eaten by the survivors. On another trip, thirty-two children died of hunger
and disease and were thrown into the ocean. 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 ahout 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. One observer testified: "I have
seen an Overseer beat a Servant with a cane about the head till the blood has followed, for a fault
that is not worth the speaking of...." The Maryland court records showed many servant suicides. In
1671, Governor Berkeley of Virginia reported that in previous years four of five servants died of
disease after their arrival. Many were poor children, gathered up by the hundreds on the streets of
English cities and sent to Virginia to work.

      
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."

      
Servants could not marry without permission, could be separated from their families, 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."

      
Although colonial laws existed to stop excesses against servants, they were not very well enforced,
we learn from Richard Morris's comprehensive study of early court records in Government and
Labor in Early America. Servants did not participate in juries. Masters did. (And being
propertyless, servants did not vote.) In 1666, a New England court accused a couple of the death of
a servant after the mistress had cut off the servant's toes. The jury voted acquittal. 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.

      
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. (Abbot
Smith suggests this was because there was more chance of success on a small island.)

      
However, in
York County, Virginia, in 1661, a servant named Isaac Friend proposed to another, after much
dissatisfaction with the food, that they "get a matter of Forty of them together, and get Gunnes &
hee would be the first & lead them and cry as they went along, 'who would be for Liberty, and free
from bondage', & that there would enough come to them and they would goe through the Countrey
and kill those that made any opposition and that they would either be free or dye for it." The
scheme was never carried out, but two years later, in Gloucester County, servants again planned a
general uprising. One of them gave the plot away, and four were executed. The informer was given
his freedom and 5,000 pounds of tobacco. Despite the rarity of servants' rebellions, the threat was
always there, and masters were fearful.

      
Finding their situation intolerable, and rebellion impractical in an increasingly organized society,
servants reacted in individual ways. The files of the county courts in New England show that one
servant struck at his master with a pitchfork. An apprentice servant was accused of "laying violent
hands upon his ... master, and throwing him downe twice and feching bloud of him, threatening to
breake his necke, running at his face with a chayre...." One maidservant was brought into court for
being "bad, unruly, sulen, careles, destructive, and disobedient."

      
After the participation of servants in Bacon's Rebellion, the Virginia legislature passed laws to
punish servants who rebelled. The preamble to the act said:

Whereas many evil disposed servants in these late tymes of horrid rebellion taking advantage of the
loosnes and liberty of the tyme, did depart from their service, and followed the rebells in rebellion,
wholy neglecting their masters imploymcnt whereby the said masters have suffered great damage
and injury....

            
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, 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 Maryland court records show,
in the 1650s, a conspiracy of a dozen servants to seize a boat and to resist with arms if intercepted.
They were captured and whipped.

      
The mechanism of control was formidable. Strangers had to show passports or certificates to prove
they were free men. 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, 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 that
class."

      
After we make our way through Abbot Smith's disdain for the servants, as "men and women who
were dirty and lazy, rough, ignorant, lewd, and often criminal," who "thieved and wandered, had
bastard children, and corrupted society with loathsome diseases," we find that "about one in ten was
a sound and solid individual, who would if fortunate survive his 'seasoning,' work out his time, take
up land, and wax decently prosperous." Perhaps another one in ten would become an artisan or an
overseer. The rest, 80 percent, who were "certainly ... shiftless, hopeless, ruined individuals," either
"died during their servitude, returned to England after it was over, or became 'poor whites.'"

      Smith's
conclusion is supported by a more recent study of servants in seventeenth-century Maryland, where
it was found that the first batches of servants became landowners and politically active in the
colony, but by the second half of the century more than half the servants, even after ten years of
freedom, remained landless. Servants became tenants, providing cheap labor for the large planters
both during and after their servitude.

      
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 50,000 pounds (a huge sum 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.

      
In the Carolinas, the Fundamental Constitutions were written in the 1660s by John Locke, who is
often considered the philosophical father of the Founding Fathers and the American system.
Locke's constitution set up a feudal-type aristocracy, in which eight barons would own 40 percent
of the colony's land, and only a baron could be governor. When the crown took direct control of
North Carolina, after a rebellion against the land arrangements, rich speculators seized half a
million acres for themselves, monopolizing the good farming land near the coast Poor people,
desperate for land, squatted on bits of farmland and fought all through the pre-Revolutionary period
against the landlords' attempts to collect rent.

      
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. 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.

            
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 Deer-field 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. ..."

      
In Newport, Rhode Island, Bridenbaugh found, as in Boston, that "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
merchants as "... 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."

      
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."

      
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, hi 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 30 shillings. Under Lord Cornbury in the early 1700s, one grant to a group of speculators was for
2 million acres.

      
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 city council resolution read:

Whereas the Necessity, Number and Continual Increase of the Poor within this City is very Great
and ... frequendy Commit divers misdemeanors within the Said City, who living Idly and
unemployed, become debauched and Instructed in the Practice of Thievery and Debauchery. For
Remedy Whereof... Resolved that there be forthwith built... A good, Strong and Convenient House
and Tenement.

            
The two-story brick structure was called "Poor House, Work House, and House of Correction."

      
A letter to Peter Zenger's New York Journal in 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, Charleston-were doubling and tripling
in size.

      
Through all that growth, the upper class was getting most of the benefits and monopolized political
power. A historian who studied Boston tax lists in 1687 and 1771 found that in 1687 there were,
out of a population of six thousand, about one thousand property owners, and that the top 5 percent-
1 percent of the population-consisted of fifty rich individuals who had 25 percent of the wealth. By
1770, the top 1 percent of property owners owned 44 percent of the wealth.

      
As Boston grew, from 1687 to 1770, the percentage of adult males who were poor, perhaps rented a
room, or slept in the back of a tavern, owned no property, doubled from 14 percent of the adult
males to 29 percent. And loss of property meant loss of voting rights.

      
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, crippled, 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."

      
Kenneth Lockridge, in a study of colonial New England, found that vagabonds and paupers kept
increasing and "the wandering poor" were a distinct fact of New England life in the middle 1700s.
James T. Lemon and Gary Nash found a similar concentration of wealth, a widening of the gap
between rich and poor, in their study of Chester County, Pennsylvania, in the 1700s.

      
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 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. As early as 1636, an employer off the coast of Maine reported that his
workmen and fishermen "fell into a mutiny" because he had withheld their wages. They deserted en
masse. Five years later, carpenters in Maine, protesting against inadequate food, engaged in a
slowdown. At the Gloucester shipyards in the 1640s, what Richard Morris calls the "first lockout in
American labor history" took place when the authorities told a group of troublesome shipwrights
they could not "worke a stroke of worke more."

      
There were early strikes of coopers, butchers, bakers, protesting against government control of the
fees they charged. Porters in the 1650s in New York refused to carry salt, and carters (truckers,
teamsters, carriers) who went out on strike were prosecuted in New York City "for not obeying the
Command and Doing their Uutyes as becomes them in their Places." In 1741, bakers combined to
refuse to bake because they had to pay such high prices for wheat.

      
A severe food shortage in Boston in 1713 brought a warning from town selectmen to the General
Assembly of Massachusetts saying 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 Belchers ships, broke into his warehouses looking for corn, and shot the lieutenant
governor when he tried to interfere.

      
Eight years after the bread riot on the Common, a pamphleteer protested against those who became
rich "by grinding the poor," by studying "how to oppress, cheat, and overreach their neighbors." He
denounced "The Rich, Great and Potent" who "with rapacious violence bear down all before
them...."

      
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.

      
Around the same time, in New York, an election pamphlet urged New York voters to join "Shuttle"
the weaver, "Plane" the joiner, "Drive" the carter, "Mortar" the mason, "Tar" the mariner, "Snip"
the tailor, "Smallrent" the fair-minded landlord, and "John Poor" the tenant, against "Gripe the
Merchant, Squeeze the Shopkeeper, Spintext and Quible the Lawyer." The electorate was urged to
vote out of office "people in Exalted Stations" who scorned "those they call the Vulgar, the Mob,
the herd of Mechanicks."

      
In the 1730s, a committee of the Boston town meeting spoke out for Bostonians in debt, who
wanted paper money issued to make it easier to pay off their debts to the merchant elite. They did
not want, they declared, to "have our Bread and Water measured out to Us by those who Riot in
Luxury & Wantonness on Our Sweat & Toil. ..."

      
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 town house 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 tide 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."

      
When two men who freed Baldwin were arrested, hundreds of New Jersey citizens gathered around
the jail. A report sent by the New Jersey government to the Lords of Trade in London described the
scene:

Two of the new captains of the Newark Companies by the Sheriffs order went with their drumms,
to the people, so met, and required all persons there, belong to their companies, to follow the drums
and to defend the prison but none followed, tho many were there. . .. The multitude ... between tour
and five of the clock in the afternoon lighted off their horses, and came towards the gaol, huzzaing
and swinging their clubbs ... till they came within reach of the guard, struck them with their clubbs,
and the guard (having no orders to fire) returned the blows with then- guns, and some were
wounded on both sides, but none killed. The multitude broke the ranks of the soldiers, and pressed
on the prison door, where the Sheriff stood with a sword, and kept them off, till they gave him
several blows, and forced him out from thence. They then, with axes and other instruments, broke
open the prison door, and took out the two prisoners. As also one other prisoner, that was confined
for debt, and went away.

            
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.

      
The Indians, they had found, were too unruly to keep as a labor force, and remained an obstacle to
expansion. Black slaves were easier to control, and their profitability for southern plantations was
bringing an enormous increase in the importation of slaves, who were becoming a majority in some
colonies and constituted one-fifth of the entire colonial population. But the blacks were not totally
submissive, and as their numbers grew, the prospect of slave rebellion grew.

      
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."

      
There was little chance that whites and Indians would combine in North America as they were
doing in South and Central America, where the shortage of women, and the use of Indians on the
plantations, led to daily contact. Only in Georgia and South Carolina, where white women were
scarce, was there some sexual mixing of white men and Indian women. In general, the Indian had
been pushed out of sight, out of touch. One fact disturbed: whites would run off to join Indian
tribes, or would be captured in battle and brought up among the Indians, and when this happened
the whites, given a chance to leave, chose to stay in the Indian culture, Indians, having the choice,
almost never decided to join the whites.

      
Hector St. Jean Crevecoeur, the Frenchman who lived in America for almost twenty years, told, in
Letters from an American Farmer, how children captured during the Seven Years' War and found
by their parents, grown up and living with Indians, would refuse to leave their new families. "There
must be in their social bond," he said, "something singularly captivating, and far superior to
anything to be boasted among us; for thousands of Europeans are Indians, and we have no
examples of even one of those Aborigines having from choice become Europeans."

      
But this affected few people. In general, the Indian was kept at a distance. And the colonial
officialdom had found a way of alleviating the danger: by monopolizing the good land on the
eastern seaboard, they forced landless whites to move westward to the frontier, there to encounter
the Indians and to be a buffer for the seaboard rich against Indian troubles, white becoming more
dependent on the government for protection. 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 northern colonies (except on
Cape Cod, Martha's Vineyard, and Rhode Island, where there was close contact and sexual mixing),
there was not much opportunity for Africans and Indians to meet in large numbers. New York had
the largest slave population in the North, and there was some contact between blacks and Indians,
as in 1712 when Africans and Indians joined in an insurrection. But this was quickly suppressed.

      
In the Carolinas, however, whites were outnumbered by black slaves and nearby Indian tribes; in
the 1750s, 25,000 whites faced 40,000 black slaves, with 60,000 Creek, Cherokee, Choctaw, and
Chickasaw Indians in the area. Gary Nash writes: "Indian uprisings that punctuated the colonial
period and a succession of slave uprisings and insurrectionary plots that were nipped in the bud
kept South Carolinians sickeningly aware that only through the greatest vigilance and through
policies designed to keep their enemies divided could they hope to remain in control of the
situation."

      
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 Lyttletown of South Carolina wrote in 1738: "It has always been the
policy of this government to create an aversion in them [Indians] to Negroes."

      
Part of this policy involved using black slaves in the South Carolina militia to fight Indians. Still,
the government was worried about black revolt, and during the Cherokee war in the 1760s, a
motion to equip five hundred slaves to fight the Indians lost in the Carolina assembly by a single
vote.

      
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." Mixed offspring
continued to be produced by white-black sex relations throughout the colonial period, in spite of
laws prohibiting interracial marriage in Virginia, Massachusetts, Maryland, Delaware,
Pennsylvania, the Carolinas, Georgia. By declaring the children illegitimate, they would keep them
inside the black families, so that the white population could remain "pure" and in control.

      
What made Bacon's Rebellion especially fearsome for the rulers of Virginia was that black slaves
and white servants joined forces. The final surrender was by "four hundred English and Negroes in
Armes" at one garrison, and three hundred "freemen and African and English bondservants" in
another garrison. The naval commander who subdued the four hundred wrote: "Most of them I
persuaded to goe to their Homes, which accordingly they did, except about eighty Negroes and
twenty English which would not deliver their Armes."

      
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. In 1698, South Carolina passed a
"deficiency law" requiring plantation owners to have at least one white servant for every six male
adult Negroes. A letter from the southern colonies in 1682 complained of "no white men to
superintend our negroes, or repress an insurrection of negroes. . . ." In 1691, the House of
Commons received "a petition of divers merchants, masters of ships, planters and others, trading to
foreign plantations .. . setting forth, that the plantations cannot be maintained without a
considerable number of white servants, as well to keep the blacks in subjection, as to bear arms in
case of invasion."

      
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.
The militia of this province does not consist of above 2000 men." Apparently, two thousand were
not considered sufficient to meet the threat.

      
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. It also makes understandable why the Virginia Assembly, after Bacon's
Rebellion, gave amnesty to white servants who had rebelled, but not to blacks. Negroes were
forbidden to carry any arms, while whites finishing their servitude would get muskets, along with
corn and cash. The distinctions of status between white and black servants became more and more
clear.

      
In the 1720s, with fear of slave rebellion growing, white servants were allowed in Virginia to join
the militia as substitutes for white freemen. At the same time, slave patrols were established in
Virginia to deal with the "great dangers that may ... happen by the insurrections of negroes...." Poor
white men would make up the rank and file of these patrols, and get the monetary reward.

      
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.

      
The growing cities generated more skilled workers, and the governments cultivated the support of
white mechanics by protecting them from the competition of both slaves and free Negroes. As early
as 1686, the council in New York ordered that "noe Negro or Slave be suffered to work on the
bridge as a Porter about any goods either imported or Exported from or into this City." In the
southern towns too, white craftsmen and traders were protected from Negro competition. In 1764
the South Carolina legislature prohibited Charleston masters from employing Negroes or other
slaves as mechanics or in handicraft trades.

      
Middle-class Americans might be invited to join a new elite by attacks against the corruption of the
established rich. The New Yorker Cadwallader Golden, in his Address to the Freeholders in 1747,
attacked the wealthy as tax dodgers unconcerned with the welfare of others (although he himself
was wealthy) and spoke for the honesty and dependability of "the midling rank of mankind" in
whom citizens could best trust "our liberty & Property." This was to become a critically important
rhetorical device for the rule of the few, who would speak to the many of "our" liberty, "our"
property, "our" country.

      
Similarly, in Boston, the rich James Otis could appeal to the Boston middle class by attacking the
Tory Thomas Hutchinson. James Henretta has shown that 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 with community obligations to act as
overseers of roads, appraisers of estates and similar duties." It helped the alliance to accept the
middle class socially in "a round of activities that included local politics ... dances, horseracing, and
cockfights, occasionally punctuated with drinking brawls..."

      
The Pennsylvania Journal wrote 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 fanners, artificers or men
in trade; they enjoy and are fond of freedom, and the meanest among them thinks he has a right to
civility from the greatest." Indeed, there was a substantial middle class fitting that description. 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.

Around 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 over France in the Seven Years' War (known in America as the
French and Indian War), expelling them 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, no conscious forethought strategy by the colonial elite, hut 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 in need of English rule, the English more in need of the
colonists' wealth. The elements were there for conflict.


      
The war had brought glory for the generals, death to the privates, wealth for the merchants,
unemployment for the poor. There were 25,000 people living in New York (there had been 7,000 in
1720) when the French and Indian 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% of the city's taxable assets. In Philadelphia and New York too, wealth
was more and more concentrated. Court-recorded wills showed that by 1750 the wealthiest people
in the cities were leaving 20,000 pounds (equivalent to about $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. As Nash puts it:

James Otis, Samuel Adams, Royall lyler, Oxenbridge Thacher, and a host of other Bostonians,
linked to the artisans and laborers through a network of neighborhood taverns, fire companies, and
the Caucus, espoused a vision of politics that gave credence to laboring-class views and regarded as
entirely legitimate the participation of artisans and even laborers in the political process.

      
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 pan 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.


      
Especially in Philadelphia, according to Nash, the consciousness of the lower middle classes grew
to the point where it must have caused some hard thinking, not just among the conservative
Loyalists sympathetic to England, but even among leaders of the Revolution. "By mid-1776,
laborers, artisans, and small tradesmen, employing extralegal measures when electoral politics
failed, were in clear command in Philadelphia." Helped by some middle-class leaders (Thomas
Paine, Thomas Young, and others), they "launched a full-scale attack on wealth and even on the
right to acquire unlimited private property."


      
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, one
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. They were aimed at a handful of rich
landlords, but with the landlords far away, they often had to direct their anger against farmers who
had leased the disputed land from the owners. (See Edward Countryman's pioneering work on rural
rebellion.)


      
Just as the Jersey rebels had broken into jails to free their friends, rioters in the Hudson
Valley rescued prisoners from the sheriff and one time took the sheriff himself as prisoner. The
tenants were seen as "chiefly the dregs of the People," and the posse that the sheriff of Albany
County led to Bennington in 1771 included the privileged top of the local power structure.


      
The land rioters saw their battle as poor against rich. A witness at a rebel leader's trial in New York in 1766 said that the farmers evicted by the landlords "had an equitable Tide but could not be
defended in a Course of Law because they were poor and . . . poor men were always oppressed by
the rich." Ethan Alien's Green Mountain rebels in Vermont described themselves as "a poor people
. . . fatigued in settling a wilderness country," and their opponents as "a number of Attorneys and
other gentlemen, with all their tackle of ornaments, and compliments, and French finesse."


      
Land-hungry farmers in the Hudson Valley turned to the British for support against the American
landlords; the Green Mountain rebels did the same. But as the conflict with Britain intensified, the
colonial leaders of the movement for independence, aware of the tendency of poor tenants to side
with the British in their anger against the rich, adopted policies to win over people in the
countryside.


      
In North Carolina, a powerful 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 movement in
North Carolina was called the Regulator movement, and it consisted, says Marvin L. Michael Kay,
a specialist in the history of that movement, of "class-conscious white farmers in the west who
attempted to democratize local government in their respective counties." The Regulators referred to
themselves as "poor Industrious peasants," as "labourers," "the wretched poor," "oppressed" by
"rich and powerful . . . designing Monsters."


      
The Regulators saw that a combination of wealth and political power ruled North Carolina, and
denounced those officials "whose highest Study is the promotion of their wealth." 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. In the western
counties where the movement developed, only a small percentage of the households had slaves, and
41 percent of these were concentrated, to take one sample western county, in less than 2 percent of
the households. The Regulators did not represent servants or slaves, but they did speak for small
owners, squatters, and tenants.


      
A contemporary account of the Regulator movement in Orange County describes the situation:

Thus were the people of Orange insulted by The sheriff, robbed and plundered . . . neglected and
condemned by the Representatives and abused by the Magistracy; obliged to pay Fees regulated
only by the Avarice of the officer; obliged to pay a TAX which they believed went to enrich and
aggrandize a few, who lorded it over them continually; and from all these Evils they saw no way to
escape; for the Men in Power, and Legislation, were the Men whose interest it was to oppress, and
make gain of the Labourer.

      
In that county in the 1760s, the Regulators organized to prevent the collection of taxes, or 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. The
Regulators petitioned the government on their grievances in 1768, citing "the unequal chances the
poor and the weak have in contentions with the rich and powerful."


      
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. But they also tried to elect farmers to the assembly,
asserting "that a majority of our assembly is composed of Lawyers, Clerks, and others in
Connection with them...." In 1770 there was a large-scale riot in Hillsborough, North Carolina, in
which they disrupted a court, forced the judge to flee, beat three lawyers and two merchants, and
looted stores.


      
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. Kay says that in the three western counties of
Orange, Anson, and Rowan, where the Regulator movement was concentrated, it had the support of
six thousand to seven thousand men out of a total white taxable population of about eight thousand.


      
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, who
faced 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.


      
When riots against the Stamp Act swept Boston in 1767, they were analyzed by the commander of
the British forces in North America, General Thomas Gage, as follows:

The Boston Mob, raised first by the Instigation of Many of the Principal Inhabitants, Allured by
Plunder, rose shordy after of their own Accord, attacked, robbed, and destroyed several Houses,
and amongst others, mat of the Lieutenant Governor.... People then began to be terrified at the
Spirit they had raised, to perceive that popular Fury was not to be guided, and each individual
feared he might be the next Victim to their Rapacity. The same Fears spread thro' the other
Provinces, and there has been as much Pains taken since, to prevent Insurrections, of the People, as
before to excite them.

Gage's comment suggests that leaders of the movement against the Stamp Act had instigated crowd
action, but then became frightened by the thought that it might be directed against their wealth, too. At this time, the top 10 percent of Boston's taxpayers held about 66 percent of Boston's taxable wealth, while the lowest 30 percent of the taxpaying population had no taxable property at all. The propertyless could not vote and so (like blacks, women, Indians) could not participate in town meetings. This included sailors, journeymen, apprentices, servants.


      
Dirk Hoerder, a student of Boston mob actions in the Revolutionary period, calls the Revolutionary
leadership "the Sons of Liberty type drawn from the middling interest and well-to-do merchants ...
a hesitant leadership," wanting to spur action against Great Britain, yet worrying about maintaining
control over the crowds at home.


      
It took the Stamp Act crisis to make this leadership aware of its dilemma. 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. These were, as one of the Loyal Nine said, "amazingly inflamed people." The Loyal Nine
seemed taken aback by the direct assault on the wealthy furnishings of the stampmaster.


      
The rich set up armed patrols. 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. As
more demonstrations were planned for November 1, 1765, when the Stamp Act was to go into
effect, and for Pope's Day, November 5, steps were taken to keep things under control; a dinner was
given for certain leaders of the rioters to win them over. 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 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...."


      
Impressment and the quartering of troops by the British were 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. Mechanics and shopkeepers lost work or business because of the colonists'
boycott of British goods. In 1769, Boston set up a committee "to Consider of some Suitable
Methods of employing the Poor of the Town, whose Numbers and distresses are dayly increasing
by the loss of its Trade and Commerce."


      
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. There was anger 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 mulattoes, 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 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 after five weeks of impressment by the British. 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, 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. Still, town meetings and mass meetings rose in opposition. The seizure of a
powder store by the British led four thousand men from all around Boston to assemble in
Cambridge, where some of the wealthy officials had their sumptuous homes. The crowd forced the
officials to resign. The Committees of Correspondence of Boston and other towns welcomed this
gathering, but warned against destroying private property.


      
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." In Newport, Rhode Island, for instance, the Sons of Liberty, according
to a contemporary writer, "contained some Gentlemen of the First Figure in 'Town for Opulence,
Sense and Politeness." In North Carolina "one of the wealthiest of the gentlemen and freeholders"
led the Sons of Liberty. Similarly in Virginia and South Carolina. And "New York's leaders, too,
were involved in small but respectable independent business ventures." Their aim, however, was to
broaden their organization, to develop a mass base of wage earners.


      
Many of the Sons of Liberty groups declared, as in Milford, Connecticut, their "greatest
abhorrence" of lawlessness, or as in Annapolis, opposed "all riots or unlawful assemblies tending to
the disturbance of the public tranquility." John Adams expressed the same fears: "These tarrings
and featherings, this breaking open Houses by rude and insolent Rabbles, in Resentment for private
Wrongs or in pursuing of private Prejudices and Passions, must be discountenanced.


      
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. One Virginian wrote
in his diary in the spring of 1774: "The lower Class of People here are in tumult on account of
Reports from Boston, many of them expect to he press'd & compell'd to go and fight the Britains!"
Around the time of the Stamp Act, a Virginia orator addressed the poor: "Are not the gentlemen
made of the same materials as the lowest and poorest among you? . . . Listen to no doctrines which
may tend to divide us, but let us go hand in hand, as brothers...."


      
It was a problem for which the rhetorical talents of Patrick Henry were superbly fitted. He was, as
Rhys Isaac puts it, "firmly attached to the world of the gentry," but he spoke in words that the
poorer whites of Virginia could understand. Henry's fellow Virginian Edmund Randolph recalled
his style as "simplicity and even carelessness. . .. His pauses, which for their length might
sometimes be feared to dispell the attention, rivited it the more by raising the expectation."


      
Patrick Henry's oratory in Virginia pointed a way to relieve class tension between upper and lower
classes and form a bond against the British. This was to find 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 Bandits 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 in it."


      
Paine dealt with the practical advantages of sticking to England or being separated; he knew the
importance of economics:

I challenge the wannest 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:

But the injuries and disadvantages which we sustain by that connection are without number.. . . any
submission to, or dependence on, Great Britain, tends directly to involve this Continent in
European wars and quarrels, and set us at variance with nations who would otherwise seek our
friendship. . ..

      
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 contents.
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 hut wanted to make
sure it didn't go too far in the direction of democracy. Paine had denounced the so-called balanced
government of Lords and Commons as a deception, and called for single-chamber representative
bodies where the people could be represented. Adams denounced Paine's plan as "so democratical,
without any restraint or even an attempt at any equilibrium or counter-poise, that it must produce
confusion and every evil work." Popular assemblies needed to be checked, Adams thought, because
they were "productive of hasty results and absurd judgments."


      
Paine himself came out of "the lower orders" of England-a stay-maker, tax official, teacher, poor
emigrant to America. He arrived in Philadelphia in 1774, when agitation against England was
already strong in the colonies. The artisan mechanics of Philadelphia, along with journeymen,
apprentices, and ordinary laborers, were forming into a politically conscious militia, "in general
damn'd riff-raff-dirty, mutinous, and disaffected," as local aristocrats described them. By speaking
plainly and strongly, he could represent those politically conscious lower-class people (he opposed
property qualifications for voting in Pennsylvania). But his great concern seems to have been to
speak for a middle group. "There is an extent of riches, as well as an extreme of poverty, which, by
harrowing the circles of a man's acquaintance, lessens his opportunities of general knowledge."


      
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, hi 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 not allowing 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 the powerful philosophical statement:

We hold these truths to he 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 arc 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 as, 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 Penobseot 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 in the great manifesto of freedom of the American Revolution.


      
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 like 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 lay impossible moral burdens on 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 philosophy of the Declaration, that government is set up by the people to secure their life,
liberty, and happiness, and is to be overthrown when it no longer does that, is often traced to the
ideas of John Locke, in his Second Treatise on Government. That was published in England in
1689, when the English were rebelling against tyrannical kings and setting up parliamentary
government. The Declaration, like Locke's Second Treatise, talked about government and political
rights, but ignored the existing inequalities in property. And how could people truly have equal
rights, with stark differences in wealth?


      
Locke himself was a wealthy man, with investments in the silk trade and slave trade, income from
loans and mortgages. He invested heavily in the first issue of the stock of the Bank of England, just
a few years after he had written his Second Treatise as the classic statement of liberal democracy.
As adviser to the Carolinas, he had suggested a government of slaveowners run by wealthy land
barons.


      
Locke's statement of people's government was in support of a revolution in England for the free
development of mercantile capitalism at home and abroad. Locke himself regretted that the labor of
poor children "is generally lost to the public till they are twelve or fourteen years old" and
suggested that all children over three, of families on relief, should attend "working schools" so
they would be "from infancy . . . inured to work."


      
The English revolutions of the seventeenth century brought representative government and opened
up discussions of democracy. But, as the English historian Christopher Hill wrote in The Puritan
Revolution: "The establishment of parliamentary supremacy, of the rule of law, no doubt mainly
benefited the men of property." The kind of arbitrary taxation that threatened the security of
property was overthrown, monopolies were ended to give more free reign to business, and sea
power began to be used for an imperial policy abroad, including the conquest of Ireland. The
Levellers and the Diggers, two political movements which wanted to carry equality into the
economic sphere, were put down by the Revolution.


      
One can see the reality of Locke's nice phrases about representative government in the class
divisions and conflicts in England that followed the Revolution that Locke supported. At the very
time the American scene was becoming tense, in 1768, England was racked by riots and strikes-of
coal heavers, saw mill workers, halters, weavers, sailors- because of the high price of bread and the
miserable wages. The Annual Register reviewed the events of the spring and summer of 1768:

A general dissatisfaction unhappily prevailed among several of the lower orders of the people. This
ill temper, which was pardy occasioned by the high price of provisions, and partly proceeded from
other causes, too frequently manifested itself in acts of tumult and riot, which were productive of
the most melancholy consequences.

"The people" who were, supposedly, at the heart of Locke's theory of people's sovereignty were
defined by a British member of Parliament: "I don't mean the mob. ... I mean the middling people
of England, the manufacturer, the yeoman, the merchant, the country gentleman. . . ."

      
In America, too, the reality behind the words of the Declaration of Independence (issued in the
same year as Adam Smith's capitalist manifesto, The Wealth of Nations) 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."

The American victory over the British army was made possible by the existence of an already-
armed people. Just about every white male had a gun, and could shoot. The Revolutionary
leadership distrusted the mobs of poor. But they knew the Revolution had no appeal to slaves and
Indians. They would have to woo the armed white population.


      
This was not easy. Yes, mechanics and sailors, some others, were incensed against the British. But
general enthusiasm for the war was not strong. While much of the white male population went into
military service at one time or another during the war, only a small fraction stayed. John Shy, in his
study of the Revolutionary army (A People Numerous and Armed), says they "grew weary of being
bullied by local committees of safety, by corrupt deputy assistant commissaries of supply, and by
bands of ragged strangers with guns in their hands calling themselves soldiers of the Revolution."
Shy estimates that perhaps a fifth of the population was actively treasonous. John Adams had
estimated a third opposed, a third in support, a third neutral.


      
Alexander Hamilton, an aide of George Washington and an up-and-coming member of the new
elite, wrote from his headquarters: ". . . our countrymen have all the folly of the ass and all the
passiveness of the sheep... . They are determined not to be free.. . . If we are saved, France and
Spain must save us."


      
Slavery got in the way in the South. South Carolina, insecure since the slave uprising in Stono in
1739, could hardly fight against the British; her militia had to be used to keep slaves under control.


      
The men who first joined the colonial militia were generally "hallmarks of respectability or at least
of full citizenship" in their communities, Shy says. Excluded from the militia were friendly Indians,
free Negroes, white servants, and free white men who had no stable home.
But desperation led to the recruiting of the less respectable whites. Massachusetts and Virginia
provided for drafting "strollers" (vagrants) into the militia. In fact, the military became a place of
promise for the poor, who might rise in rank, acquire some money, change their social status.


      
Here was the traditional device by which those in charge of any social order mobilize and discipline
a recalcitrant population-offering the adventure and rewards of military service to get poor people
to fight for a cause they may not see clearly as their own. A wounded American lieutenant at
Bunker Hill, interviewed by Peter Oliver, a Tory (who admittedly might have been looking for such
a response), told how he had joined the rebel forces:

I was a Shoemaker, & got my living by my Labor. When this Rebellion came on, I saw some of my
Neighbors got into Commission, who were no better than myself. I was very ambitious, & did not
like to see those Men above me. T was asked to enlist, as a private Soldier ... I offered to enlist
upon having a Lieutenants Commission; which was granted. I imagined my self now in a way of
Promotion: if I was killed in Battle, there would be an end of me, but if any Captain was killed, I
should rise in Rank, & should still have a Chance to rise higher. These Sir! were the only Motives
of my entering into the Service; for as to the Dispute between Great Britain & the Colonies, I know
nothing of it. ...

      
John Shy investigated the subsequent experience of that Bunker Hill lieutenant. He was William
Scott, of Peterborough, New Hampshire, and after a year as prisoner of the British he escaped,
made his way back to the American army, fought in battles in New York, was captured again by the
British, and escaped again by swimming the Hudson River one night with his sword tied around his
neck and his watch pinned to his hat. He returned to New Hampshire, recruited a company of his
own, including his two eldest sons, and fought in various battles, until his health gave way. He
watched his eldest son the of camp fever after six years of service. He had sold his farm in
Peterborough for a note that, with inflation, became worthless. After the war, he came to public
attention when he rescued eight people from drowning after their boat turned over in New York
harbor. He then got a job surveying western lands with the army, but caught a fever and died in
1796.


      
Scott was one of many Revolutionary fighters, usually of lower military ranks, from poor and
obscure backgrounds. Shy's study of the Peterborough contingent shows that the prominent and
substantial citizens of the town had served only briefly in the war. Other American towns show the
same pattern. As Shy puts it: "Revolutionary America may have been a middle-class society,
happier and more prosperous than any other in its time, but it contained a large and growing
number of fairly poor people, and many of them did much of the actual fighting and suffering
between I775 and 1783: A very old story."


      
The military conflict itself, by dominating everything in its time, diminished other issues, made
people choose sides in the one contest that was publicly important, forced people onto the side of
the Revolution whose interest in Independence was not at all obvious. Ruling elites seem to have
learned through the generations-consciously or not-that war makes them more secure against
internal trouble.


      
The force of military preparation had a way of pushing neutral people into line. In Connecticut, for
instance, a law was passed requiring military service of all males between sixteen and sixty,
omitting certain government officials, ministers, Yale students and faculty, Negroes, Indians, and
mulattos. Someone called to duty could provide a substitute or get out of it by paying 5 pounds.
When eighteen men failed to show up for military duty they were jailed and, in order to be released,
had to pledge to fight in the war. Shy says: "The mechanism of their political conversion was the
militia." What looks like the democratization of the military forces in modern times shows up as
something different: a way of forcing large numbers of reluctant people to associate themselves
with the national cause, and by the end of the process believe in it.


      
Here, in the war for liberty, was conscription, as usual, cognizant of wealth. With the impressment
riots against the British still remembered, impressment of seamen by the American navy was taking
place by 1779. A Pennsylvania official said: "We cannot help observing how similar this Conduct
is to that of the British Officers during our Subjection to Great Britain and are persuaded it will
have the same unhappy effects viz. an estrangement of the Affections of the People from . . .
Authority . . . which by an easy Progression will proceed to open Opposition . . . and bloodshed."


      
Watching the new, tight discipline of Washington's army, a chaplain in. Concord, Massachusetts,
wrote: "New lords, new laws. The strictest government is taking place and great distinction is made
between officers & men. Everyone is made to know his place & keep it, or be immediately tied up,
and receive not one but 30 or 40 lashes."


      
The Americans lost the first battles of the war: Bunker Hill, Brooklyn Heights, Harlem Heights, the
Deep South; they won small battles at Trenton and Princeton, and then in a turning point, a big
battle at Saratoga, New York, in 1777. Washington's frozen army hung on at Valley Forge,
Pennsylvania, while Benjamin Franklin negotiated an alliance with the French monarchy, which
was anxious for revenge on England. The war turned to the South, where the British won victory
after victory, until the Americans, aided by a large French army, with the French navy blocking off
the British from supplies and reinforcements, won the final victory of the war at Yorktown,
Virginia, in 1781.


      
Through all this, the suppressed conflicts between rich and poor among the Americans kept
reappearing. In the midst of the war, in Philadelphia, which Eric Foner describes as "a time of
immense profits for some colonists and terrible hardships for others," the inflation (prices rose in
one month that year by 45 percent) led to agitation and calls for action. One Philadelphia
newspaper carried a reminder that in Europe "the People have always done themselves justice when
the scarcity of bread has arisen from the avarice of forestallers. They have broken open magazines-
appropriated stores to their own use without paying for them-and in some instances have hung up
the culprits who created their distress."


      
In May of 1779, the First Company of Philadelphia Artillery petitioned the Assembly about the
troubles of "the midling and poor" and threatened violence against "those who are avariciously
intent upon amassing wealth by the destruction of the more virtuous part of the community." That
same month, there was a mass meeting, an extralegal gathering, which called for price reductions
and initiated an investigation of Robert Morris, a rich Philadelphian who was accused of holding
food from the market. In October came the "Fort Wilson riot," in which a militia group marched
into the city and to the house of James Wilson, a wealthy lawyer and Revolutionary official who
had opposed price controls and the democratic constitution adopted in Pennsylvania in 1776. The
militia were driven away by a "silk stocking brigade" of well-off Philadelphia citizens.


      
It seemed that the majority of white colonists, who had a bit of land, or no property at all, were still
better off than slaves or indentured servants or Indians, and could be wooed into the coalition of the
Revolution. But when the sacrifices of war became more bitter, the privileges and safety of the rich
became harder to accept. About 10 percent of the white population (an estimate of Jackson Main in
The Social Structure of Revolutionary America), large landholders and merchants, held 1,000
pounds or more in personal property and 1,000 pounds in land, at the least, and these men owned
nearly half the wealth of the country and held as slaves one-seventh of the country's people.


      
The Continental Congress, which governed the colonies through the war, was dominated by rich
men, linked together in factions and compacts by business and family connections. These links
connected North and South, East and West. For instance, Richard Henry Lee of Virginia was
connected with the Adamses of Massachusetts and the Shippens of Pennsylvania. Delegates from
middle and southern colonies were connected with Robert Morris of Pennsylvania through
commerce and land speculation. Morris was superintendent of finance, and his assistant was
Gouverneur Morris.


      
Morris's plan was to give more assurance to those who had loaned money to the Continental
Congress, and gain the support of officers by voting half-pay for life for those who stuck to the end.
This ignored the common soldier, who was not getting paid, who was suffering in the cold, dying
of sickness, watching the civilian profiteers get rich. On New Year's Day, 1781, the Pennsylvania
troops near Morristown, New Jersey, perhaps emboldened by rum, dispersed their officers, killed
one captain, wounded others, and were marching, fully armed, with cannon, toward the Continental
Congress at Philadelphia.


      
George Washington handled it cautiously. Informed of these developments by General Anthony
Wayne, he told Wayne not to use force. He was worried that the rebellion might spread to his own
troops. He suggested Wayne get a list of the soldiers' grievances, and said Congress should not flee
Philadelphia, because then the way would be open for the soldiers to be joined by Philadelphia
citizens. He sent Knox rushing to New England on his horse to get three months' pay for the
soldiers, while he prepared a thousand men to march on the mutineers, as a last resort. A peace was
negotiated, in which one-half the men were discharged; the other half got furloughs.


      
Shortly after this, a smaller mutiny took place in the New Jersey Line, involving two hundred men
who defied their officers and started out for the state capital at Trenton. Now Washington was
ready. Six hundred men, who themselves had been well fed and clothed, marched on the mutineers
and surrounded and disarmed them. Three ringleaders were put on trial immediately, in the field.
One was pardoned, and two were shot by firing squads made up of their friends, who wept as they
pulled the triggers. It was "an example," Washington said.


      
Two years later, there was another mutiny in the Pennsylvania line. The war was over and the army
had disbanded, but eighty soldiers, demanding their pay, invaded the Continental Congress
headquarters in Philadelphia and forced the members to flee across the river to Princeton-
"ignominiously turned out of doors," as one historian sorrowfully wrote (John Fiske, The Critical
Period), "by a handful of drunken mutineers."


      
What soldiers in the Revolution could do only rarely, rebel against their authorities, civilians could
do much more easily. Ronald Hoffman says: "The Revolution plunged the states of Delaware,
Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and, to a much lesser degree, Virginia into
divisive civil conflicts that persisted during the entire period of struggle." The southern lower
classes resisted being mobilized for the revolution. They saw themselves under the rule of a
political elite, win or lose against the British.


      
In Maryland, for instance, by the new constitution of 1776, to run for governor one had to own
5,000 pounds of property; to run for state senator, 1,000 pounds. Thus, 90 percent of the population
were excluded from holding office. And so, as Hoffman says, "small slave holders, non-
slaveholding planters, tenants, renters and casual day laborers posed a serious problem of social
control for the Whig elite."


      
With black slaves 25 percent of the population (and in some counties 50 percent), fear of slave
revolts grew. George Washington had turned down the requests of blacks, seeking freedom, to fight
in the Revolutionary army. So when the British military commander in Virginia, Lord Dunmore,
promised freedom to Virginia slaves who joined his forces, this created consternation. A report
from one Maryland county worried about poor whites encouraging slave runaways:

The insolence of the Negroes in this county is come to such a height, that we are under a necessity
of disarming them which we affected on Saturday last. We took about eighty guns, some bayonets,
swords, etc. The malicious and imprudent speeches of some among the lower classes of whites
have induced them to believe that their freedom depended on the success of the King's troops. We
cannot therefore be too vigilant nor too rigorous with those who promote and encourage this
disposition in our slaves.

      
Even more unsettling was white rioting in Maryland against leading families, supporting the
Revolution, who were suspected of hoarding needed commodities. The class hatred of some of
these disloyal people was expressed by one man who said "it was better for the people to lay down
their arms and pay the duties and taxes laid upon them by King and Parliament than to be brought
into slavery and to be commanded and ordered about as they were." A wealthy Maryland land-
owner, Charles Carroll, took note of the surly mood all around him:

There is a mean low dirty envy which creeps thro all ranks and cannot suffer a man a superiority of
fortune, of merit, or of understanding in fellow citizens-either of these are sure to entail a general ill
will and dislike upon the owners.

Despite this, Maryland authorities retained control. They made concessions, taxing land and slaves
more heavily, letting debtors pay in paper money. It was a sacrifice by the upper class to maintain
power, and it worked.


      
In the lower South, however, in the Carolinas and Georgia, according to Hoffman, "vast regions
were left without the slightest apparition of authority." The general mood was to take no part in a
war that seemed to have nothing for them. "Authoritative personages on both sides demanded that
common people supply material, reduce consumption, leave their families, and even risk their lives.
Forced to make hard decisions, many flailed out in frustration or evaded and defied first one side,
then the other. .. ."


      
Washington's military commander in the lower South, Nathanael Greene, dealt with disloyalty by a
policy of concessions to some, brutality to others. In a letter to Thomas Jefferson he described a
raid by his troops on Loyalists. "They made a dreadful carnage of them, upwards of one hundred
were killed and most of the rest cut to pieces. It has had a very happy effect on those disaffected
persons of which there were too many in this country." Greene told one of his generals "to strike
terror into our enemies and give spirit to our friends." On the other hand, he advised the governor of
Georgia "to open a door for the disaffected of your state to come in... ."


      
In general, throughout the states, concessions were kept to a minimum. The new constitutions that
were drawn up in all states from 1776 to 1780 were not much different from the old ones. Although
property qualifications for voting and holding office were lowered in some instances, in
Massachusetts they were increased. Only Pennsylvania abolished them totally. The new bills of
rights had modifying provisions. North Carolina, providing for religious freedom, added "that
nothing herein contained shall be construed to exempt preachers of treasonable or seditious
discourses, from legal trial and punishment." Maryland, New York, Georgia, and Massachusetts
took similar cautions.


      
The American Revolution is sometimes said to have brought about the separation of church and
state. The northern states made such declarations, but after 1776 they adopted taxes that forced
everyone to support Christian teachings. William G. McLoughlin, quoting Supreme Court Justice
David Brewer in 1892 that "this is a Christian nation," says of the separation of church and state in
the Revolution that it "was neither conceived of nor carried out. .,. Far from being left to itself,
religion was imbedded into every aspect and institution of American life."


      
One would look, in examining the Revolution's effect on class relations, at what happened to land
confiscated from fleeing Loyalists. It was distributed in such a way as to give a double opportunity
to the Revolutionary leaders: to enrich themselves and their friends, and to parcel out some land to
small farmers to create a broad base of support for the new government. Indeed, this became
characteristic of the new nation: finding itself possessed of enormous wealth, it could create the
richest ruling class in history, and still have enough for the middle classes to act as a buffer
between the rich and the dispossessed.


      
The huge landholdings of the Loyalists had been one of the great incentives to Revolution. Lord
Fairfax in Virginia had more than 5 million acres encompassing twenty-one counties. Lord
Baltimore's income from his Maryland holdings exceeded 30,000 pounds a year. After the
Revolution, Lord Fairfax was protected; he was a friend of George Washington. But other Loyalist
holders of great estates, especially those who were absentees, had their land confiscated. In New
York, the number of freeholding small farmers increased after the Revolution, and there were fewer
tenant fanners, who had created so much trouble in the pre-Revolution years.


      
Although the numbers of independent fanners grew, according to Rowland Berthoff and John
Murrin, "the class structure did not change radically." The ruling group went through personnel
changes as "the rising merchant families of Boston, New York or Philadelphia ... slipped quite
credibly into the social status-and sometimes the very houses of those who failed in business or
suffered confiscation and exile for loyalty to the crown."


      
Edmund Morgan sums up the class nature of the Revolution this way: "The fact that the lower
ranks were involved in the contest should not obscure the fact that the contest itself was generally a
struggle for office and power between members of an upper class: the new against the established."
Looking at the situation after the Revolution, Richard Morris comments: "Everywhere one finds
inequality." He finds "the people" of "We the people of the United States" (a phrase coined by the
very rich Gouverneur Morris) did not mean Indians or blacks or women or white servants. In fact,
there were more indentured servants than ever, and the Revolution "did nothing to end and little to
ameliorate white bondage."


      
Carl Degler says (Out of Our Past): "No new social class came to power through the door of the
American revolution. The men who engineered the revolt were largely members of the colonial
ruling class." George Washington was the richest man in America. John Hancock was a prosperous
Boston merchant. Benjamin Franklin was a wealthy printer. And so on.


      
On the other hand, town mechanics, laborers, and seamen, as well as small farmers, were swept
into "the people" by the rhetoric of the Revolution, by the camaraderie of military service, by the
distribution of some land. Thus was created a substantial body of support, a national consensus,
something that, even with the exclusion of ignored and oppressed people, could be called
"America."


      
Staughton Lynd's close study of Dutchess County, New York, in the Revolutionary period
corroborates this. There were tenant risings in 1766 against the huge feudal estates in New York.
The Rensselaerwyck holding was a million acres. Tenants, claiming some of this land for
themselves, unable to get satisfaction in the courts, turned to violence. In Poughkeepsie, 1,700
armed tenants had closed the courts and broken open the jails. But the uprising was crushed.


      
During the Revolution, there was a struggle in Dutchess County over the disposition of confiscated
Loyalist lands, but it was mainly between different elite groups. One of these, the Poughkeepsie
anti-Federalists (opponents of the Constitution), included men on the make, newcomers in land and
business. They made promises to the tenants to gain their support, exploiting their grievances to
build their own political careers and maintain their own fortunes.


      
During the Revolution, to mobilize soldiers, the tenants were promised land. A prominent
landowner of Dutchess County wrote in 1777 that a promise to make tenants freeholders "would
instantly bring you at least six thousand able farmers into the field." But the fanners who enlisted in
the Revolution and expected to get something out of it found that, as privates in the army, they
received $6.66 a month, while a colonel received $75 a month. They watched local government
contractors like Melancton Smith and Mathew Paterson become rich, while the pay they received in
continental currency became worthless with inflation.


      
All this led tenants to become a threatening force in the midst of the war. Many stopped paying
rent. The legislature, worried, passed a bill to confiscate Loyalist land and add four hundred new
freeholders to the 1,800 already in the county. This meant a strong new voting bloc for the faction
of the rich that would become anti-Federalists in 1788. Once the new landholders were brought
into the privileged circle of the Revolution and seemed politically under control, their leaders,
Mclancton Smith and others, at first opposed to adoption of the Constitution, switched to support,
and with New York ratifying, adoption was ensured. The new freeholders found that they had
stopped being tenants, but were now mortgagees, paying back loans from banks instead of rent to
landlords.


      
It seems that the rebellion against British rule allowed a certain group of the colonial elite to
replace those loyal to England, give some benefits to small landholders, and leave poor white
working people and tenant farmers in very much their old situation.


      
What did the Revolution mean to the Native Americans, the Indians? They had been ignored by the
fine words of the Declaration, had not been considered equal, certainly not in choosing those who
would govern the American territories in which they lived, nor in being able to pursue happiness as
they had pursued it for centuries before the white Europeans arrived. Now, with the British out of
the way, the Americans could begin the inexorable process of pushing the Indians off their lands,
killing them if they resisted, in short, as Francis Jennings puts it, the white Americans were fighting
against British imperial control in the East, and for their own imperialism in the West.


      
Before the Revolution, the Indians had been subdued by force in Virginia and in New England.
Elsewhere, they had worked out modes of coexistence with the colonies. But around 1750, with the
colonial population growing fast, the pressure to move westward onto new land set the stage for
conflict with the Indians. Land agents from the East began appearing in the Ohio River valley, on
the territory of a confederation of tribes called the Covenant Chain, for which the Iroquois were
spokesmen. In New York, through intricate swindling, 800,000 acres of Mohawk land were taken,
ending the period of Mohawk-New York friendship. Chief Hendrick of the Mohawks is recorded
speaking his bitterness to Governor George Clinton and the provincial council of New York in
1753:

Brother when we came here lo relate our Grievances about our Lands, we expected to have
something done for us, and we have told you that the Covenant Chain of our Forefathers was like to
be broken, and brother you tell us that we shall be redressed at Albany, but we know them so well,
we will not trust to them, for they [the Albany merchants] are no people but Devils so ... as soon
as we come home we will send up a Belt of Wampum to our Brothers the other 5 Nations to
acquaint them the Covenant Chain is broken between you and us. So brother you are not to expect
to hear of me any more, and Brother we desire to hear no more of you.

      
When the British fought the French for North America in the Seven Years' War, the Indians fought
on the side of the French. The French were traders but not occupiers of Indian lands, while the
British clearly coveted their hunting grounds and living space. Someone reported the conversation
of Shingas, chief of the Delaware Indians, with the British General Braddock, who sought his help
against the French:

Shingas asked General Braddock, whether the Indians that were friends to the English might not be
permitted to Live and Trade among the English and have Hunting Ground sufficient to Support
themselves and Familys.... On which General Braddock said that No Savage Should Inherit the
Land.. . . On which Shingas and the other Chiefs answered That if they might not have Liberty to
Live on the Land they would not Fight for it....

      
When that war ended in 1763, the French, ignoring their old allies, ceded to the British lands west
of the Appalachians. The Indians therefore united to make war on the British western forts; this is
called "Pontiac's Conspiracy" by the British, but "a liberation war for independence" in the words
used by Francis Jennings. Under orders from British General Jeffrey Amherst, the commander of
Fort Pitts gave the attacking Indian chiefs, with whom he was negotiating, blankets from the
smallpox hospital. It was a pioneering effort at what is now called biological warfare. An epidemic
soon spread among the Indians.


      
Despite this, and the burning of villages, the British could not destroy the will of the Indians, who
continued guerrilla war. A peace was made, with the British agreeing to establish a line at the
Appalachians, beyond which settlements would not encroach on Indian territory. This was the
Royal Proclamation of 1763, and it angered Americans (the original Virginia charter said its land
went westward to the ocean). It helps to explain why most of the Indians fought for England during
the Revolution. With their French allies, then their English allies, gone, the Indians faced a new
land-coveting nation-alone.


      
The Americans assumed now that the Indian land was theirs. But the expeditions they sent
westward to establish this were overcome-which they recognized in the names they gave these
battles: Harmar's Humiliation and St. Glair's Shame. And even when General Anthony Wayne
defeated the Indians' western confederation in 1798 at the Battle of Fallen Timbers, he had to
recognize their power. In the Treaty of Grenville, it was agreed that in return for certain cessions of
land the United States would give up claims to the Indian lands north of the Ohio, east of the
Mississippi, and south of the Great Lakes, but that if the Indians decided to sell these lands they
would offer them first to the United States.


      
Jennings, putting the Indian into the center of the American Revolution-after all, it was Indian land
that everyone was fighting over-sees the Revolution as a "multiplicity of variously oppressed and
exploited peoples who preyed upon each other." With the eastern elite controlling the lands on the
seaboard, the poor, seeking land, were forced to go West, there becoming a useful bulwark for the
rich because, as Jennings says, "the first target of the Indian's hatchet was the frontiersman's skull."


      
The situation of black slaves as a result of the American Revolution was more complex. Thousands
of blacks fought with the British. Five thousand were with the Revolutionaries, most of them from
the North, but there were also free blacks from Virginia and Maryland. The lower South was
reluctant to arm blacks. Amid the urgency and chaos of war, thousands took their freedom-leaving
on British ships at the end of the war to settle in England, Nova Scotia, the West Indies, or Africa.
Many others stayed in America as free blacks, evading their masters.


      
In the northern states, the combination of blacks in the military, the lack of powerful economic
need for slaves, and the rhetoric of Revolution led to the end of slavery-but very slowly. As late as
1810, thirty thousand blacks, one-fourth of the black population of the North, remained slaves. In
1840 there were still a thousand slaves in the North. In the upper South, there were more free
Negroes than before, leading to more control legislation. In the lower South, slavery expanded with
the growth of rice and cotton plantations.


      
What the Revolution did was to create space and opportunity for blacks to begin making demands
of white society. Sometimes these demands came from the new, small black elites in Baltimore,
Philadelphia, Richmond, Savannah, sometimes from articulate and bold slaves. Pointing to the
Declaration of Independence, blacks petitioned Congress and the state legislatures to abolish
slavery, to give blacks equal rights. In Boston, blacks asked for city money, which whites were
getting, to educate their children. In Norfolk, they asked to he allowed to testify in court. Nashville
blacks asserted that free Negroes "ought to have the same opportunities of doing well that any
Person ... would have." Peter Mathews, a free Negro butcher in Charleston, joined other free black
artisans and tradesmen in petitioning the legislature to repeal discriminatory laws against blacks, hi
1780, seven blacks in Dartmouth, Massachusetts, petitioned the legislature for the right to vote,
linking taxation to representation:

... we apprehend ourselves to be Aggreeved, in that while we are not allowed the Privilege of
freemen of the State having no vote or Influence in the Election of those that Tax us yet many of
our Colour (as is well known) have cheerfully Entered the field of Battle in the defense of the
Common Cause and that (as we conceive) against a similar Exertion of Power (in Regard to
taxation) too well known to need a recital in this place.. ..

      
A black man, Benjamin Banneker, who taught himself mathematics and astronomy, predicted
accurately a solar eclipse, and was appointed to plan the new city of Washington, wrote to Thomas
Jefferson:

I suppose it is a truth too well attested to you, to need a proof here, that we are a race of beings,
who have long labored under the abuse and censure of the world; that we have long been looked
upon with an eye of contempt; and that we have long been considered rather as brutish than human,
and scarcely capable of mental endowments. ... I apprehend you will embrace every opportunity to
eradicate that train of absurd and false ideas and opinions, which so generally prevails with respect
to us; and that your sentiments are concurrent with mine, which are, that one universal Father hath
given being to us all; and that he hath not only made us all of one flesh, but that he hath also,
without partiality, afforded us all the same sensations and endowed us all with the same facilities. ..

Banneker asked Jefferson "to wean yourselves from those narrow prejudices which you have
imbibed."


      
Jefferson tried his best, as an enlightened, thoughtful individual might. But the structure of
American society, the power of the cotton plantation, the slave trade, the politics of unity between
northern and southern elites, and the long culture of race prejudice in the colonies, as well as his
own weaknesses-that combination of practical need and ideological fixation-kept Jefferson a
slaveowner throughout his life.


      
The inferior position of blacks, the exclusion of Indians from the new society, the establishment of
supremacy for the rich and powerful in the new nation-all this was already settled in the colonies by
the time of the Revolution. With the English out of the way, it could now be put on paper,
solidified, regularized, made legitimate, by the Constitution of the United States, drafted at a
convention of Revolutionary leaders in Philadelphia.


      
To many Americans over the years, the Constitution drawn up in 1787 has seemed a work of genius
put together by wise, humane men who created a legal framework for democracy and equality. This
view is stated, a bit extravagantly, by the historian George Bancroft, writing in the early nineteenth
century:

The Constitution establishes nothing that interferes with equality and individuality. It knows
nothing of differences by descent, or opinions, of favored classes, or legalized religion, or the
political power of property. It leaves the individual alongside of the individual. ... As the sea is
made up of drops, American society is composed of separate, free, and constantly moving atoms,
ever in reciprocal action ... so that the institutions and laws of the country rise out of the masses of
individual thought which, like the waters of the ocean, are rolling evermore.

      
Another view of the Constitution was put forward early in the twentieth century by the historian
Charles Beard (arousing anger and indignation, including a denunciatory editorial in the New York
Times). lie wrote in his book An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution:

Inasmuch as the primary object of a government, beyond the mere repression of physical violence,
is the making of the rules which determine the property relations of members of society, the
dominant classes whose rights are thus to be determined must perforce obtain from the government
such rules as are consonant with the larger interests necessary to the continuance of their economic
processes, or they must themselves control the organs of government.

In short, Beard said, the rich must, in their own interest, either control the government directly or
control the laws by which government operates.


      
Beard applied this general idea to the Constitution, by studying the economic backgrounds and
political ideas of the fifty-five men who gathered in Philadelphia in 1787 to draw up the
Constitution. He found that a majority of them were lawyers by profession, that most of them were
men of wealth, in land, slaves, manufacturing, or shipping, that half of them had money loaned out
at interest, and that forty of the fifty-five held government bonds, according to the records of the
Treasury Department.


      
Thus, Beard found that most of the makers of the Constitution had some direct economic interest in
establishing a strong federal government: the manufacturers needed protective tariffs; the
moneylenders wanted to stop the use of paper money to pay off debts; the land speculators wanted
protection as they invaded Indian lands; slaveowners needed federal security against slave revolts
and runaways; bondholders wanted a government able to raise money by nationwide taxation, to
pay off those bonds.


      
Four groups, Beard noted, were not represented in the Constitutional Convention: slaves,
indentured servants, women, men without property. And so the Constitution did not reflect the
interests of those groups.


      
He wanted to make it clear that he did not think the Constitution was written merely to benefit the
Founding Fathers personally, although one could not ignore the $150,000 fortune of Benjamin
Franklin, the connections of Alexander Hamilton to wealthy interests through his father-in-law and
brother-in-law, the great slave plantations of James Madison, the enormous landholdings of George
Washington. Rather, it was to benefit the groups the Founders represented, the "economic interests
they understood and felt in concrete, definite form through their own personal experience."


      
Not everyone at the Philadelphia Convention fitted Beard's scheme. Elbridge Gerry of
Massachusetts was a holder of landed property, and yet he opposed the ratification of the
Constitution. Similarly, Luther Martin of Maryland, whose ancestors had obtained large tracts of
land in New Jersey, opposed ratification. But, with a few exceptions, Beard found a strong
connection between wealth and support of the Constitution.


      
By 1787 there was not only a positive need for strong central government to protect the large
economic interests, but also immediate fear of rebellion by discontented farmers. The chief event
causing this fear was an uprising in the summer of 1786 in western Massachusetts, known as Shays'
Rebellion.


      
In the western towns of Massachusetts there was resentment against the legislature in Boston. The
new Constitution of 1780 had raised the property qualifications for voting. No one could hold state
office without being quite wealthy. Furthermore, the legislature was refusing to issue paper money,
as had been done in some other states, like Rhode Island, to make it easier for debt-ridden farmers
to pay off their creditors.


      
Illegal conventions began to assemble in some of the western counties to organize opposition to the
legislature. At one of these, a man named Plough Jogger spoke his mind:

I have been greatly abused, have been obliged to do more than my part in the war; been loaded with
class rates, town rates, province rates, Continental rates and all rates ... been pulled and hauled by
sheriffs, constables and collectors, and had my cattle sold for less than they were worth....
. . . The great men are going to get all we have and I think it is time for us to rise and put a stop to
it, and have no more courts, nor sheriffs, nor collectors nor lawyers.. . .

The chairman of that meeting used his gavel to cut short the applause. He and others wanted to
redress their grievances, but peacefully, by petition to the General Court (the legislature) in Boston,


      
However, before the scheduled meeting of the General Court, there were going to he court
proceedings in Hampshire County, in the towns of Northampton and Springfield, to seize the cattle
of farmers who hadn't paid their debts, to take away their land, now full of grain and ready for
harvest. And so, veterans of the Continental army, also aggrieved because they had been treated
poorly on discharge-given certificates for future redemption instead of immediate cash-began to
organize the fanners into squads and companies. One of these veterans was Luke Day, who arrived
the morning of court with a fife-and-drum corps, still angry with the memory of being locked up in
debtors' prison in the heat of the previous summer.


      
The sheriff looked to the local militia to defend the court against these armed farmers. But most of
the militia was with Luke Day. The sheriff did manage to gather five hundred men, and the judges
put on their black silk robes, waiting for the sheriff to protect their trip to the courthouse. But there
at the courthouse steps, Luke Day stood with a petition, asserting the people's constitutional right to
protest the unconstitutional acts of the General Court, asking the judges to adjourn until the General
Court could act on behalf of the farmers. Standing with Luke Day were fifteen hundred armed
farmers. The judges adjourned.


      
Shortly after, at courthouses in Worcester and Athol, farmers with guns prevented the courts from
meeting to take away their property, and the militia were too sympathetic to the farmers, or too
outnumbered, to act. In Concord, a fifty-year-old veteran of two wars, Job Shattuck, led a caravan
of carts, wagons, horses, and oxen onto the town green, while a message was sent to the judges:

The voice of the People of this county is such that the court shall not enter this courthouse until
such time as the People shall have redress of the grievances they labor under at the present.

A county convention then suggested the judges adjourn, which they did.


      
At Great Barrington, a militia of a thousand faced a square crowded with armed men and boys. But
the militia was split in its opinion. When the chief justice suggested the militia divide, those in
favor of the court's sitting to go on the right side of the road, and those against on the left, two
hundred of the militia went to the right, eight hundred to the left, and the judges adjourned. Then
the crowd went to the home of the chief justice, who agreed to sign a pledge that the court would
not sit until the Massachusetts General Court met. The crowd went back to the square, broke open
the county jail, and set free the debtors. The chief justice, a country doctor, said: "I have never
heard anybody point out a better way to have their grievances redressed than the people have
taken."


      
The governor and the political leaders of Massachusetts became alarmed. Samuel Adams, once
looked on as a radical leader in Boston, now insisted people act within the law. He said "British
emissaries" were stirring up the farmers. People in the town of Greenwich responded: You in
Boston have the money, and we don't. And didn't you act illegally yourselves in the Revolution?
The insurgents were now being called Regulators. Their emblem was a sprig of hemlock.


      
The problem went beyond Massachusetts. In Rhode Island, the debtors had taken over the
legislature and were issuing paper money. In New Hampshire, several hundred men, in September
of 1786, surrounded the legislature in Exeter, asking that taxes be returned and paper money issued;
they dispersed only when military action was threatened.


      
Daniel Shays entered the scene in western Massachusetts. A poor farm hand when the revolution
broke out, he joined the Continental army, fought at Lexington, Bunker Hill, and Saratoga, and was
wounded in action. In 1780, not being paid, he resigned from the army, went home, and soon found
himself in court for nonpayment of debts. He also saw what was happening to others: a sick
woman, unable to pay, had her bed taken from under her.


      
What brought Shays fully into the situation was that on September 19, the Supreme Judicial Court
of Massachusetts met in Worcester and indicted eleven leaders of the rebellion, including three of
his friends, as "disorderly, riotous and seditious persons" who "unlawfully and by force of arms"
prevented "the execution of justice and the laws of the commonwealth." The Supreme Judicial
Court planned to meet again in Springfield a week later, and there was talk of Luke Day's being
indicted.


      
Shays organized seven hundred armed farmers, most of them veterans of the war, and led them to
Springfield. There they found a general with nine hundred soldiers and a cannon. Shays asked the
general for permission to parade, which the general granted, so Shays and his men moved through
the square, drums hanging and fifes blowing. As they marched, their ranks grew. Some of the
militia joined, and reinforcements began coming in from the countryside. The judges postponed
hearings for a day, then adjourned the court.


      
Now the General Court, meeting in Boston, was told by Governor James Bowdoin to "vindicate the
insulted dignity of government." The recent rebels against England, secure in office, were calling
for law and order. Sam Adams helped draw up a Riot Act, and a resolution suspending habeas
corpus, to allow the authorities to keep people in jail without trial. At the same time, the legislature
moved to make some concessions to the angry farmers, saying certain old taxes could now be paid
in goods instead of money.


      
This didn't help. In Worcester, 160 insurgents appeared at the courthouse. The sheriff read the Riot
Act. The insurgents said they would disperse only if the judges did. The sheriff shouted something
about hanging. Someone came up behind him and put a sprig of hemlock in his hat. The judges left.


      
Confrontations between farmers and militia now multiplied. The winter snows began to interfere
with the trips of farmers to the courthouses. When Shays began marching a thousand men into
Boston, a blizzard forced them back, and one of his men froze to death.


      
An army came into the field, led by General Benjamin Lincoln, on money raised by Boston
merchants. In an artillery duel, three rebels were killed. One soldier stepped in front of his own
artillery piece and lost both arms. The winter grew worse. The rebels were outnumbered and on the
run. Shays took refuge in Vermont, and his followers began to surrender. There were a few more
deaths in battle, and then sporadic, disorganized, desperate acts of violence against authority: the
burning of barns, the slaughter of a general's horses. One government soldier was killed in an eerie
night-time collision of two sleighs.


      
Captured rebels were put on trial in Northampton and six were sentenced to death. A note was left
at the door of the high sheriff of Pittsfidd:

I understand that there is a number of my countrymen condemned to the because they fought for
justice. I pray have a care that you assist not in the execution of so horrid a crime, for by all that is
above, he that condemns and he that executes shall share alike. . . - Prepare for death with speed,
for your life or mine is short. When the woods are covered with leaves, I shall return and pay you a
short visit.

      
Thirty-three more rebels were put on trial and six more condemned to death. Arguments took place
over whether the hangings should go forward. General Lincoln urged mercy and a Commission of
Clemency, but Samuel Adams said: "In monarchy the crime of treason may admit of being
pardoned or lightly punished, but the man who dares rebel against the laws of a republic ought to
suffer death." Several hangings followed; some of the condemned were pardoned. Shays, in
Vermont, was pardoned in 1788 and returned to Massachusetts, where he died, poor and obscure, in
1825.


      
It was Thomas Jefferson, in France as ambassador at the time of Shays' Rebellion, who spoke of
such uprisings as healthy for society. In a letter to a friend he wrote: "I hold it that a little rebellion
now and then is a good thing.... It is a medicine necessary for the sound health of government....
God forbid that we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion.. . . The tree of liberty
must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure."


      
But Jefferson was far from the scene. The political and economic elite of the country were not so
tolerant. They worried that the example might spread. A veteran of Washington's army, General
Henry Knox, founded an organization of army veterans, "The Order of the Cincinnati," presumably
(as one historian put it) "for the purpose of cherishing the heroic memories of the struggle in which
they had taken part," but also, it seemed, to watch out for radicalism in the new country. Knox
wrote to Washington in late 1786 about Shays' Rebellion, and in doing so expressed the thoughts of
many of the wealthy and powerful leaders of the country:

The people who are the insurgents have never paid any, or but very little taxes. But they see the
weakness of government; they feel at once their own poverty, compared with the opulent, and their
own force, and they are determined to make use of the latter, in order to remedy the former. Their
creed is "That the property of the United States has been protected from the confiscations of Britain
by the joint exertions of all, and therefore ought to he the common properly of all. And he that
attempts opposition to this creed is an enemy to equity and justice and ought to be swept from off
the face of the earth."

      
Alexander Hamilton, aide to Washington during the war, was one of the most forceful and astute
leaders of the new aristocracy. He voiced his political philosophy:

All communities divide themselves into the few and the many. The first arc the rich and well-horn,
the other the mass of the people. The voice of the people has been said to be the voice of God; and
however generally this maxim has been quoted and believed, it is not true in fact. The people are
turbulent and changing; they seldom judge or determine right. Give therefore to the first class a
distinct permanent share in the government. .. . Can a democratic assembly who annually revolve in
the mass of the people be supposed steadily to pursue the public good? Nothing but a permanent
body can check the imprudence of democracy.. ..

At the Constitutional Convention, Hamilton suggested a President and Senate chosen for life.


      
The Convention did not take his suggestion. But neither did it provide for popular elections, except
in the case of the House of Representatives, where the qualifications were set by the state
legislatures (which required property-holding for voting in almost all the states), and excluded
women, Indians, slaves. The Constitution provided for Senators to be elected by the state
legislators, for the President to be elected by electors chosen by the state legislators, and for the
Supreme Court to be appointed by the President.


      
The problem of democracy in the post-Revolutionary society was not, however, the Constitutional
limitations on voting. It lay deeper, beyond the Constitution, in the division of society into rich and
poor. For if some people had great wealth and great influence; if they had the land, the money, the
newspapers, the church, the educational system- how could voting, however broad, cut into such
power? There was still another problem: wasn't it the nature of representative government, even
when most broadly based, to be conservative, to prevent tumultuous change?


      
It came time to ratify the Constitution, to submit to a vote in state conventions, with approval of
nine of the thirteen required to ratify it. In New York, where debate over ratification was intense, a
series of newspaper articles appeared, anonymously, and they tell us much about the nature of the
Constitution. These articles, favoring adoption of the Constitution, were written by James Madison,
Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay, and came to be known as the Federalist Papers (opponents of
the Constitution became known as anti-Federalists).


      
In Federalist Paper #10, James Madison argued that representative government was needed to
maintain peace in a society ridden by factional disputes. These disputes came from "the various and
unequal distribution of property. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever
formed distinct interests in society." The problem, he said, was how to control the factional
struggles that came from inequalities in wealth. Minority factions could be controlled, he said, by
the principle that decisions would be by vote of the majority.


      
So the real problem, according to Madison, was a majority faction, and here the solution was
offered by the Constitution, to have "an extensive republic," that is, a large nation ranging over
thirteen states, for then "it will be more difficult for all who feel it to discover their own strength,
and to act in unison with each other.... The influence of factious leaders may kindle a flame within
their particular States, but will be unable to spread a general conflagration through the other
States."


      
Madison's argument can be seen as a sensible argument for having a government which can
maintain peace and avoid continuous disorder. But is it the aim of government simply to maintain
order, as a referee, between two equally matched fighters? Or is it that government has some
special interest in maintaining a certain kind of order, a certain distribution of power and wealth, a
distribution in which government officials are not neutral referees but participants? In that case, the
disorder they might worry about is the disorder of popular rebellion against those monopolizing the
society's wealth. This interpretation makes sense when one looks at the economic interests, the
social backgrounds, of the makers of the Constitution.


      
As part of his argument for a large republic to keep the peace, James Madison tells quite clearly, in
Federalist #10, whose peace he wants to keep: "A rage for paper money, for an abolition of debts,
for an equal division of property, or for any other improper or wicked project, will be less apt to
pervade the whole body of the Union than a particular member of it."


      
When economic interest is seen behind the political clauses of the Constitution, then the document
becomes not simply the work of wise men trying to establish a decent and orderly society, but the
work of certain groups trying to maintain their privileges, while giving just enough rights and
liberties to enough of the people to ensure popular support.


      
In the new government, Madison would belong to one party (the Democrat-Republicans) along
with Jefferson and Monroe. Hamilton would belong to the rival party (the Federalists) along with
Washington and Adams. But both agreed-one a slaveholder from Virginia, the other a merchant
from New York-on the aims of this new government they were establishing. They were anticipating
the long-fundamental agreement of the two political parties in the American system. Hamilton
wrote elsewhere in the Federalist Papers that the new Union would be able "to repress domestic
faction and insurrection." He referred directly to Shays' Rebellion: "The tempestuous situation from
which Massachusetts has scarcely emerged evinces that dangers of this kind are not merely
speculative."


      
It was either Madison or Hamilton (the authorship of the individual papers is not always known)
who in Federalist Paper #63 argued the necessity of a "well-constructed Senate" as "sometimes
necessary as a defense to the people against their own temporary errors and delusions" because
"there are particular moments in public affairs when the people, stimulated by some irregular
passion, or some illicit advantage, or misted by the artful misrepresentations of interested men, may
call for measures which they themselves will afterwards be the most ready to lament and
condemn." And: "In these critical moments, how salutary will be the interference of some
temperate and respectable body of citizens in order to check the misguided career, and to suspend
the blow meditated by the people against themselves, until reason, justice, and truth can regain their
authority over the public mind?"


      
The Constitution was a compromise between slaveholding interests of the South and moneyed
interests of the North. For the purpose of uniting the thirteen states into one great market for
commerce, the northern delegates wanted laws regulating interstate commerce, and urged that such
laws require only a majority of Congress to pass. The South agreed to this, in return for allowing
the trade in slaves to continue for twenty years before being outlawed.


      
Charles Beard warned us that governments-including the government of the United States-arc not
neutral, that they represent the dominant economic interests, and that their constitutions are
intended to serve these interests. One of his critics (Robert E. Brown, Charles Beard and the
Constitution) raises an interesting point. Granted that the Constitution omitted the phrase "life,
liberty and the pursuit of happiness," which appeared in the Declaration of Independence, and
substituted "life, liberty, or property"-well, why shouldn't the Constitution protect property? As
Brown says about Revolutionary America, "practically everybody was interested in the protection
of property" because so many Americans owned property.


      
However, this is misleading. True, there were many property owners. But some people had much
more than others. A few people had great amounts of property; many people had small amounts;
others had none. Jackson Main found that one-third of the population in the Revolutionary period
were small fanners, while only 3 percent of the population had truly large holdings and could he
considered wealthy.


      
Still, one-third was a considerable number of people who felt they had something at stake in the
stability of a new government. This was a larger base of support for government than anywhere in
the world at the end of the eighteenth century. In addition, the city mechanics had an important
interest in a government which would protect their work from foreign competition. As Staughton
Lynd puts it: "How is it that the city workingmen all over America overwhelmingly and
enthusiastically supported the United States Constitution?"


      
This was especially true in New York. When the ninth and tenth states had ratified the Constitution,
four thousand New York City mechanics marched with floats and banners to celebrate. Bakers,
blacksmiths, brewers, ship joiners and shipwrights, coopers, cartmen and tailors, all marched. What
Lynd found was that these mechanics, while opposing elite rule in the colonies, were nationalist.
Mechanics comprised perhaps half the New York population. Some were wealthy, some were poor,
but all were better off than the ordinary laborer, the apprentice, the journeyman, and their
prosperity required a government that would protect them against the British hats and shoes and
other goods that were pouring into the colonies after the Revolution. As a result, the mechanics
often supported wealthy conservatives at the ballot box.


      
The Constitution, then, illustrates the complexity of the American system: that it serves the interests
of a wealthy elite, hut also does enough for small property owners, for middle-income mechanics
and farmers, to build a broad base of support. The slightly prosperous people who make up this
base of support are buffers against the blacks, the Indians, the very poor whites. They enable the
elite to keep control with a minimum of coercion, a maximum of law-all made palatable by the
fanfare of patriotism and unity.


      
The Constitution became even more acceptable to the public at large after the first Congress,
responding to criticism, passed a series of amendments known as the Bill of Rights. These
amendments seemed to make the new government a guardian of people's liberties: to speak, to
publish, to worship, to petition, to assemble, to be tried fairly, to be secure at home against official
intrusion. It was, therefore, perfectly designed to build popular backing for the new government.
What was not made clear-it was a time when the language of freedom was new and its reality
untested-was the shakiness of anyone's liberty when entrusted to a government of the rich and
powerful.


      
Indeed, the same problem existed for the other provisions of the Constitution, like the clause
forbidding states to "impair the obligation of contract," or that giving Congress the power to tax the
people and to appropriate money. They all sound benign and neutral until one asks: lax who, for
what? Appropriate what, for whom? To protect everyone's contracts seems like an act of fairness,
of equal treatment, until one considers that contracts made between rich and poor, between
employer and employee, landlord and tenant, creditor and debtor, generally favor the more
powerful of the two parties. Thus, to protect these contracts is to put the great power of the
government, its laws, courts, sheriffs, police, on the side of the privileged-and to do it not, as in
premodern times, as an exercise of brute force against the weak but as a matter of law.


      
The First Amendment of the Bill of Rights shows that quality of interest hiding behind innocence.
Passed in 1791 by Congress, it provided that "Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the
freedom of speech, or of the press. . . ." Yet, seven years after the First Amendment became part of
the Constitution, Congress passed a law very clearly abridging the freedom of speech.


      
This was the Sedition Act of 1798, passed under John Adams's administration, at a time when
Irishmen and Frenchmen in the United States were looked on as dangerous revolutionaries because
of the recent French Revolution and the Irish rebellions. The Sedition Act made it a crime to say or
write anything "false, scandalous and malicious" against the government, Congress, or the
President, with intent to defame them, bring them into disrepute, or excite popular hatreds against
them.


      
This act seemed to directly violate the First Amendment. Yet, it was enforced. Ten Americans were
put in prison for utterances against the government, and every member of the Supreme Court in
1798-1800, sitting as an appellate judge, held it constitutional.


      
There was a legal basis for this, one known to legal experts, but not to the ordinary American, who
would read the First Amendment and feel confident that he or she was protected in the exercise of
free speech. That basis has been explained by historian Leonard Levy. Levy points out that it was
generally understood (not in the population, but in higher circles) that, despite the First
Amendment, the British common law of "seditious libel" still ruled in America. This meant that
while the government could not exercise "prior restraint"-that is, prevent an utterance or publication
in advance-it could legally punish the speaker or writer afterward. Thus, Congress has a convenient
legal basis for the laws it has enacted since that time, making certain kinds of speech a crime. And,
since punishment after the fact is an excellent deterrent to the exercise of free expression, the claim
of "no prior restraint" itself is destroyed. This leaves the First Amendment much less than the stone
wall of protection it seems at first glance.


      
Are the economic provisions in the Constitution enforced just as weakly? We have an instructive
example almost immediately in Washington's first administration, when Congress's power to tax
and appropriate money was immediately put to use by the Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander
Hamilton.


      
Hamilton, believing that government must ally itself with the richest elements of society to make
itself strong, proposed to Congress a series of laws, which it enacted, expressing this philosophy. A
Bank of the United States was set up as a partnership between the government and certain banking
interests. A tariff was passed to help the manufacturers. It was agreed to pay bondholders-most of
the war bonds were now concentrated in a small group of wealthy people-the full value of their
bonds. Tax laws were passed to raise money for this bond redemption.


      
One of these tax laws was the Whiskey 'lax, which especially hurt small fanners who raised grain
that they converted into whiskey and then sold. In 1794 the fanners of western Pennsylvania took
up arms and rebelled against the collection of this tax. Secretary of the Treasury Hamilton led the
troops to put them down. We see then, in the first years of the Constitution, that some of its
provisions-even those paraded most flamboyantly (like the First Amendment)-might be treated
lightly. Others (like the power to tax) would be powerfully enforced.


      
Still, the mythology around the Founding Fathers persists. To say, as one historian (Bernard
Bailyn) has done recently, that "the destruction of privilege and the creation of a political system
that demanded of its leaders the responsible and humane use of power were their highest
aspirations" is to ignore what really happened in the America of these Founding Fathers.


      
Bailyn says:

Everyone knew the basic prescription for a wise and just government. It was so to balance the
contending powers in society that no one power could overwhelm the others and, unchecked,
destroy the liberties that belonged to all. The problem was how to arrange the institutions of
government so that this balance could be achieved.

Were the Founding Fathers wise and just men trying to achieve a good balance? In fact, they did
not want a balance, except one which kept things as they were, a balance among the dominant
forces at that time. They certainly did not want an equal balance between slaves and masters,
propertyless and property holders, Indians and white.


      
As many as half the people were not even considered by the Founding Fathers as among Bailyn's
"contending powers" in society. They were not mentioned in the Declaration of Independence, they
were absent in the Constitution, they were invisible in the new political democracy. They were the
women of early America.

It is possible, reading standard histories, to forget half the population of the country. The explorers
were men, the landholders and merchants men, the political leaders men, the military figures men.
The very invisibility of women, the overlooking of women, is a sign of their submerged status.


      
In this invisibility they were something like black slaves (and thus slave women faced a double
oppression). The biological uniqueness of women, like skin color and facial characteristics for
Negroes, became a basis for treating them as inferiors. True, with women, there was something
more practically important in their biology than skin color-their position as childbearers-but this
was not enough to account for the general push backward for all of them in society, even those who
did not bear children, or those too young or too old for that. It seems that their physical
characteristics became a convenience for men, who could use, exploit, and cherish someone who
was at the same time servant, sex mate, companion, and bearer-teacher-ward en of his children.


      
Societies based on private property and competition, in which monogamous families became
practical units for work and socialization, found it especially useful to establish this special status
of women, something akin to a house slave in the matter of intimacy and oppression, and yet
requiring, because of that intimacy, and long-term connection with children, a special patronization,
which on occasion, especially in the face of a show of strength, could slip over into treatment as an
equal. An oppression so private would turn out hard to uproot.


      
Earlier societies-in America and elsewhere-in which property was held in common and families
were extensive and complicated, with aunts and uncles and grandmothers and grandfathers all
living together, seemed to treat women more as equals than did the white societies that later
overran them, bringing "civilization" and private property.


      
In the Zuni tribes of the Southwest, for instance, extended families- large clans-were based on the
woman, whose husband came to live with her family. It was assumed that women owned the
houses, and the fields belonged to the clans, and the women had equal rights to what was produced.
A woman was more secure, because she was with her own family, and she could divorce the man
when she wanted to, keeping their property.


      
Women in the Plains Indian tribes of the Midwest did not have farming duties hut had a very
important place in the tribe as healers, herbalists, and sometimes holy people who gave advice.
When bands lost their male leaders, women would become chieftains. Women learned to shoot
small bows, and they carried knives, because among the Sioux a woman was supposed to be able to
defend herself against attack.


      
The puberty ceremony of the Sioux was such as to give pride to a young Sioux maiden:

Walk the good road, my daughter, and the buffalo herds wide and dark as cloud shadows moving
over the prairie will follow you... . Be dutiful, respectful, gentle and modest, my daughter. And
proud walking. If the pride and the virtue of the women arc lost, the spring will come but the
buffalo trails will turn to grass. Be strong, with the warm, strong heart of the earth. No people goes
down until their women are weak and dishonored. . ..

      
It would be an exaggeration to say that women were treated equally with men; but they were
treated with respect, and the communal nature of the society gave them a more important place.


      
The conditions under which white settlers came to America created various situations for women.
Where the first settlements consisted almost entirely of men, women were imported as sex slaves,
childbearers, companions. In 1619, the year that the first black slaves came to Virginia, ninety
women arrived at Jamestown on one ship: "Agreeable persons, young and incorrupt... sold with
their own consent to settlers as wives, the price to be the cost of their own transportation."


      
Many women came in those early years as indentured servants- often teenaged girls-and lived lives
not much different from slaves, except that the term of service had an end. They were to be
obedient to masters and mistresses. The authors of Americans Working Women (Baxandall,
Gordon, and Reverby) describe the situation:

They were poorly paid and often treated rudely and harshly, deprived of good food and privacy. Of
course these terrible conditions provoked resistance. Living in separate families without much
contact with others in their position, indentured servants had one primary path of resistance open to
them: passive resistance, trying to do as little work as possible and to create difficulties for their
masters and mistresses. Of course the masters and mistresses did not interpret it that way, but saw
the difficult behavior of their servants as sullenness, laziness, malevolence and stupidity.

      
For instance, the General Court of Connecticut in 1645 ordered that a certain "Susan C., for her
rebellious carriage toward her mistress, to be sent to the house of correction and be kept to hard
labor and coarse diet, to be brought forth the next lecture day to be publicly corrected, and so to be
corrected weekly, until order be given to the contrary."


      
Sexual abuse of masters against servant girls became commonplace. The court records of Virginia
and other colonies show masters brought into court for this, so we can assume that these were
especially flagrant cases; there must have been many more instances never brought to public light.


      
In 1756, Elizabeth Sprigs wrote to her father about her servitude:

What we unfortunate 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, with only this comfort that you Bitch you do not halfe enough,
and then tied up and whipp'd to that Degree that you'd not serve an Animal, 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 ... what rest we can get is to rap ourselves up in a Blanket and
ly upon the Ground. ...

      


      
Whatever horrors can be imagined in the transport of black slaves to America must be multiplied
for black women, who were often one-third of the cargo. Slave traders reported:

I saw pregnant women give birth to babies while chained to corpses which our drunken overseers
had not removed... . packed spoon-fashion they often gave birth to children in the scalding
perspiration from the human cargo. ... On board the ship was a young negro woman chained to the
deck, who had lost her senses soon after she was purchased and taken on board.

      
A woman named
Linda Brent who escaped from slavery told of another burden:

But I now entered on my fifteenth year-a sad epoch in the life of a slave girl. My master began to
whisper foul words in my ear. Young as I was, I could not remain ignorant of their import. . .. My
master met me at every turn, reminding me that I belonged to him, and swearing by heaven and
earth that he would compel me to submit to him. If I went out for a breath of fresh air, after a day of
unwearied toil, his footsteps dogged me. If I knelt by my mother's grave, his dark shadow fell on
me even there. The light heart which nature had given me became heavy with sad forebodings. .. .

      
Even free white women, not brought as servants or slaves but as wives of the early settlers, faced
special hardships. Eighteen married women came over on the Mayflower. Three were pregnant, and
one of them gave birth to a dead child before they landed. Childbirth and sickness plagued the
women; by the spring, only four of those eighteen women were still alive.


      
Those who lived, sharing the work of building a life in the wilderness with their men, were often
given a special respect because they were so badly needed. And when men died, women often took
tip the men's work as well. All through the first century and more, women on the American frontier
seemed close to equality with their men.


      
But all women were burdened with ideas carried over from England with the colonists, influenced
by Christian teachings. English law was summarized in a document of 1632 entitled "The Lawes
Resolutions of Womens Rights":

In this consolidation which we call wedlock is a locking together. It is true, that man and wife arc
one person, but understand in what manner. When a small brooke or little river incorporateth with
Rhodanus, Humber, or the Thames, the poor rivulet looseth her name.... A woman as soon as she is
married is called covert ... that is, "veiled"; as it were, clouded and overshadowed; she hath lost her
surname. I may more truly, farre away, say to a married woman, Her new self is her superior; her
companion, her master. . ..

Julia Spruill describes the woman's legal situation in the colonial period: ''The husband's control
over the wife's person extended to the right of giving her chastisement. . .. But he was not entitled
to inflict permanent injury or death on his wife. . . ."


      
As for property: "Besides absolute possession of his wife's personal property and a life estate in her
lands, the husband took any other income that might be hers. He collected wages earned by her
labor. . . . Naturally it followed that the proceeds of the joint labor of husband and wife belonged to
the husband."


      
For a woman to have a child out of wedlock was a crime, and colonial court records are full of cases of women being arraigned for "bastardy"-the father of the child untouched by the law and on
the loose. A colonial periodical of 1747 reproduced a speech "of Miss Polly Baker before a Court
of Judicature, at Connecticut near Boston in New England; where she was prosecuted the fifth time
for having a Bastard Child." (The speech was Benjamin Franklin's ironic invention.)

May it please
the honourable bench to indulge me in a few words: I am a poor, unhappy woman, who have no
money to fee lawyers to plead for me.. .. This is the fifth time, gentlemen, that I have been dragg'd
before your court on the same account; twice I have paid heavy fines, and twice have been brought
to publick punishment, for want of money to pay those fines. This may have been agreeable to the
laws, and I don't dispute it; but since laws arc sometimes unreasonable in themselves, and therefore
repealed; and others bear too hard on the subject in particular circumstances ... I take the liberty to
say, that I think this law, by which I am punished, both unreasonable in itself, and particularly
severe with regard to me... . Abstracted from the law, I cannot conceive ... what the nature of my
offense is. Ihave brought five fine children into the world, at the risque of my life; I have
maintained them well by my own industry, without burdening the township, and would have done
it better, if it had not been for the heavy charges and fines I have paid.. . . nor has anyone the least
cause of complaint against me, unless, perhaps, the ministers of justice, because Ihave had
children without being married, by which they missed a wedding fee. But can this be a fault of
mine? .. .


      
What must poor young women do, whom customs and nature forbid to solicit the men, and who
cannot force themselves upon husbands, when the laws take no care to provide them any, and yet
severely punish them if they do their duty without them; the duty of the first and great command of
nature and nature's Cod, increase and multiply; a duty from the steady performance of which
nothing has been able to deter me, but for its sake I have hazarded the loss of the publick esteem,
and have frequently endured pub-lick disgrace and punishment; and therefore ought, in my humble
opinion, instead of a whipping, to have a statue erected to my memory.

      
The father's position in the
family was expressed in The Spectator, an influential periodical in America and England: "Nothing
is more gratifying to the mind of man than power or dominion; and ... as I am the father of a family
... I am perpetually taken up in giving out orders, in prescribing duties, in hearing parties, in
administering justice, and in distributing rewards and punishments.... In short, sir, I look upon my
family as a patriarchal sovereignty in which I am myself both king and priest."


      
No wonder that Puritan New England carried over this subjection of women. At a trial of a woman
for daring to complain about the work a carpenter had done for her, one of the powerful church
fathers of Boston, the Reverend John Cotton, said: ". . . that the husband should obey his wife, and
not the wife the husband, that is a false principle. For God hath put another law upon women:
wives, be subject to your husbands in all things."


      
A best-selling "pocket book," published in London, was widely read in the American colonies in
the 1700s. It was called Advice to a Daughter:

You must first lay it down for a Foundation in general, That there is Inequality in Sexes, and that
for the better Economy of the World; the Men, who were to be the Law-givers, had the larger share
of Reason bestow'd upon them; by which means your Sex is the better prepar'd for the Compliance
that is necessary for the performance of those Dudes which seem'd to be most properly assign'd to
it.... Your Sex wanteth our Reason for your Conduct, and our Strength for your Protection: Ours
wanteth your Gendeness to soften, and to entertain us. ...

      
Against this powerful education, it is remarkable that women nevertheless rebelled. Women rebels
have always faced special disabilities: they live under the daily eye of their master; and they are
isolated one from the other in households, thus missing the daily camaraderie which has given heart
to rebels of other oppressed groups.


      
Anne Hutchinson was a religious woman, mother of thirteen children, and knowledgeable about
healing with herbs. She defied the church fathers in the early years of the Massachusetts Bay
Colony by insisting that she, and other ordinary people, could interpret the Bible for themselves. A
good speaker, she held meetings to which more and more women came (and even a few men), and
soon groups of sixty or more were gathering at her home in Boston to listen to her criticisms of
local ministers. John Winthrop, the governor, described her as "a woman of a haughty and fierce
carriage, of a nimble wit and active spirit, and a very voluble tongue, more bold than a man, though
in understanding and judgement, inferior to many women."


      
Anne Hutchinson was put on trial twice: by the church for heresy, and by the government for
challenging their authority. At her civil trial she was pregnant and ill, but they did not allow her to
sit down until she was close to collapse. At her religious trial she was interrogated for weeks, and
again she was sick, but challenged her questioners with expert knowledge of the Bible and
remarkable eloquence. When finally she repented in writing, they were not satisfied. They said:
"Her repentance is not in her countenance."


      
She was banished from the colony, and when she left for Rhode Island in 1638, thirty-five families
followed her. Then she went to the shores of Long Island, where Indians who had been defrauded
of their land thought she was one of their enemies; they killed her and her family. Twenty years
later, the one person back in Massachusetts Bay who had spoken up for her during her trial, Mary
Dyer, was hanged by the government of the colony, along with two other Quakers, for "rebellion,
sedition, and presumptuous obtruding themselves."


      
It remained rare for women to participate openly in public affairs, although on the southern and
western frontiers conditions made this occasionally possible. Julia Spruill found in Georgia's early
records the story of Mary Musgrove Mathews, daughter of an Indian mother and an English father,
who could speak the Creek language and became an adviser on Indian affairs to Governor James
Oglethorpe of Georgia. Spruill finds that as the communities became more settled, women were
thrust back farther from public life and seemed to behave more timorously than before. One
petition: "It is not the province of our sex to reason deeply upon the policy of the order."


      
During the Revolution, however, Spruill reports, the necessities of war brought women out into
public affairs. Women formed patriotic groups, carried out anti-British actions, wrote articles for
independence. They were active in the campaign against the British tea tax, which made tea prices
intolerably high. They organized Daughters of Liberty groups, boycotting British goods, urging
women to make their own clothes and buy only American-made things. In 1777 there was a
women's counterpart to the Boston lea Party-a "coffee party," described by Abigail Adams in a
letter to her husband John:

One eminent, wealthy, stingy merchant (who is a bachelor) had a hogshead of coffee in his store,
which he refused to sell the committee under six shillings per pound. A number of females, some
say a hundred, some say more, assembled with a cart and trunks, marched down to the warehouse,
and demanded the keys, which he refused to deliver. Upon which one of them seized him by his
neck and tossed him into the cart. Upon his finding no quarter, he delivered the keys when they
tipped up the cart and discharged him; then opened the warehouse, hoisted out the coffee
themselves, put it into the trunks and drove off. ... A large concourse of men stood amazed, silent
spectators of the whole transaction.

      
It has been pointed out by women historians recently that the contributions of working-class
women in the American Revolution have been mostly ignored, unlike the genteel wives of the
leaders (Dolly Madison, Martha Washington, Abigail Adams). Margaret Corbin, called "Dirty
Kate," Deborah Sampson Garnet, and "Molly Pitcher" were rough, lower-class women, prettified
into ladies by historians. While poor women, in the last years of the fighting, went to army
encampments, helped, and fought, they were represented later as prostitutes, whereas Martha
Washington was given a special place in history books for visiting her husband at Valley Forge.


      
When feminist impulses are recorded, they are, almost always, the writings of privileged women
who had some status from which to speak freely, more opportunity to write and have their writings
recorded. Abigail Adams, even before the Declaration of Independence, in March of 1776, wrote to
her husband:

... in the new code of laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make, I desire you
would remember the ladies, and be more generous to them than your ancestors. Do not put such
unlimited power in the hands of husbands. Remember, all men would be tyrants if they could. If
particular care and attention are not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and
will not hold ourselves bound to obey the laws in which we have no voice of representation.

      
Nevertheless, Jefferson underscored his phrase "all men are created equal" by his statement that
American women would be "too wise to wrinkle their foreheads with politics." And after the
Revolution, none of the new state constitutions granted women the right to vote, except for New
Jersey, and that state rescinded the right in 1807. New York's constitution specifically disfranchised
women by using the word "male."


      
While perhaps 90 percent of the white male population were literate around 1750, only 40 percent
of the women were. Working-class women had little means of communicating, and no means of
recording whatever sentiments of rebelliousness they may have felt at their subordination. Not only
were they bearing children in great numbers, under great hardships, but they were working in the
home. Around the time of the Declaration of Independence, four thousand women and children in
Philadelphia were spinning at home for local plants under the "putting out" system. Women also
were shopkeepers and innkeepers and engaged in many trades. They were bakers, tinworkers,
brewers, tanners, ropemakers, lumberjacks, printers, morticians, woodworkers, stay-makers, and
more.


      
Ideas of female equality were in the air during and after the Revolution, Tom Paine spoke out for
the equal rights of women. And the pioneering book of Mary Wollstonecraft in England, A
Vindication of the Rights of Women, was reprinted in the United States shortly after the
Revolutionary War. Wollstonecraft was responding to the English conservative and opponent of the
French Revolution, Edmund Burke, who had written in his Reflections on the Revolution in France
that "a woman is but an animal, and an animal not of the highest order." She wrote:

I wish to persuade women to endeavor to acquire strength, both of mind and body, and to convince
them that soft phrases, susceptibility of heart, delicacy of sentiment, and refinement of taste, are
almost synonymous with epithets of weakness, and that those beings who arc only the objects of
pity and that kind of love . .. will soon become objects of contempt.. . .


      
I wish to show that the first object of laudable ambition is to obtain a character as a human being,
regardless of the distinction of sex.

      
Between the American Revolution and the Civil War, so many elements of American society were
changing-the growth of population, the movement westward, the development of the factory
system, expansion of political rights for white men, educational growth to match the new economic
needs-that changes were bound to take place in the situation of women. In preindustrial America,
the practical need for women in a frontier society had produced some measure of equality; women
worked at important jobs-publishing newspapers, managing tanneries, keeping taverns, engaging in
skilled work. In certain professions, like midwifery, they had a monopoly. Nancy Cott tells of a
grandmother, Martha Moore Ballard, on a farm in Maine in 1795, who "baked and brewed, pickled
and preserved, spun and sewed, made soap and dipped candles" and who, in twenty-five years as a
midwife, delivered more than a thousand babies. Since education took place inside the family,
women had a special role there.


      
There was complex movement in different directions. Now, women were being pulled out of the
house and into industrial life, while at the same time there was pressure for women to stay home
where they were more easily controlled. The outside world, breaking into the solid cubicle of the
home, created fears and tensions in the dominant male world, and brought forth ideological controls
to replace the loosening family controls: the idea of "the woman's place," promulgated by men, was
accepted by many women.


      
As the economy developed, men dominated as mechanics and tradesmen, and aggressiveness
became more and more defined as a male trait. Women, perhaps precisely because more of them
were moving into the dangerous world outside, were told to be passive. Clothing styles developed-
for the rich and middle class of course, but, as always, there was the intimidation of style even for
the poor-in which the weight of women's clothes, corsets and petticoats, emphasized female
separation from the world of activity.


      
It became important to develop a set of ideas, taught in church, in school, and in the family, to keep
women in their place even as that place became more and more unsettled. Barbara Welter (Dimity
Convictions) has shown how powerful was the "cult of true womanhood" in the years after 1820.
The woman was expected to be pious. A man writing in The Ladies' Repository: "Religion is
exactly what a woman needs, for it gives her that dignity that bests suits her dependence." Mrs.
John Sandford, in her book Woman, in Her Social and Domestic Character, said: "Religion is just
what woman needs. Without it she is ever restless or unhappy."


      
Sexual purity was to be the special virtue of a woman. It was assumed that men, as a matter of
biological nature, would sin, but woman must not surrender. As one male author said: "If you do,
you will be left in silent sadness to bewail your credulity, imbecility, duplicity, and premature
prostitution." A woman wrote that females would get into trouble if they were "high spirited not
prudent."


      
The role began early, with adolescence. Obedience prepared the girl for submission to the first
proper mate. Barbara Welter describes this:

The assumption is twofold: the American female was supposed to be so infinitely lovable and
provocative that a healthy male could barely control himself when in the same room with her, and
the same girl, as she "conies out" of the cocoon of her family's protectiveness, is so palpitating with
undirected affection, so filled to the brim with tender feelings, that she fixes her love on the first
person she sees. She awakes from the midsummer night's dream of adolescence, and it is the
responsibility of her family and society to see that her eyes fall on a suitable match and not some
clown with the head of an ass. They do their part by such restrictive measures as segregated (by sex
and/or class) schools, dancing classes, travel, and other external controls. She is required to exert
the inner control of obedience. The combination forms a kind of societal chastity belt which is not
unlocked until the marriage partner has arrived, and adolescence is formally over.

      
When Amelia Bloomer in 1851 suggested in her feminist publication that women wear a kind of
short skirt and pants, to free themselves from the encumbrances of traditional dress, this was
attacked in the popular women's literature. One story has a girl admiring the "bloomer" costume,
but her professor admonishes her that they are "only one of the many manifestations of that wild
spirit of socialism and agrarian radicalism which is at present so rife in our land."


      
In The Young Lady's Book of 1830: ",.. in whatever situation of life a woman is placed from her
cradle to her grave, a spirit of obedience and submission, pliability of temper, and humility of mind,
are required from her." And one woman wrote, in 1850, in the book Greenwood Leaves: "True
feminine genius is ever timid, doubtful, and clingingly dependent; a perpetual childhood." Another
book, Recollections of a Southern Matron: "If any habit of his annoyed me, I spoke of it once or
twice, calmly, then bore it quietly." Giving women "Rules for Conjugal and Domestic Happiness,"
one book ended with: "Do not expect too much."


      
The woman's job was to keep the home cheerful, maintain religion, he nurse, cook, cleaner,
seamstress, flower arranger. A woman shouldn't read too much, and certain books should be
avoided. When Harriet Martineau, a reformer of the 1830s, wrote Society in America, one reviewer
suggested it he kept away from women: "Such reading will unsettle them for their true station and
pursuits, and they will throw the world back again into confusion."


      
A sermon preached in 1808 in New York:

How interesting and important are the duties devolved on females as wives . .. the counsellor and
friend of the husband; who makes it her daily study to lighten his cares, to soothe his sorrows, and
to augment his joys; who, like a guardian angel, watches over his interests, warns him against
dangers, comforts him under trials; and by her pious, assiduous, and attractive deportment,
constantly endeavors to render him more virtuous, more useful, more honourable, and more happy.

      
Women were also urged, especially since they had the job of educating children, to he patriotic.
One women's magazine offered a prize to the woman who wrote the best essay on "I low May an
American Woman Best Show Her Patriotism."


      
It was in the 1820s and 1830s, Nancy Cott tells us (The Bonds of Womanhood), that there was an
outpouring of novels, poems, essays, sermons, and manuals on the family, children, and women's
role. The world outside was becoming harder, more commercial, more demanding. In a sense, the
home carried a longing for some Utopian past, some refuge from immediacy.


      
Perhaps it made acceptance of the new economy easier to be able to see it as only part of life, with
the home a haven. In 1819, one pious wife wrote: ". . . the air of the world is poisonous. You must
carry an antidote with you, or the infection will prove fetal." All this was not, as Cott points out, to
challenge the world of commerce, industry, competition, capitalism, hut to make it more palatable.


      
The cult of domesticity for the woman was a way of pacifying her with a doctrine of "separate but
equal"-giving her work equally as important as the man's, hut separate and different. Inside that
"equality" there was the fact that the woman did not choose her mate, and once her marriage took
place, her life was determined. One girl wrote in 1791: "The die is about to be cast which will
probably determine the future happiness or misery of my life.... I have always anticipated the event
with a degree of solemnity almost equal to that which will terminate my present existence."


      
Marriage enchained, and children doubled the chains. One woman, writing in 1813: "The idea of
soon giving birth to my third child and the consequent duties I shall he called to discharge
distresses me so I feel as if I should sink." This despondency was lightened by the thought that
something important was given the woman to do: to impart to her children the moral values of self-
restraint and advancement through individual excellence rather than common action.


      
The new ideology worked; it helped to produce the stability needed by a growing economy. But its
very existence showed that other currents were at work, not easily contained. And giving the
woman her sphere created the possibility that she might use that space, that time, to prepare for
another kind of life.


      
The "cult of true womanhood" could not completely erase what was visible as evidence of woman's
subordinate status: she could not vote, could not own property; when she did work, her wages were
one-fourth to one-half what men earned in the same job. Women were excluded from the
professions of law and medicine, from colleges, from the ministry.


      
Putting all women into the same category-giving them all the same domestic sphere to cultivate-
created a classification (by sex) which blurred the lines of class, as Nancy Cott points out.
However, forces were at work to keep raising the issue of class. Samuel Slater had introduced
industrial spinning machinery in New England in 1789, and now there was a demand for young
girls-literally, "spinsters"-to work the spinning machinery in factories. In 1814, the power loom was
introduced in Waltham, Massachusetts, and now all the operations needed to turn cotton fiber into
cloth were under one roof. The new textile factories swiftly multiplied, with women 80 to 90
percent of their operatives-most of these women between fifteen and thirty.


      
Some of the earliest industrial strikes took place in these textile mills in the 1830s. Eleanor Flexner
(A Century of Struggle) gives figures that suggest why: women's daily average earnings in 1836
were less than 371/2 cents, and thousands earned 25 cents a day, working twelve to sixteen hours a
day. In Pawtucket, Rhode Island, in 1824, came the first known strike of women factory workers;
202 women joined men in protesting a wage cut and longer hours, but they met separately. Four
years later, women in Dover, New Hampshire, struck alone. And in Lowell, Massachusetts, in
1834, when a young woman was fired from her job, other girls left their looms, one of them then
climbing the town pump and making, according to a newspaper report, "a flaming Mary
Wollstonecraft speech on the rights of women and the iniquities of the 'moneyed aristocracy' which
produced a powerful effect on her auditors and they determined to have their own way, if they died
for it."


      
A journal kept by an unsympathetic resident of Chicopee, Massachusetts, recorded an event of May
2, 1843:

Great turnout among the girls .. . after breakfast this morning a procession preceded by a painted
window curtain for a banner went round the square, the number sixteen. They soon came past again
.. . then numbered forty-four. They marched around a while and then dispersed. After dinner they
sallied forth to the number of forty-two and marched around to Cabot. ... They marched around the
streets doing themselves no credit. ...

      
There were strikes in various cities in the 1840s, more militant than those early New England
"turnouts," but mostly unsuccessful. A succession of strikes in the Allegheny mills near Pittsburgh
demanded a shorter workday. Several rimes in those strikes, women armed with sticks and stones
broke through the wooden gates of a textile mill and stopped the looms.


      
Catharine Beecher, a woman reformer of the time, wrote about the factory system:

Let me now present the facts I learned by observation or inquiry on the spot. I was there in mid-
winter, and every morning I was awakened at five, by the bells calling to labor. The time allowed
for dressing and breakfast was so short, as many told me, that both were performed hurriedly, and
then the work at the mill was begun by lamplight, and prosecuted without remission till twelve, arid
chiefly in a standing position. Then half an hour only allowed for dinner, from which the time for
going and returning was deducted. Then back to the mills, to work till seven o'clock. ... it must be
remembered that all the hours of labor are spent in rooms where oil lamps, togedier with from 40 to
80 persons, are exhausting the healthful principle of the air ... and where the air is loaded with
particles of cotton thrown from thousands of cards, spindles, and looms.

      
And the life of upper-class women? Frances Trollope, an Englishwoman, in her book
Domestic Manners of the Americans, wrote;

Let me be permitted to describe the day of a Philadelphia lady of the first class... .


      
This lady shall be the wife of a senator and a lawyer in the highest repute and practice.. . . She rises,
and her first hour is spent in the scrupulously nice arrangement of her dress; she descends to her
parlor, neat, stiff, and silent; her breakfast is brought in by her free black footman; she eats her fried
ham and her salt fish, and drinks her coffee in silence, while her husband reads one newspaper, and
puts another under his elbow; and then perhaps, she washes the cups and saucers. Her carriage is
ordered at eleven; till that hour she is employed in the pastry room, her snow-white apron
protecting her mouse-colored silk. Twenty minutes before her carriage should appear, she retires to
her chamber, as she calls it; shakes and folds up her still snowwhite apron, smooths her rich dress,
and . .. sets on her elegant bonnet .. . then walks downstairs, just at the moment that her free black
coachman announces to her free black footman that the carriage waits. She steps into it, and gives
the word: "Drive to the Dorcas Society."

      
At Lowell, a Female Labor Reform Association put out a series of "Factory Tracts." The first was
entitled "Factory Life as It Is By an Operative" and spoke of the textile mill women as "nothing
more nor less than slaves in every sense of the word! Slaves, to a system of labor which requires
them to toil from five until seven o'clock, with one hour only to attend to the wants of nature-slaves
to the will and requirements of the 'powers that be.'..."


      
In 1845, the New York Sun carried this item:

"Mass Meeting of Young Women"-We are requested to call the attention of the young women of
the city engaged in industrious pursuits to the call for a mass meeting in the Park this afternoon at 4
o'clock.


      
We are also requested to appeal to the gallantry of the men of this city . . . and respectfully ask
them not to be present at this meeting as those for whose benefit it is called prefer to deliberate by
themselves.

Around that time, the New York Herald carried a story about "700 females, generally of the most
interesting state and appearance," meeting "in their endeavor to remedy the wrongs and oppressions
under which they labor." The Herald editorialized about such meetings: ". .. we very much doubt
whether it will terminate in much good to female labor of any description.... All combinations end
in nothing."


      
The tide of Nancy Cott's book The Bonds of Womanhood reflects her double view of what was
happening to women in the early nineteenth century. They were trapped in the bonds of the new
ideology of "women's sphere" in the home, and, when forced out to work in factories, or even in
middle-class professions, found another kind of bondage. On the other hand, these conditions
created a common consciousness of their situation and forged bonds of solidarity among them.


      
Middle-class women, barred from higher education, began to monopolize the profession of
primary-school teaching. As teachers, they read more, communicated more, and education itself
became subversive of old ways of thinking. They began to write for magazines and newspapers,
and started some ladies' publications. Literacy among women doubled between 1780 and 1840.
Women became health reformers. They formed movements against double standards in sexual
behavior and the victimization of prostitutes. They joined in religious organizations. Some of the
most powerful of them joined the antislavery movement. So, by the time a clear feminist movement
emerged in the 1840s, women had become practiced organizers, agitators, speakers.


      
When Emma Willard addressed the New York legislature in 1819 on the subject of education for
women, she was contradicting the statement made just the year before by Thomas Jefferson (in a
letter) in which he suggested women should not read novels "as a mass of trash" with few
exceptions. "For a like reason, too, much poetry should not be indulged." Female education should
concentrate, he said, on "ornaments too, and the amusements of life. . . . These, for a female, are
dancing, drawing, and music."


      
Emma Willard told the legislature that the education of women "has been too exclusively directed
to fit them for displaying to advantage the charms of youth and beauty." The problem, she said, was
that "the taste of men, whatever it might happen to be, has been made into a standard for the
formation of the female character." Reason and religion teach us, she said, that "we too are primary
existences ... not the satellites of men."


      
In 1821, Willard founded the Troy Female Seminary, the first recognized institution for the
education of girls. She wrote later of how she upset people by teaching her students about the
human body:

Mothers visiting a class at the Seminary in the early thirties were so shocked at the sight of a pupil
drawing a heart, arteries and veins on a blackboard to explain the circulation of the blood, that they
left the room in shame and dismay. lb preserve the modesty of the girls, and spare them too
frequent agitation, heavy paper was pasted over the pages in their textbooks which depicted the
human body.

      
Women struggled to enter the all-male professional schools. Dr. Harriot Hunt, a woman physician
who began to practice in 1835, was twice refused admission to Harvard Medical School. But she
carried on her practice, mostly among women and children. She believed strongly in diet, exercise,
hygiene, and mental health. She organized a Ladies Physiological Society in 1843 where she gave
monthly talks. She remained single, defying convention here too.


      
Elizabeth Blackwell got her medical degree in 1849, having overcome many rebuffs before being
admitted to Geneva College. She then set up the New York Dispensary for Poor Women and
Children "to give to poor women an opportunity of consulting physicians of their own sex." In her
first Annual Report, she wrote:

My first medical consultation was a curious experience. In a severe case of pneumonia in an elderly
lady I called in consultation a kind-hearted physician of high standing. .. . This gentleman, after
seeing the patient, went with me into the parlour. There he began to walk about the room in some
agitation, exclaiming, "A most extraordinary case! Such a one never happened to me before; I
really do not know what to do!" I listened in surprise and much perplexity, as it was a clear case of
pneumonia and of no unusual degree of danger, until at last I discovered that his perplexity related
to me, not to the patient, and to the propriety of consulting with a lady physician!

      
Oberlin College pioneered in the admission of women. But the first girl admitted to the theology
school there, Antoinette Brown, who graduated in 1850, found that her name was left off the class
list. With Lucy Stone, Oberlin found a formidable resister. She was active in the peace society and
in antislavery work, taught colored students, and organized a debating club for girls. She was
chosen to write the commencement address, then was told it would have to be read by a man. She
refused to write it.


      
Lucy Stone began lecturing on women's rights in 1847 in a church in Gardner, Massachusetts,
where her brother was a minister. She was tiny, weighed about 100 pounds, was a marvelous
speaker. As lecturer for the American Anti-Slavery Society, she was, at various times, deluged with
cold water, sent reeling by a thrown book, attacked by mobs.


      
When she married Henry Blackwell, they joined hands at their wedding and read a statement:

While we acknowledge our mutual affection by publicly assuming the relationship of husband and
wife ... we deem it a duty to declare that this act on our part implies no sanction of, nor promise of
voluntary obedience to such of the present laws of marriage as refuse to recognize the wife as an
independent, rational being, while they confer upon the husband an injurious and unnatural
superiority. . . .

      
She was one of the first to refuse to give up her name after marriage. She was "Mrs. Stone." When
she refused to pay taxes because she was not represented in the government, officials took all her
household goods in payment, even her baby's cradle.


      
After Amelia Bloomer, a postmistress in a small town in New York State, developed the bloomer,
women activists adopted it in place of the old whale-boned bodice, the corsets and petticoats.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who was one of the leaders of the feminist movement in this period, told
of how she first saw a cousin of hers wearing bloomers:

To see my cousin with a lamp in one hand and a baby in the other, walk upstairs, with ease and
grace while, with flowing robes, I pulled myself up with difficulty, lamp and baby out of the
question, readily convinced me that there was sore need of a reform in woman's dress and I
promptly donned a similar costume.

      
Women, after becoming involved in other movements of reform- antislavery, temperance, dress
styles, prison conditions-turned, emboldened and experienced, to their own situation. Angelina
Grimke, a southern white woman who became a fierce speaker and organizer against slavery, saw
that movement leading further:

Let us all first wake up the nation to lift millions of slaves of both sexes from the dust, and turn
them into men and then ... it will he an easy matter to take millions of females from their knees and
set them on their feet, or in other words transform them from babies into women.

      
Margaret Fuller was perhaps the most formidable intellectual among the feminists. Her starting
point, in Woman in the Nineteenth Century, was the understanding that "there exists in the minds
of men a tone of feeling toward woman as toward slaves...." She continued: "We would have every
arbitrary harrier thrown down. We would have every path open to Woman as freely as to Man."
And: "What woman needs is not as a woman to act or rule, but as a nature to grow, as an intellect to
discern, as a soul to live freely and unimpeded. . . ."


      
There was much to overcome. One of the most popular writers of the mid-nineteenth century, the
Reverend John Todd (one of his many best-selling books gave advice to young men on the results
of masturbation-"the mind is greatly deteriorated"), commented on the new feminist mode of dress:

Some have tried to become semi-men by putting on the Bloomer dress. Let me tell you in a word
why it can never be done. It is this: woman, robed and folded in her long dress, is beautiful. She
walks gracefully. ... If she attempts to run, the charm is gone. . . . Take off the robes, and put on
pants, and show the limbs, and grace and mystery are all gone.

In the 1830s, a pastoral letter from the General Association of Ministers of Massachusetts
commanded ministers to forbid women to speak from pulpits: ". .. when she assumes the place and
tone of man ... we put ourselves in self-defense against her."


      
Sarah Grimke, Angelina's sister, wrote in response a series of articles, "Letters on the Condition of
Women and the Equality of the Sexes":

During the early part of my life, my lot was cast among the butterflies of the fashionable world; and
of this class of women, I am constrained to say, both from experience and observation, that their
education is miserably deficient; that they are taught to regard marriage as the one thing needful,
the only avenue to distinction.. . .

      
She said: "I ask no favors for my sex. I surrender not our claim to equality. All I ask of our
brethren is that they will take their feet from off our necks, and permit us to stand upright on the
ground which God has designed us to occupy. ... To me it is perfectly clear that whatsoever it is
morally right for a man to do, it is morally right for a woman to do."


      
Sarah could write with power; Angelina was the firebrand speaker. Once she spoke six nights in a
row at the Boston Opera House. To the argument of some well-meaning fellow abolitionists that
they should not advocate sexual equality because it was so outrageous to the common mind that it
would hurt the campaign for the abolition of slavery, she responded:

We cannot push Abolitionism forward with all our might until we take up the stumbling block out
of the road.. . . If we surrender the right to speak in public this year, we must surrender the right to
petition next year, and the right to write the year after, and so on. What then can woman do for the
slave, when she herself is under the feet of man and shamed into silence?

      
Angelina was the first woman (in 1838) to address a committee of the Massachusetts state
legislature on antislavery petitions. She later said: "I was so near fainting under the tremendous
pressure of feeling. . . ." Her talk attracted a huge crowd, and a representative from Salem proposed
that "a Committee be appointed to examine the foundations of the State House of Massachusetts to
see whether it will bear another lecture from Miss Grimke!"


      
Speaking out on other issues prepared the way for speaking on the situation of women: Dorothea
Dix, in 1843, addressed the legislature of Massachusetts on what she saw in the prisons and
almshouses in the Boston area:

I tell what I have seen, painful and shocking as the details often are. ... I proceed, gendemen, briefly
to call your attention to the present state of insane persons confined within this Commonwealth in
cages, closets, cellars, stalls, pens; chained, naked, beaten with rods, and lashed into obedience!...

      
Frances Wright was a writer, founder of a Utopian community, immigrant from Scotland in 1824, a fighter
for the emancipation of slaves, for birth control and sexual freedom. She wanted free public
education for all children over two years of age in state-supported hoarding schools. She expressed
in America what the Utopian socialist Charles Fourier had said in France, that the progress of
civilization depended on the progress of women. In her words:

I shall venture the assertion, that, until women assume the place in society which good sense and
good feeling alike assign to them, human improvement must advance but feebly.... Men will ever
rise or fall to the level of the other sex. ... Let them not imagine that they know aught of the delights
which intercourse with the other sex can give, until they have felt the sympathy of mind with mind,
and heart with heart; until they bring into that intercourse every affection, every talent, every
confidence, every refinement, every respect. Until power is annihilated on one side, fear and
obedience on the other, and both restored to their birthright-equality.

      
Women put in enormous work in antislavery societies all over the country, gathering thousands of
petitions to Congress. Eleanor Flexner writes in A Century of Struggle:

Today, countless file boxes in the National Archives in Washington bear witness to that anonymous
and heart-breaking labor. The petitions arc yellowed and frail, glued together, page on page,
covered with ink blots, signed with scratchy pens, with an occasional erasure by one who fearfully
thought better of so bold an act... . They bear the names of women's anti-slavery societies from
New England to Ohio.,. .

      
In the course of this work, events were set in motion that carried the movement of women for their
own equality racing alongside the movement against slavery. In 1840, a World Anti-Slavery
Society Convention met in London. After a fierce argument, it was voted to exclude women, but it
was agreed they could attend meetings in a curtained enclosure. The women sat in silent protest in
the gallery, and William Lloyd Garrison, one abolitionist who had fought for the rights of women,
sat with them.


      
It was at that time that Elizabeth Cady Stanton met Lucretia Mott and others, and began to lay the
plans that led to the first Women's Rights Convention in history. It was held at Seneca Falls, New
York, where Elizabeth Cady Stanton lived as a mother, a housewife, full of resentment at her
condition, declaring: "A woman is a nobody. A wife is everything." She wrote later:

I now fully understood the practical difficulties most women had to contend with in the isolated
household, and the impossibility of woman's best development if, in contact, the chief part of her
life, with servants and children, .. . The general discontent I felt with woman's portion as wife,
mother, housekeeper, physician, and spiritual guide, the chaotic condition into which everything
fell without her constant supervision, and the wearied, anxious look of the majority of women,
impressed me with the strong feeling that some active measures should he taken to remedy the
wrongs of society in general and of women in particular. My experiences at the World Anti-Slavery
Convention, all I had read of the legal status of women, and the oppression I saw everywhere,
together swept across my soul.... I could not see what to do or where to begin-my only thought was
a public meeting for protest and discussion.

      
An announcement was put in the Seneca County Courier calling for a meeting to discuss the "rights
of woman" the 19th and 20th of July. Three hundred women and some men came. A Declaration of
Principles was signed at the end of the meeting by sixty-eight women and thirty-two men. It made
use of the language and rhythm of the Declaration of Independence:

When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one portion of the family of man to
assume among the people of the earth a position different from that they have hitherto occupied ...


      
We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal; that they are
endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; dial among these are life, liberty and the
pursuit of happiness.. ..


      
The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward
woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her. To prove this, let
facts be submitted to a candid world.. . .

      
Then came the list of grievances: no right to vote, no right to her wages or to property, no rights in
divorce cases, no equal opportunity in employment, no entrance to colleges, ending with: "He had
endeavored, in every way that he could, to destroy her confidence in her own powers, to lessen her
self-respect and to make her willing to lead a dependent and abject life...."


      
And then a series of resolutions, including: "That all laws which prevent woman from occupying
such a station in society as her conscience shall dictate, or which place her in a position inferior to
that of man, are contrary to the great precept of nature, and therefore of no force or authority."


      
A series of women's conventions in various parts of the country followed the one at Seneca Falls.
At one of these, in 1851, an aged black woman, who had been born a slave in New York, tall, thin,
wearing a gray dress and white turban, listened to some male ministers who had been dominating
the discussion. This was Sojourner Truth. She rose to her feet and joined the indignation of her race
to the indignation of her sex:

That man over there says that woman needs to be helped into carriages and
lifted over ditches. .. . Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles or gives me any
best place. And a'nt I a woman?


      
Look at my arm! I have ploughed, and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head
me! And a'nt I a woman?


      
I would work as much and eat as much as a man, when I could get it, and bear the lash as well.
And a'nt I a woman?


      
I have borne thirteen children and seen em most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with
my mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me! And a'nt I a woman?

      
Thus were women beginning to resist, in the 1830s and 1840s and 1850s, the attempt to keep them
in their "woman's sphere." They were taking part in all sorts of movements, for prisoners, for the
insane, for black slaves, and also for all women.




      
In the midst of these movements, there exploded, with the force of government and the authority of
money, a quest for more land, an urge for national expansion.

If women, of all the subordinate groups in a society dominated by rich white males, were closest to
home (indeed, in the home), the most interior, then the Indians were the most foreign, the most
exterior. Women, because they were so near and so needed, were dealt with more by patronization
than by force. The Indian, not needed-indeed, an obstacle-could be dealt with by sheer force, except
that sometimes the language of paternalism preceded the burning of villages.

      
And so, Indian Removal, as it has been politely called, cleared the land for white occupancy
between the Appalachians and the Mississippi, cleared it for cotton in the South and grain in the
North, for expansion, immigration, canals, railroads, new cities, and the building of a huge
continental empire clear across to the Pacific Ocean. The cost in human life cannot be accurately
measured, in suffering not even roughly measured. Most of the history books given to children pass
quickly over it.

      
Statistics tell the story. We find these in Michael Rogin's Fathers and Children: In 1790, there were
3,900,000 Americans, and most of them lived within 50 miles of the Atlantic Ocean. By 1830,
there were 13 million Americans, and by 1840, 4,500,000 had crossed the Appalachian Mountains
into the Mississippi Valley-that huge expanse of land crisscrossed by rivers flowing into the
Mississippi from east and west. In 1820, 120,000 Indians lived east of the Mississippi. By 1844,
fewer than 30,000 were left. Most of them had been forced to migrate westward. But the word
"force" cannot convey what happened.

      
In the Revolutionary War, almost every important Indian nation fought on the side of the British.
The British signed for peace and went home; the Indians were already home, and so they continued
fighting the Americans on the frontier, in a set of desperate holding operations. Washington's war-
enfeebled militia could not drive them back. After scouting forces were demolished one after the
other, he tried to follow a policy of conciliation. His Secretary of War, Henry Knox, said: "The
Indians being the prior occupants, possess the right of the soil." His Secretary of State, Thomas
Jefferson, said in 1791 that where Indians lived within state boundaries they should not be
interfered with, and that the government should remove white settlers who tried to encroach on
them.

      
But as whites continued to move westward, the pressure on the national government increased. By
the time Jefferson became President, in 1800, there were 700,000 white settlers west of the
mountains. They moved into Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, in the North; into Alabama and Mississippi in
the South. These whites outnumbered the Indians about eight to one. Jefferson now committed the
federal government to promote future removal of the Creek and the Cherokee from Georgia.
Aggressive activity against the Indians mounted in the Indiana territory under Governor William
Henry Harrison.

      
When Jefferson doubled the size of the nation by purchasing the Louisiana territory from France in
1803-thus extending the western frontier from the Appalachians across the Mississippi to the
Rocky Mountains-he thought the Indians could move there. He proposed to Congress that Indians
should be encouraged to settle down on smaller tracts and do farming; also, they should be
encouraged to trade with whites, to incur debts, and then to pay off these debts with tracts of land.
".. . Two measures are deemed expedient. First to encourage them to abandon hunting... - Secondly,
To Multiply trading houses among them ... leading them thus to agriculture, to manufactures, and
civilization...."

      
Jefferson's talk of "agriculture . . . manufactures . . . civilization" is crucial. Indian removal was
necessary for the opening of the vast American lands to agriculture, to commerce, to markets, to
money, to the development of the modern capitalist economy. Land was indispensable for all this,
and after the Revolution, huge sections of land were bought up by rich speculators, including
George Washington and Patrick Henry. In North Carolina, rich tracts of land belonging to the
Chickasaw Indians were put on sale, although the Chickasaws were among the few Indian tribes
fighting on the side of the Revolution, and a treaty had been signed with them guaranteeing their
land. John Donelson, a state surveyor, ended up with 20,000 acres of land near what is now
Chattanooga. His son-in-law made twenty-two trips out of Nashville in 1795 for land deals. This
was Andrew Jackson.

      
Jackson was a land speculator, merchant, slave trader, and the most aggressive enemy of the
Indians in early American history. He became a hero of the War of 1812, which was not (as usually
depicted in American textbooks) just a war against England for survival, but a war for the
expansion of the new nation, into Florida, into Canada, into Indian territory.

      
Tecumseh, a Shawnee chief and noted orator, tried to unite the Indians against the white invasion:

The way, and the only way, to check and to stop this evil, is for all the Redmen to unite in claiming
a common and equal right in the land, as it. was at first and should be yet; for it was never divided,
but belongs to all for the use of each. That no part has a right to sell, even to each other, much less
to strangers-those who want all and will not do with less.

Angered when fellow Indians were induced to cede a great tract of land to the United States
government, Tecumseh organized in 1811 an Indian gathering of five thousand, on the bank of the
Tallapoosa River in Alabama, and told them: "Let the white race perish. They seize your land; they
corrupt your women, they trample on the ashes of your dead! Back whence they came, upon a trail
of blood, they must be driven."

      
The Creeks, who occupied most of Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi, were divided among
themselves. Some were willing to adopt the civilization of the white man in order to live in peace.
Others, insisting on their land and their culture, were called "Red Sticks." The Red Sticks in 1813
massacred 250 people at Fort Mims, whereupon Jackson's troops burned down a Creek village,
killing men, women, children. Jackson established the tactic of promising rewards in land and
plunder: ". .. if either party, cherokees, friendly creeks, or whites, takes property of the Red Sticks,
the properly belongs to those who take it."

      
Not all his enlisted men were enthusiastic for the righting. There were mutinies; the men were
hungry, their enlistment terms were up, they were tired of lighting and wanted to go home. Jackson
wrote to his wife about "the once brave and patriotic volunteers .. . sunk ... to mere whining,
complaining, seditioners and mutineers.. .." When a seventeen-year-old soldier who had refused to
clean up his food, and threatened his officer with a gun, was sentenced to death by a court-martial,
Jackson turned down a plea for commutation of sentence and ordered the execution to proceed. He
then walked out of earshot of the firing squad.

      
Jackson became a national hero when in 1814 he fought the Battle of Horseshoe Bend against a
thousand Creeks and killed eight hundred of them, with few casualties on his side. His white troops
had failed in a frontal attack on the Creeks, but the Cherokees with him, promised governmental
friendship if they joined the war, swam the river, came up behind the Creeks, and won the battle for
Jackson.

      
When the war ended, Jackson and friends of his began buying up the seized Creek lands. He got
himself appointed treaty commissioner and dictated a treaty which took away half the land of the
Creek nation. Rogin says it was "the largest single Indian cession of southern American land." It
took land from Creeks who had fought with Jackson as well as those who had fought against him,
and when Big Warrior, a chief of the friendly Creeks, protested, Jackson said:

Listen.. . . The United States would have been justified by the Great Spirit, had they taken all the
land of the nation.. .. Listen-the truth is, the great body of the Creek chiefs and warriors did not
respect the power of the United States-They thought we were an insignificant nation-that we would
be overpowered by the British... . They were fat with eating beef- they wanted flogging. .. . We
bleed our enemies in such eases to give them their senses.

As Rogin puts it: "Jackson had conquered 'the cream of the Creek country,' and it would guarantee
southwestern prosperity. He had supplied the expanding cotton kingdom with a vast and valuable
acreage."

      
Jackson's 1814 treaty with the Creeks started something new and important. It granted Indians
individual ownership of land, thus splitting Indian from Indian, breaking up communal
landholding, bribing some with land, leaving others out-introducing the competition and conniving
that marked the spirit of Western capitalism. It fitted well the old Jeffersonian idea of how to
handle the Indians, by bringing them into "civilization."

      
From 1814 to 1824, in a series of treaties with the southern Indians, whites took over three-fourths
of Alabama and Florida, one-third of Tennessee, one-fifth of Georgia and Mississippi, and parts of
Kentucky and North Carolina. Jackson played a key role in those treaties, and, according to Rogin,
"His friends and relatives received many of the patronage appointments-as Indian agents, traders,
treaty commissioners, surveyors and land agents...."

      
Jackson himself described how the treaties were obtained: "... we addressed ourselves feelingly to
the predominant and governing passion of all Indian tribes, i.e., their avarice or fear." He
encouraged white squatters to move into Indian lands, then told the Indians the government could
not remove the whites and so they had better cede the lands or be wiped out. He also, Rogin says,
"practiced extensive bribery."

      
These treaties, these land grabs, laid the basis for the cotton kingdom, the slave plantations. Every
time a treaty was signed, pushing the Creeks from one area to the next, promising them security
there, whites would move into the new area and the Creeks would feel compelled to sign another
treaty, giving up more land in return for security elsewhere.

      
Jackson's work had brought the white settlements to the border of Florida, owned by Spain. Here
were the villages of the Seminole Indians, joined by some Red Stick refugees, and encouraged by
British agents in their resistance to the Americans. Settlers moved into Indian lands. Indians
attacked. Atrocities took place on both sides. When certain villages refused to surrender people
accused of murdering whites, Jackson ordered the villages destroyed.

      
Another Seminole provocation: escaped black slaves took refuge in Seminole villages. Some
Seminoles bought or captured black slaves, but their form of slavery was more like African slavery
than cotton plantation slavery. The slaves often lived in their own villages, their children often
became free, there was much intermarriage between Indians and blacks, and soon there were mixed
Indian-black villages-all of which aroused southern slaveowners who saw this as a lure to their own
slaves seeking freedom.

      
Jackson began raids into Florida, arguing it was a sanctuary for escaped slaves and for marauding
Indians. Florida, he said, was essential to the defense of the United States. It was that classic
modern preface to a war of conquest. Thus began the Seminole War of 1818, leading to the
American acquisition of Florida. It appears on classroom maps politely as "Florida Purchase,
1819"-but it came from Andrew Jackson's military campaign across the Florida border, burning
Seminole villages, seizing Spanish forts, until Spain was "persuaded" to sell. He acted, he said, by
the "immutable laws of self-defense."

      
Jackson then became governor of the Florida Territory. He was able now to give good business
advice to friends and relatives. To a nephew, he suggested holding on to property in Pensacola. To a
friend, a surgeon-general in the army, he suggested buying as many slaves as possible, because the
price would soon rise.

      
Leaving his military post, he also gave advice to officers on how to deal with the high rate of
desertion. (Poor whites-even if willing to give their lives at first-may have discovered the rewards
of battle going to the rich.) Jackson suggested whipping for the first two attempts, and the third
time, execution.

      
The leading books on the Jacksonian period, written by respected historians (The Age of Jackson
by Arthur Schlesinger; The Jacksonian Persuasion by Marvin Meyers), do not mention Jackson's
Indian policy, but there is much talk in them of tariffs, banking, political parties, political rhetoric.
If you look through high school textbooks and elementary school textbooks in American history
you will find Jackson the frontiersman, soldier, democrat, man of the people-not Jackson the
slaveholder, land speculator, executioner of dissident soldiers, exterminator of Indians.

       This is not
simply hindsight (the word used for thinking back differently on the past). After Jackson was
elected President in 1828 (following John Quincy Adams, who had followed Monroe, who had
followed Madison, who had followed Jefferson), the Indian Removal bill came before Congress
and was called, at the time, "the leading measure" of the Jackson administration and "the greatest
question that ever came before Congress" except for matters of peace and war. By this time the two
political parties were the Democrats and Whigs, who disagreed on banks and tariffs, but not on
issues crucial for the white poor, the blacks, the Indians-although some white working people saw
Jackson as their hero, because he opposed the rich man's Bank.

      
Under Jackson, and the man he chose to succeed him, Martin Van Buren, seventy thousand Indians
east of the Mississippi were forced westward. In the North, there weren't that many, and the
Iroquois Confederation in New York stayed. But the Sac and Fox Indians of Illinois were removed,
after the Black Hawk War (in which Abraham Lincoln was an officer, although he was not in
combat). When Chief Black Hawk was defeated and captured in 1832, he made a surrender speech:

I fought hard. But your guns were well aimed. The bullets flew like birds in the air, and whizzed by
our cars like the wind through the trees in the winter. My warriors fell around me.. . . The sun rose
dim on us in the morning, and at night it sunk in a dark cloud, and looked like a ball of fire. That
was the last sun that shone on Black Hawk. ... He is now a prisoner to the white men.. .. He has
done nothing for which an Indian ought to be ashamed. He has fought for his countrymen, the
squaws and papooses, against white men, who came year after year, to cheat them and take away
their lands. You know the cause of our making war. It is known to all white men. They ought to be
ashamed of it. Indians are not deceitful. The white men speak bad of the Indian and look at him
spitefully. But the Indian does not tell lies. Indians do not steal.

      
An Indian who is as bad as the white men could not live in our nation; he would be put to death,
and eaten up by the wolves. The white men are bad schoolmasters; they carry false books, and deal
in false actions; they smile in the face of the poor Indian to cheat him; they shake them by the hand
to gain their confidence, to make them drunk, to deceive them, and ruin our wives. We told them to
leave us alone, and keep away from us; they followed on, and beset our paths, and they coiled
themselves among us, like the snake. They poisoned us by their touch. We were not safe. We lived
in danger. We were becoming like them, hypocrites and liars, adulterous lazy drones, all talkers and
no workers. .. .

      
The white men do not scalp the head; but they do worse-they poison the heart.. . . Farewell, my
nation! . .. Farewell to Black Hawk.

      
Black Hawk's bitterness may have come in part from the way he was captured. Without enough
support to hold out against the white troops, with his men starving, hunted, pursued across the
Mississippi, Black Hawk raised the white flag. The American commander later explained: "As we
neared them they raised a white flag and endeavored to decoy us, but we were a little too old for
them." The soldiers fired, killing women and children as well as warriors. Black Hawk fled; he was
pursued and captured by Sioux in the hire of the army. A government agent told the Sac and Fox
Indians: "Our Great Father .. . will forbear no longer. He has tried to reclaim them, and they grow
worse. He is resolved to sweep them from the face of the earth. ... If they cannot be made good they
must be killed."

      
The removal of the Indians was explained by Lewis Cass-Secretary of War, governor of the
Michigan territory, minister to France, presidential candidate:

A principle of progressive improvement seems almost inherent in human nature. . .. We are all
striving in the career of life to acquire riches of honor, or power, or some other object, whose
possession is to realize the day dreams of our imaginations; and the aggregate of these efforts
constitutes the advance of society. But there is little of this in the constitution of our savages.

      
Cass-pompous, pretentious, honored (Harvard gave him an honorary doctor of laws degree in 1836,
at the height of Indian removal)- claimed to be an expert on the Indians. But he demonstrated again
and again, in Richard Drinnon's words (Violence in the American Experience: Winning the West),
a "quite marvelous ignorance of Indian life." As governor of the Michigan Territory, Cass took
millions of acres from the Indians by treaty: "We must frequently promote their interest against
their inclination."

      
His article in the North American Review in 1830 made the case for Indian Removal. We must not
regret, he said, "the progress of civilization and improvement, the triumph of industry and art, by
which these regions have been reclaimed, and over which freedom, religion, and science are
extending their sway." He wished that all this could have been done with "a smaller sacrifice; that
the aboriginal population had accommodated themselves to the inevitable change of their
condition... . But such a wish is vain. A barbarous people, depending for subsistence upon the
scanty and precarious supplies furnished by the chase, cannot live in contact with a civilized
community."

      
Drinnon comments on this (writing in 1969): "Here were all the necessary grounds for burning
villages and uprooting natives, Cherokee and Seminole, and later Cheyenne, Philippine, and
Vietnamese."

      
If the Indians would only move to new lands across the Mississippi, Cass promised in
1825 at a treaty council with Shawnees and Cherokees, "The United States will never ask for your
land there. This I promise you in the name of your great father, the President. That country he
assigns to his red people, to be held by them and their children's children forever."

      
The editor of the North American Review, for whom Cass wrote this article, told him that his
project "only defers the fate of the Indians. In half a century their condition beyond the Mississippi
will be just what it is now on this side. Their extinction is inevitable." As Drinnon notes, Cass did
not dispute this, yet published his article as it was.

      
Everything in the Indian heritage spoke out against leaving their land. A council of Creeks, offered
money for their land, said: "We would not receive money for land in which our fathers and friends
are buried." An old Choctaw chief said, responding, years before, to President Monroe's talk of
removal: "I am sorry I cannot comply with the request of my father. . . . We wish to remain here,
where we have grown up as the herbs of the woods; and do not wish to be transplanted into another
soil." A Seminole chief had said to John Quincy Adams: "Here our navel strings were first cut and
the blood from them sunk into the earth, and made the country dear to us."

      
Not all the Indians responded to the white officials' common designation of them as "children" and
the President as "father." It was reported that when Tecumseh met with William Henry Harrison,
Indian fighter and future President, the interpreter said: "Your father requests you to take a chair."
Tecumseh replied: "My father! The sun is my father, and the earth is my mother; I will repose upon
her bosom."

      
As soon as Jackson was elected President, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi began to pass laws to
extend the states' rule over the Indians in their territory. These laws did away with the tribe as a
legal unit, outlawed tribal meetings, took away the chiefs' powers, made the Indians subject to
militia duty and state taxes, but denied them the right to vote, to bring suits, or to testify in court.
Indian territory was divided up, to be distributed by state lottery. Whites were encouraged to settle
on Indian land.

      
However, federal treaties and federal laws gave Congress, not the states, authority over the tribes.
The Indian Trade and Intercourse Act, passed by Congress in 1802, said there could be no land
cessions except by treaty with a tribe, and said federal law would operate in Indian territory.
Jackson ignored this, and supported state action.

      
It was a neat illustration of the uses of the federal system: depending on the situation, blame could
be put on the states, or on something even more elusive, the mysterious Law before which all men,
sympathetic as they were to the Indian, must bow. As Secretary of War John Eaton explained to the
Creeks of Alabama (Alabama itself was an Indian name, meaning "Here we may rest"): "It is not
your Great Father who does this; but the laws of the Country, which he and every one of his people
is bound to regard."

      
The proper tactic had now been found. The Indians would not be "forced" to go West. But if they
chose to stay they would have to abide by state laws, which destroyed their tribal and personal
rights and made them subject to endless harassment and invasion by white settlers coveting their
land. If they left, however, the federal government would give them financial support and promise
them lands beyond the Mississippi. Jackson's instructions to an army major sent to talk to the
Choctaws and Cherokees put it this way:

Say to my reel Choctaw children, and my Chickasaw children to listen-my white children of
Mississippi have extended their law over their country. .. . Where they now are, say to them, their
father cannot prevent them from being subject to the laws of the state of Mississippi. . .. The
general government will be obliged to sustain the States in the exercise of their right. Say to the
chiefs and warriors that I am their friend, that I wish to act as their friend but they must, by
removing from the limits of the States of Mississippi and Alabama and by being settled on the
lands I offer them, put it in my power to be such-There, beyond the limits of any State, in
possession of land of their own, which they shall possess as long as Grass grows or water runs. I
am and will protect them and be their friend and lather.

That phrase "as long as Grass grows or water runs" was to be recalled with bitterness by
generations of Indians. (An Indian GI, veteran of Vietnam, testifying publicly in 1970 not only
about the horror of the war but about his own maltreatment as an Indian, repeated that phrase and
began to weep.)

      
As Jackson took office in 1829, gold was discovered in Cherokee territory in
Georgia. Thousands of whites invaded, destroyed Indian property, staked out claims. Jackson
ordered federal troops to remove them, but also ordered Indians as well as whites to stop mining.
Then he removed the troops, the whites returned, and Jackson said he could not interfere with
Georgia's authority.

      
The white invaders seized land and stock, forced Indians to sign leases, heat up Indians who
protested, sold alcohol to weaken resistance, killed frame which Indians needed for food. But to put
all the blame on white mobs, Rogin says, would be to ignore "the essential roles played by planter
interests and government policy decisions." Food shortages, whiskey, and military attacks began a
process of tribal disintegration. Violence by Indians upon other Indians increased.

      
Treaties made under pressure and by deception broke up Creek, Choctaw, and Chickasaw tribal
lands into individual holdings, making each person a prey to contractors, speculators, and
politicians. The Chickasaws sold their land individually at good prices and went west without much
suffering. The Creeks and Choctaws remained on their individual plots, but great numbers of them
were defrauded by land companies. According to one Georgia bank president, a stockholder in a
land company, "Stealing is the order of the day."

      
Indians complained to Washington, and Lewis Cass replied:

Our citizens were disposed to buy and the Indians to sell. . .. The subsequent disposition which
shall he made of these payments seems to be utterly beyond the reach of the Government.. . . The
improvident habits of the Indian cannot be controlled by regulations.... If they waste it, as waste it
they too often will, it is deeply to be regretted yet still it is only exercising a right conferred upon
them by the treaty.

      
The Creeks, defrauded of their land, short of money and food, refused to go West. Starving Creeks
began raiding white farms, while Georgia militia and settlers attacked Indian settlements. Thus
began the Second Creek War. One Alabama newspaper sympathetic to the Indians wrote: "The war
with the Creeks is all humbug. It is a base and diabolical scheme, devised by interested men, to
keep an ignorant race of people from maintaining their just rights, and to deprive them of the small
remaining pittance placed under their control."

      
A Creek man more than a hundred years old, named Speckled Snake, reacted to Andrew Jackson's
policy of removal:

Brothers! I have listened to many talks from our great white father. When he first came over the
wide waters, he was but a little man ... very little. His legs were cramped by sitting long in his big
boat, and he begged for a little land to light his fire on. ... But when the white man had warmed
himself before the Indians' fire and filled himself with their hominy, he became very large. With a
step he bestrode the mountains, and his feet covered the plains and the valleys. His hand grasped
the eastern and the western sea, and his head rested on the moon. Then he became our Great Father.
He loved his red children, and he said, "Get a little further, lest I tread on thee."

      
Brothers! I have listened to a great many talks from our great father. But they always began and
ended in this-"Get a little further; you are too near me."

      
Dale Van Every, in his book The Disinherited, sums
up what removal meant to the Indian:

In the long record of man's inhumanity exile has wrung moans of anguish from many different
peoples. Upon no people could it ever have fallen with a more shattering impact than upon the
eastern Indians. The Indian was peculiarly susceptible to every sensory attribute of every natural
feature of his surroundings. He lived in the open. He knew every marsh, glade, hill top, rock,
spring, creek, as only the hunter can know them. He had never fully grasped the principle
establishing private ownership of land as any more rational than private ownership of air but he
loved the land with a deeper emotion than could any proprietor. He felt himself as much a part of it
as the rocks and trees, the animals and birds. His homeland was holy ground, sanctified for him as
the resting place of the bones of his ancestors and the natural shrine of his religion. He conceived
its waterfalls and ridges, its clouds and mists, its glens and meadows, to be inhabited by the myriad
of spirits with whom he held daily communion. It was from this rain-washed land of forests,
streams and lakes, to which he was held by the traditions of his forebears and his own spiritual
aspirations, that he was to be driven to the arid, treeless plains of the far west, a desolate region
then universally known as the Great American Desert.

      
According to Van Every, just before Jackson became President, in the 1820s, after the tumult of the
War of 1812 and the Creek War, the southern Indians and the whites had settled down, often very
close to one another, and were living in peace in a natural environment which seemed to have
enough for all of them. They began to see common problems. Friendships developed. White men
were allowed to visit the Indian communities and Indians often were guests in white homes.
Frontier figures like Davy Crockett and Sam Houston came out of this setting, and both-unlike
Jackson-became lifelong friends of the Indian.

      
The forces that led to removal did not come, Van Every insists, from the poor white frontiersmen
who were neighbors of the Indians. They came from industrialization and commerce, the growth of
populations, of railroads and cities, the rise in value of land, and the greed of businessmen. "Party
managers and land speculators manipulated the growing excitement. . . . Press and pulpit whipped
up the frenzy." Out of that frenzy the Indians were to end up dead or exiled, the land speculators
richer, the politicians more powerful. As for the poor white frontiersman, he played the part of a
pawn, pushed into the first violent encounters, but soon dispensable.

      
There had been three voluntary Cherokee migrations westward, into the beautiful wooded country
of Arkansas, but there the Indians found themselves almost immediately surrounded and penetrated
by white settlers, hunters, trappers. These West Cherokees now had to move farther west, this time
to arid land, land too barren for white settlers. The federal government, signing a treaty with them
in 1828, announced the new territory as "a permanent home ... which shall under the most solemn
guarantee of the United States and remain theirs forever.. . ." It was still another lie, and the plight
of the western Cherokees became known to the three-fourths of the Cherokees who were still in the
East, being pressured by the white man to move on.

      
With 17,000 Cherokees surrounded by 900,000 whites in Georgia, Alabama, and Tennessee, the
Cherokees decided that survival required adaptation to the white man's world. They became
fanners, blacksmiths, carpenters, masons, owners of property. A census of 1826 showed 22,000
cattle, 7,600 horses, 46,000 swine, 726 looms, 2,488 spinning wheels, 172 wagons, 2,943 plows, 10
saw mills, 31 grist mills, 62 blacksmith shops, 8 cotton machines, 18 schools.

      
The Cherokees' language-heavily poetic, metaphorical, beautifully expressive, supplemented by
dance, drama, and ritual-had always been a language of voice and gesture. Now their chief,
Sequoyah, invented a written language, which thousands learned. The Cherokees' newly established
Legislative Council voted money for a printing press, which on February 21, 1828, began
publishing a newspaper, the Cherokee Phoenix, printed in both English and Seqnoyah's Cherokee.

      
Before this, the Cherokees had, like Indian tribes in general, done without formal government. As
Van Every puts it:

The foundation principle of Indian government had always been the rejection of government. The
freedom of the individual was regarded by practically all Indians north of Mexico as a canon
infinitely more precious than the individual's duty to his community or nation. This anarchistic
altitude ruled all behavior, beginning with the smallest social unit, the family. The Indian parent
was constitutionally reluctant to discipline his children.' Their every exhibition of self-will was
accepted as a favorable indication of the development of maturing character.. .

There was an
occasional assembling of a council, with a very loose and changing membership, whose decisions
were not enforced except by the influence of public opinion. A Moravian minister who lived among
them described Indian society:

Thus has been maintained for ages, without convulsions and without civil discords, this traditional
government, of which the world, perhaps, does not offer another example; a government in which
there are no positive laws, but only long established habits and customs, no code of jurisprudence,
but the experience of former times, no magistrates, but advisers, to whom the people nevertheless,
pay a willing and implicit obedience, in which age confers rank, wisdom gives power, and moral
goodness secures title to universal respect.

      
Now, surrounded by white society, all this began to change. The Cherokees even started to emulate
the slave society around them: they owned more than a thousand slaves. They were beginning; to
resemble that civilization the white men spoke about, making what Van Every calls "a stupendous
effort" to win the good will of Americans. They even welcomed missionaries and Christianity.
None of this made them more desirable than the land they lived on.

      
Jackson's 1829 message to Congress made his position clear: "I informed the Indians inhabiting
parts of Georgia and Alabama that their attempt to establish an independent government would not
be countenanced by the Executive of the United States, and advised them to emigrate beyond the
Mississippi or submit to the laws of those States." Congress moved quickly to pass a removal bill.

      
There were defenders of the Indians. Perhaps the most eloquent was Senator Theodore
Frelinghuysen of New Jersey, who told the Senate, debating removal:

We have crowded the tribes upon a few miserable acres on our southern frontier; it is all that is left
to them of their once boundless forest; and still, like the horse-leech, our insatiated cupidity cries,
give! give! ... Sir ... Do the obligations of justice change with the color of the skin?

The North was in general against the removal bill. The South was for it. It passed the House 102 to
97. It passed the Senate narrowly. It did not mention force, but provided for helping the Indians to
move. What it implied was that if they did not, they were without protection, without funds, and at
the mercy of the states.

      
Now the pressures began on the tribes, one by one. The Choctaws did not want to leave, but fifty of
their delegates were offered secret bribes of money and land, and the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit
Creek was signed: Choctaw land east of the Mississippi was ceded to the United States in return for
financial help in leaving, compensation for property left behind, food for the first year in their new
homes, and a guarantee they would never again be required to move. For twenty thousand
Choctaws in Mississippi, though most of them hated the treaty, the pressure now became
irresistible. Whites, including liquor dealers and swindlers, came swarming onto their lands. The
state passed a law making it a crime for Choctaws to try to persuade one another on the matter of
removal.

      
In late 1831, thirteen thousand Choctaws began the long journey west to a land and climate totally
different from what they knew. "Marshaled by guards, hustled by agents, harried by contractors,
they were being herded on the way to an unknown and unwelcome destination like a flock of sick
sheep." They went on ox wagons, on horses, on foot, then to be ferried across the Mississippi
River. The army was supposed to organize their trek, hut it turned over its job to private contractors
who charged the government as much as possible, gave the Indians as little as possible. Everything
was disorganized. Food disappeared. Hunger came. Van Every again:

The long somber columns of groaning ox wagons, driven herds and straggling crowds on foot
inched on westward through swamps and forests, across rivers and over hills, in their crawling
struggle from the lush lowlands of the Gulf to the arid plains of the west. In a kind of death spasm
one of the last vestiges of the original Indian world was being dismembered and its collapsing
remnants jammed bodily into an alien new world.

The first winter migration was one of the coldest on record, and people began to the of pneumonia.
In the summer, a major cholera epidemic hit Mississippi, and Choctaws died by the hundreds. The
seven thousand Choctaws left behind now refused to go, choosing subjugation over death. Many of
their descendants still live in Mississippi.

      
As for the Cherokees, they faced a set of laws passed by Georgia: their lands were taken, their
government abolished, all meetings prohibited. Cherokees advising others not to migrate were to be
imprisoned. Cherokees could not testify in court against any white. Cherokees could not dig for the
gold recently discovered on their land. A delegation of them, protesting to the federal government,
received this reply from Jackson's new Secretary of War, Eaton: "If you will go to the setting sun
there you will be happy; there you can remain in peace and quietness; so long as the waters run and
the oaks grow that country shall be guaranteed to you and no white man shall be permitted to settle
near you."

      
The Cherokee nation addressed a memorial to the nation, a public plea for justice. They reviewed
their history:

After the peace of 1783, the Cherokees were an independent people, absolutely so, as much as any
people on earth. They had been allies to Great Britain. . . . The United States never subjugated the
Cherokees; on the contrary, our fathers remained in possession of their country and with arms in
their hands. ... In 1791, the treaty of Holston was made.... The Cherokees acknowledged themselves
to be under the protection of the United States, and of no other sovereign.... A cession of land was
also made to the United States. On the other hand, the United States ... stipulated that white men
should not hunt on these lands, not even enter the country, without, a passport; and gave a solemn
guarantee of all Cherokee lands not ceded. . ..

They discussed removal:

We are aware that some persons suppose it will be for our advantage to remove beyond the
Mississippi. We think otherwise. Our people universally think otherwise. . .. We wish to remain on
the land of our fathers. We have a perfect and original right to remain without interruption or
molestation. The treaties with us, and laws of the United States made in pursuance of treaties,
guarantee our residence and our privileges, and secure us against intruders- Our only request is, that
these treaties may he fulfilled, and these laws executed.. . .

Now they went beyond history, beyond law:

We entreat those to whom the foregoing paragraphs are addressed, to remember the great law of
love. "Do to others as ye would that others should do to you." .. . We pray them to remember that,
for the sake of principle, their forefathers were compelled to leave, therefore driven from the old
world, and that the winds of persecution wafted them over the great waters and landed them on the
shores of the new world, when the Indian was the sole lord and proprietor of these extensive
domains-Let them remember in what way they were received by the savage of America, when
power was in his hand, and his ferocity could not be restrained by any human arm. We urge them to
hear in mind, that those who would not ask of them a cup of cold water, and a spot of earth ... are
the descendants of these, whose origin, as inhabitants of North America, history and tradition are
alike insufficient to reveal. Let them bring to remembrance all these facts, and they cannot, and we
are sure, they will not fail to remember, and sympathize with us in diese our trials and sufferings.

      
Jackson's response to this, in his second Annual Message to Congress 111 December 1830, was to
point to the fact that the Choctaws and Chickasaws had already agreed to removal, and that "a
speedy removal" of the rest would offer many advantages to everyone. For whites it "will place a
dense and civilized population in large tracts of country now occupied by a few savage hunters."
For Indians, it will "perhaps cause them, gradually, under the protection of the Government and
through the influence of good counsels, to cast off their savage habits and become an interesting,
civilized, and Christian community."

      
He reiterated a familiar theme. "Toward the aborigines of the country no one can indulge a more
friendly feeling than myself. . . ." However: "The waves of population and civilization are rolling to
the westward, and we now propose to acquire the countries occupied by the red men of the South
and West by a fair exchange. . .."

      
Georgia passed a law making it a crime for a white person to stay in Indian territory without taking
an oath to the state of Georgia. When the white missionaries in the Cherokee territory declared their
sympathies openly for the Cherokees to stay, Georgia militia entered the territory in the spring of
1831 and arrested three of the missionaries, including Samuel Worcester. They were released when
they claimed protection as federal employees (Worcester was a federal postmaster). Immediately
the Jackson administration took away Worcester's job, and the militia moved in again that summer,
arresting ten missionaries as well as the white printer of the Cherokee Phoenix. They were beaten,
chained, and forced to march 35 miles a day to the county jail. A jury tried them, found them
guilty. Nine were released when they agreed to swear allegiance to Georgia's laws, but Samuel
Worcester and Elizur Butler, who refused to grant legitimacy to the laws repressing the Cherokees,
were sentenced to four years at hard labor.

      
This was appealed to the Supreme Court, and in Worcester v. Georgia, John Marshall, for the
majority, declared that the Georgia law on which Worcester was jailed violated the treaty with the
Cherokees, which by the Constitution was binding on the states. He ordered Worcester freed.
Georgia ignored him, and President Jackson refused to enforce the court order.

      
Georgia now put Cherokee land on sale and moved militia in to crush any sign of Cherokee
resistance. The Cherokees followed a policy of nonviolence, though their property was being taken,
their homes were being burned, their schools were closed, their women mistreated, and liquor was
being sold in their churches to render them even more helpless.

      
The same year Jackson was declaring states' rights for Georgia on the Cherokee question in 1832,
he was attacking South Carolina's right to nullify a federal tariff. His easy reelection in 1832
(687,000 to 530,000 for his opponent Henry Clay) suggested that his anti-Indian policies were in
keeping with popular sentiment, at least among those white males who could vote (perhaps 2
million of the total population of 13 million). Jackson now moved to speed up Indian removal.
Most of the Choctaws and some of the Cherokees were gone, but there were still 22,000 Creeks in
Alabama, 18,000 Cherokees in Georgia, and 5,000 Seminoles in Florida.

      
The Creeks had been fighting for their land ever since the years of Columbus, against Spaniards,
English, French, and Americans. But by 1832 they had been reduced to a small area in Alabama,
while the population of Alabama, growing fast, was now over 300,000. On the basis of extravagant
promises from the federal government, Creek delegates in Washington signed the Treaty of
Washington, agreeing to removal beyond the Mississippi. They gave up 5 million acres, with the
provision that 2 million of these would go to individual Creeks, who could either sell or remain in
Alabama with federal protection.

      
Van Every writes of this treaty:

The interminable history of diplomatic relations between Indians and white men had before 1832
recorded no single instance of a treaty which had not been presently broken by the white parties to
it ... however solemnly embellished with such terms as "permanent," "forever," "for all time," "so
long as the sun shall rise." . .. But no agreement between white men and Indians had ever been so
soon abrogated as the 1832 Treaty of Washington. Within days the promises made in it on behalf of
the United States had been broken.

      
A white invasion of Creek lands began-looters, land seekers, defrauders, whiskey sellers, thugs-
driving thousands of Creeks from their homes into the swamps and forests. The federal government
did nothing. Instead it negotiated a new treaty providing for prompt emigration west, managed by
the Creeks themselves, financed by the national government. An army colonel, dubious that this
would work, wrote:

They fear starvation on the route; and can it be otherwise, when many of them are nearly starving
now, without the embarrassment of a long journey on their hands.... You cannot have an idea of the
deterioration which diese Indians have undergone during the last two or three years, from a general
state of comparative plenty to that of unqualified wretchedness and want. The free egress into the
nation by the whites; encroachments upon their lands, even upon their cultivated fields; abuses of
their person; hosts of traders, who, like locusts, have devoured their substance and inundated their
homes with whiskey, have destroyed what little disposition to cultivation the Indians may once
have had.. .. They are brow beat, and cowed, and imposed upon, and depressed with the feeling that
they have no adequate protection in the United States, and no capacity of self-protection in
themselves.

      
Northern political sympathizers with the Indian seemed to be fading away, preoccupied with other
issues. Daniel Webster was making a rousing speech in the Senate for the "authority of law ... the
power of the general government," but he was not referring to Alabama, Georgia, and the Indians-
he was talking about South Carolina's nullification of the tariff.

      
Despite the hardships, the Creeks refused to budge, but by 1836, both state and federal officials
decided they must go. Using as a pretext some attacks by desperate Creeks on white settlers, it was
declared that the Creek nation, by making "war," had forfeited its treaty rights.

      
The army would now force it to migrate west. Fewer than a hundred Creeks had been involved in
the "war," but a thousand had fled into the woods, afraid of white reprisals. An army of eleven
thousand was sent after them. The Creeks did not resist, no shots were fired, they surrendered.
Those Creeks presumed by the army to be rebels or sympathizers were assembled, the men
manacled and chained together to march westward under military guard, their women and children
trailing after them. Creek communities were invaded by military detachments, the inhabitants
driven to assembly points and marched westward in batches of two or three thousand. No talk of
compensating them for land or property left behind.

      
Private contracts were made for the march, the same kind that had failed for the Choctaws. Again,
delays and lack of food, shelter, clothing, blankets, medical attention. Again, old, rotting
steamboats and ferries, crowded beyond capacity, taking them across the Mississippi. "By
midwinter the interminable, stumbling procession of more than 15,000 Creeks stretched from
border to border across Arkansas." Starvation and sickness began to cause large numbers of deaths.
"The passage of the exiles could be distinguished from afar by the howling of trailing wolf packs
and the circling flocks of buzzards," Van Every writes.

      
Eight hundred Creek men had volunteered to help the United States army fight the Seminoles in
Florida in return for a promise that their families could remain in Alabama, protected by the federal
government until the men returned. The promise was not kept. The Creek families were attacked by
land-hungry white marauders-robbed, driven from their homes, women raped. Then the army,
claiming it was for their safety, removed them from Creek country to a concentration camp on
Mobile Bay. Hundreds died there from lack of food and from sickness.

      
When the warriors returned from the Seminole War, they and their families were hustled west.
Moving through New Orleans, they encountered a yellow fever plague. They crossed the
Mississippi-611 Indians crowded onto the aged steamer Monmouth. It went down in the
Mississippi River and 311 people died, four of them the children of the Indian commander of the
Creek volunteers in Florida.

      
A New Orleans newspaper wrote:

The fearful responsibility for this vast sacrifice of human life rests on the contractors .. . The
avaricious disposition to increase the profits on the speculation first induced the chartering of
rotten, old, and unseaworthy boats, because they were of a class to be procured cheaply; and then to
make those increased profits still larger, the Indians were packed upon those crazy vessels in such
crowds that not the slightest regard seems to have been paid to their safety, comfort, or even
decency.

The Choctaws and Chickasaws had quickly agreed to migrate. The Creeks were stubborn and had
to be forced. The Cherokees were practicing a nonviolent resistance. One tribe-the Seminoles-
decided to fight.

      
With Florida now belonging to the United States, Seminole territory was open to American land-
grabbers. They moved down into north Florida from St. Augustine to Pensacola, and down the
fertile coastal strip. In 1823, the Treaty of Camp Moultrie was signed by a few Seminoles who got
large personal landholdings in north Florida and agreed that all the Seminoles would leave northern
Florida and every coastal area and move into the interior. This meant withdrawing into the swamps
of central Florida, where they could not grow food, where even wild game could not survive.

      
The pressure to move west, out of Florida, mounted, and in 1834 Seminole leaders were assembled
and the U.S. Indian agent told them they must move west. Here were some of the replies of the
Seminoles at that meeting:

We were all made by the same Great Father, and are all alike His Children. We all came from the
same Mother, and were suckled at the same breast. Therefore, we are brothers, and as brothers,
should treat together in an amicable way.



Your talk is a good one, but my people cannot say they will go. We are not willing to do so. If their
tongues say yes, their hearts cry no, and call them liars.



If suddenly we tear our hearts from the homes around which they are twined, our heart-strings will
snap.

      
The Indian agent managed to get fifteen chiefs and subchiefs to sign a removal treaty, the U.S.
Senate promptly ratified it, and the War Department began making preparations for the migration.
Violence between whites and Seminoles now erupted.

      
A young Seminole chief, Osceola, who had been imprisoned and chained by the Indian agent
Thompson, and whose wife had been delivered into slavery, became a leader of the growing
resistance. When Thompson ordered the Seminoles, in December 1835, to assemble for the
journey, no one came. Instead, the Seminoles began a series of guerrilla attacks on white coastal
settlements, all along the Florida perimeter, striking in surprise and in succession from the interior.
They murdered white families, captured slaves, destroyed property. Osceola himself, in a lightning
stroke, shot down Thompson and an army lieutenant.

      
That same day, December 28, 1835, a column of 110 soldiers was attacked by Seminoles, and all
but three soldiers were killed. One of the survivors later told the story:

It was 8 o'clock. Suddenly I heard a rifle shot .. . followed by a musket shot.... I had not time to
think of the meaning of diese shots, before a volley, as if from a thousand rifles, was poured in
upon us from the front, and all along our left flank.... I could only see their heads and arms, peering
out from the long grass, far and near, and from behind the pine trees.. . .

It was the classic Indian tactic against a foe with superior firearms. General George Washington
had once given parting advice to one of his officers: "General St. Clair, in three words, beware of
surprise... . again and again, General, beware of surprise."

      
Congress now appropriated money for a war against the Seminoles. In the Senate, Henry Clay of
Kentucky opposed the war; he was an enemy of Jackson, a critic of Indian removal. But his Whig
colleague Daniel Webster displayed that unity across party lines which became standard in
American wars:

The view taken by the gentleman from Kentucky was undoubtedly the true one. But the war rages,
the enemy is in force, and the accounts of their ravages are disastrous. The executive government
has asked for the means of suppressing diese hostilities, and it was entirely proper that the bill
should pass.

      
General Winfield Scott took charge, hut his columns of troops, marching impressively into
Seminole territory, found no one. They became tired of the mud, the swamps, the heat, the sickness,
the hunger-the classic fatigue of a civilized army fighting people on their own land. No one wanted
to face Seminoles in the Florida swamps. In 1836, 103 commissioned officers resigned from the
regular army, leaving only forty-six. In the spring of 1837, Major General Jesup moved into the
war with an army of ten thousand, but the Seminoles just faded into the swamps, coming out from
time to time to strike at isolated forces.

      
The war went on for years. The army enlisted other Indians to fight the Seminoles. But that didn't
work either. Van Every says: "The adaptation of the Seminole to his environment was to be
matched only by the crane or the alligator." It was an eight-year war. It cost $20 million and 1,500
American lives. Finally, in the 1840s, the Seminoles began to get tired. They were a tiny group
against a huge nation with great resources. They asked for truces. But when they went forward
under truce flags, they were arrested, again and again. In 1837, Osceola, under a flag of truce, had
been seized and put in irons, then died of illness in prison. The war petered out.

      
Meanwhile the Cherokees had not fought back with arms, but had resisted in their own way. And
so the government began to play Cherokee against Cherokee, the old game. The pressures built up
on the Cherokee community-their newspaper suppressed, their government dissolved, the
missionaries in jail, their land parceled among whites by the land lottery. In 1834, seven hundred
Cherokees, weary of the straggle, agreed to go west; eighty-one died en route, including forty-five
children-mostly from measles and cholera. Those who lived arrived at their destination across the
Mississippi in the midst of a cholera epidemic and half of them died within a year.

      
The Cherokees were summoned to sign the removal treaty in New Echota, Georgia, in 1836, but
fewer than five hundred of the seventeen thousand Cherokees appeared. The treaty was signed
anyway. The Senate, including northerners who had once spoken for the Indian, ratified it, yielding,
as Senator Edward Everett of Massachusetts said, to "the force of circumstances . . . the hard
necessity." Now the Georgia whites stepped up their attacks to speed the removal.

      
The government did not move immediately against the Cherokees. In April 1838, Ralph Waldo
Emerson addressed an open letter to President Van Buren, referring with indignation to the removal
treaty with the Cherokees (signed behind the backs of an overwhelming-majority of them) and
asked what had happened to the sense of justice in America:

The soul of man, the justice, the mercy that is the heart's heart in all men, from Maine to Georgia,
does abhor this business ... a crime is projected that confounds our understandings by its
magnitude, a crime that really deprives us as well as the Cherokees of a country for how could we
call the conspiracy that should crush these poor Indians our government, or the land that was cursed
by their parting and dying imprecations our country any more? You, sir, will bring down that
renowned chair in which you sit into infamy if your seal is set to this instrument of perfidy; and the
name of this nation, hitherto the sweet omen of religion and liberty, will stink to the world.

      
Thirteen days before Emerson sent this letter, Martin Van Buren had ordered Major General
Winfield Scott into Cherokee territory to use whatever military force was required to move the
Cherokees west. Five regiments of regulars and four thousand militia and volunteers began pouring
into Cherokee country. General Scott addressed the Indians:

Cherokees-the President of the United States has sent me with a powerful army, to cause you, in
obedience to the treaty of 1834, to join mat part of your people who are already established in
prosperity on the other side of the Mississippi.. . . The full moon of May is already on the wane,
and before another shall have passed every Cherokee man, woman, and child . .. must be in motion
to join their brethren in the far West.. . . My troops already occupy many positions in the country
that you are about to abandon, and thousands and thousands arc approaching from every quarter, to
tender resistance and escape alike hopeless.. .. Chiefs, head men, and warriors-Will you then, by
resistance, compel us to resort to arms? God forbid. Or will you, by flight, seek to hide yourselves
in mountains and forests, and thus oblige us to hunt you down?

      
Some Cherokees had apparently given up on nonviolence: three chiefs who signed the Removal
Treaty were found dead. But the seventeen thousand Cherokees were soon rounded up and crowded
into stockades. On October 1, 1838, the first detachment set out in what was to be known as the
Trail of Tears. As they moved westward, they began to the-of sickness, of drought, of the heat, of
exposure. There were 645 wagons, and people marching alongside. Survivors, years later, told of
halting at the edge of the Mississippi in the middle of winter, the river running full of ice,
"hundreds of sick and dying penned up in wagons or stretched upon the ground." Grant Foreman,
the leading authority on Indian removal, estimates that during confinement in the stockade or on the
march westward four thousand Cherokees died.

      
In December 1838, President Van Buren spoke to Congress:

It affords sincere pleasure to apprise the Congress of the entire removal of the Cherokee Nation of
Indians to their new homes west of the Mississippi. The measures authorized by Congress at its last
session have had the happiest effects.

Colonel Ethan Alien Hitchcock, a professional soldier, graduate of the Military Academy,
commander of the 3rd Infantry Regiment, a reader of Shakespeare, Chaucer, Hegel, Spinoza, wrote
in his diary:

Fort Jesup, La., June 30, 1845. Orders came last evening by express from Washington City
directing General Taylor to move without any delay to some point on the coast near the Sabine or
elsewhere, and as soon as he shall hear of the acceptance by the Texas convention of the annexation
resolutions of our Congress he is immediately to proceed with his whole command to the extreme
western border of Texas and take up a position on the banks of or near the Rio Grande, and he is to
expel any armed force of Mexicans who may cross that river. Bliss read the orders to me fast
evening hastily at tattoo. I have scarcely slept a wink, thinking of the needful preparations. I am
now noting at reveille by candlelight and waiting the signal for muster.. . . Violence leads to
violence, and if this movement of ours does not lead to others and to bloodshed, I am much
mistaken.

      
Hitchcock was not mistaken. Jefferson's Louisiana Purchase had doubled the territory of the United
States, extending it to the Rocky Mountains. To the southwest was Mexico, which had won its
independence in a revolutionary war against Spain in 1821-a large country which included Texas
and what are now New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, Arizona, California, and part of Colorado. After
agitation, and aid from the United States, Texas broke off from Mexico in 1836 and declared itself
the "Lone Star Republic." In 1845, the U.S. Congress brought it into the Union as a state.

      
In the White House now was James Polk, a Democrat, an expansionist, who, on the night of his
inauguration, confided to his Secretary of the Navy that one of his main objectives was the
acquisition of California. His order to General Taylor to move troops to the Rio Grande was a
challenge to the Mexicans. It was not at all clear that the Rio Grande was the southern boundary of
Texas, although Texas had forced the defeated Mexican general Santa Anna to say so when he was
a prisoner. The traditional border between Texas and Mexico had been the Nueces River, about 150
miles to the north, and both Mexico and the United States had recognized that as the border.
However, Polk, encouraging the Texans to accept annexation, had assured them he would uphold
their claims to the Rio Grande.

      
Ordering troops to the Rio Grande, into territory inhabited by Mexicans, was clearly a provocation.
Taylor had once denounced the idea of the annexation of Texas. But now that he had his marching
orders, his altitude seemed to change. His visit to the tent of his aide Hitchcock to discuss the move is described in Hitchcock's diary:

He seems to have lost all respect for Mexican rights and is willing to be an instrument of Mr. Polk
for pushing our boundary as far west as possible. When I told him that, if he suggested a movement
(which he told me he intended), Mr. Polk would seize upon it and throw the responsibility on him,
he at once said he would take it, and added that if the President instructed him to use his discretion, he would ask no orders, but would go upon the Rio Grande as soon as he could get transportation. I think the General wants an additional brevet, and would strain a point to get it.

Taylor moved his troops to Corpus Christ!, Texas, just across the Nueces River, and waited further
instructions. They came in February 1846-to go down the Gulf Coast to the Rio Grande. Taylor's
army marched in parallel columns across the open prairie, scouts far ahead and on the flanks, a
train of supplies following. Then, along a narrow road, through a belt of thick chaparral, they
arrived, March 28, 1846, in cultivated fields and thatched-roof huts hurriedly abandoned by the
Mexican occupants, who had fled across the river to the city of Matamoros. Taylor set up camp,
began construction of a fort, and implanted his cannons facing the white houses of Matamoros,
whose inhabitants stared curiously at the sight of an army on the banks of a quiet river.

      
The Washington Union, a newspaper expressing the position of President Polk and the Democratic party, had spoken early in 1845 on the meaning of Texas annexation:

Let the great measure of annexation be accomplished, and with it the questions of boundary and
claims. For who can arrest the torrent that will pour onward to the West? The road to California
will be open to us. Who will stay the march of our western people?

They could have meant a peaceful march westward, except for other words, in the same newspaper:
"A corps of properly organized volunteers . .. would invade, overrun, and occupy Mexico. They
would enable us not only to take California, but to keep it." It was shortly after that, in the summer of 1845, that John O'Sullivan, editor of the Democratic Review, used the phrase that became
famous, saying it was "Our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for
the free development of our yearly multiplying millions." Yes, manifest destiny.

      
All that was needed in the spring of 1846 was a military incident to begin the war that Polk wanted.
It came in April, when General Taylor's quartermaster, Colonel Cross, while riding up the Rio
Grande, disappeared. His body was found eleven days later, his skull smashed by a heavy blow. It
was assumed he had been killed by Mexican guerrillas crossing the river. In a solemn military
ceremony visible to the Mexicans of Matamoros crowding onto the roofs of their houses across the
Rio Grande, Cross was buried with a religious service and three volleys of rifle fire.

      
The next day (April 25), a patrol of Taylor's soldiers was surrounded and attacked by Mexicans,
and wiped out: sixteen dead, others wounded, the rest captured. Taylor sent a message to the
governors of Texas and Louisiana asking them to recruit live thousand volunteers; he had been
authorized to do this by the White House before he left for Texas. And he sent a dispatch to Polk:
"Hostilities may now be considered as commenced."

      
The Mexicans had fired the first shot. But they had done what the American government wanted,
according to Colonel Hitchcock, who wrote in his diary, even before those first incidents:

I have said from the first that the United States are the aggressors. . . . We have not one particle of right to be here. ... It looks as if the government sent a small force on purpose to bring on a war, so as to have a pretext for taking California and as much of this country as it chooses, for, whatever becomes of this army, there is no doubt of a war between the United States and Mexico. . .. My heart is not in this business ... but, as a military man, I am bound to execute orders.

And before those first clashes, Taylor had sent dispatches to Polk which led the President to note
that "the probabilities are that hostilities might take place soon." On May 9, before news of any
battles, Polk was suggesting to his cabinet a declaration of war, based on certain money claims
against Mexico, and on Mexico's recent rejection of an American negotiator named John Slidell.
Polk recorded in his diary what he said to the cabinet meeting:

I stated ... that up to this time, as we knew, we had heard of no open act of aggression by the
Mexican army, but that the danger was imminent that such acts would be committed. I said that in
my opinion we had ample cause of war, and that it was impossible . . . that I could remain silent
much longer .. . that the country was excited and impatient on the subject.. . .

      
The country was not "excited and impatient." But the President was. When the dispatches arrived
from General Taylor telling of casualties from the Mexican attack, Polk summoned the cabinet to
hear the news, and they unanimously agreed he should ask for a declaration of war. Polk's message
to Congress was indignant:

The cup of forbearance had been exhausted even before the recent information from the frontier of
the Del Norte [the Rio Grande]. But now, after reiterated menaces, Mexico has passed the boundary
of the United States, has invaded our territory and shed American blood upon the American soil... .

      
As war exists, notwithstanding all our efforts to avoid it, exists by the act of Mexico herself, we are called upon by every consideration of duty and patriotism to vindicate with decision the honor, the rights, and the interests of our country.

Polk spoke of the dispatch of American troops to the Rio Grande as a necessary measure of
defense. As John Schroeder says (Mr. Polk's War): "Indeed, the reverse was true; President Polk had incited war by sending American soldiers into what was disputed territory, historically
controlled and inhabited by Mexicans."

      
Congress then rushed to approve the war message. Schroeder comments: "The disciplined
Democratic majority in the House responded with alacrity and high-handed efficiency to Polk's
May 11 war recommendations." The bundles of official documents accompanying the war message,
supposed to be evidence for Polk's statement, were not examined, but were tabled immediately by
the House. Debate on the bill providing volunteers and money for the war was limited to two hours,
and most of this was used up reading selected portions of the tabled documents, so that barely a
half-hour was left for discussion of the issues.

      
The Whig party was presumably against the war in Mexico, but it was not against expansion. The
Whigs wanted California, but preferred to do it without war. As Sehroeder puts it, "theirs was a
commercially oriented expansionism designed to secure frontage on the Pacific without recourse to
war." Also, they were not so powerfully against the military action that they would stop it by
denying men and money for the operation. They did not want to risk the accusation that they were
putting American soldiers in peril by depriving them of the materials necessary to fight. The result
was that Whigs joined Democrats in voting overwhelmingly for the war resolution, 174 to 14. The
opposition was a small group of strongly antislavery Whigs, or "a little knot of ultraists," as one
Massachusetts Congressman who voted for the war measure put it.

      
In the Senate, there was debate, but it was limited to one day, and "the tactics of stampede were
there repeated," according to historian Frederick Merk. The war measure passed, 40 to 2, Whigs
joining Democrats. Throughout the war, as Sehroeder says, "the politically sensitive Whig minority
could only harry the administration with a barrage of verbiage while voting for every appropriation
which the military campaigns required." The newspaper of the Whigs, the National Intelligencer of Washington, took this position. John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts, who originally voted with
"the stubborn 14," later voted for war appropriations.

      
Abraham Lincoln of Illinois was not yet in Congress when the war began, but after his election in
1846 he had occasion to vote and speak on the war. His "spot resolutions" became famous-he
challenged Polk to specify the exact spot where American blood was shed "on the American soil."
But he would not try to end the war by stopping funds for men and supplies. Speaking in the House
on July 27, 1848, in support of the candidacy of General Zachary Taylor for President, he said:

But, as General Taylor is, par excellence, the hero of the Mexican War, and as you Democrats say
we Whigs have always opposed the war, you think it must be very awkward and embarrassing for
us to go for General Taylor. The declaration that we have always opposed the war is true or false,
according as one may understand the term "oppose the war." If to say "the war was unnecessarily
and unconstitutionally commenced by the President" be opposing the war, then the Whigs have
very generally opposed it. ... The marching an army into the midst of a peaceful Mexican
settlement, frightening the inhabitants away, leaving their growing crops and other property to
destruction, to you may appear a perfectly amiable, peaceful, unprovoking procedure; hut it does
not appear so to us. . .. But if, when the war had begun, and had become the cause of the country,
the giving-of our money and our blood, in common with yours, was support of the war, then it is
not true that we have always opposed the war. With few individual exceptions, you have constantly
had our votes here for all the necessary supplies. ...

      
A handful of antislavery Congressmen voted against all war measures, seeing the Mexican
campaign as a means of extending the southern slave territory. One of these was Joshua Giddings
of Ohio, a fiery speaker, physically powerful, who called it "an aggressive, unholy, and unjust war." He explained his vote against supplying anus and men: "In the murder of Mexicans upon their own soil, or in robbing them of their country, I can take no part either now or hereafter. The guilt of these crimes must rest on others-I will not participate in them. . . ." Giddings pointed to the British Whigs who, during the American Revolution, announced in Parliament in 1776 that they would not vote supplies for a war to oppress Americans.

      
After Congress acted in May of 1846, there were rallies and demonstrations for the war in New
York, Baltimore, Indianapolis, Philadelphia, and many other places. Thousands rushed to volunteer
for the army. The poet Walt Whitman wrote in the Brooklyn Eagle in the early days of the war:
"Yes: Mexico must be thoroughly chastised! . . . Let our arms now he carried with a spirit which
shall teach the world that, while we are not forward for a quarrel, America knows how to crush, as
well as how to expand!"

      
Accompanying all this aggressiveness was the idea that the United States would be giving the
blessings of liberty and democracy to more people. This was intermingled with ideas of racial
superiority, longings for the beautiful lands of New Mexico and California, and thoughts of
commercial enterprise across the Pacific.

      
Speaking of California, the Illinois State Register asked: "Shall this garden of beauty be suffered to lie dormant in its wild and useless luxuriance? ... myriads of enterprising Americans would flock to its rich and inviting prairies; the hum of Anglo-American industry would be heard in its valleys; cities would rise upon its plains and sea-coast, and the resources and wealth of the nation be increased in an incalculable degree." The American Review talked of Mexicans yielding to "a superior population, insensibly oozing into her territories, changing her customs, and out-living, out-trading, exterminating her weaker blood. . . ." The New York Herald was saying, by 1847: "The universal Yankee nation can regenerate and disenthrall the people of Mexico in a few years; and we believe it is a part of our destiny to civilize that beautiful country."

      
A letter appeared in the New York Journal of Commerce introducing God into the situation: "The supreme Ruler of the universe seems to interpose, and aid the energy of man towards benefiting
mankind. His interposition ... seems to me to be identified with the success of our arms. ... That the redemption of 7,000,000 of souls from all the vices that infest the human race, is the ostensible object. . . appears manifest."

      
Senator H. V. Johnson said:

I believe we should be recreant to our noble mission, if we refused acquiescence in the high purposes of a wise Providence. War has its evils. In all ages it has been the minister of wholesale death and appalling desolation; but however inscrutable to us, it has also been made, by the Allwise Dispenser of events, the instrumentality of accomplishing the great end of human elevation and human happiness. ... It is in this view, that I subscribe to the doctrine of "manifest destiny."

      
The Congressional Globe of February 11, 1847, reported:

Mr. Giles, of Maryland-I take it for granted, that we shall gain territory, and must gain territory,
before we shut the gates of the temple of Janus. .. . We must march from ocean to ocean. .. . We
must march from Texas straight to the Pacific ocean, and be bounded only by its roaring wave.... It
is the destiny of the white race, it is the destiny of the Anglo-Saxon race. .. .

      
The American Anti-Slavery Society, on the other hand, said the war was "waged solely for the
detestable and horrible purpose of extending and perpetuating American slavery throughout the
vast territory of Mexico." A twenty-seven-year-old Boston poet and abolitionist, James Russell
Lowell, began writing satirical poems in the Boston Courier (they were later collected as the
Biglow Papers). In them, a New England farmer, Hosea Biglow, spoke, in his own dialect, on the war:

Ez fer war, I call it murder,-
      
There you hev it plain an' flat;

I don't want to go no furder
      
Than my Testyment fer that. . . .

They may talk o' Freedom's airy
      
Tell they'er pupple in the face,-

It's a grand gret cemetary
      
Per the barthrights of our race;

They jest want this Californy
      
So's to lug new slave-states in

To abuse ye, an' to scorn ye,
      
An' to plunder ye like sin.

      
The war had barely begun, the summer of 1846, when a writer, Henry David Thorean, who lived in
Concord, Massachusetts, refused to pay his Massachusetts poll tax, denouncing the Mexican war.
He was put in jail and spent one night there. His friends, without his consent, paid his tax, and he
was released. Two years later, he gave a lecture, "Resistance to Civil Government," which was then
printed as an essay, "Civil Disobedience":

It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. .. . Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice. A common and natural result of an undue respect for law is, that you may see a file of soldiers .. . marching in admirable order over hill and dale to the wars, against their wills, ay, against their common sense and consciences, which makes it very steep marching indeed, and produces a palpitation of the heart.

His friend and fellow writer, Ralph Waldo Emerson, agreed, but thought it futile to protest. When Emerson visited Thoreau in jail and asked, "What are you doing in there?" it was reported that Thoreau replied, "What are you doing out there?"

      
The churches, for the most part, were either outspokenly for the war or timidly silent. Generally, no one but the Congregational, Quaker, and Unitarian churches spoke clearly against the war.
However, one Baptist minister, the Reverend Francis Wayland, president of Brown University,
gave three sermons in the university chapel in which he said that only wars of self-defense were
just, and in case of unjust war, the individual was morally obligated to resist it and lend no money
to the government to support it.

      
The Reverend Theodore Parker, Unitarian minister in Boston, combined eloquent criticism of the
war with contempt for the Mexican people, whom he called "a wretched people; wretched in their
origin, history, and character," who must eventually give way as the Indians did. Yes, the United
States should expand, he said, but not by war, rather by the power of her ideas, the pressure of her
commerce, by "the steady advance of a superior race, with superior ideas and a better civilization ... by being better than Mexico, wiser, humaner, more free and manly." Parker urged active resistance to the war in 1847: "Let it be infamous for a New England man to enlist; for a New England merchant to loan his dollars, or to let his ships in aid of this wicked war; let it be infamous for a manufacturer to make a cannon, a sword, or a kernel of powder to kill our brothers...."

      
The racism of Parker was widespread. Congressman Delano of Ohio, an antislavery Whig, opposed
the war because he was afraid of Americans mingling with an inferior people who "embrace all
shades of color. ... a sad compound of Spanish, English, Indian, and negro bloods . . . and resulting, it is said, in the production of a slothful, ignorant race of beings."

      
As the war went on, opposition grew. The American Peace Society printed a newspaper, the
Advocate of Peace, which published poems, speeches, petitions, sermons against the war, and
eyewitness accounts of the degradation of army life and the horrors of battle. The abolitionists,
speaking through William Lloyd Garrison's Liberator, denounced the war as one "of aggression, of invasion, of conquest, and rapine-marked by ruffianism, perfidy, and every other feature of national depravity ..." Considering the strenuous efforts of the nation's leaders to build patriotic support, the amount of open dissent and criticism was remarkable. Antiwar meetings took place in spite of attacks by patriotic mobs.

      
As the army moved closer to Mexico City, The Liberator daringly declared its wishes for the defeat of the American forces: "Every lover of Freedom and humanity, throughout the world, must wish
them [the Mexicans] the most triumphant success.. .. We only hope that, if blood has had to flow,
that it has been that of the Americans, and that the next news we shall hear will be that General
Scott and his army are in the hands of the Mexicans. . . , We wish him and his troops no bodily
harm, but the most utter defeat and disgrace."

      
Frederick Douglass, former slave, extraordinary speaker and writer, wrote in his Rochester
newspaper the North Star, January 21, 1848, of "the present disgraceful, cruel, and iniquitous war with our sister republic. Mexico seems a doomed victim to Anglo Saxon cupidity and love of dominion." Douglass was scornful of the unwillingness of opponents of the war to take real action (even the abolitionists kept paying their taxes):

The determination of our slaveholding President to prosecute the war, and the probability of his
success in wringing from the people men and money to carry it on, is made evident, rather than
doubtful, by the puny opposition arrayed against him. No politician of any considerable distinction
or eminence seems willing to hazard his popularity with his party ... by an open and unqualified
disapprobation of the war. None seem willing to take their stand for peace at all risks; and all seem willing that the war should be carried on, in some form or other.

      
Where was popular opinion? It is hard to say. After the first rush, enlistments began to dwindle.
The 1846 elections showed much anti-Polk sentiment, but who could tell how much of this was due
to the war? In Massachusetts, Congressman Robert Winthrop, who had voted for the war, was
elected overwhelmingly against an antiwar Whig, Schroeder concludes that although Folk's
popularity fell, "general enthusiasm for the Mexican War remained high." But this is a guess. There
were no surveys of public opinion at that time. As for voting, a majority of the people did not vote
at all-and how did these nonvoters feel about the war?

      
Historians of the Mexican war have talked easily about "the people" and "public opinion"-like
Justin H. Smith, whose two-volume work The War with Mexico has long been a standard account:
"Of course, too, all the pressure of warlike sentiment among our people ... had to be recognized,
more or less, for such is the nature of popular government."

      
Smith's evidence, however, is not from "the people" but from the newspapers, claiming to be the
voice of the people. The New York Herald wrote in August 1845: "The multitude cry aloud for
war." And the New York Journal of Commerce, half-playfully, half-seriously, wrote: "Let us go to war. The world has become stale and insipid, the ships ought to be all captured, and the cities
battered down, and the world burned up, so that we can start again. There would be fun in that.
Some interest,-something to talk about." The New York Morning News said "young and ardent
spirits that throng the cities . . . want but a direction to their restless energies, and their attention is already fixed on Mexico."

      
Were the newspapers reporting a feeling in the public, or creating a feeling in the public? Those
reporting this feeling, like Justin Smith, themselves express strong views about the need for war.
Smith (who dedicates his book to Henry Cabot Lodge, one of the ultraexpansionists of American
history) makes a long list of Mexican sins against the United States, and ends by saying: "It rested
with our government, therefore, as the agent of national dignity and interests, to apply a remedy."
He comments on Folk's call for war. "In truth no other course would have been patriotic or even
rational."

      
It is impossible to know the extent of popular support of the war. But mere is evidence that many
organized workingmen opposed the war. Earlier, when the annexation of Texas was being
considered, working-men meeting in New England protested the annexation. A newspaper in
Manchester, New Hampshire, wrote:

We have heretofore held our peace in regard to the annexation of Texas, for the purpose of seeing
whether our Nation would attempt so base an action. We call it base, because it would be giving
men that live upon the blood of others, an opportunity of dipping their hand still deeper in the sin of slavery. ... Have we not slaves enough now?

There were demonstrations of Irish workers in New York, Boston, and Lowell against the
annexation of Texas, Philip Foner reports. In May, when the war against Mexico began, New York
workingmen called a meeting to oppose the war, and many Irish workers came. The meeting called
the war a plot by slaveowners and asked for the withdrawal of American troops from disputed
territory. That year, a convention of the New England Workingmen's Association condemned the
war and announced they would "not take up arms to sustain the Southern slaveholder in robbing
one-fifth of our countrymen of their labor."

      
Some newspapers, at the very start of the war, protested. Horace Greeley wrote in the New York
Tribune, May 12, 1846:

We can easily defeat the armies of Mexico, slaughter them by thousands, and pursue them perhaps
to their capital; we can conquer and "annex" their territory; but what then? Have the histories of the ruin of Greek and Roman liberty consequent on such extensions of empire by the sword no lesson
for us? Who believes that a score of victories over Mexico, the "annexation" of half her provinces,
will give us more Liberty, a purer Morality, a more prosperous Industry, than we now have? ... Is
not Life miserable enough, comes not Death soon enough, without resort to the hideous enginery of
War?

What of those who fought the war-the soldiers who marched, sweated, got sick, died? The
Mexican soldiers. The American soldiers.

      
We know little of the reactions of Mexican soldiers. We do know that Mexico was a despotism, a
land of Indians and mestizos (Indians mixed with Spanish) controlled by criollos-whites of Spanish
blood. There were a million criollos, 2 million mestizos, 3 million Indians. Was the natural
disinclination of peasants to fight for a country owned by landlords overcome by the nationalist
spirit roused against an invader?

      
We know much more about the American army-volunteers, not conscripts, lured by money and
opportunity for social advancement via promotion in the armed forces. Half of General Taylor's
army were recent immigrants-Irish and German mostly. Whereas in 1830, 1 percent of the
population of the United States was foreign-born, by the Mexican war the number was reaching 10
percent. Their patriotism was not very strong. Their belief in all arguments for expansion paraded
in the newspapers was probably not great. Indeed, many of them deserted to the Mexican side,
enticed by money. Some enlisted in the Mexican army and formed their own battalion, the San
Patrick) (St. Patrick's) Battalion.

      
At first there seemed to be enthusiasm in the army, fired by pay and patriotism. Martial spirit was
high in New York, where the legislature authorized the governor to call fifty thousand volunteers.
Placards read "Mexico or Death." There was a mass meeting of twenty thousand people in
Philadelphia. Three thousand volunteered in Ohio.

      
This initial spirit soon wore off. A woman in Greensboro, North Carolina, recorded in her diary:

Tuesday, January 5, 1847 . . . today was a general muster and speeches by Mr. Gorrell and Mr.
Henry. General Logan received them in this street and requested all the Volunteers to follow after;
as he walked up and down the street, I saw some 6 or 7, bad looking persons following, with poor
Jim Laine in front. How many poor creatures have been and are still to be sacrificed upon the altar
of pride and ambition?

      
Posters appealed for volunteers in Massachusetts: "Men of old Essex! Men of Newburyport! Rally
around the bold, gallant and lionhearted dishing. He will lead you to victory and to glory!" They
promised pay of $7 to $10 a month, and spoke of a federal bounty of $24 and 160 acres of land. But
one young man wrote anonymously to the Cambridge Chronicle:

Neither have I the least idea of "joining" you, or in any way assisting the unjust war waging against Mexico. I have no wish to participate in such "glorious" butcheries of women and children as were displayed in the capture of Montercy, etc. Neither have I any desire to place myself under the
dictation of a petty military tyrant, to every caprice of whose will I must yield implicit obedience. No sir-ee! As long as I can work, beg, or go to the poor house, I won't go to Mexico, to be lodged on the damp ground, half starved, half roasted, bitten by mosquitoes and centipedes, stung by scorpions and tarantulas-marched, drilled, and flogged, and then stuck up to be shot at, for eight dollars a month and putrid rations. Well, I won't.. . . Human butchery has had its day... . And the time is rapidly approaching when the professional soldier will be placed on the same level as a
bandit, the Bedouin, and the Thug.

      
Reports grew of men forced to be volunteers, impressed for service. One James Miller of Norfolk,
Virginia, protested that he had been persuaded "by the influence of an unusual quantity of ardent
spirits" to sign a paper enrolling for military service. "Next morning, I was dragged aboard of a
boat landed at Fort Monroe, and closely immured in the guard house for sixteen days."

      
There were extravagant promises and outright lies to build up the volunteer units. A man who
wrote a history of the New York Volunteers declared:

If it is cruel to drag black men from their homes, how much more cruel it is to drag white men from their homes under false inducements, and compelling them to leave their wives and children, without leaving a cent or any protection, in the coldest season of the year, to the in a foreign and sickly climate! ... Many enlisted for the sake of their families, having no employment, and having been offered "three months' advance", and were promised that they could leave part of their pay for their families to draw in their absence. ... I boldly pronounce, that the whole Regiment was got up by fraud-a fraud on the soldier, a fraud on the City of New York, and a fraud on the Government of the United States. ...

      
By late 1846, recruitment was falling off, so physical requirements were lowered, and anyone
bringing in acceptable recruits would get $2 a head. Even this didn't work. Congress in early 1847
authorized ten new regiments of regulars, to serve for the duration of the war, promising them 100
acres of public land upon honorable discharge. But dissatisfaction continued. Volunteers
complained that the regulars were given special treatment. Enlisted men complained that the
officers treated them as interiors.

      
And soon, the reality of battle came in upon the glory and the promises. On the Rio Grande before
Matamoros, as a Mexican army of five thousand under General Arista faced Taylor's army of three
thousand, the shells began to fly, and artilleryman Samuel French saw his first death in battle. John Weems describes it:

He happened to be staring at a man on horseback nearby when he saw a shot rip off the pommel of
the saddle, tear through the man's body, and burst out with a crimson gush on the other side. Pieces
of bone or metal tore into the horse's hip, split the lip and tongue and knocked teeth out of a second horse, and broke the jaw of a third

      
Lieutenant Grant, with the 4th Regiment, "saw a ball crash into ranks nearby, tear a musket from one soldier's grasp and rip off the man's head, then dissect the face of a captain he knew." When the battle was over, five hundred Mexicans were dead or wounded. There were perhaps fifty American casualties. Weems describes the aftermath: "Night blanketed weary men who fell asleep where they dropped on the trampled prairie grass, while around them other prostrate men from both armies screamed and groaned in agony from wounds. By the eerie light of torches 'the surgeon's saw was going the livelong night.'"

      
Away from the battlefield, in the army camps, the romance of the recruiting posters was quickly forgotten. A young artillery officer wrote about the men camped at Corpus Christi in the summer of 1845, even before the war began:

It ... becomes our painful task to allude to the sickness, suffering and death, from criminal
negligence. Two-thirds of the tents furnished the army on taking the field were worn out and rotten
. . . provided for campaigning in a country almost deluged three months in the year. . . . During the whole of November and December, either the rains were pouring down with violence, or the
furious "northers" were showering the frail tentpoles, and rending the rotten canvas. For days and
weeks every article in hundreds of tents was thoroughly soaked. During those terrible months, the
sufferings of the sick in the crowded hospital tents were horrible beyond conception.. . .

      
The 2nd Regiment of Mississippi Rifles, moving into New Orleans, was stricken by cold and
sickness. The regimental surgeon reported: "Six months after our regiment had entered the service
we had sustained a loss of 167 by death, and 134 by discharges." The regiment was packed into the
holds of transports, eight hundred men into three ships. The surgeon continued:

The dark cloud of disease still hovered over us. The holds of the ships . . . were soon crowded with
the sick. The effluvia was intolerable. . . . The sea became rough. .. . Through the long dark night
the rolling ship would dash the sick man from side to side bruising his flesh upon the rough corners
of his berth. The wild screams of the delirious, the lamentations of the sick, and the melancholy
groans of the dying, kept up one continual scene of confusion. . . . Four weeks we were confined to
the loathsome ships and before we had landed at the Brasos, we consigned twenty-eight of our men
to the dark waves.

      
Meanwhile, by land and by sea, Anglo-American forces were moving into California. A young
naval officer, after the long voyage around the southern cape of South America, and up the coast to
Monterey in California, wrote in his diary:

Asia . . . will be brought to our very doors. Population will flow into the fertile regions of
California. The resources of the entire country . . . will be developed. . . . The public lands lying along the route [of railroads] will be changed from deserts into gardens, and a large population will be settled. . . .

      
It was a separate war that went on in California, where Anglo-Americans raided Spanish
settlements, stole horses, and declared California separated from Mexico-the "Bear Flag Republic."
Indians lived there, and naval officer Revere gathered the Indian chiefs and spoke to them (as he
later recalled):

I have called you together to have a talk with you. The country you inhabit no longer belongs to
Mexico, but to a mighty nation whose territory extends from the great ocean you have all seen or
heart! of, to another great ocean thousands of miles toward the rising sun.... I am an officer of that great country, and to get here, have traversed both of those great oceans in a ship of war which, with a terrible noise, spits forth flames and hurls forth instruments of destruction, dealing death to ail our enemies. Our armies are now in Mexico, and will soon conquer the whole country. But you have nothing to fear from us, if you do what is right. . . . if you are faithful to your new rulers. .. . We come to prepare this magnificent region for the use of other men, for the population of the world demands more room, and here is room enough for many millions, who will hereafter occupy
and rill the soil. But, in admitting others, we shall not displace you, if you act properly.. .. You can easily learn, but you are indolent. I hope you will alter your habits, and be industrious and frugal, and give up all the low vices which you practice; but if you are lazy and dissipated, you must, before many years, become extinct. We shall watch over you, and give you true liberty; but beware of sedition, lawlessness, and all other crimes, for the army which shields can assuredly punish, and it will reach you in your most retired hiding places.

      
General Kearney moved easily into New Mexico, and Santa Fe was taken without battle. An
American staff officer described the reaction of the Mexican population to the U.S. army's entrance
into the capital city:

Our march into the city .. . was extremely warlike, with drawn sabres, and daggers in every look.
From around corners, men with surly countenances and downcast looks regarded us with
watchfulness, if not terror, and black eyes looked through latticed windows at our column of
cavaliers, some gleaming with pleasure, and others filled with tears. ... As the American flag was
raised, and the cannon boomed its glorious national salute from the hill, the pent-up emotions of
many of the women could be suppressed no longer ... as the wail of grief arose above the din of our
horses' tread, and reached our ears from the depth of the gloomy-looking buildings on every hand.

      
That was in August. In December, Mexicans in Taos, New Mexico, rebelled against American rule.
As a report to Washington put it, "many of the most influential persons in the northern part of this
territory were engaged in the rebellion." The revolt was put down, and arrests were made. But
many of the rebels fled, and carried on sporadic attacks, killing a number of Americans, then hiding
in the mountains. The American army pursued, and in a final desperate battle, in which six to seven
hundred rebels were engaged, 150 were killed, and it seemed the rebellion was now over.

      
In Los Angeles, too, there was a revolt. Mexicans forced the American garrison there to surrender
in September 1846. The United States did not retake Los Angeles until January, after a bloody
battle.

      
General Taylor had moved across the Rio Grande, occupied Matamoros, and now moved
southward through Mexico. But his volunteers became more unruly on Mexican territory. Mexican
villages were pillaged. One officer wrote in his diary in the summer of 1846: "We reached Burrita
about 5 P.M., many of the Louisiana volunteers were there, -A lawless drunken rabble. They had
driven away the inhabitants, taken possession of their houses, and were emulating each other in
making beasts of themselves." Cases of rape began to multiply.

      
As the soldiers moved up the Rio Grande to Camargo, the heat became unbearable, the water
impure, and sickness grew-diarrhea, dysentery, and other maladies-until a thousand were dead. At
first the dead were buried to the sounds of the "Dead March" played by a military hand. Then the
number of dead was too great, and formal military funerals ceased.

      
Southward to Monterey and another battle, where men and horses died in agony, and one officer
described the ground as "slippery with . . . foam and blood."

      
After Taylor's army took Monterey he reported "some shameful atrocities" by the Texas Rangers,
and he sent them home when their enlistment expired. But others continued robbing and killing
Mexicans. A group of men from a Kentucky regiment broke into one Mexican dwelling, threw out
the husband, and raped his wife. Mexican guerrillas retaliated with cruel vengeance.

      
As the American armies advanced, more battles were fought, more thousands died on both sides,
more thousands were wounded, more thousands sick with diseases. At one battle north of
Chihuahua, three hundred Mexicans were killed and five hundred wounded, according to the
American accounts, with few Anglo-American casualties: "The surgeons are now busily engaged in
administering relief to the wounded Mexicans, and it is a sight to sec the pile of legs and arms that have been amputated."

      
An artillery captain named John Vinton, writing to his mother, told of sailing to Vera Cruz:

The weather is delightful, our troops in good health and spirits, and all tidings look auspicious of
success. I am only afraid the Mexicans will not meet us & give us battle,-for, to gain everything
without controversy after our large & expensive preparations .. . would give us officers no chance
for exploits and honors.

Vinton died during the siege of Vera Cruz. The U.S. bombardment of the city became an
indiscriminate killing of civilians. One of the navy's shells hit the post office; others burst all over the city. A Mexican observer wrote:

The surgical hospital, which was situated in the Convent of Santo Domingo, suffered from the fire,
and several of the inmates were killed by fragments of bombs bursting at that point. While an
operation was being performed on a wounded man, the explosion of a shell extinguished the lights,
and when other illumination was brought, the patient was found torn in pieces, and many others
dead and wounded.

      
In two days, 1,300 shells were fired into the city, until it surrendered. A reporter for the New
Orleans Delta wrote: "The Mexicans variously estimate their loss at from 500 to 1000 killed and wounded, but all agree that the loss among the soldiery is comparatively small and the destruction among the women and children is very great."

      
Colonel Hitchcock, coming into the city, wrote: "I shall never forget the horrible fire of our mortars ... going with dreadful certainty and bursting with sepulchral tones often in the centre of private dwellings- it was awful. I shudder to think of it." Still, Hitchcock, the dutiful soldier, wrote for General Scott "a sort of address to the Mexican people" which was then printed in English and Spanish by the tens of thousands saying ". . . we have not a particle of ill-will towards you-we treat you with all civility-we are not in fact your enemies; we do not plunder your people or insult your women or your religion ... we are here for no earthly purpose except the hope of obtaining a peace."

      
That was Hitchcock the soldier. Then we have Weems the historian:

Hitchcock, the old anti-war philosopher, thus seemed to fit Henry David Thoreau's description of
"small movable forts and magazines, at the service of some unscrupulous man in power", it should
be remembered that Hitchcock was first of all a soldier-and a good one, as conceded even by the
superiors he had antagonized.

      
It was a war of the American elite against the Mexican elite, each side exhorting, using, killing its own population as well as the other. The Mexican commander Santa Anna had crushed rebellion
after rebellion, his troops also raping and plundering after victory. When Colonel Hitchcock and
General Winfield Scott moved into Santa Anna's estate, they found its walls full of ornate paintings.
But half his army was dead or wounded.

      
General Winfield Scott moved toward the last battle-for Mexico City-with ten thousand soldiers.
They were not anxious for battle. Three days' march from Mexico City, at Jalapa, seven of his
eleven regiments evaporated, their enlistment times up. Justin Smith writes:

It would have been quite agreeable to linger at Jalapa ... but the soldiers had learned what
campaigning really meant. They had been allowed to go unpaid and unprovided for. They had met
with hardships and privations not counted upon at the time of enlistment. Disease, battle, death,
fearful toil and frightful marches had been found realities.... In spite of their strong desire to see the Halls of the Montezumas, out of about 3700 men only enough to make one company would
reengage, and special inducements, offered by the General, to remain as teamsters proved wholly
ineffective.

      
On the outskirts of Mexico City, at Churubusco, Mexican and American armies clashed for three
hours. As Weems describes it:

Those fields around Churubusco were now covered with thousands of human casualties and with
mangled bodies of horses and mules that blocked roads and filled ditches. Four thousand Mexicans
lay dead or wounded; three thousand others had been captured (including sixty-nine U.S. Army
deserters, who required the protection of Scott's officers to escape execution at the hands of their
former comrades). .. . The Americans lost nearly one thousand men killed, wounded, or missing.

As often in war, battles were fought without point. After one such engagement near Mexico City,
with terrible casualties, a marine lieutenant blamed General Scott: "He had originated it in error and caused it to be fought, with inadequate forces, for an object that had no existence."

      
In the final battle for Mexico City, Anglo-American troops took the height of Chapultepec and
entered the city of 200,000 people, General Santa Anna having moved northward. This was
September 1847. A Mexican merchant wrote to a friend about the bombardment of the city: "In
some cases whole blocks were destroyed and a great number of men, women and children killed
and wounded."

      
General Santa Anna fled to Huamantla, where another battle was fought, and he had to flee again.
An infantry lieutenant wrote to his parents what happened after an officer named Walker was killed
in battle:

General Lane ... told us to "avenge the death of the gallant Walker, to ... take all we could lay hands on". And well and fearfully was his mandate obeyed. Grog shops were broken open first, and then, maddened with liquor, every species of outrage was committed. Old women and girls were stripped of their clothing-and many suffered still greater outrages. Men were shot by dozens . .. their property, churches, stores and dwelling houses ransacked. . .. Dead horses and men lay about pretty thick, while drunken soldiers, yelling and screeching, were breaking open houses or chasing some poor Mexicans who had abandoned their houses and fled for life. Such a scene I never hope to see again. It gave me a lamentable view of human nature , .. and made me for the first time ashamed of my country.

The editors of Chronicles of the Gringos sum up the attitude of the American soldiers to the war:

Although they had volunteered to go to war, and by far the greater number of them honored their
commitments by creditably sustaining hardship and battle, and behaved as well as soldiers in a
hostile country are apt to behave, they did not like the army, they did not like war, and generally
speaking, they did not like Mexico or the Mexicans. This was the majority: disliking the job,
resenting the discipline and caste system of the army, and wanting to get out and go home.

      
One Pennsylvania volunteer, stationed at Matamoros late in the war, wrote:

We are under very strict discipline here. Some of our officers are very good men but the balance of
them are very tyrannical and brutal toward the men... . tonight on drill an officer laid a soldier's
skull open with his sword.. .. But the time may come and that soon when officers and men will
stand on equal footing. ... A soldier's life is very disgusting.

      
On the night of August 15, 1847, volunteer regiments from Virginia, Mississippi, and North
Carolina rebelled in northern Mexico against Colonel Robert Treat Paine. Paine killed a mutineer,
but two of his lieutenants refused to help him quell the mutiny. The rebels were ultimately
exonerated in an attempt to keep the peace.

      
Desertion grew. In March 1847 the army reported over a thousand deserters. The total number of
deserters during the war was 9,207: 5,331 regulars, 3,876 volunteers. Those who did not desert
became harder and harder to manage. General Gushing referred to sixty-live such men in the 1st
Regiment of the Massachusetts Infantry as "incorrigibly mutinous and insubordinate."

      
The glory of the victory was for the President and the generals, not the deserters, the dead, the
wounded. Of the 2nd Regiment of Mississippi Rifles, 167 died of disease. Two regiments from
Pennsylvania went out 1,800 strong and came home with six hundred. John Calhoun of South
Carolina said in Congress that 20 percent of the troops had died of battle or sickness. The
Massachusetts Volunteers had started with 630 men. They came home with three hundred dead,
mostly from disease, and at the reception dinner on their return their commander, General Gushing,
was hissed by his men. The Cambridge Chronicle wrote: "Charges of the most serious nature
against one and all of these military officials drop daily from the lips of the volunteers."

      
As the veterans returned home, speculators immediately showed up to buy the land warrants given
by the government. Many of the soldiers, desperate for money, sold their 160 acres for less than
$50. The New York Commercial Advertiser said in June 1847: "It is a well-known fact that
immense fortunes were made out of the poor soldiers who shed their blood in the revolutionary war
by speculators who preyed upon their distresses. A similar system of depredation was practised
upon the soldiers of the last war."

      
Mexico surrendered. There were calls among Americans to take all of Mexico. The Treaty of
Guadalupe Hidalgo, signed February 1848, just took half. The Texas boundary was set at the Rio
Grande; New Mexico and California were ceded. The United States paid Mexico $15 million,
which led the Whig Intelligencer to conclude that "we take nothing by conquest.... Thank God."

The United States government's support of slavery was based on an overpowering practicality. In
1790, a thousand tons of cotton were being produced every year in the South. By 1860, it was a
million tons. In the same period, 500,000 slaves grew to 4 million. A system harried by slave
rebellions and conspiracies (Gabriel Prosser, 1800; Denmark Vesey, 1822; Nat Turner, 1831)
developed a network of controls in the southern states, hacked by the laws, courts, armed forces,
and race prejudice of the nation's political leaders.

      
It would take either a full-scale slave rebellion or a full-scale war to end such a deeply entrenched
system. If a rebellion, it might get out of hand, and turn its ferocity beyond slavery to the most
successful system of capitalist enrichment in the world. If a war, those who made the war would
organize its consequences. Hence, it was Abraham Lincoln who freed the slaves, not John Brown.
In 1859, John Brown was hanged, with federal complicity, for attempting to do by small-scale
violence what Lincoln would do by large-scale violence several years later-end slavery.

      
With slavery abolished by order of the government-true, a government pushed hard to do so, by
blacks, free and slave, and by white abolitionists-its end could be orchestrated so as to set limits to
emancipation. Liberation from the top would go only so far as the interests of the dominant groups
permitted. If carried further by the momentum of war, the rhetoric of a crusade, it could be pulled
back to a safer position. Thus, while the ending of slavery led to a reconstruction of national
politics and economics, it was not a radical reconstruction, but a safe one- in fact, a profitable one.

      
The plantation system, based on tobacco growing in Virginia, North Carolina, and Kentucky, and
rice in South Carolina, expanded into lush new cotton lands in Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi-and
needed more slaves. But slave importation became illegal in 1808. Therefore, "from the beginning,
the law went unenforced," says John Hope Franklin (From Slavery to Freedom). "The long,
unprotected coast, the certain markets, and the prospects of huge profits were too much for the
American merchants and they yielded to the temptation.. .." He estimates that perhaps 250,000
slaves were imported illegally before the Civil War.

      
How can slavery be described? Perhaps not at all by those who have not experienced it. The 1932
edition of a best-selling textbook by two northern liberal historians saw slavery as perhaps the
Negro's "necessary transition to civilization." Economists or cliometricians (statistical historians)
have tried to assess slavery by estimating how much money was spent on slaves for food and
medical care. But can this describe the reality of slavery as it was to a human being who lived
inside it? Are the conditions of slavery as important as the existence of slavery?

      
John Little, a former slave, wrote:

They say slaves are happy, because they laugh, and are merry. I myself and three or four others,
have received two hundred lashes in the day, and had our feet in fetters; yet, at night, we would
sing and dance, and make others laugh at the rattling of our chains. Happy men we must have been!
We did it to keep down trouble, and to keep our hearts from being completely broken: that is as true
as the gospel! Just look at it,-must not we have been very happy? Yet I have done it myself-I have
cut capers in chains.

      
A record of deaths kept in a plantation journal (now in the University of North Carolina Archives)
lists the ages and cause of death of all those who died on the plantation between 1850 and 1855. Of
the thirty-two who died in that period, only four reached the age of sixty, four reached the age of
fifty, seven died in their forties, seven died in their twenties or thirties, and nine died before they
were five years old.

      
But can statistics record what it meant for families to be torn apart, when a master, for profit, sold a
husband or a wife, a son or a daughter? In 1858, a slave named Abream Scriven was sold by his
master, and wrote to his wife: "Give my love to my father and mother and tell them good Bye for
me, and if we Shall not meet in this world I hope to meet in heaven."

      
One recent book on slavery (Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman, Time on the Cross) looks at
whippings in 1840-1842 on the Barrow plantation in Louisiana with two hundred slaves: "The
records show that over the course of two years a total of 160 whippings were administered, an
average of 0.7 whippings per hand per year. About half the hands were not whipped at all during
the period." One could also say: "Half of all slaves were whipped." That has a different ring. That
figure (0.7 per hand per year) shows whipping was infrequent for any individual. But looked at
another way, once every four or five days, some slave was whipped.

      
Barrow as a plantation owner, according to his biographer, was no worse than the average. He
spent money on clothing for his slaves, gave them holiday celebrations, built a dance hall for them.
He also built a jail and "was constantly devising ingenious punishments, for he realized that
uncertainty was an important aid in keeping his gangs well in hand."

      
The whippings, the punishments, were work disciplines. Still, Herbert Gutman (Slavery and the
Numbers Game) finds, dissecting Fogel and Engerman's statistics, "Over all, four in five cotton
pickers engaged in one or more disorderly acts in 1840-41.... As a group, a slightly higher
percentage of women than men committed seven or more disorderly acts." Thus, Gutman disputes
the argument of Fogel and Engerman that the Barrow plantation slaves became "devoted,
hardworking responsible slaves who identified their fortunes with the fortunes of their masters."

      
Slave revolts in the United States were not as frequent or as large-scale as those in the Caribbean
islands or in South America. Probably the largest slave revolt in the United States took place near
New Orleans in 1811. Four to five hundred slaves gathered after a rising at the plantation of a
Major Andry. Armed with cane knives, axes, and clubs, they wounded Andry, killed his son, and
began marching from plantation to plantation, their numbers growing. They were attacked by U.S.
army and militia forces; sixty-six were killed on the spot, and sixteen were tried and shot by a firing
squad.

      
The conspiracy of Denmark Vesey, himself a free Negro, was thwarted before it could be carried
out in 1822. The plan was to burn Charleston, South Carolina, then the sixth-largest city in the
nation, and to initiate a general revolt of slaves in the area. Several witnesses said thousands of
blacks were implicated in one way or another. Blacks had made about 250 pike heads and bayonets
and over three hundred daggers, according to Herbert Aptheker's account. But the plan was
betrayed, and thirty-five blacks, including Vesey, were hanged. The trial record itself, published in
Charleston, was ordered destroyed soon after publication, as too dangerous for slaves to see.

      
Nat Turner's rebellion in Southampton County, Virginia, in the summer of 1831, threw the
slaveholding South into a panic, and then into a determined effort to bolster the security of the slave
system. Turner, claiming religious visions, gathered about seventy slaves, who went on a rampage
from plantation to plantation, murdering at least fifty-five men, women, and children. They
gathered supporters, but were captured as their ammunition ran out. Turner and perhaps eighteen
others were hanged.

      
Did such rebellions set back the cause of emancipation, as some moderate abolitionists claimed at
the time? An answer was given in 1845 by James Hammond, a supporter of slavery:

But if your course was wholly different-If you distilled nectar from your lips and discoursed
sweetest music.... do you imagine you could prevail on us to give up a thousand millions of dollars
in the value of our slaves, and a thousand millions of dollars more in the depreciation of our lands
... ?

      
The slaveowner understood this, and prepared. Henry Tragic (The Southampton Slave Revolt of
1831), says:

In 1831, Virginia was an armed and garrisoned state... . With a total population of 1,211,405, the
State of Virginia was able to field a militia force of 101,488 men, including cavalry, artillery,
grenadiers, riflemen, and light infantry! It is true that this was a "paper army" in some ways, in that
the county regiments were not fully armed and equipped, but it is still an astonishing commentary
on the state of the public mind of the time. During a period when neither the State nor the nation
faced any sort of exterior threat, we find that Virginia felt the need to maintain a security force
roughly ten percent of the total number of its inhabitants: black and white, male and female, slave
and free!

      
Rebellion, though rare, was a constant fear among slaveowners. Ulrich Phillips, a southerner whose
American Negro Slavery is a classic study, wrote:

A great number of southerners at all times held the firm belief that the negro population was so
docile, so little cohesive, and in the main so friendly toward the whites and so contented that a
disastrous insurrection by them would be impossible. But on the whole, there was much greater
anxiety abroad in the land than historians have told of....

      
Eugene Genovese, in his comprehensive study of slavery, Roll, Jordan, Roll, sees a record of
"simultaneous accommodation and resistance to slavery." The resistance included stealing property,
sabotage and slowness, killing overseers and masters, burning down plantation buildings, running
away. Even the accommodation "breathed a critical spirit and disguised subversive actions." Most
of this resistance, Genovese stresses, fell short of organized insurrection, but its significance for
masters and slaves was enormous.

      
Running away was much more realistic than armed insurrection. During the 1850s about a
thousand slaves a year escaped into the North, Canada, and Mexico. Thousands ran away for short
periods. And this despite the terror facing the runaway. The dogs used in tracking fugitives "bit,
tore, mutilated, and if not pulled off in time, killed their prey," Genovese says.

      
Harriet Tubman, born into slavery, her head injured by an overseer when she was fifteen, made her
way to freedom alone as a young woman, then became the most famous conductor on the
Underground Railroad. She made nineteen dangerous trips back and forth, often disguised,
escorting more than three hundred slaves to freedom, always carrying a pistol, telling the fugitives,
"You'll be free or the." She expressed her philosophy: "There was one of two things I had a right to,
liberty or death; if I could not have one, I would have the other; for no man should take me alive...."

      
One overseer told a visitor to his plantation that "some negroes are determined never to let a white
man whip them and will resist you, when you attempt it; of course you must kill them in that case."

      
One form of resistance was not to work so hard. W. E. B. Du Bois wrote, in The Gift of Black Folk:

As a tropical product with a sensuous receptivity to the beauty of the world, he was not as easily
reduced to be the mechanical draft-horse which the northern European laborer became. He ...
tended to work as the results pleased him and refused to work or sought to refuse when he did not
find the spiritual returns adequate; thus he was easily accused of laziness and driven as a slave
when in truth he brought to modern manual labor a renewed valuation of life.

      
Ulrich Phillips described "truancy," "absconding," "vacations without leave," and "resolute efforts
to escape from bondage altogether." He also described collective actions:

Occasionally, however, a squad would strike in a body as a protest against severities. An episode of
this sort was recounted in a letter of a Georgia overseer to his absent employer: "Sir, I write you a
few lines in order to let you know that six of your hands bas left the plantation-every man but Jack.
They displeased me with their work and I give some of them a few lashes, Tom with the rest. On
Wednesday morning, they were missing."

      
The instances where poor whites helped slaves were not frequent, but sufficient to show the need
for setting one group against the other.
Genovese says:

The slaveholders ... suspected that non-slaveholders would encourage slave disobedience and even
rebellion, not so much out of sympathy for the blacks as out of hatred for the rich planters and
resentment of their own poverty. White men sometimes were linked to slave insurrectionary plots,
and each such incident rekindled fears.

This helps explain the stern police measures against whites who fraternized with blacks.

      
Herbert Aptheker quotes a report to the governor of Virginia on a slave conspiracy in 1802: "I have
just received information that three white persons are concerned in the plot; and they have arms and
ammunition concealed under their houses, and were to give aid when the negroes should begin."
One of the conspiring slaves said that it was "the common run of poor white people" who were
involved.

      
In return, blacks helped whites in need. One black runaway told of a slave woman who had
received fifty lashes of the whip for giving food to a white neighbor who was poor and sick.

      
When the Brunswick canal was built in Georgia, the black slaves and white Irish workers were
segregated, the excuse being that they would do violence against one another. That may well have
been true, but Fanny Kemble, the famous actress and wife of a planter, wrote in her journal:

But the Irish are not only quarrelers, and rioters, and fighters, and drinkers, and despisers of
niggers-they are a passionate, impulsive, warm-hearted, generous people, much given to powerful
indignations, which break out suddenly when not compelled to smoulder sullenly-pestilent
sympathizers too, and with a sufficient dose of American atmospheric air in their lungs, properly
mixed with a right proportion of ardent spirits, there is no saying but what they might actually take
to sympathy with the slaves, and I leave you to judge of the possible consequences. You perceive, I
am sure, that they can by no means be allowed to work together on the Brunswick Canal.

The need for slave control led to an ingenious device, paying poor whites-themselves so
troublesome for two hundred years of southern history-to be overseers of black labor and therefore
buffers for black hatred.

      
Religion was used for control. A book consulted by many planters was the Cotton Plantation
Record and Account Book, which gave these instructions to overseers: "You will find that an hour
devoted every Sabbath morning to their moral and religious instruction would prove a great aid to
you in bringing about a better state of things amongst the Negroes."

      
As for black preachers, as Genovese puts it, "they had to speak a language defiant enough to hold
the high-spirited among their flock but neither so inflammatory as to rouse them to battles they
could not win nor so ominous as to arouse the ire of ruling powers." Practicality decided: "The
slave communities, embedded as they were among numerically preponderant and militarily
powerful whites, counseled a strategy of patience, of acceptance of what could not be helped, of a
dogged effort to keep the black community alive and healthy-a strategy of survival that, like its
African prototype, above all said yes to life in this world."

      
It was once thought that slavery had destroyed the black family. And so the black condition was
blamed on family frailty, rather than on poverty and prejudice. Blacks without families, helpless,
lacking kinship and identity, would have no will to resist. But interviews with ex-slaves, done in
the 1930s by the Federal Writers Project of the New Deal for the Library of Congress, showed a
different story, which George Rawick summarizes (From Sundown to Sunup):

The slave community acted like a generalized extended kinship system in which all adults looked
after all children and there was little division between "my children for whom I'm responsible" and
"your children for whom you're responsible." ... A kind of family relationship in which older
children have great responsibility for caring for younger siblings is obviously more functionally
integrative and useful for slaves than the pattern of sibling rivalry and often dislike that frequently
comes out of contemporary middle-class nuclear families composed of highly individuated persons.
... Indeed, the activity of the slaves in creating patterns of family life that were functionally
integrative did more than merely prevent the destruction of personality. ... It was part and parcel, as
we shall see, of the social process out of which came black pride, black identity, black culture, the
black community, and black rebellion in America.

      
Old letters and records dug out by historian Herbert Gutman (The Black Family in Slavery and
Freedom) show the stubborn resistance of the slave family to pressures of disintegration, A woman
wrote to her son from whom she had been separated for twenty years: "I long to see you in my old
age.. .. Now my dear son I pray you to come and see your dear old Mother. ... I love you Cato you
love your Mother-You are my only son. ..."

      
And a man wrote to his wife, sold away from him with their children: "Send me some of the
children's hair in a separate paper with their names on the paper. ... I had rather anything to had
happened to me most than ever to have been parted from you and the children. . . . Laura I do love
you the same...."

      
Going through records of slave marriages, Gutman found how high was the incidence of marriage
among slave men and women, and how stable these marriages were. He studied the remarkably
complete records kept on one South Carolina plantation. He found a birth register of two hundred
slaves extending from the eighteenth century to just before the Civil War; it showed stable kin
networks, steadfast marriages, unusual fidelity, and resistance to forced marriages.

      
Slaves hung on determinedly to their selves, to their love of family, their wholeness. A shoemaker
on the South Carolina Sea Islands expressed this in his own way: "I'se lost an arm but it hasn't gone
out of my brains."

      
This family solidarity carried into the twentieth century. The remarkable southern black farmer
Nate Shaw recalled that when his sister died, leaving three children, his father proposed sharing
their care, and he responded:

That suits me. Papa. . .. Let's handle cm like this; don't get the two little boys, the youngest ones,
off at your house and the oldest one be at my house and we bold these little boys apart and won't
bring em to see one another. I'll bring the little boy that I keep, the oldest one, around to your home
amongst the other two. And you forward the others to my house and let em grow up knowin that
they are brothers. Don't keep em separated in a way that they'll forget about one another. Don't do
that, Papa.

      
Also insisting on the strength of blacks even under slavery, Lawrence Levine (Black Culture and
Black Consciousness) gives a picture of a rich culture among slaves, a complex mixture of
adaptation and rebellion, through the creativity of stories and songs:

We raise de wheat,

Dey gib us de corn;

We bake de bread,

Dey gib us de crust,

We sif de meal,

Dey gib us de huss;

We peel de meat,

Dey gib us de skin;

And dat's de way

Dey take us in;

We skim de pot,

Dey gib us de liquor,

An say dat's good enough for nigger.

      
There was mockery. The poet William Cullen Bryant, after attending a corn shucking in 1843 in
South Carolina, told of slave dances turned into a pretended military parade, "a sort of burlesque of
our militia trainings. . . ."

      
Spirituals often had double meanings. The song "O Canaan, sweet Canaan, I am bound for the land
of Canaan" often meant that slaves meant to get to the North, their Canaan. During the Civil War,
slaves began to make up new spirituals with bolder messages: "Before I'd be a slave, I'd be buried
in my grave, and go home to my Lord and be saved." And the spiritual "Many Thousand Go":

No more peck o ' corn for me, no more, no more,

No more driver's lash far me, no more, no more. . . .

Levine refers to slave resistance as "pre-political," expressed in countless ways in daily life and
culture. Music, magic, art, religion, were all ways, he says, for slaves to hold on to their humanity.

      
While southern slaves held on, free blacks in the North (there were about 130,000 in 1830, about
200,000 in 1850) agitated for the abolition of slavery. In 1829, David Walker, son of a slave, but
horn free in North Carolina, moved to Boston, where he sold old clothes. The pamphlet he wrote
and printed, Walker's Appeal, became widely known. It infuriated southern slaveholders; Georgia
offered a reward of $10,000 to anyone who would deliver Walker alive, and $1,000 to anyone who
would kill him. It is not hard to understand why when you read his Appeal.

      
There was no slavery in history, even that of the Israelites in Egypt, worse than the slavery of the
black man in America, Walker said. "... show me a page of history, either sacred or profane, on which a verse can he found, which maintains, that the Egyptians heaped the insupportable insult upon the children of Israel, by telling them that they were not of the human family."

      
Walker was scathing to his fellow blacks who would assimilate: "I would wish, candidly ... to be
understood, that I would not give a pinch of snuff to be married to any white person I ever saw in
all the days of my life."

      
Blacks must fight for their freedom, he said:

Let our enemies go on with their butcheries, and at once fill up their cup. Never make an attempt to
gain our freedom or natural right from under our cruel oppressors and murderers, until you see your
way clear-when that hour arrives and you move, be not afraid or dismayed. . .. God has been
pleased to give us two eyes, two hands, two feet, and some sense in our heads as well as they. They
have no more right to hold us in slavery than we have to hold them... . Our sufferings will come to
an end, in spite of all the Americans this side of eternity. Then we will want all the learning and
talents among ourselves, and perhaps more, to govern ourselves.-"Every dog must have its day,"
the American's is coming to an end.

One summer day in 1830, David Walker was found dead near the doorway of his shop in Boston.

      
Some born in slavery acted out the unfulfilled desire of millions. Frederick Douglass, a slave, sent
to Baltimore to work as a servant and as a laborer in the shipyard, somehow learned to read and
write, and at twenty-one, in the year 1838, escaped to the North, where he became the most famous
black man of his time, as lecturer, newspaper editor, writer. In his autobiography, Narrative of the
Life of Frederick Douglass, he recalled his first childhood thoughts about his condition:

Why am I a slave? Why are some people slaves, and others masters? Was there ever a time when
this was not so? How did the relation commence?

      
Once, however, engaged in the inquiry, I was not very long in finding out the true solution of the
matter. It was not color, but crime, not God, but man, that afforded the true explanation of the
existence of slavery; nor was I long in finding out another important truth, viz: what man can make,
man can unmake. .. .

      
I distinctly remember being, even then, most strongly impressed with the idea of being a free man
some clay. This cheering assurance was an inborn dream of my human nature-a constant menace to
slavery-and one which all the powers of slavery were unable to silence or extinguish.

      
The Fugitive Slave Act passed in 1850 was a concession to the southern states in return for the
admission of the Mexican war territories (California, especially) into the Union as nonslave states.
The Act made it easy for slaveowners to recapture ex-slaves or simply to pick up blacks they
claimed had run away. Northern blacks organized resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act, denouncing
President Fillmore, who signed it, and Senator Daniel Webster, who supported it. One of these was
J. W. Loguen, son of a slave mother and her white owner. He had escaped to freedom on his
master's horse, gone to college, and was now a minister in Syracuse, New York. He spoke to a
meeting in that city in 1850:

The time has come to change the tones of submission into tones of defiance-and to tell Mr. Fillmore
and Mr. Webster, if they propose to execute this measure upon us, to send on their blood-hounds. ...
I received my freedom from Heaven, and with it came the command to defend my title to it. ... I
don't respect this law-I don't fear it-I won't obey it! It outlaws me, and I outlaw it.... I will not live a
slave, and if force is employed to re-enslave me, I shall make preparations to meet the crisis as
becomes a man. ... Your decision tonight in favor of resistance will give vent to the spirit of liberty,
and it will break the bands of party, and shout for joy all over the North. ... Heaven knows that this
act of noble daring will break out somewhere-and may God grant that Syracuse be the honored
spot, whence it shall send an earthquake voice through the land!

      
The following year, Syracuse had its chance. A runaway slave named Jerry was captured and put
on trial. A crowd used crowbars and a battering ram to break into the courthouse, defying marshals
with drawn guns, and set Jerry free.

      
Loguen made his home in Syracuse a major station on the Underground Railroad. It was said that
he helped 1,500 slaves on their way to Canada. His memoir of slavery came to the attention of his
former mistress, and she wrote to him, asking him either to return or to send her $1,000 in
compensation. Loguen's reply to her was printed in the abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator:

Mrs. Sarah Logue. .. . You say you have offers to buy me, and that you shall sell me if I do not send
you $1000, and in the same breath and almost in the same sentence, you say, "You know we raised
you as we did our own children." Woman, did you raise your own children for the market? Did you
raise them for the whipping post? Did you raise them to be driven off, bound to a coffle in chains? .
.. Shame on you!

      
But you say I am a thief, because I took the old mare along with me. Have you got to learn that I
had a better right to the old mare, as you call her, than Manasseth Logue had to me? Is it a greater
sin for me to steal his horse, than it was for him to rob my mother's cradle, and steal me? . .. Have
you got to learn that human rights are mutual and reciprocal, and if you take my liberty and life,
you forfeit your own liberty and life? Before God and high heaven, is there a law for one man
which is not a law for every other man?

      
If you or any other speculator on my body and rights, wish to know how I regard my rights, they
need but come here, and lay their hands on me to enslave me.. . .

Yours, etc. J. W. Loguen

      
Frederick Douglass knew that the shame of slavery was not just the South's, that the whole nation
was complicit in it. On the Fourth of July, 1852, he gave an Independence Day address:

Fellow Citizens: Pardon me, and allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here today? What
have I or those I represent to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of
political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to
us? And am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the national altar, and to
confess the benefits, and express devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your
independence to us?.. .

      
What to the American slave is your Fourth of July? I answer, a day that reveals to him more than
all other days of the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. 'In him
your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling
vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass-
fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns,
your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are to him mere
bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy-a thin veil to cover up crimes which would
disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation of the earth guilty of practices more shocking
and bloody than are the people of these United States at this very hour.

      
Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the
Old World, travel through South America, search out every abuse and when you have found the
last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me
that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival... .

      
Ten years after Nat Turner's rebellion, there was no sign of black insurrection in the South. But that
year, 1841, one incident took place which kept alive the idea of rebellion. Slaves being transported
on a ship, the Creole, overpowered the crew, killed one of them, and sailed into the British West
Indies (where slavery had been abolished in 1833). England refused to return the slaves (there was
much agitation in England against American slavery), and this led to angry talk in Congress of war
with England, encouraged by Secretary of State Daniel Webster. The Colored Peoples Press
denounced Webster's "bullying position," and, recalling the Revolutionary War and the War of
1812, wrote:

If war be declared . .. Will we fight in defense of a government which denies us the most precious
right of citizenship? .. . The States in which we dwell have twice availed themselves of our
voluntary services, and have repaid us with chains and slavery. Shall we a third time kiss the foot
that crushes us? If so, we deserve our chains.

      
As the tension grew, North and South, blacks became more militant. Frederick Douglass spoke in
1857:

Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reforms. The whole history of the progress of human
liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of struggle. ... If
there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate
agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder
and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. The struggle may be
a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a
struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will... .

      
There were tactical differences between Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison, white abolitionist
and editor of The Liberator-differences between black and white abolitionists in general. Blacks
were more willing to engage in armed insurrection, but also more ready to use existing political
devices-the ballot box, the Constitution-anything to further their cause. They were not as morally
absolute in their tactics as the Garrisonians. Moral pressure would not do it alone, the blacks knew;
it would take all sorts of tactics, from elections to rebellion.

      
How ever-present in the minds of northern Negroes was the question of slavery is shown by black
children in a Cincinnati school, a private school financed by Negroes. The children were
responding to the question "What do you think most about?" Only five answers remain in the
records, and all refer to slavery. A seven-year-old child wrote:

Dear schoolmates, we are going next summer to buy a farm and to work part of the day and to
study the other part if we live to see it and come home part of the day to see our mothers and sisters
and cousins if we are got any and see our kind folks and to be good boys and when we get a man to
get the poor slaves from bondage. And I am sorrow to hear that the boat... went down with 200
poor slaves from up the river. Oh how sorrow I am to hear that, it grieves my heart so drat I could
faint in one minute.

      
White abolitionists did courageous and pioneering work, on the lecture platform, in newspapers, in
the Underground Railroad. Black abolitionists, less publicized, were the backbone of the
antislavery movement. Before Garrison published his famous Liberator in Boston in 1831, the first
national convention of Negroes had been held, David Walker had already written his "Appeal," and
a black abolitionist magazine named Freedom's Journal had appeared. Of The Liberator's first
twenty-five subscribers, most were black.

      
Blacks had to struggle constantly with the unconscious racism of white abolitionists. They also had
to insist on their own independent voice. Douglass wrote for The Liberator, but in 1847 started his
own newspaper in Rochester, North Star, which led to a break with Garrison. In 1854, a conference
of Negroes declared: ". . . it is emphatically our battle; no one else can fight it for us. . . . Our
relations to the Anti-Slavery movement must be and are changed. Instead of depending upon it we
must lead it."

      
Certain black women faced the triple hurdle-of being abolitionists in a slave society, of being black
among white reformers, and of being women in a reform movement dominated by men. When
Sojourner Truth rose to speak in 1853 in New York City at the Fourth National Woman's Rights
Convention, it all came together. There was a hostile mob in the hall shouting, jeering, threatening.
She said:

I know that it feels a kind o' hissin' and ticklin' like to see a colored woman get up and tell you
about things, and Woman's Rights. We have all been thrown down so low that nobody thought we'd
ever get up again; but ... we will come up again, and now I'm here. . . . we'll have our rights; see if
we don't; and you can't stop us from them; see if you can. You may hiss as much as yon like, but it
is comin'. ... I am sittin' among you to watch; and every once and awhile I will come out and tell
you what time of night it is. ...

      
After Nat Turner's violent uprising and Virginia's bloody repression, the security system inside the
South became tighter. Perhaps only an outsider could hope to launch a rebellion. It was such a
person, a white man of ferocious courage and determination, John Brown, whose wild scheme it
was to seize the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, and then set off a revolt of slaves
through the South.

      
Harriet Tubman, 5 feet tall, some of her teeth missing, a veteran of countless secret missions
piloting blacks out of slavery, was involved with John Brown and his plans. But sickness prevented
her from joining him. Frederick Douglass too had met with Brown. He argued against the plan from
the standpoint of its chances of success, but he admired the ailing man of sixty, tall, gaunt, white-
haired.

      
Douglass was right; the plan would not work. The local militia, joined by a hundred marines under
the command of Robert E. Lee, surrounded the insurgents. Although his men were dead or
captured, John Brown refused to surrender: he barricaded himself in a small brick building near the
gate of the armory. The troops battered down a door; a marine lieutenant moved in and struck
Brown with his sword. Wounded, sick, he was interrogated. W. E. B. Du Bois, in his book John
Brown, writes:

Picture the situation: An old and blood-bespattered man, half-dead from the wounds inflicted but a
few hours before; a man lying in the cold and dirt, without sleep for fifty-five nerve-wrecking
hours, without food for nearly as long, with the dead bodies of his two sons almost before his eyes,
the piled corpses of his seven slain comrades near and afar, a wife and a bereaved family listening
in vain, and a Lost Cause, the dream of a lifetime, lying dead in his heart. . . .

Lying there, interrogated by the governor of Virginia, Brown said: "You had better-all you people
at the South-prepare yourselves for a settlement of this question.. . . You may dispose of me very
easily-I am nearly disposed of now, but this question is still to be settled,-this Negro question, I
mean; the end of that is not yet."

      
Du Bois appraises Brown's action:

If his foray was the work of a handful of fanatics, led by a lunatic and repudiated by the slaves to a
man, then the proper procedure would have been to ignore the incident, quietly punish the worst
offenders and either pardon the misguided leader or send him to an asylum... . While insisting that
the raid was too hopelessly and ridiculously small to accomplish anything .. . the state nevertheless
spent $250,000 to punish the invaders, stationed from one to three thousand soldiers in the vicinity
and threw the nation into turmoil.

      
In John Brown's last written statement, in prison, before he was hanged, he said: "I, John Brown,
am quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood."
Ralph Waldo Emerson, not an activist himself, said of the execution of John Brown: "He will make
the gallows holy as the cross."

      
Of the twenty-two men in John Brown's striking force, five were black. Two of these were killed on
the spot, one escaped, and two were hanged by the authorities. Before his execution, John Copeland
wrote to his parents:

Remember that if I must die I die in trying to liberate a few of my poor and oppressed people from
my condition of servitude which Cod in his Holy Writ has hurled his most bitter denunciations
against ...

      
I am not terrified by the gallows....

      
I imagine that I hear you, and all of you, mother, father, sisters, and brothers, say-"No, there is not a
cause for which we, with less sorrow, could see you the." Believe me when I tell you, that though
shut up in prison and under sentence of death, I have spent more happy hours here, and .. . I would
almost as lief the now as at any time, for I feel that I am prepared to meet my Maker. .. .

      
John Brown was executed by the state of Virginia with the approval of the national government. It
was the national government which, while weakly enforcing the law ending the slave trade, sternly
enforced the laws providing for the return of fugitives to slavery. It was the national government
that, in Andrew Jackson's administration, collaborated with the South to keep abolitionist literature
out of the mails in the southern states. It was the Supreme Court of the United States that declared
in 1857 that the slave Dred Scott could not sue for his freedom because he was not a person, but
property.

      
Such a national government would never accept an end to slavery by rebellion. It would end
slavery only under conditions controlled by whites, and only when required by the political and
economic needs of the business elite of the North. It was Abraham Lincoln who combined perfectly
the needs of business, the political ambition of the new Republican party, and the rhetoric of
humanitarianism. He would keep the abolition of slavery not at the top of his list of priorities, but
close enough to the top so it could be pushed there temporarily by abolitionist pressures and by
practical political advantage.

      
Lincoln could skillfully blend the interests of the very rich and the interests of the black at a
moment in history when these interests met. And he could link these two with a growing section of
Americans, the white, up-and-coming, economically ambitious, politically active middle class. As
Richard Hofstadter puts it:

Thoroughly middle class in his ideas, he spoke for those millions of Americans who had begun
their lives as hired workers-as farm hands, clerks, teachers, mechanics, flatboat men, and rail-
splitters-and had passed into the ranks of landed farmers, prosperous grocers, lawyers, merchants,
physicians and politicians.

Lincoln could argue with lucidity and passion against slavery on moral grounds, while acting
cautiously in practical politics. lie believed "that the institution of slavery is founded on injustice
and bad policy, but that the promulgation of abolition doctrines tends to increase rather than abate
its evils." (Put against this Frederick Douglass's statement on struggle, or Garrison's "Sir, slavery
will not be overthrown without excitement, a most tremendous excitement") Lincoln read the
Constitution strictly, to mean that Congress, because of the Tenth Amendment (reserving to the
states powers not specifically given to the national government), could not constitutionally bar
slavery in the states.

      
When it was proposed to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia, which did not have the rights
of a state bat was directly under the jurisdiction of Congress, Lincoln said this would be
Constitutional, but it should not be done unless the people in the District wanted it. Since most
there were white, this killed the idea. As Hofstadter said of Lincoln's statement, it "breathes the fire
of an uncompromising insistence on moderation."

      
Lincoln refused to denounce the Fugitive Slave Law publicly. He wrote to a friend: "I confess T
hate to see the poor creatures hunted down . .. but I bite my lips and keep quiet." And when he did
propose, in 1849, as a Congressman, a resolution to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia, he
accompanied this with a section requiring local authorities to arrest and return fugitive slaves
coming into Washington. (This led Wendell Phillips, the Boston abolitionist, to refer to him years
later as "that slavehound from Illinois.") He opposed slavery, but could not see blacks as equals, so
a constant theme in his approach was to free the slaves and to send them back to Africa.

      
In his 1858 campaign in Illinois for the Senate against Stephen Douglas, Lincoln spoke differently
depending on the views of his listeners (and also perhaps depending on how close it was to the
election). Speaking in northern Illinois in July (in Chicago), he said:

Let us discard all this quibbling about this man and the other man, this race and that race and the
other race being inferior, and therefore they must be placed in an inferior position. Let us discard
all these things, and unite as one people throughout this land, until we shall once more stand up
declaring that all men are created equal.

Two months later in Charleston, in southern Illinois, Lincoln told his audience:

I will say, then, that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social
and political equality of the white and black races (applause); that I am not, nor ever have been, in
favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry
with white people.. . .

      
And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of
superior and inferior, and J as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position
assigned to the white race.

      
Behind the secession of the South from the Union, after Lincoln was elected President in the fall of
1860 as candidate of the new Republican party, was a long series of policy clashes between South
and North. The clash was not over slavery as a moral institution-most northerners did not care
enough about slavery to make sacrifices for it, certainly not the sacrifice of war. It was not a clash
of peoples (most northern whites were not economically favored, not politically powerful; most
southern whites were poor farmers, not decisionmakers) but of elites. The northern elite wanted
economic expansion-free land, free labor, a free market, a high protective tariff for manufacturers, a
bank of the United States. The slave interests opposed all that; they saw Lincoln and the
Republicans as making continuation of their pleasant and prosperous way of life impossible in the
future.

      
So, when Lincoln was elected, seven southern states seceded from the Union. Lincoln initiated
hostilities by trying to repossess the federal base at Fort Sumter, South Carolina, and four more
states seceded. The Confederacy was formed; the Civil War was on.

      
Lincoln's first Inaugural Address, in March 1861, was conciliatory toward the South and the
seceded states: "I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery
in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do
so." And with the war four months on, when General John C. Fremont in Missouri declared martial
law and said slaves of owners resisting the United States were to he free, Lincoln countermanded
this order. He was anxious to hold in the Union the slave states of Maryland, Kentucky, Missouri,
and Delaware.

      
It was only as the war grew more bitter, the casualties mounted, desperation to win
heightened, and the criticism of the abolitionists threatened to unravel the tattered coalition behind
Lincoln that he began to act against slavery. Hofstadter puts it this way: "Like a delicate barometer,
he recorded the trend of pressures, and as the Radical pressure increased he moved toward the left."
Wendell Phillips said that if Lincoln was able to grow "it is because we have watered him."

      
Racism in the North was as entrenched as slavery in the South, and it would take the war to shake
both. New York blacks could not vote unless they owned $250 in property (a qualification not
applied to whites). A proposal to abolish this, put on the ballot in 1860, was defeated two to one
(although Lincoln carried New York by 50,000 votes). Frederick Douglass commented: "The black
baby of Negro suffrage was thought too ugly to exhibit on so grand an occasion. The Negro was
stowed away like some people put out of sight their deformed children when company comes."

      
Wendell Phillips, with all his criticism of Lincoln, recognized the possibilities in his election.
Speaking at the Tremont Temple in Boston the day after the election, Phillips said:

If the telegraph speaks truth, for the first time in our history the slave has chosen a President of the
United States. . . . Not an Abolitionist, hardly an antislavery man, Mr. Lincoln consents to represent
an antislavery idea. A pawn on the political chessboard, his value is in his position; with fair effort,
we may soon change him for knight, bishop or queen, and sweep the board. (Applause)