concealed by the fact that they were frequently led and used by rival groups of land speculators.
Harassed and ignored small farmers were helpless against the power of colonial land speculators, merchants, and government officials. A petition came from the town of Deerfield in 1678 to the Massachusetts General Court: “You may be pleased to know that the very principle and best of the land; the best for soile; the best for situation; as lying in ye center and midle of the town: and as to quantity, nere half, belongs unto eight or nine proprietors.…” Also within the colonial working class should be counted tens of thousands of sailors and dockworkers of various kinds—about thirty-five hundred counted in Salem and Boston alone in the early eighteenth century.
There is not much to be said here about the slaves in colonial society, except to reiterate that no account of class relationships and distribution of wealth and power in America can, in justice, leave the slaves out of the reckoning; to do so is to accept the pre-Civil War judgment of them as less than human beings. It needs to be emphasized that slaves constituted one-fifth of the entire colonial population by the time of the Revolution and were in all of the colonies, North and South, though their heaviest concentration was in Virginia and South Carolina (where they were a majority of the population). That their treatment as the bottom class was universal is shown clearly by the law passed in 1693 by the Quaker legislature of Pennsylvania, authorizing any persons “to take up Negroes, male or female, whom they shall find gadding abroad … to take them to jail, there to remain that night, and that without meat or drink, and to cause them to be publicly whipped next morning with 39 lashes, well laid on their bare backs, at which their said master or mistress shall pay 15 pence to the whipper.”
On March 28, 1771, the Virginia Gazette ran an announcement: “Just arrived at Leedstown, the Ship Justitia, with about one Hundred Healthy Servants, Men Women & Boys.… The Sale will commence on Tuesday the 2nd of April.…” Ranking just above the slave in the colonial class structure, and yet so often close to the slave in misery and deprivation that he has often been termed “a semi-slave” was the indentured servant. Indentured servants, the chief source of labor in the seventeenth century, continued to pour into the colonies in the eighteenth century; two-thirds of Pennsylvania’s immigrants, for instance, were white servants. The institution of indenture did not die out until the early part of the nineteenth century, and it is probable that more than a quarter of a million persons served as indentured servants during the colonial period. These were indigent Europeans who, in return for passage to America, signed contracts (either voluntarily or by force, for many were convicts and vagrants in England) guaranteeing five or seven years of servile labor to an American master.
To this day, the way people travel is a key to their social and economic class; in colonial times this was true to the point of death. The indentured servants were at times packed into ships much like the screaming, dying African slaves, with as many as six hundred forced into a boat meant to carry three hundred. On one trip thirty-two children were thrown into the ocean as a result of starvation and disease.*
Indentured servants had some rights that slaves did not have, like the right to sue in court, but the court was generally friendlier to the owner than to the servant. They could not marry without permission, could be separated from their families at will, could be whipped for various offenses. Pennsylvania law in the seventeenth century said that marriage of servants “without the consent of the Masters … shall be proceeded against as for Adultery, or fornication, and Children to be reputed as Bastards.” 5 The great numbers of ads for runaway servants tell something about the conditions under which they lived and worked, conditions adjudicated by judges who took the word of the master, one contemporary observer noted, “ten to one.” 6
Returning to Germany from America in the mid-eighteenth century, Gottlieb Mittelburg wrote of the privations of his fellow Germans in servitude in Pennsylvania. He said many asked him to let others in Germany know what they were suffering so they would not be enticed into slavery. Contemporary accounts of the good living conditions of indentured servants need to be taken cautiously in view of the fact that most of these were written for the purpose of inducing immigration. They should be placed against letters like the following, written at the time: “Whoever is well off in Europe better remain there. Here is misery and distress, same as everywhere, and for certain persons and conditions incomparably more than in Europe.” And:
O Dear Father, belive what I am going to relate the words of truth and sincerity, and Ballance my former bad conduct to my sufferings here, and then I am sure you’ll pitty your Distressed Daughter, What we unfortunat English people suffer here is beyond the probability of you in England to conceive, let it suffice that I one of the unhappy Number, am toiling almost Day and Night, and very often in the Horses druggery … and then tied up and whipp’d to that Degree that you’d not serve an Annimal, scarce any thing but Indian Corn and Salt to eat and that even begrudged nay many Negroes are better used, almost naked, no shoes nor stockings to wear, and the comfort after slaving dureing Masters pleasure, what rest we get is to rap ourselve up in a Blanket and ly upon the Ground, this is the deplorable condition your poor Betty endures.…7
John Adams wrote about Massachusetts, as late as the Revolutionary period: “Perhaps it may be said that in America we have no distinctions of ranks …; but have we not laborers, yeomen, gentlemen, esquires, honorable gentlemen, and excellent gentlemen?” There were rich and poor in the colonies, and the distinction was clear not only in economic and political power, but in every aspect of daily living. Poor and rich lived in different kinds of houses, ate different foods, entertained themselves in different ways, were addressed with different degrees of respect, and were buried differently. An early eighteenth-century traveler stopped off at “a dirty poor house, with hardly anything in it but children, that wallowed about like so many pigs” and in another home was “forced to pig together” with ten people in a room.
By the latter part of that century, prosperous merchants and planters lived in lavish mansions with ornate Chippendale furniture and elaborate china, drank claret, port, and Madeira (while the poor drank “kill-devil” rum). Even frontier societies can support an idle aristocracy, if the differences in wealth are sharp enough. Josiah Quincy wrote about a sojourn in Maryland: “I spent yesterday chiefly with young men of fortune; they were gamblers and cockfighters, hound-breeders and horse-jockies.”
In Massachusetts, the law forbade a woman from wearing silk hoods and scarves unless her husband was worth two hundred pounds. The upper class were called Master and Mistress, the ordinary people Goodman and Goodwife. The upper class did not get whippings if they broke the law. The poor did. One-fifth to one-sixth of the population were servants in seventeenth-century Massachusetts.
In a study of five important colonial towns—Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Newport, Charles Town—Carl Bridenbaugh concludes: “The colonists who came to settle in the villages brought with them the social order then existing in England or Holland, and sought with considerable success to set up a similar system in America.” They “were thoroughly indoctrinated with prevailing ideas of social inequality.… and they certainly had never heard of a classless society.” 8 His work enables us to give quick sketches of the class society in these five towns.
BOSTON: “The leaders of early Boston were gentlemen of considerable wealth who, in association with the clergy, eagerly sought to preserve in America the social arrangements of the Mother Country. By means of their control of trade and commerce, by their political domination of the inhabitants through church and Town Meeting, and by careful marriage alliances among themselves, members of this little oligarchy laid the foundations for an aristocratic class in seventeenth century Boston.” 9 Rich merchants erected mansions, persons “of Qualitie” traveled in coaches or sedan chairs, had their portraits painted, wore periwigs, and filled themselves with rich food and Madeira. At times of crisis, the maldistribution of wealth brought food shortages, and one night in 1713, a Bostonian recorded “the Riot Committed that night … by 200 people in the Comon, thinking to
