in that year that Cotton Mather wrote: “… the distressed Families of the Poor to which I dispense, or procure needful Relief, are now so many, and of such daily Occurrence, that it is needless for me here to mention them.” The Bostonian rich lived in “elaborate town houses, beautifully appointed, and filled with elegant furniture … a corps of servants, black and white.… Boston gentlewomen dressed in the latest and most expensive London clothese and bedecked themselves with lavish jewelry.” The rich began to spend so much money on elaborate funerals that the General Court had to pass laws against extraordinary funeral expenses.
NEWPORT: As in Boston, Bridenbaugh finds “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 merchant aristocracy: “… the 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.” Common sailors, warehousemen, dockworkers formed the lower strata of town society (with slaves and servants below them). In the summer of 1730 a quarrel between the “gentleman’s party” and one representing town workers led to a mob rising in the town.
NEW YORK: Negro slaves made up a much larger part of the working class in Northern towns than is generally recognized. In 1720, of New York’s population of 7000, 1600 were Negroes, and Wall Street was designated as the market place where slaveowners could hire them out by the day or the week. In the bloody Negro insurrection of 1712 in New York City, twenty-one slaves were executed.
When, in 1735, John Van Zandt horsewhipped his slave to death for having been found on the streets by the night watch, the New York City coroner’s jury said: “The Correction given by the Master was not the Cause of his Death … but it was by the visitation of God.” In 1741, another Negro insurrection in New York led to the burning to death of fifteen Negroes, the hanging of eight more.
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.” The middle classes lived fairly comfortably, but far below the style of the rich; poor laborers and free Negroes, just above the servant-slave rank, lived at the edge of poverty.
A letter to Peter Zenger’s New York Journal in 1737 spoke of the poor children in New York: “I believe it would be a very shocking Appearance to a moralized Heathen, were he to meet with 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.…”
With variations in detail, the sharpness of class distinctions were similar in Charles Town and Philadelphia.
THE PROBLEM OF HISTORICAL SELECTION
If the colonial period of our history constitutes our birth and infancy we were not “born free.” We were born amidst slavery, semi-slavery, poverty, land monopoly, class privilege, and class conflict. And this is not putting it as starkly as we might, for history has always been written by the upper and middle classes, and has only rarely been able to capture even a glimpse of the actual misery of lower-class life. The very nature of intellectual discourse on inequalities in wealth guarantees an overall tone of moderation and detachment, just as American history written by whites tends to complacency on the race issue. It takes the rare artistic talent of a Zola, Dickens, or Melville to even approach the terrible reality masked by historical description.
Three points have been omitted from this discussion so far, all of which support the temper lying behind the concept that we were “born free.” One is that whatever conditions were in America for the lower classes, they were worse in Europe. This is true, if we follow the American historian’s custom of leaving out Negro slavery from assessments of the social condition which are not primarily concerned with race. An amended statement would read: the lower-class white Anglo-Saxon farmer, worker, and servant was better off in America than in England.
The second point is: the mobility from lower to upper classes was much greater in the American colonies. The evidence so far indicates a flat yes to this statement. Much has been made of the social mobility in America but we are beginning now to see, in the emerging countries of Asia and Africa, the same kind of dynamic, shooting mobility that we had in our early years; it seems to come with any fresh, vigorous society and is not unique to our nation. This mobility, even at its best, in America as elsewhere, has always been a prize for the few, and has not affected the position of the vast majority. It gives to society both the zest and the deception that Irish Sweepstakes winners gave not long ago to the Lower East Side of New York City.
The third point in favor of the “born free” idea is that we in America had, almost from the very beginning, a large middle class, something not existent in the feudal-aristocratic societies of the Old World or the despotisms of the Orient, and so, if not luxury, a degree of comfort was spread to larger proportions of the population than had ever been done before. This should also be recorded flatly as a truth, with this reminder: that it was made possible, from the beginning, by slavery and servitude, and that, throughout our history, the laudable fact of a large, well-fed middle class has obscured the existence of an equally large, ill-fed lower class.*
Thus, we have a problem in historical objectivity. We can, as I have just done, make out a case for a class society in colonial America, and for glaring inequalities of wealth and status. We can also, as has been done many times, make out a case for a fluid class structure and a rather prosperous society. Both descriptions focus on different aspects of the same complex reality. It is also possible to do as most historians, and refuse to make out a “case” at all, but to present enough facts to supply the needs of polemicists on both sides. This, while useful, represents a social detachment which ignores human need.
If one wants to avoid neutrality, and if both a case for equality and a case for inequality can be extracted from the same body of historical material, which shall the social analyst emphasize? That depends on his criterion: If his standard of judgment for characterizing American society is the comparable state of equality in most other countries of the world, then the emphasis is on American class fluidity, the comfort of the large middle class, the relatively good position even of many members of the lower class. If his standard is an ideal society where “irrational privilege” is nonexistent, then his emphasis is on the still-deplorable condition of the lower classes and on the maldistribution of wealth. But which standard should be applied? I would argue that the choice is neither arbitrary nor capricious nor instinctive, but can be rationally determined by the relationship of social needs to social possibilities at any given time.
It is a problem that is not confined to the issue we are here discussing, but to all situations where an analyst understands that his analysis enters into history and must have some effect (even so-called neutrality, or “objectivity,” has its effect) and needs to decide whether to emphasize progress already made, or distance from the goal still to be achieved. There are two situations which warrant, I think, a stress on progress already achieved: when it is necessary to encourage those dubious of the possibility of progress; or when there is no chance of substantially improving conditions, and focusing on the ideal would only result in false expectations and terrible frustration. Human happiness seems to depend on the balance of expectations and fulfillment. If there is no possibility of fulfillment, it is socially desirable to reduce expectations (Buddhism, with its exhortation to eliminate desire, has this function).
The first of the above reasons—combating pessimism—is sufficiently operative today to warrant maintaining, as a minor theme in social analysis of the national condition,
