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 and 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 wars 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.
Exercises
1. Why did Virginians massacre Indians instead of enslaving them?
2. How does the answer to the above question explain the choice to import black slaves?
3. Why were Africans vulnerable to enslavement?
4. Page 27: “…where whites and blacks found themselves with common problems, common work, a common enemy in their master, they behaved toward one another as equals.”
What were the “problems” that blacks and whites shared? What was the “work” that blacks and whites did? Was it the same? Did they work together? How did the “master” treat his indentured servant? How did the “master” treat his slave? To what degree was the treatment the same?
5. How do we know that slaves resisted their enslavement?
6. How do we know that indentured servants resisted their indentured condition?
7. How did the Virginia ruling class begin to drive a wedge between the white indentured servants and enslaved blacks?
8. Below are three versions of one essential question. Choose ONE of the three to answer.
a. Zinn argues that racism is not natural but a product of human choice and historical circumstances. Given the forces that created racism, what choices need to be made to undo it?
b. What were the historical forces that caused white plantation owners to choose black slaves as their labor source? Was it a “decision” to make a profit, or were Englishmen forced to do it? Would the Powhatans have accepted wages to labor in the fields of the plantation owners? Does that constitute a historical force?
c. Zinn argues that racism is not natural. Does he mean that it is caused by human decisions or historical forces? Explain your answer by first defining the difference between historical forces and human decision. What is a “historical force”? Do such forces compel humans to make decisions they would otherwise not have made?
9. At what point in the chronology of American history is the topic of slavery covered in traditional American history texts? At what point is it covered in Zinn’s text? How might you explain the difference in placement? (What are the purposes of including slavery in the traditional texts? What are the purposes for Zinn?)
Persons of Mean and Vile Condition
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, was described in a Royal Commission report:
He seduced the Vulgar and most ignorant people to believe (two thirds of each county being of that Sort) Soe 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.
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 that would divide Indians in order to control them, 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.
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.
Bacon himself 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 farmers from the Indians.
But 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.”
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 freemen, servants, and slaves. He promised to pardon everyone, to give freedom to slaves and servants, but when they got into the boat, he trained his big guns on them, disarmed them, and eventually delivered the slaves and servants
