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.”
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 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 laying in ye center and midle of the town: and as to quantity, nere half, belongs unto eight or nine proprietors.…”
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. In 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 thirty shillings.
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 letter to Peter Zenger’s New York Journal va. 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, and Charleston—were doubling and tripling in size.
Through all that growth, the upper class was getting most of the benefits and monopolized political power. In Boston, by 1770, the top 1 percent of property owners owned 44 percent of the wealth.
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, cripples, 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.”
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 Gary 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. A severe food shortage in Boston in 1713 brought a warning from town selectmen to the General Assembly of Massachusetts, saying that 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 Belcher’s ships, broke into his warehouses looking for corn, and shot the lieutenant governor when he tried to interfere.
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.
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 townhouse 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 title 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.”
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.
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,
