Smith puts it, “a lively fear that servants would join with Negroes or Indians to overcome the small number of masters.”
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 Carolinas, whites were outnumbered by black slaves and nearby Indian tribes; in the 1750s, twenty-five thousand whites faced forty thousand black slaves, with sixty thousand Creek, Cherokee, Choctaw, and Chickasaw Indians in the area.
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 Lyttle-town of South Carolina wrote in 1738: “It has always been the policy of this government to create an aversion in them [Indians] to Negroes.”
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.”
What made Bacon’s Rebellion especially fearsome for the rulers of Virginia was that black slaves and white servants joined forces. 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. A letter from the southern colonies in 1682 complained of “no white men to superintend our negroes, or repress an insurrection of negroes.…” 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.”
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.
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.
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.”
The Pennsylvania Journalwrote 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 farmers, artificers or men in trade”.… 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.
Exercises
1. What was the economic condition of Virginia in 1676?
2. What is the evidence that Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676 “had the overwhelming support of the Virginia population”?
3. Why would a European man or woman sign an indenture? Was it a “choice” or were they compelled by “historical forces”?
4. Copy and fill in the chart below. Expand the chart by adding to the given criteria of comparison.
5. What happened when servants became free?
6. Which of the following is the most accurate characterization of the colonial economy, and WHY? Consider (without limiting yourself to) the following as criteria: closeness to actual event; how far removed from witnessing the event; degree of possibility of being an isolated event; degree of safety in generalizing from the specific; relevance of detail to question; how much the detail actually says about the entire colonial society.
a. In Boston, by 1770, the top 1% of property owners owned 44% of the wealth.
b. In New York [around 1750], the city almshouse, built for 100 poor, was housing over 400.
c. In 1757, Boston officials spoke of “a great Number of Poor…who can scarcely procure from day to day daily Bread for themselves & Families.”
d. According to the present day historian Gary Nash, “Outbreaks of disorder punctuated the last quarter of the seventeenth century [1675–1700], toppling established governments in Massachusetts, New York, Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina.”
e. In Boston in 1713, a town selectmen said 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.”
f. In New Jersey in 1745, Sam Baldwin was arrested for nonpayment of rent. “The People in general, supposing the Design of the Proprietors was to ruin them…went to the Prison, opened the Door, took out Baldwin.”
7. What experiences besides economic deprivation or hardship might have caused colonists to resent their local or state governments?
8. What was the greatest threat to the elite’s control over the colonists—a fear that was realized in Bacon’s Rebellion? What tactics did the wealthy elite/rich rulers
