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December 25, 2019 - January 20, 2020
Many successful Americans believe they have made it on their own and have little patience for the complaints of those left behind.
class barriers almost invariably make that dream unobtainable.
popular American history is most commonly told—dramatized—without much reference to the existence of social classes.
British colonists promoted a dual agenda: one involved reducing poverty back in England, and the other called for transporting the idle and unproductive to the New World.
America was in the eyes of sixteenth-century adventurers a foul, weedy wilderness—a “sinke hole” suited to ill-bred commoners.
Because of how history is taught, Americans tend to associate Plymouth and Jamestown with cooperation rather than class division.
We cling to the comfort of the middle class, forgetting that there can’t be a middle class without a lower.
Murray’s fable of class denial can only exist by erasing a wealth of historical evidence that proves otherwise.
Far more than we choose to acknowledge, our relentless class system evolved out of recurring agrarian notions regarding the character and potential of the land, the value of labor, and critical concepts of breeding.
most colonizing schemes that took root in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British America were built on privilege and subordination, not any kind of proto-democracy.
1607,
Founding of Jamestown
The men of early Jamestown were predisposed to play cards, to trade with vile sailors, and to rape Indian women.
Beginning of Jamestown in early 17th c
The leading planters in Jamestown had no illusion that they were creating a classless society.
wives and children were held accountable for their husband’s or father’s indentured period of labor.
In 1620 the Virginia Company sent to the colony fifty-seven “young, handsome, and honestlie educated Maides.” Over the next three years, 157 more women made the crossing.
214 women sent ca. 1620-1624
Jamestown’s founders reproduced no English villages. Instead, they fashioned a ruthless class order.
1620.
Mayflower landed in Cape Cod. Half of them died in the first year.
1630
Winthrop, 11 ships, 700 people, including families. Settled in Massachusetts colony.
When Winthrop defended the colony, he wanted to create a religious community that would be saved from the “corrupted” bastions of learning, Oxford and Cambridge.
Governor Winthrop despised democracy,
The government enacted sumptuary laws, penalizing those who wore rich silks or gold buttons in an attempt to rise above their class station.
Sumptuary laws?
Puritans were obsessed with class rank.
He satirized the Puritans in New English Canaan as sexually impotent second husbands to a widowed land, which Morton (who had married a widow himself) and his business associates could rescue.
class warfare.
Bacon's Rebellion of 1676
Massachusetts and English possessions in the Caribbean, not Virginia, were the first colonies to codify slave law.
Keeping the land and widows in circulation was more important to the royal commissioners than impoverishing unrepentant women.
Fertility was greatly prized in colonial America.
A woman’s breeding capacity was a calculable natural resource meant to be exploited and a commodity exchanged in marriage.
Women and land were for the use and benefit of man.
The Fundamental Constitutions did more than endorse slavery. It was a manifesto promoting a semifeudalistic and wholly aristocratic society.
Significant contribution from John Locke
The constitution made clear that power rested at the top and that every effort had been made to “avoid erecting a numerous democracy.”5
Locke, like many successful Britons, felt contempt for the vagrant poor in England.
eventually led Carolina to be divided into two colonies in 1712.
North Carolina, which came to be known as “Poor Carolina,” went in a very different direction from its sibling to the south.
lazy lubbers of Poor Carolina stood out as a dangerous refuge of waste people, and the spawning ground of a degenerate breed of Americans.14
the Georgia colony promised that “free labor” would replace a reliance on indentured servants as well as African bondsmen.
people. Along the boundary between Virginia and Carolina was a large and forbidding wetland known as the Dismal Swamp.
Without a major harbor, and facing burdensome taxes if they shipped their goods through Virginia, many Carolinians turned to smuggling.
Explorers, amateur scientists, and early ethnologists like William Byrd all assumed—and unabashedly professed—that inferior or mismanaged lands bred inferior, ungovernable people.
Georgia was founded as a charitable venture, designed to uplift poor families and to reform debtors.
Unique among the American settlements, Georgia was not motivated by a desire for profit.
1732,
Georgia colony chartered
They aimed to do something completely unprecedented: to build a “free labor” colony.
More than any other colonial founder, Oglethorpe made himself one of the people, promoting collective effort.43
Unlike others before him, Oglethorpe felt the disadvantaged could be reclaimed if they were given a fair chance.
Slavery ruined the “industry of our White People,” he confessed, for they saw a “Rank of Poor Creatures below them,” and detested the thought of work out of a perverse pride, lest they might “look like slaves.”
sought to convince British policy makers that the Caribbean islands should not be the preferred colonial model.
mirroring the system of labor that Oglethorpe had tried but failed
Franklin was not sympathetic to the plight of the poor.
he contended that the only solution to poverty was some kind of coercive system to make the indigent work:
