No one in the colony had any expectation that indentured and enslaved workers would be treated as equal to their masters. But the distinction between planters and workers was generally rooted not in race but in class. England had a long history of dividing the rich from the poor, and class markers had only gotten more pronounced in the years since the enclosure movement had created roving bands of homeless people. As folks who had been pushed off the land moved about the country looking for work, the English gentry began to consider them lazy, unprincipled, savage. Reformers warned that the
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