Ethnic Studies

A PEOPLE’S HISTORY Of rHE UNITED STATES

we make it our own, there would be an eternally inexhaustible earth and

a forever lasting peace.” Perhaps there is some romantic mythology in that. But the evidence

from European travelers in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, put together recently by an American specialist on Indian life,

William Brandon, is overwhmiMdY supportive of much of that “myth.” Even allowing for the imperfection of myths, it is enough to make us question, for that time and ours, the excuse of progress in the

annihilation of races, and the telling of history from the standpoint of the conquerors and leaders ofWestern civilization.

DRAWING THE COLOR LINE

A black American writer, J. Saunders Redding, describes the arrival of a ship in North America in the year 1619:

Sails furled, flag drooping at her rounded stern, she rode the tide in from the sea. She was a strange ship, indeed, by all accounts, a frightening ship, a ship of mystery. ‘Whether she was trader, privateer, or man-of-war no one knows. Through her bulwarks black-mouthed cannon yawned. The flag she flew was Dutch; her crew a motley. Her port of call, an English settlement, Jamestown, in the colony of Virginia. She came, she traded, and shortly aftenvards was gone. Probably no ship in modern history has carried a more portentous freight. Her cargo? Twenty slaves.

There is not a country in world history in which racism has been more important, for so long a time, as the United States. And the prob lem of“the color line,” as W. E. B. Du Bois put it, is still with us. So it is more than a purely historical question to ask: How does it start?—and an even more urgent question: How might it end? Or, to put it differ ently: Is it possible for whites and blacks to live together without hatred? If history can help answer these questions, then the beginnings of

slavery in North America—a continent where we can trace the comingof the first whites and the first blacks—might supply at least a few clues. Some historians think those first blacks in Virginia were consideredas servants, like the white indentured servants brought from Europe.

Ut the strong probability is that, even if they were listed as “servants” (amore familiar category to the English), they were viewed as being differ- white servants, were treated differently, and in fact were slaves.

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A PEOPLE’S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

In any case, slavery developed quickly into a regular institution, into the

normal labor relation of blacks to whites in the New World. With it

developed that special racial feeling—whether hatred, or contempt, or

pity, or patronization—that accompanied the inferior position of blacks

in America for the next 350 years—that combination of inferior status

and derogatory thought we call racism.

Everything in the experience of the first white settlers acted as a

pressure for the enslavement of blacks.

The Virginians of 1619 were desperate for labor, to grow enough

food to stay alive. Among them were survivors from the winter of

1609—1610, the “starving time,” when, crazed for want of food, they

roamed the woods for nuts and berr ies, dug up graves to eat the corpses,

and died in batches until five hundre d colonists were reduced to sixty.

In the Journals of the House of Burge sses of Virginia is a document

of 1619 which tells of the first twelve years of the Jamestown colony.

The first settlement had a hundred persons, who h ad one small ladle of

barley per meal. When more people arrived, there was even less fo od.

Many of the people lived in cavelike holes dug into the grou nd, and in

the winter of 1609—16 10, they were

driven thru insufferable hunger to eat those things which nature most

abhorred, the flesh and excrements ofman as well ofour own nation as ofan Indian, cligged by some out of his grave after he had lain buried three days

and wholly devoured him; others, envying the better state of body of any whom hunger has not yet so much wasted as their own, lay wait and threat ened to kill and eat them; one among them slew his wife as she slept in his bosom, cut her in pieces, salted her and fed upon her till he had clean

devoured all parts saving her head.

A petition by thirty colonists to the House ofBurgesses, complaining against the twelve-year governorship of Sir Thomas Smith, said:

In those 12 years of Sir Thomas Smith, his government, we aver that the colony for the most part remained in great want and misery under most severe and cruel laws. . . . The allowance in those times for a man was only eight

ounces of meale and half a pint of peas for a day... mouldy, rotten, full of cobwebs and maggots, loathsome to man and not fit for beasts, which forced many to flee for relief to the savage enemy, who being taken again were put to sundry deaths as by hanging, shooting and breaking upon the wheel ... of whom one for stealing two or three pints of oatmeal had a bodkin thrust through his tongue and was tied with a chain to a tree until he starved.

DRAWING THE COLOR LINE 25

The Virginians needed labor, to grow corn for subsistence, to grow tobacco for export. They had just figured out how to grow tobacco, and in 1617 they sent off the first cargo to England. finding that, like all pleasurable drugs tainted with moral disapproval, it brought a high price, the planters, despite their high religious talk, were not going to ask questions about something so profitable. They couldn’t force Indians to work for them, as Columbus had

done. They were outnumbered, and while, with superior firearms, they could massacre Indians, they would face massacre in return. They could not capture them and keep them enslaved; the Indians were tough, resourceful, defiant, and at home in these woods, as the transplanted Englishmen were not. White servants had not yet been brought over in sufficient quantity.

Besides, they did not come out of slavery, and did not have to do more than contract their labor for a few years to get their passage and a start in the New World. As for the free white settlers, many of them were skilled craftsmen, or even men of leisure back in England, who were so little inclined to work the land thatJohn Smith, in those early years, had to declare a kind of martial law, organize them into work gangs, and force them into the fields for survival. There may have been a kind of frustrated rage at their own inepti

tude, at the Indian superiority at taking care of themselves, that made the Virginians especially ready to become the masters ofslaves. Edmund Ivlorgan imagines their mood as he writes in his book American Slavey, American freedom:

If you were a colonist, you knew that your technology was superior to the Indians’. You knew that you were civilized, and they were savages But yotir superior technology had proved insufficient to extract anything. The Indians, keeping to themselves, laughed at your superior methods and lived from the land more abundantly and with less labor than you did.... And when your own people started deserting in order to live with them, it was too much C) you killed the Indians, tortured them, burned their vil lages, burned their cornfields. It proved your superiority, in spite of your failures. And you gave similar treatment to any ofyour own people who suc cumbed to their savage ways of life. But you still did not grow much

Black slaves were the answer And it was natural to consider impotd blacks as sLaves, even if the institution of slavery would not regu1ar1z and legalized for several decades. Because, by 1619, a

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corn.

DRAWING THE COLOR LINE

million blacks had already been bro ught from Africa to South America

and the Caribbean, to the Portugues e and Spanish colonies, to wo

rk as

slaves, fifty years before Columbus, the Portuguese took ten African

blacks to Lisbon—this was the s tart of a regular trade in slaves. Afri

can

blacks had been stamped as slave labor for a hundred years. So it would

have been strange if those twenty blacks, forcibly transported to

Jamestown, and sold as objects tO settlers anxious for a steadfast source

of labor, were considered as anything but slaves.

Their helplessness made enslavement easier. The Indians were on

their own land. The whites were in their own European culture. The

blacks had been torn from their land and culture, forced into a situation

where the heritage of language, dress, custom, family relations, was bit

by hit obliterated except for the remnants that blacks could hold on to

by sheer, extraordinary persistence.

l.Vas their culture inferior— and so subject to easy destruction?

Inferior in military capability, yes—vulnerable to whites with guns and

ships. But in no other way— except that cultures that are different are

often taken as inferior, especially when such a judgment is practical and

profitable. Even militarily, while the Westerners could secure forts on

the African coast, they were unable to subdue the interior and had to

come to terms with its chiefs. The African civilization was as advanced in

its own way as that of

Europe. In certain ways, it was more admirable; but it also included cru

elties, hierarchical privilege, and the readiness t o sacrifice human lives

for religion or profit. It was a civilization of 10 0 million people, using

iron implements and skilled in farming. It had larg e urban centers and

remarkable achievements in weaving, ceramics, sculp ture.

European travelers in the sixteenth century were im pressed with the

African kingdoms of Timbuktu and Mali, already stab le and organized

at a time when European states were just beginning t o develop into the

modern nation. In 1563, Ramusio, secretary to the r ulers in Venice,

wrote to the Italian merchants: “Let them go and do bus iness with the

King ofTimbuktu and Mali and there is no doubt that the y will be well-

received there with their ships and their goods and treated well, and

granted the favours that they ask. . . A Dutch report, around 1602, on the West African kin

gdom of

Benin, said: “The Towne seemeth to be very great, when you enter it.

You go into a great broad street, not paved, which seemeth to be seven

or eight times broader than the Warmoes Street in Amsterdam. . . . The

Houses in this Towne stand in good order, one close and even with the

other, as the Houses in Holland stand.”

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The inhabitants of the Guinea Coast were described by one traveler around 1680 as “very civil and good-natured people, easy to be dealt with, condescending to what Europeans require of them in a civil way,

and very ready to return double the presents we make them.” Africa had a kind of feudalism, like Europe based on agriculture, and

with hierarchies of lords and vassals. But African feudalism did not

come, as did Europe’s, out of the slave societies of Greece and Rome,

which had destroyed ancient tribal life. In Africa, tribal life was still

powerful and some of its better features—a communal spirit, more

kindness in law and punishment—still existed. And because the lords did

not have the weapons that European lords had, they could not co mmand

obedience as easily. In his book The African Slave Trade, Basil Davidson contrasts law in

the Congo in the early sixteenth century with law in Portug al and

England. In those European countries, where the idea of private prop

erty was becoming powerful, theft was punished brutally. In England,

even as late as 1740, a child could be hanged for stealing a ra g ofcotton.

But in the Congo, communal life persisted, the idea of priva te property

was a strange one, and thefts were punished with fines or vario us degrees

of servitude. A Congolese leader, told of the Portuguese l egal codes,

asked a Portuguese once, teasingly: “Vhat is the penalty in Po rtugal for

anyone who puts his feet on the ground?” Slavery’ existed in the African states, and it was sometimes used by

Europeans to justify their own slave trade. But, as Davidson points out,

the “slaves” of Africa were more like the serfs of Europe—in other

words, like most of the population of Europe. It was a harsh servitude,

but they had rights which slaves brought to America did not have, and

they were “altogether different from the human cattle of the slave ships

and the American plantations.” In the Ashanti Kingdom ofWest Africa, one observer noted that “a slave might marry; own property; himself own a slave; swear an oath; be a competent witness and ultimately become heir to his master. . . . An Ashanti slave, nine cases out of ten, possibly became an adopted member of the family, and in time his descendants so merged and intermarried with the owner’s kinsmen that only a few would know their origin.” One slave trader, John Newton (who later became an antislavery

leader), wrote about the people ofwhat is now Sierra Leone:

THE UNITED STATES 26 A PEOPLE’S HISTORY

Of

The state of slavery, among these wild barbarous people, as we esteem them, is much milder than in our colonies, for as, on the one hand, they have no land in high cultivation, like our West India plantations, and therefore no

guageS. The conditions of cap

ture and sale were crushing affirmations to

the black African of his helplessness in the face of sup

erior force. The

marches to the coast, s ometimes for 1,000 miles, with

people shackled

around the neck, under w hip and gun, were death m

arches, in which

two of every five blacks died. On the coast, they were

kept in cages

until they were picked and sold. One John Barbot, at the

end of the

seventeenth century, described these cages on the Gold Coast:

As the slaves come down to Fida from the inland country, they are p

ut into a

booth or prison . . . near the beach, and when the Europeans are to re

ceive

them, they are brought out onto a large plain, where the ship’s sttrgeon

s

examine every part of everyone of th em, to the smallest member, men

and

women being stark naked.... Such as are allowed good and sound are

set

on one side ... marked on the breast with a red-hot iron, imprinting

the

mark of the French, English, or Dutch companies... . The branded slaves

after this are returned to their former bo oths where they await shipmen

t,

sometimes 10—15 days....

DRAWING TIlE COLOR LINE

The height, sometimes, between decks, was only eighteen i nches; so that the

unfortunate human beings could not turn around, or even on the ir sides, the

elevation being less than the breadth of their shoulders; and here they are

usually chained to the decks by the neck and legs. In such a place the sense of

misery and suffocation is so great, that the Negroes . . . are driven to frenzy

On one occasion, hearing a great noise from belowd ecks where the

blacks were chained together, the sailors ope ned the hatches and found

the slaves in different stages of suffoca tion, many dead, some having

killed others in desperate attempts to brea the. Slaves often jumped over

hoard to drown rather than continue thei r suffering. To one observer a

slave-deck was “so covered with blood and mucus that it resembled a

slaughter house.” Under these conditions, perhaps one of every th

ree blacks trans

ported overseas died, but the huge prof its (often double the investment

on one trip) made it worthwhile fo r the slave trader, and so the blacks

were packed into the holds like fish. first the Dutch, then the English, dominate

d the slave trade. (By

1795 Liverpool had more than a hun dred ships carrying slaves and

accounted for half of all the European slav e trade.) Some Americans in

New England entered the business, an d in 1637 the first American slave

ship, the Desire, sailed from Marblehe ad. Its holds were partitioned into

racks, 2 feet by 6 feet, with leg irons and bars.

By 1800, 10 to 15 million blacks had been t ransported as slaves to the

Americas, representing perhaps one-third o f those originally seized in

Africa. It is roughly estimated that Africa lost 50 million human beings

to death and slavery in those centuries we call the beginnings ofmodern

Western civilization, at the hands of slave traders an d plantation owners

in Western Europe and America, the countries d eemed the most

advanced in the world. In the year 1610, a Catholic priest in the Americas nam

ed Father

Sandoval wrote hack to a church functionary in Europe to ask if the cap

ture, transport, and enslavement of African blacks was legal by church

doctrine. A letter dated March 12, 1610, from Brother Luis Bran daon to

Father Sandoval gives the answer:

Your Reverence writes me that you would like to know whether the Negroes

who are sent to your parts have been legally captured. To this I reply that I

thmkyour Reverence should have no scruples on this point, because this is a matter which has been questioned by the Board of Conscience in Lisbon, and all Its members are learned and conscientious men. Nor did the bishops

I IIL

28 A PEOPLF’S HISTORY of THE UNI

TED STATES

call for that excessive, uninternUtt labour,

which exhausts our slaves: so ,

on the other hand, no man is permitted to draw

blood even from a slave.

African slavery is hardly tO be praised. But

it was far different from

plantation or mining slavery jn the Am

ericas, which was lifelong,

morally crippling, des tructive of family

ties, without hope of any

future. African slavery lacked two elements

that made American slav

ery the most cruel form of slavery in history:

the frenzy for limitless

profit that comes from capitalistic agriculture; the

reduction of the

slave to less than hum an status by the us

e of racial hatred, with that

relentless clarit)’ base d on color, where

white was master, black was

slave. In fact, it was

because they came from a settled culture, of tribal

customs and family ties, of communal life and

traditional ritual, that

African blacks foun d themselves especially

helpless when removed

from this. They were captured in the interio

r (frequently by blacks

caught up in the slave trade themselves), sold on the

coast, then shoved

into pens with blacks of other tribes, often speaking

different lan-

Then they were packed aboard the slave ships, in spaces not muc

h

bigger than coffins, chained together in the dark, wet slime of the sh

lp

bottom, choking in the stench of their own excrement. Documents

of

zCCQzU ,

A PEOPLE’S HISTORY Of THE UNITED STATES DRAWING THE COLOR LINE 3

There is an enormous difference between a feeling of racial

strangeness, perhaps fear, and the mass enslavement ofmillions of black

people that took place in the Americas. The transition from one to the

other cannot be explained easily by “natural” tendencies. It is not hard

to understand as the outcome ofhistorical conditions. Slavery grew as the plantation system grew. The reason is easily

traceable to something other than natural racial repugnance: the num

ber of arriving whites, whether free or indentured servants (under four

to seven years contract), was not enough to meet the need of the planta

tions. By 1700, in Virginia, there were 6,000 slaves, one-twelfth of the

population. By 1763, there were 170,000 slaves, about half the popu la

Blacks were easier to enslave than whites or Indians. But they were

still not easy to enslave. from the beginning, the imported black men

and women resisted their enslavement. Ultimately their resistance was

controlled, and slavery was established for 3 million blacks in the South.

Still, under the most difficult conditions, under pain of mutilation and

death, throughout their two hundred years of enslavement in North

America, these Afro-Americans continued to rebel. Only occasionally

was there an organized insurrection. More often they showed their

refusal to submit by running away. Even more often, they engaged in

sabotage, slowdowns, and subtle forms of resistance which asserted, if only to themselves and their brothers and sisters, their dignity as human beings. The refusal began in Africa. One slave trader reported that Negroes

were “so wilful and loth to leave their own country that they have often leap’d out of the canoes, boat and ship into the sea, and kept under water till they were drowned.” When the very first black slaves were brought into Hispaniola in

1503, the Spanish governor of Hispaniola complained to the Spanish court that fugitive Negro slaves were teaching disobedience to the Indians. In the 1520s and 1530s, there were slave revolts in Hispaniola, Puerto Rico, Santa Marta, and what is now Panama. Shortly after those rebellions, the Spanish established a special police for chasing fugitive slaves.

A Virginia statute of 1669 referred to “the obstinacy of many of them,” and in 1680 the Assembly took note ofslave meetings “under the pretense of feasts and brawls” which they considered of “dangerous con sequence.” In 1687, in the colony’s Northern Neck, a plot was discov ered in which slaves planned to kill all the whites in the area and escape during a mass funeral.

Gerald Mtillin, who studied slave resistance in eighteenth-century Virginia in his work Flight and Rebellion, reports:

The available sources on slavery in l$th-cenmry Virginia—plantation and county records, the newspaper advertisements for runaways—describe rebellious slaves and few others. The slaves described were lazy and thiev ing; they feigned illnesses, destroyed crops, stores, tools, and sometimes attacked or killed overseers. They operated blackmarkets in stolen goods. Runaways were defined as various types, they were truants (who usually returned voluntarily), “outlaws”. . . and slaves who were actually fugitives: men who visited relatives, went to town to pass as free, or tried to escape slavery completely, either by boarding ships and leaving the colony, or band ing together in cooperative efforts to establish villages or hide-outs in the frontier. The commitment of another type of rebellious slave was total; these men became killers, arsonists, and insurrectionists.

Slaves recently from Africa, still holding on to the heritage of their communal society would run away in groups and try to establish villages of runaways out in the wilderness, on the frontier. Slaves born in America, on the other hand, were more likely to run off alone, and, with the skills they had learned on the plantation, try to pass as free men. In the colonial papers of England, a 1729 report from the lieutenant

governor ofVirginia to the British Board of Trade tells how “a number of Negroes, about fifteen . . . formed a design to withdraw from their Master and to fix themselves in the fastnesses of the neighboring Mountains. They had found means to get into their possession some Arms and Ammunition, and they took along with them some Provisions, their Cloths, bedding and working Tools. . . . Tho’ this attempt has hap pily been defeated, it ought nevertheless to awaken us into some effec tual measures. . . Slavery was immensely profitable to some masters. James Madison

told a British visitor shortly after the American Revolution that he could make $257 on every Negro in a year, and spend only $12 or $13 on his keep. Another viewpoint was of slaveowner Landon Carter, writing about fifty years earlier, complaining that his slaves so neglected their work and were so uncooperative (“either cannot or will not work”) that he began to wonder ifkeeping them was worthwhile.

Some historians have painted a picture—based on the infrequency of organizej rebellions and the ability of the South to maintain slavery for two hundred years—of a slave population made submissive by their con ition; with their African heritage destroyed, they were, as Stanley

tion.

A PEOPLE’S hISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

Elkins said, made into “Sambos,” “a society ofhelpless dependents.” Or as another historian, Ulrich Phillips, said, “by racial quality submissive.” But looking at the totality of slave behavior, at the resistance ofeveryday life, from quiet noncooperation in work to running away, the picture becomes different. In 1710, warning the Virginia Assembly, Governor Alexander

Spotswood said:

freedom wears a cap which can without a tongue, call together all those who long to shake off the fetters of slavery and as such an Insurrection would surely be attended with most dreadful consequences so I think we cannot be too early in providing against it, both by putting our selves in a better posture ofdefence and by making a law to prevent the consultations of those Negroes.

Indeed, considering the harshness of punishment for running away, that so many blacks did run away must be a sign of a powerful rebel liousness. All through the 1700s, the Virginia slave code read:

Whereas many times slaves run away and lie hid and lurking in swamps, woods, and other obscure places, killing hogs, and commiting other injuries to the inhabitants . . . if the slave does not immediately return, anyone what soever may kill or destroy such slaves by such ways and means as he . . . shall think fit. . . . If the slave is apprehended . it shall . . . be lawful for the county court, to order such punishment for the said slave, either by dismem bering, or in any other way. . . as they in their discretion shall think fit, for the reclaiming any such incorrigible slave, and terrifying others from the like practices.

Mullin found newspaper advertisements between 1736 and 1801 for 1,138 men runaways, and 141 women. One consistent reason for run ning away was to find members of one’s family—showing that despite the attempts of the slave system to destroy family ties by not allowing marriages and by separating families, slaves would face death and inuti lation to get together. In Maryland, where slaves were about one-third of the population in

1750, slavery had been written into law since the 1660s, and statutes for controlling rebellious slaves were passed. There were cases where slave women killed their masters, sometimes by poisoning them, sometimes by burning tobacco houses and homes. Punishments ranged from whip ping and branding to execution, but the trouble continued. In 1742, seven slaves were put to death for murdering their master.

DRAWING THE COLOR LINE 35

Fear of slave revolt seems to have been a permanent fact of planta tion life. William Byrd, a wealthyVirginia slaveowner, wrote in 1736:

We have already at least 10,000 men of these descendants of Ham, fit to bear arms, and these numbers increase every day, as well by birth as by importation. And in case there should arise a man of desperate fortune, he might with more advantage than Cataline kindle a servile war.. . and tinge our rivers wide as they are with blood.

It was an intricate and powerful system ofcontrol that the slaveown ers developed to maintain their labor supply and their way of life, a sys tem both subtle and crude, involving every device that social orders employ for keeping power and wealth where it is. As Kenneth Stampp puts it:

A wise master did not take seriously the belief that Negroes were natural- born slaves. He knew better. He knew that Negroes freshly imported from Africa had to be broken into bondage; that each succeeding generation had to be carefully trained. This was no easy task, for the bondsman rarely sub mitted willingly. Moreover, he rarely submitted completely. In most cases there was no end to the need for control—at least not until old age reduced the slave to a condition ofhelplessness.

The system was psychological and physical at the same time. The slaves were taught discipline, were impressed again and again with the idea of their own inferiority to “know their place,” to see blackness as a sign of subordination, to be awed by the power of the master, to merge their interest with the master’s, destroying their own individual needs. To accomplish this there was the discipline ofhard labor, the breakup of the slave family, the lulling effects of religion (which sometimes led to “great mischief,” as one slaveholder reported), the creation of disunity among slaves by separating them into field slaves and more privileged house slaves, and finally the power of law and the immediate power of the overseer to invoke whipping, burning, mutilation, and death.

]Dismemberment was provided for in the Virginia Code of 1705. _j Maryland passed a law in 1723 providing for cutting off the ears of

blacks who struck whites, and that for certain serious crimes, slaves should be hanged and the body quartered and exposed.

Still, rebellions took place—not many, but enough to create constantear among white planters. The first large-scale revolt in the North encan colonies took place in New York in 1712. In New York, slaves

34 t

were 10 percent of the population, the highest proportion in the north

ern states, where economic conditions usually did not require large

numbers of field slaves. About twenty-five blacks and two Indians set fire

to a building, then killed nine whites who caIne on the scene. They were

captured by soldiers, put on trial, and twenty-one were executed. The

governor’s report to England said: “Some were burn t, others were

hanged, one broke on the wheel, and one hung alive in chains in the

town.. . .“ One had been burned over a slow fire for eight to ten

hours—all this to serve notice to other slaves. A letter to London from South Carolina in 1720

reports:

I am now to acquaint you that very lately we have had a very wicked and bar

barous plot of the designe of the negroes rising with a designe to destroy all

the white people in the Country’ and then to take Charles Town in hill body

hut it pleased God it was discovered and many of them taken prisoners and

some burnt and some hang’d and some banish’d.

Around this time there were a number of fires in Boston and New

Haven, suspected to be the work ofNegro slaves. As a result, one Negro

was executed in Boston, and the Boston Council ruled that any slaves

who on their own gathered in groups of two or more were to be pun

ished by whipping. At Stono, South Carolina, in 1739, about twenty

slaves rebelled,

killed two warehouse guards, stole guns and gunpowder, and headed

south, killing people in their way, and burning buildings. They were

joined by others, until there were perhaps eighty slaves in all and,

according to one account of the time, “they called out Liberty, marched

on with Colours displayed, and two Drums beating.” The militia found

and attacked them. In the ensuing battle perhaps fifty slaves and twenty-

five whites were killed before the uprising was crushed. Herbert Aptheker, who did detailed research on slave

resistance in

North Asnerica for his book American Negro Stave Revolts, found about

250 instances where a minimum of ten slaves joined in a revolt or con

spiracy. from time to time, whites were involved in the slave resistance.

As

early as 1663, indentured white servants and black slaves in Gloucester

County, Virginia, formed a conspiracy to rebel and gain their freedom.

The plot was betrayed, and ended with executions. Mullin reports that

the newspaper notices of runaways in Virginia often warned “ill

disposed” whites about harboring fugitives. Sometimes slaves and free

men ran off together, or cooperated in crimes together. Sometimes,

37

black male slaves ran off and joined white women. from time to time, white ship captains and watermen dealt with runaways, perhaps making the slave a part of the crew. In New York in 1741, there were ten thousand whites in the city and

two thousand black slaves. It had been a hard winter and the poor—slave and free—had suffered greatly. ‘When mysterious fires broke out, blacks and whites were accused of conspiring together. Mass hysteria devel oped against the accused. After a trial full of lurid accusations by inform ers, and forced confessions, two white men and two white women were executed, eighteen slaves were hanged, and thirteen slaves were burned

Only one fear was greater than the fear ofblack rebellion in the new American colonies. That was the fear that discontented whites would join black slaves to overthrow the existing order. In the early years of slavery, especia11y before racism as a way of thinking was firmly ingrained, while white indentured servants were often treated as badly as black slaves, there was a possibility of cooperation.As Edmund Morgan sees it:

There are hints that the two despised groups initially saw each other as shar ing the same predicament. It was common, for example, for servants and slaves to run away together, steal hogs together, get drunk together. It was not uncommon for them to make love together. In Bacon’s Rebellion, one of the last groups to surrender was a mixed band of eighty negroes and twenty English servants.

As Morgan says, masters, “initially at least, perceived slaves in much the same way they had always perceived servants . . . shiftless, irresponsible, unfaithful, ungrateful, dishonest. . . .“ And “if freemen with disap pointed hopes should make common cause with slaves of desperate hope, the results might be worse than anything Bacon had done.” And so, measures were taken. About the same time that slave codes,

involving discipline and punishment, were passed by the Virginia Assembly,

6 A PEOPLE’S HISTORY Of THE UNITED STATES DRAWING THE COLOR LINE

alive.

J

Virginia’s ruling class, having proclaimed that all white men were superior to black, went on to offer their social (but white) inferiors a number of benefits previously denied them. In 1705 a law was passed requiring Inasters to provide whmt servants whose indenture time was up with ten bushels of corn, thirty shillings, and a gun, while women servants were to get 15 bushels ofcorn and fort shillings. Also, the newly freed servants were to get 50 acres of land.

38 A PEOPLE’S HISTORY Of THE UNITED STATES

Morgan concludes: “Once the small planter felt less exploited by tax ation and began to prosper a little, he became less turbulent, less dan gerous, more respectable. He could begin to see his big neighbor not as an extortionist but as a powerful protector of their common interests.” We see now a complex web ofhistorical threads to ensnare blacks for

slavery in America: the desperation of starving settlers, the special help lessness of the displaced African, the powerful incentive of profit for slave trader and planter, the temptation of superior status for poor whites, the elaborate controls against escape and rebellion, the legal and

social punishment ofblack and white collaboration. The point is that the elements of this web are historical, not “natu

ral.” This does not mean that they are easily disentangled, 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 des

perate for small gifts of status, and has prevented that unity ofblack and white necessary for joint rebellion and reconstruction. Around 1700, the Virginia House ofBurgesses 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 warrs that according to our present Circumstances we can hardly governe them and if they were fitted with Armes and had the Opertunity ofmeeting 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.

PERSONS OF MEAN AND VILE CONDITION

i 1676, seventy years after Virginia was founded, a hundred years before it supplied leadership for the American Revolution, that colony faced a rebellion ofwhite frontiersmen, joined by slaves and servants, a rebellion so threatening that the governor had to flee the burning capi tal 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 sup pressed, its leader, Nathaniel Bacon, dead, and his associates hanged, Bacon was described in a Royal Commission report:

He was said to be about four or five and thirty years of age, indifferent tall but slender, black-hair’d and of an ominous, pensive, melancholly Aspect, of a pestilent and prevalent Logical discourse tending to atheisme. . . . 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, beacherous and incapable, the Lawes and Taxes as unjust and oppressive and cryes up absolute necessity of redress. Thus Bacon encouraged the Tumult and as the unquiet crowd follow and adhere to him, he listeth them as they come in upon a large paper, writing their name circular wise, that their Ringleaders might not be found out. Having connur’d them into this circle, given them Brandy to wind up the charme, and enjoyned them by an oath to sck fast together and to him and the oath being administered he went and infected New Kent County ripe for Rebellion.

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