“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”
https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcript
In American mythology, Americans are a classless society where everyone rises or falls by his own merit. But Americans, our founders, started out as English. George Orwell dubbed Britain “the most class-ridden society under the sun.” And that was centuries later after class structure had relaxed. Of course, the English brought their strict and often cruel class structure with them to the colonies. The enslaved, Native and African, the indentured, servants, laborers, landowners, and the rest all had their own inflexible places in the class hierarchy. Nancy Isenberg in White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America writes of a class and bond enforcement in the early 1600s so harsh that being held captive by Native Americans did not free one of obligation. She goes on to note that an ideology that blamed poverty on the poor and corroded endorsement of welfare programs was present from the inception of the country.
New England would not need labor in mass until the first Industrial Revolution in the mid-18th to mid-19th centuries. In Southern English America, however, commercial agriculture demanded a great need for labor from early on. While a few who immigrated to what would become the US managed to do so on their own, most came as either indentured servants or enslaved Africans. The demand for labor meant that some states rewarded landowners with more land for each indentured servant brought from Europe. The servants would negotiate contracts, before or after the trip across the Atlantic, within whatever market forces existed at the time that covered contract length and provisions.
Provisions generally covered room and board and contracts averaged between 5 and 7 years. At the completion of the contract the servant would gain both their freedom and whatever pre-arranged bonus they’d negotiated: land, money, guns, clothing, etc. When the first black Africans came to Virginia in 1619 there were no laws enforcing slavery in the mainland American British colonies. The Africans were initially treated as indentured servants. They were given the same opportunity to pay off the debt of their purchase and receive freedom dues as any other indentured servant.
It sounds like a great deal. Unfortunately, there were people involved and people suck. The result was that less than half of indentured servants lived to complete the terms of their contracts. If you were a woman rape would probably be part of your “service” and if you became pregnant you could count on years being added to your contract. Early on those that survived to receive their freedom packages may well have been better off than those new immigrants who were able to come freely to the country but by the end of the century slave laws had spread throughout the colonies. By the late 1600s a form of African slavery was present all over the colonial US. Things were not much better for indentured servants.
In the latter half of the 17th century the best land was already taken, contracts were arbitrarily enforced, and survivors of indentured servitude often found themselves with little to show for their labor. In a story familiar and repetitive the rich got richer while small farmers and landless freemen struggled to survive. This was the impetus of Bacon’s Rebellion of 1676. The Rebellion, the increasing cost of indentured servants, and competition from newly freed servants’ demands for land, led to a turn away from indentured servitude and a revamping of slavery into the race-based chattel slavery with which most Americans are familiar.
Meanwhile, the white, landed elite still held on to their exalted status. Most land throughout the colonies was held by a scant few. In Virginia at the turn of the 18th century fewer than 10% of people owned more than half the land. “Land was the principal source of wealth, and those without any had little chance to escape servitude,” Isenberg notes. By the time of the American Revolution race-based chattel slavery had been an American institution for almost a century. The landless underclass, in the meantime, were marked and their status ingrained. Noted citizenry of the time would refer to their white poor as slothful, mean, and squalid.
Only 15 of the 56 men who signed the Declaration of Independence in 1776 never enslaved anyone. The rest, 41 or almost three quarters of them, ~73%, were slavers at some time in the lives. All thirteen of the colonies: New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia, were slave states at the signing of the Constitution. Even those of us with our heads most thoroughly buried in the sand recognize that the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution purposefully and with prejudice excluded enslaved people.
Often, American history is written as though whites were one class united against the “other”. Even those histories about becoming “white” suggest this. The twin specters of slavery and white supremacy in American history often distract from, or obscure, the severe class divisions. Thus, what is less noted is how poor whites, free people who were not white, and/or those not Christian were also excluded from the pursuit of happiness, from liberty, and even had their lives taken from them. America started out as an individualist society strangled by a classism that focused all wealth and support ever upward. It was dog eat dog and whoever landed on top was validated in his means by his ends.
To be continued…
Sources
https://interactive.aljazeera.com/aje/2016/us-elections-2016-who-can-vote/index.html
https://calendar.eji.org/racial-injustice/jul/02
https://www.vpr.org/post/how-enslaved-woman-sued-her-freedom-18th-century-massachusetts#stream/0
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/04/02/vermont-slavery-ban/7200493/
https://nmaahc.si.edu/blog-post/vermont-1777-early-steps-against-slavery
http://www.mrheintz.com/how-many-signers-of-the-declaration-of-independence-owned-slaves.html
https://jacobinmag.com/2019/08/poor-whites-have-been-written-out-of-history-for-a-very-political-reason
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/09/the-original-underclass/492731/
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/26/books/review/white-trash-by-nancy-isenberg.html
https://medium.com/@ebruenig/the-undeserving-poor-a-very-tiny-history-96c3b9141e13
https://www.pbs.org/opb/historydetectives/feature/indentured-servants-in-the-us/
https://www.ushistory.org/us/5b.asp
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/03/american-immigration-service-slavery/555824/
https://journals.openedition.org/mimmoc/2777?lang=en
https://eh.net/encyclopedia/indentured-servitude-in-the-colonial-u-s/