A People's History of the United States

Zinn’s next chapter looks forward to the 17th century and the creation of the “color line” in the colonies that would become the United States. The story begins in the Virginia Colony at Jamestown at the start of the planting season in 1619. A Dutch trading ship sold 20 enslaved Africans to the colonists, who were desperate for additional labor (24). For the Jamestown settlers, the use of African slaves seemed attractive compared to the alternatives. Unlike in Central and South America, the Indigenous people outside Jamestown were able to resist the Europeans militarily. Attempts to enslave the locals tended to precipitate violent reprisals, which the Jamestown colonists could not afford. White settlers tended to be skilled workers and artisans who signed indenture contracts with those who had already settled in Virginia. These indentured servants sold their skills over a fixed period for the money needed to travel to the colony. The holders of their indentures were unwilling to see their valuable employees, who worked on time-sensitive contracts, waste their skills in fields growing wheat and tobacco. African slaves could be purchased specifically for purpose of field labor (25).

Zinn spends the rest of the chapter attempting to articulate how slavery came to be associated solely with Africans and how that development in turn formed the foundation for racism in the US. While the first Virginian slaves were purchased in 1619, the first Africans brought to North America traveled to Hispaniola in 1503 to replace the Indigenous people who were dying or being killed in the thousands. Africans had greater immunity to Eurasian diseases like smallpox and could be pressed into labor growing familiar staple crops. But this did not mean that Africans were compliant. In the 1520s and 1530s, there were several slave revolts across the Spanish colonies. The Spanish concluded that Africans had to be treated strictly to coerce compliance with their enslaved status (32). In addition, Europeans had to maintain their status as masters and colonizers. Virginia adopted these lessons and as early as 1630 punished white and Black people who grew too close or developed sexual relations (30). These policies were formalized in the 1670s and 1680s when the colony of Virginia formalized its slavery laws. These laws, according to Zinn, were based as much on the financial investments of Virginia slave owners as on a philosophical belief about race relations. But within a few generations, the relationship between white and Black people came to be seen as a natural relationship of subordination between the races. This racial hierarchy would come to replace the class hierarchies that existed in Europe at this same time (38).

Next, Zinn moves to the first popular movement in US history, Bacon’s Rebellion. The rebellion began in 1676, was led by a settler on the Virginia frontier Nathaniel Bacon, and was composed of white frontiersmen, Black slaves, and other discontents on the margins of Virginia society. According to a report sent to London after Bacon’s death, the rebels were motivated by the believed corruption and inefficiency of the colonial governor, by the high taxes levied against them, and most importantly by a perceived policy of toleration towards Indigenous peoples who lived on the other side of the Virginia frontier (39-40). Bacon, who the report says “seduced the Vulgar and most ignorant people” to his cause, argued that the colonial governor negotiated with native tribes independently of the reality of frontier life, which was constant warfare. Zinn argues that Bacon’s rebellion, and his “Declaration of the People” published in July 1676, represented a struggle between impoverished frontiersmen and the wealthy, cosmopolitan, coastal elite who administered the colony. But the rebellion was cut short. Just weeks later Bacon fell sick and died. According to reports, he was poisoned by the “swarmes of Vermyn that bred in his body” (41). A government flotilla sailed up the York River and by the end of the year had broken the remaining resistance.

Bacon’s Rebellion highlighted the class tensions not just in the Virginia colony but in many of the other British colonies. Settlers, servants, and slaves traveled across the Atlantic in growing numbers. Those who traveled as free or indentured persons hoped they would find new opportunities and vast tracts of unsettled land (44). But when they arrived, they realized that the first waves of colonists had entrenched themselves as an aristocratic elite. The reaction among America’s first elite was not to accommodate the needs of the new settlers but to defend their privileges. In many places, especially in the South, the rich tried to divide the impoverished along racial lines. One Carolinian suggested that the way to protect their power was “to make Indians & Negros a checque upon each other lest by their Vastly Superior Numbers we should be crushed” (54). By turning white against Black, and both against Indigenous people, disenfranchised people of various ethnicities could not organize against the rich. In the North, the disenfranchised were divided from the middle and upper classes by a narrative that emphasized how mean, unclean, and eventually un-British newer settlers were. This framework was more racially egalitarian but required stricter legal and social controls, including debtor’s prisons and public floggings for even slight infractions, to maintain the class hierarchy (46-47). In both cases, through the 18th century, the burgeoning white middle class became critical in maintaining the class and racial hierarchies that protected elite wealth and power. This strategy required a rhetoric of fraternity and equality among the middle and upper classes and the creation of a new national identity that erased class distinctions.

The class antagonisms that defined the late colonial era were subsumed after 1763 by a growing resentment towards the British crown. The French and Indian War, fought in the 1750s and 1760s, radically altered politics in the British colonies. The final settlement signed in 1763 left much to be desired in the estimation of the colonists. Few of their longstanding grievances were resolved and, in the wake of the war, the British government sought to impose duties and taxes to help pay Britain’s considerable debts. These taxes impacted the wealthy elites who resented their lack of control or input on the taxation policy (60). It seemed as if the British finally gave colonists a common cause to bind them together in a unified polity. However, despite the surface-level consensus, old class antagonisms remained.

Lower-class Americans articulated their discontent with the crown through loud, aggressive, often drunken, and sometimes violent meetings and protests, which included the sometimes-fatal practice of tarring-and-feathering British officials. This popular discontent often tapped into the longstanding class grievances first seen in Bacon’s Rebellion. One group formed in the mid-1760s, the Regulators, decried “the unequal chances the poor and the weak have in contentions with the rich and powerful” (64). These criticisms were couched in class inequalities and were concerning for America’s wealthy elites. Their solution, as Zinn frames it, was in the “mobilization of lower-class energy by upper-class politicians, for their own purposes” (61). The result was a compromise between the classes. The populist movements of the countryside demanded democracy, rights, and popular meetings. This was not entirely objectionable to the upper class, who in turn wanted control over economic policy. In exchange for greater democracy, wealthy Americans became the voice and ideological center of the revolution. The famous Sons of Liberty were formed from the upper tiers of urban society and declared themselves to be in opposition to “all riots or unlawful assemblies tending to the disturbance of the public tranquility” (68). Likewise, Thomas Paine, for many the voice of the revolution, made it clear that he was not for the crowd action of lower-class people” (70). Elite opinion channeled popular sentiments in opposition to the British crown but simultaneously made it clear that independent action or challenge to America’s class hierarchy was unacceptable.

The American Revolution began in 1775 and initially attracted many of the most radical and politically engaged Americans. Yet despite this early enthusiasm for the cause, most Americans were ambivalent about the war. John Adams estimated that one-third of Americans supported the Revolution, another third were neutral, and a final third actively supported the British (79). Militarily, the war quickly turned against the colonists thanks to several stinging defeats and the loss of New York City. While military fortunes would slowly reverse themselves in 1777, the initial defeats and stories of the hardships of the colonial army pushed many away from enlistment. Rather than tap into popular excitement to mobilize manpower, the Continental Congress was forced to turn to other inducements to entice recruits. Congress experimented with several measures, including a kind of conscription (79). But the most successful measures were those which promised to redistribute wealth through formal pay, signing bonuses, and the promise of post-war land redistribution. Many Americans, who had longstanding grievances about class inequality, saw the war as a way for them to improve their status and secure new economic opportunities.

American elites, however, had no intention of making good on these promises or of sharing power with the lower class. Land redistribution was fraught, in part because plantation owners were unwilling to break up their estates to pay for the war. Native Americans along the frontier actively resisted new settlements. And the massive estates owned by pro-British Tories were protected by Congress until they could be sold for profit. While the number of freeholding farmers increased after the war, there was no massive redistribution of wealth or fundamental change to the economic order (84). Likewise, a soldier could make as much as $6.66 per month as a private while the colonel who recruited them was paid over $75 per month plus a share of each enlistment bonus (85). But the pay divide is misleading as most soldiers were paid in Continental script, which was subject to inflation rates as high as 45% a month. Wages quickly evaporated in these economic conditions, if they were paid at all, which was never guaranteed. This circumstance led to several revolts within the Continental Army. George Washington and his subordinates imposed harsh discipline to maintain the military hierarchy. Overall, despite the rhetoric of democracy and freedom, the American Revolution reinforced and rebuilt America’s class hierarchy.

Likewise, the Constitution was drafted by elites to serve interests rather than in a collaborative process aimed at delivering the promises of the revolution. Of the 55 men in Philadelphia who drafted the document in 1787, the majority owned large estates. Many were slaveowners. And all owned, or had stakes, in significant businesses in their home states. The objective, as James Madison suggested, was to prevent “a rage for paper money, for an abolition of debts, for an equal division of property, or for any other improper or wicked project” from pervading “the whole body of the Union” (97). According to Zinn, this was the central project at the heart of the Constitution.