Colonial Rebels

THE REBEL SPIRIT grew in early America as naturally as seed in good soil. It was not that the immigrants were radicals by persuasion. Except for a few, such as Roger Williams, most were motivated by mundane considerations. Captain John Smith and the band of 120 men who founded Jamestown in 1607 came to make their fortune. They were seeking not a new social order but, as Smith wrote, to "dig gold, wash gold, refine gold, load gold"-just as the Spanish had been doing, at much profit, in Latin America. When they could find no gold, they reconciled themselves to working the land. But what lay uppermost in their thoughts was improvement in their material plight. A couplet used in 1630 to entice men to the colonies expressed the prevailing hopes: In England land scarce and labour plenty, In Virginia land free and labour scarce. There were some dissenters who sought freedom to practice religious "heresies," such as the Puritans who would "purify" the Established Church, or the Pilgrims who would separate from it. But even they had no intention of subverting the British system or undermining the crown. The majority of early Americans were average Englishmen imbued with old-world biases. The idea of government by consent of the governed clashed fiercely with their inbred notion that you had to obey your king whether he was good or bad. The term "democracy" they deemed subversive. God had never ordained, said the Puritan John Cotton in 1638, that democracy be considered "a fit government either for church or commonwealth." If the "people be governor," he asked, "who shall be governed?" The only forms of rule "clearly approved and directed in scripture" were monarchy and aristocracy. To preach that all men, including servants and Indians, were equal was a blasphemy, subject to dire consequences. Quakers who made such statements in Boston or Salem might have an ear cut off or a tongue bored through. The Puritans, at first, lived by these aristocratic principles. Though they had fled to the Western Hemisphere to escape the tyranny of the Established Church of England, they established a tyranny of their own. Their church and state were united in a restrictive theocracy. In their colony a man could not vote unless he belonged to the official church, and he could not belong to the official church unless approved by the clergy-an approval that was withheld from five out of six applicants. Whether he belonged, however, he was required to abide by its strictures, on penalty of banishment, imprisonment, and in some cases even execution if he did not. In their economic life the Puritan leaders were stodgy bourgeois for whom, in the words of one writer, "Interest is their Faith, Money their God and large Possessions the only Heaven they covet." Their meeting houses and churches reflected this belief in class hierarchy. The rich sat in the better pews, the poor in the lesser ones. Yet even the Puritans had to modify their ways under the pressure of exigency. Since there was no Established Church here for them to "purify," they had to set up an independent one of their own. And because the colony grew too large, they had to decree representative government, even though they excluded those who did not own property from voting. Gradually, too, they had to deprive the clergy of its lay powers. Whatever the original disposition of the colonists, circumstance prodded them all too often toward radical ideas and radical acts. Consider the Pilgrims who embraced democracy almost by accident. The 102 hardy souls who set sail on the Mayflower in September 1620 had made an arrangement with the Virginia Company to settle' in its territory, north of Jamestown. But as cross winds and fierce storms drove their vessel northward, far from its original destination, they were faced with a problem. If they landed, as they must, elsewhere than Virginia, what form of government should they introduce? Some of the younger zealots suggested they use their "liberty" to recognize no foreign government-in other words, declare independence. The Mayflower Compact, drafted by the less headstrong and signed by all forty-one adult males, did not go that far, but it

spoke of majority rule and promised "just and equal laws"-concepts which were then anathema in semi-feudal England. Once they unpacked in Plymouth, the Pilgrims had to make an other decision: What kind of economic system should they adopt? Despite their religious dissent, they were not radical either in economic or political doctrine. Compared to the Anabaptists, Levellers, or Quakers they were, in fact tame as punch. Yet, they formulated a "common stock" plan that was nothing short of communistic. Under its terms the members of the community were to labor together for seven years, sharing from the common stock "their meat, drink, apparel, and all provisions." At the end of this period every adult, regardless of sex or ancestry, was to receive an equal share of the common capital and profits, including "the houses, lands, goods and chattels." The common stock plan did not work as conceived, and had to be abandoned rather early. But it is noteworthy how conditions jogged Americans in unforeseen directions. The rebel spirit, it must be conceded, did not arise here completely untutored. The immigrants came from a society much more fluid than the rest of Europe. The old order in Britain had been under attack since the Peasants' Revolt of 1381. Though it was still a tight society-as late as 1775 only 160,000 of its nine million people enjoyed the right to vote-it was much looser than that of its neighbors on the Continent. Where France and Spain permitted only Catholics to leave for the New World, and in small number, Britain permitted emigration not only by members of its own state church but Puritans, separatists, and even Christian Communists. Spain transported its feudal baggage intact to the Western Hemisphere; Britain's was already rent. Thus the men who fled its borders had already been exposed to dangerous ideas before they embarked. Any small opportunity was likely to bring those ideas into play once more. Separated from the restraints of the mother country by a ~eat ocean, living in sparsely settled communities, those opportunities were not infrequent. The small Confederation of Portsmouth and Newport, for instance, declared in 1641 that "the government which this body politic doth attend unto... is a Democratic or Popular government; that is to say, it is in the power of the body of freemen orderly assembled or the major part of them, to make or constitute just laws by which they will be regulated." Had these citizens made such a declaration in England, they would have been branded traitors and hauled off to prison. But in the isolation of America men did what came naturally. The radical impulse, however, was not solely a matter of heritage. It fed on that ancient division between the "many" and the "few," which has always been the handmaiden of radicalism. As Curtis P. Nettels notes in his book The Roots of American Civilization, "the conflict between privileged and non-privileged... forms the central theme of colonial history." The "many" came here from England (or Africa) in boats driven by sail, 90 by 26 feet, weighing only 300 tons. A trip might take as little as eight to ten weeks, but sometimes as much as a half year, if the winds were unfavorable. A passenger on one of these longer voyages records that of the original 150 aboard "more than 100 perished." To sustain life "we had to eat rats and mice. We paid from 8 pence to 2 shillings for a mouse, 4 pence for a quart of water." Approximately half of those who emigrated were "indentured servants," white slaves who sold themselves in bondage for varying periods, usually four to seven years, in return for passage to the New World. Two thirds of the inhabitants of early Virginia were indentured, many of them vagrants and former prisoners. It is estimated that at any given time in the colonial period 10 to 15 percent of the population were of this class. On arriving in America, the white slave would be marched to the magistrate's office to take an oath of allegiance to the king, then marched back to be auctioned off for ten to twenty pounds, depending on his skills. If a master could not sell a servant immediately, he would turn him over to a "soul driver" who drove him through the country in chains, looking for a buyer. It was not a pretty business.

Most white slaves came here voluntarily, but not a few, especially children, were kidnapped on the streets of Europe and shipped here against their will. Thirty-five thousand were British convicts whose death sentences were commuted (three hundred crimes were then punishable by death) on condition they accept limited servitude in Virginia, Maryland, or Georgia. So many felons were sent to Virginia that its House of Burgesses in 1670 enacted legislation to contain the practice. In addition, of course, scores of thousands of black men were kidnapped from the interior of Africa and brought here for lifelong service. At the time of the Revolution, one out of six Americans was a Negro. Contrary to belief, the white slave was often treated worse than black slaves. V. F. Calverton quotes a letter written in colonial days which has this interesting sentence: "Negroes being a property for life, the death of slaves in the prime of youth or strength is a material loss to the proprietor; they are, therefore, almost in every instance, under more comfortable circumstances than the miserable European, over whom the rigid planter exercises an inflexible severity." The only advantage enjoyed by the redemptioner vis-a-vis the black slave was that he eventually won his release and frequently a patch of land. But while that placed him a few notches ahead of his former status in England, it did not end his travail. It merely made him a small farmer-or an artisan-subject to a new set of aggrievements. If we add the small farmers and artisans who had paid their own way across the ocean, these were the elements responsible for an astonishing number of armed revolts, as well as ceaseless leftist pressures. The objects of this hostility were the "few"-the elite of Britain whose heavy hand reached out to shackle them from afar, as well as the new oligarchies that formed all too readily on colonial soil. For the British aristocrats and traders, the colonies were a lemon to be squeezed-through credits, trade, sale of land-and they were not chary about squeezing it. "For what purpose," asked the Marquis of Carmathen, "were they [the colonists] suffered to go to that country unless the profits of their labor should return to their masters here?" The profitability of relations is attested to by the fact that in the three quarters of a century before the Revolution, England had a favorable balance of trade amounting to twenty million pounds, a sizable sum those days. The British Board of Trade vetoed more than five hundred laws passed by colonial legislatures so as to guarantee Britain against American competition. The wealthy elements in America were hardly less acquisitive than their counterparts in Britain. Governor John Winthrop of Massachusetts staked out for himself a comfortable holding of eighteen hundred acres, and his subalterns were not far behind. Through political manipulation three Virginia families, the Carters, Beverleys, and Pages, eventually acquired a domain of almost three million acres. "Everywhere," writes Gustavus Myers, "but especially so in New York and Virginia, the landed proprietors became richer and more arrogant, - while poverty, even in new country with extraordinary resources, took root and continued to grow." The owner of a manor in Suffolk County, New York, wore embroidered belts costing 110 each, and on his clothes 104 embroidered silver buttons. When walking, he carried a heavy silver-headed cane; when riding, he rode on a fancy velvet saddle, always attended by twelve Negro slaves ready to meet any whim. Robert Carter of Virginia owned sixty thousand acres and was master of six hundred slaves. Colonel Samuel Allen, when he was appointed governor of New Hampshire in 1692, decreed that the whole province was his personal property and threatened to evict, as common trespassers, settlers who refused to pay him rent. His tenure was described by the Earl of Bellomont as "much more valuable than ten of the biggest estates in England and I will rate those ten estates at 300,000 a piece, one with another, which is three millions." By contrast, the farm laborer toiled sixteen hours a day for two or two and a half shillings, and the shoemaker and blacksmith for only slightly more. When Governor Winthrop was apprised of the fact that carpenters were earning as much as three shillings a day and common laborers two shillings sixpence, he rectified matters by having the courts decree lower scales.

Wages in the colonies admittedly were 30 to 40 percent higher than in Britain, and there were opportunities to secure land, where at home there were not. Yet the lot of the newcomer was no paradise. Not a few immigrants who had sold themselves into servitude "went mad," according to historian Wilfred S. Binkely, "when once they recognized the opportunity for a good living [was] not at once within their grasp." By 1660 poverty was so widespread in Boston that the city built an almshouse. The overseer was instructed to "set the poor to work" on such jobs as "carding, knitting, spinning, dressing hemp or flax, picking oakum," so that they would "not eat the bread of sloth and idleness, and be a burden on the public." Soon all major colonial towns had one or more poorhouses, and many required each family to take in impoverished citizens for a specified number of weeks annually. Prostitutes and beggars plied the streets, and many who received public aid had to wear a badge signifying their lower status.