In chapter three of A People's History of the United States, author Howard Zinn makes it clear that the socioeconomic conditions of colonial America were anything but democratic. Zinn paints a picture of Indian uprisings, negro revolts, and white servant rebellions that betray our conventional understanding of the earliest events of American history.
At the beginning of the Revolutionary War in the 1770s, the colonies were highly-divided. Aristocratic, white landholders owned most of the wealth while poor whites, negro slaves, and Indians comprised the majority of the American populace. While the white elites usually had the backing of England in times of distress, they had their hands full with the sheer numbers of people to control and the fear of, if not actual, continental uprisings. England itself answered the call to restore the colonial "order" only when it appeared that their economic interests in the upstart colonies were threatened. Zinn points out a case in point: while the colonial aristocracy was busy controlling the destinies of poor whites, Indians who had been "displaced" to the western frontier, and a growing number of black slaves, the tobacco-growing landowners were taxed highly by the King and the Parliament.
Ironically, Zinn points out that the "persons of a mean and vile condition" were not the powerless, ordinary folk but were, in fact, the powerful aristocrats at the time who exercised deceit, cunning and outright ruthlessness to preserve their base of power at all costs. For example, the colonial aristocracy (landowning white men) pitted socioeconomic classes and races against each other without unconscionably.
In Virginia, as Zinn explains, a touchstone uprising called Bacon's Rebellion, was handily defeated by English troops who were requested by the legislature in Jamestown, Virginia. According to Zinn, the easy squashing of Bacon's Rebellion showed how the white upper class succeeded in dividing Indian against Indian as well as crushing any future attempts at rebellion by white frontiersmen. In Virginia, at least, the elite could focus on more important things, such as fighting the outrageous taxes imposed by their masters, the English Parliament.
It is a little-known fact that, in early American Colonial history, whites were commonly used as indentured servants. England and other European nations were more than eager to use the new colonies as a "dumping ground" for their societal undesirables. If they were lucky enough to survive the filthy conditions aboard the westward ships, they usually met an unwelcome fate in the Colonies, one that included brutality by their masters and no glimmer of hope or prospects of true freedom.
Indeed, as Zinn makes very clear, the American Revolution was not waged on the part of the poor, the working class, or the slaves (white, black, and/or Indian), it was a war in which the aristocracy used a burgeoning middle class to fight. Lastly, he suggests, the language of "freedom and equality" was nothing more than another clever ruse to help get the upper class what it wanted -- more power and more wealth. In order to do that, they had to break away from England's despotic rule and declare "their" independence from tyranny which, ironically, did not stop them from tyrannizing the majority -- the so-called "persons of a mean and vile condition".
Works Cited
Zinn, Howard. History is a Weapon: A People's History of the United States. Retrieved on 6/04/14 from http://www.historyisaweapon.com/zinnapeopleshistory.html.
