Chapter Content
Okay, so you know, a lot of people think about indentured servants and they kind of, I don't know, gloss over it, right? But it's like, no, these people, they were bought and sold, just like slaves, seriously. I even saw this thing, this announcement, in some old newspaper, where they were advertising, like, a hundred "healthy servants" men, women, boys for sale. It's pretty wild, huh?
And you hear all these, like, rosy stories, right? About how great it was coming to America and how much better life was. But then you read stuff like this, like this one immigrant who wrote a letter, and it was like, "Dude, whoever's doing okay in Europe, just stay there. It's just misery and crap over here, just like back home, maybe even worse, depending on who you are." It wasn't all sunshine and rainbows, that's for sure.
Beatings, whippings, totally common. And, you know, servant women? Awful stuff. Raped. This one observer, he testified, like, "I've seen an overseer beat a servant, like, with a cane, just bam, bam, bam, over the head, blood everywhere, over something totally stupid." And get this, the Maryland court records? Full of servant suicides. So messed up.
Then, in Virginia, like, way back, the governor said, like, four out of five servants, just died after they got here from disease. And a lot of these people, they were, like, little kids, scooped up off the streets in England and shipped over here to work. I mean, come on.
And the masters, they were trying to control everything, especially the sex lives of the servants, yeah? They didn't want the women getting married or, you know, having kids, 'cause that would, like, cut into the work. Benjamin Franklin, even he, writing under a fake name, was giving advice, like, "Make sure your maidservant is, you know, faithful, strong, and not too pretty." Ugh.
Servants couldn't get married without permission, they could get separated from their families, they could be whipped for basically anything. This one law in Pennsylvania said that if servants got married without the master's okay, it was, like, adultery. And the kids? "Bastards," they called them. Harsh, right?
Yeah, there were laws to, like, prevent the masters from being too horrible, but, honestly? They weren't really enforced. Servants? They couldn't be on juries. The masters were. And they couldn't vote, because, you know, they didn't own property.
There's this case from New England, where this couple, they were accused of killing a servant, and the mistress had, like, cut off the servant's toes, I guess. The jury? Found them not guilty. And in Virginia, this master was convicted of raping two women servants. And this dude also, like, burned his own wife and kids, whipped another servant to death. The court gave him a lecture, but, like, specifically cleared him of the rape charges, even though there was, like, tons of evidence.
Now, sometimes, the servants, they tried to rebel. But not much. You didn't see, like, these huge servant conspiracies like you did in the West Indies. Someone suggested it was because, you know, it was easier to escape on a small island.
There was this one time in Virginia, where this servant, he wanted to get a bunch of other servants together, grab some guns, and, like, march through the country, shouting, "Who's with me for liberty?!" But it never happened. Two years later, more servants, they planned this big uprising. But one of them snitched. Four got killed, and the snitch? He got his freedom and a bunch of tobacco. Still, the masters, they were always worried.
So, if rebellion was too risky, the servants, they'd just, you know, do their own thing. County court records, they show one servant, he went after his master with a pitchfork. Some apprentice, he "laid violent hands" on his master, threw him down, drew blood, and, I don't know, threatened to break his neck. And one maidservant, they brought her to court for being "bad, unruly, sulen, careles, destructive, and disobedient."
After the servants got involved in Bacon's Rebellion, the Virginia legislature passed laws to punish servants who rebelled. They said, because all these "evil disposed servants" took advantage of the chaos and ran off to join the rebels. And, so they were neglecting their masters and causing them damage.
Two companies of English soldiers, they hung around Virginia to keep things quiet, just in case, the powers that be, said, you know, Virginia's kinda broke right now, and there are more people than ever. And, servants, they're kind of in need of clothes. And so, they might just, I don't know, rob storehouses and ships!
Escaping? Easier than a full-on rebellion. There were, like, tons of cases of white servants deserting in the Southern colonies. There were, like, rumors of servant conspiracies to run away. There's one from Maryland where about a dozen servants, they plotted to steal a boat and fight if anyone tried to stop them. They got caught and whipped.
They had this whole system to keep track of people. Strangers had to have passports or certificates to show they were free. And the colonies, they agreed to send runaway servants back, yeah? So this is kinda like the thing in the U.S. Constitution about "persons held to service" escaping to another state.
Sometimes, servants went on strike! This one master, he complained that his servants were refusing to do their "ordinary labor." The servants, they said, they were only getting "Beanes and Bread," and they were too weak to do what the master wanted. The court gave them thirty lashes. Ouch!
More than half of the colonists who came to North America, they came as servants. Mostly English at first, then Irish and German. Over time, slaves replaced the servants, you know, when they ran away or when their time was up. But, even way later, white servants, they still made up a chunk of the population.
So, what happened to these servants once they were free? You hear all these happy stories, about them getting rich, owning land, and becoming important people. But some other dude, after studying it, he said, "Nah, colonial society? It wasn't democratic. It wasn't equal. Rich guys ran everything. And barely any of those guys were ever indentured servants themselves."
Okay, so the guy kinda hated the servants calling them "dirty and lazy, rough, ignorant, lewd, and often criminal," who "thieved and wandered, had bastard children, and corrupted society with loathsome diseases." Charming, right? But he admits, like, maybe one in ten was, you know, okay. Survived the rough start, worked hard, bought land, and, you know, did alright. Another one in ten, maybe they became artisans or overseers. The rest? Eighty percent? They were "shiftless, hopeless, ruined." Either they died during their service, went back to England, or became "poor whites." Another study, they found the early servants were alright, became landowners and got involved. Later on, more than half the servants, they never owned land, even years after they got free. They just became tenant farmers, cheap labor for the rich guys, even after their service was over.
So, basically, class lines, they got sharper through the colonial period. Rich and poor, bigger gap. A few rich families, they were living large off the work of slaves and servants, owning everything, running everything. Maryland, the whole colony was controlled by some rich guy who got it from the King of England. And there were, like, five revolts against him.
Then there were the Carolinas. This dude, John Locke, wrote their constitution, which set up this, like, feudal system. A few barons, they would own most of the land, and only barons could be governor. When the King took over, rich guys grabbed a ton of land for themselves. Poor people, desperate for land, they just squatted on whatever they could find and fought over it for years.
There were a lot of early gentlemen of considerable wealth who, along with the clergy, eager to preserve in America the social arrangements of the Mother Country. By means of their control of trade and commerce, by their political domination of the inhabitants through church and Town Meeting, and by careful marriage alliances among themselves, members of this little oligarchy laid the foundations for an aristocratic class.
Right from the start, at the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the governor said, "Some people are gonna be rich, some are gonna be poor, some are gonna be in charge, some are gonna be following orders." That's just how it is.
Rich merchants, they built mansions. People of quality, they rode around in fancy carriages, had their portraits painted, wore wigs, and ate fancy food. Someone complained about how the best land was owned by just a few people. And, in Rhode Island, the town meetings? Supposedly democratic, but, really, the same rich merchants, they ran them every year.
New York? The most showy of them all. They had, like, fancy furniture, jewels, silverware, black house servants.
New York, it was like a feudal kingdom. The Dutch, they set up this system where the barons controlled everything on their land. Someone got hanged, and the rich, they just kept grabbing more land. One dude, he gave a friend, like, a half-million acres for basically nothing.
Around this time, the church, they needed money from the government, because the poor were in need of food, and clothes, and they are committing divers misdemeanors within the Said City, who living Idly and unemployed, become debauched and Instructed in the Practice of Thievery and Debauchery. For Remedy Whereof... Resolved that there be forthwith built... A good, Strong and Convenient House and Tenement. And that's what they did.
Some writer, he described the poor street kids as "an Object in Human Shape, half starv'd with Cold, with Cloathes out at the Elbows, Knees through the Breeches, Hair standing on end.... From the age about four to Fourteen they spend their Days in the Streets ... then they are put out as Apprentices, perhaps four, five, or six years...."
The colonies grew fast in the 1700s. English, Irish, German immigrants, they all came. Black slaves, they poured in. More and more, the upper class got most of the stuff.
There's this one historian, who studied the tax lists, and he found that in 1687, the richest people, they had a quarter of the wealth. By 1770? They had almost half.
As the population grew, the number of poor people who didn't own anything, it doubled. And if you didn't own anything, you couldn't vote.
Everywhere, the poor were just trying to survive, trying not to freeze to death. All the cities, they built poorhouses, not just for old people and orphans, but for the unemployed, war veterans, immigrants. Someone wrote, "It's amazing how many beggars there are this winter." Someone else said they could barely afford bread for themselves and their families.
Poverty, it just kept getting worse. "The wandering poor," they were a thing.
The colonies? They were societies of different classes, always fighting each other. But that's something you don't really hear about in the history books, all that stuff about the struggle against England, how the colonists were all united in the Revolution. So, the country wasn't "born free." It was born with slavery, with servants and masters, tenants and landlords, rich and poor. All that stuff.
And the authorities, they were always getting some flack from someone. All these rebellions, they toppled governments.
Free white workers, they were better off than slaves, but they still resented unfair treatment by the wealthy. As early as, someone reported that his workers "fell into a mutiny" because he wouldn't pay them. They all quit. Carpenters, protesting against bad food, they did a slowdown.
People were striking for all sorts of stuff. In New York, these carters, they went on strike and got prosecuted. Bakers, they refused to bake because the wheat cost too much.
A bad food shortage in Boston led to this warning that prices were so high that the poor wouldn't make it through the winter. Some rich guy, he was shipping grain to the Caribbean because he could make more money there. People rioted, attacked his ships, broke into his warehouses, and shot the governor when he tried to stop them.
Years after that, this writer was complaining about the people getting rich by "grinding the poor." He called them "Birds of prey ... Enemies to all Communities-wherever diey live."
Then, these people, they marched on the markets and, as a conservative writer complained people were "murmuring against the Government & the rich people." They warned that arresting them would bring "Five Hundred Men in Solemn League and Covenent" who would destroy other markets set up for the benefit of rich merchants.
Around this time, someone urged voters to join together against "Gripe the Merchant, Squeeze the Shopkeeper, Spintext and Quible the Lawyer."
Some people didn't want to "have our Bread and Water measured out to Us by those who Riot in Luxury & Wantonness on Our Sweat & Toil. ..."
Bostonians rioted against impressment, forced service. They surrounded the governor's house, beat up the sheriff, and stormed the town house. The militia didn't show up when they were called, and the governor ran away. They were condemned as a "Riotous Tumultuous Assembly of Foreign Seamen, Servants, Negroes, and Other Persons of Mean and Vile Condition."
In New Jersey, these farmers, they rioted when they were asked to pay rent on land they felt they had a right to. The people, in general, went to the prison, opened the Door, took out Baldwin.
A report described the scene:
Two of the new captains of the Newark Companies by the Sheriffs order went with their drumms, to the people, so met, and required all persons there, belong to their companies, to follow the drums and to defend the prison but none followed, tho many were there. . .. The multitude ... between tour and five of the clock in the afternoon lighted off their horses, and came towards the gaol, huzzaing and swinging their clubbs ... till they came within reach of the guard, struck them with their clubbs, and the guard (having no orders to fire) returned the blows with then- guns, and some were wounded on both sides, but none killed. The multitude broke the ranks of the soldiers, and pressed on the prison door, where the Sheriff stood with a sword, and kept them off, till they gave him several blows, and forced him out from thence. They then, with axes and other instruments, broke open the prison door, and took out the two prisoners. As also one other prisoner, that was confined for debt, and went away.
During this, England was fighting a bunch of wars. Some merchants got rich from these wars, but most people, they just got higher taxes, unemployment, poverty. This writer described the situation: "Poverty and Discontent appear in every Face (except the Countenances of the Rich) and dwell upon every Tongue."
The forced service of seamen led to a riot against impressment in Boston in 1747. The crowds, they turned on Thomas Hutchinson, a rich merchant, who was the governor. Hutchinson's house burned down, and people were shouting, "Let it burn!"
By the time of the Revolutionary crisis, the wealthy elite, they knew what was up. They had certain fears, and they had tactics to deal with them.
The Indians, they couldn't control. Black slaves? Easier to control, and profitable for the plantations. But the blacks, they weren't totally submissive, either, you know?
The colonial elite, they had to think about the anger of poor whites. Servants, tenants, city poor, all that. What if these different groups, the Indians, the slaves, the poor whites, what if they joined forces?
There was little chance that whites and Indians would combine in North America as they were doing in South and Central America.
One fact disturbed: whites would run off to join Indian tribes, or would be captured in battle and brought up among the Indians, and when this happened the whites, given a chance to leave, chose to stay in the Indian culture, Indians, having the choice, almost never decided to join the whites.
Someone told how children captured during the Seven Years' War and found by their parents, grown up and living with Indians, would refuse to leave their new families. "There must be in their social bond," he said, "something singularly captivating, and far superior to anything to be boasted among us; for thousands of Europeans are Indians, and we have no examples of even one of those Aborigines having from choice become Europeans."
The colonial officials, they found a way of dealing with the danger: they forced landless whites to move west, to the frontier, to fight the Indians, becoming a buffer for the rich against Indian troubles. Fighting the Indian, they got the support of the white and kept them from turning on the rich.
Might blacks and Indians combine against the white enemy? There wasn't much opportunity for Africans and Indians to meet in large numbers. New York had the largest slave population in the North, and there was some contact between blacks and Indians.
In the Carolinas, whites were outnumbered by black slaves and nearby Indian tribes.
And so laws were passed prohibiting free blacks from traveling in Indian country. Treaties with Indian tribes contained clauses requiring the return of fugitive slaves. They wanted "to create an aversion in them [Indians] to Negroes."
Part of this policy involved using black slaves in the South Carolina militia to fight Indians. Still, the government was worried about black revolt.
Blacks ran away to Indian villages, and the Creeks and Cherokees harbored runaway slaves by the hundreds. But the combination of harsh slave codes and bribes to the Indians to help put down black rebels kept things under control.
It was the potential combination of poor whites and blacks that caused the most fear among the wealthy white planters. If there had been the natural racial repugnance that some theorists have assumed, control would have been easier. But sexual attraction was powerful, across racial lines. The Too Common Practice of Criminal Conversation with Negro and other Slave Wenches in this Province. Mixed offspring continued to be produced by white-black sex relations throughout the colonial period, in spite of laws prohibiting interracial marriage in Virginia, Massachusetts, Maryland, Delaware, Pennsylvania, the Carolinas, Georgia. By declaring the children illegitimate, they would keep them inside the black families, so that the white population could remain "pure" and in control.
Bacon's Rebellion was especially fearsome. Black slaves and white servants joined forces. The naval commander who subdued the four hundred wrote: "Most of them I persuaded to goe to their Homes, which accordingly they did, except about eighty Negroes and twenty English which would not deliver their Armes."
All through those early years, black and white slaves and servants ran away together, as shown both by the laws passed to stop this and the records of the courts.
They required plantation owners to have at least one white servant for every six male adult Negroes. No white men to superintend our negroes, or repress an insurrection of negroes. The plantations cannot be maintained without a considerable number of white servants, as well to keep the blacks in subjection, as to bear arms in case of invasion.
A report said "black slaves have lately attempted and were very near succeeding in a new revolution . . . and therefore, it may be necessary . . . to propose some new law for encouraging the entertainment of more white servants in the future. The militia of this province does not consist of above 2000 men."
This may help explain why, Parliament, made transportation to the New World a legal punishment for crime. After that, tens of thousands of convicts could be sent to Virginia, Maryland, and other colonies. It also makes understandable why the Virginia Assembly, gave amnesty to white servants who had rebelled, but not to blacks. Negroes were forbidden to carry any arms, while whites finishing their servitude would get muskets, along with corn and cash. The distinctions of status between white and black servants became more and more clear.
White servants were allowed in Virginia to join the militia as substitutes for white freemen. At the same time, slave patrols were established in Virginia to deal with the "great dangers that may . . . happen by the insurrections of negroes...." Poor white men would make up the rank and file of these patrols, and get the monetary reward.
Racism was becoming more and more practical. Racism not as "natural" to black-white difference, but something coming out of class scorn, a realistic device for control. "If freemen with disappointed hopes should make common cause with slaves of desperate hope, the results might be worse than anything Bacon had done. The answer to the problem, obvious if unspoken and only gradually recognized, was racism, to separate dangerous free whites from dangerous black slaves by a screen of racial contempt."
There developed a white middle class of small planters, independent farmers, city artisans, who, given small rewards for joining forces with merchants and planters, would be a solid buffer against black slaves, frontier Indians, and very poor whites.
The growing cities generated more skilled workers, and the governments cultivated the support of white mechanics by protecting them from the competition of both slaves and free Negroes.
The council in New York ordered that "noe Negro or Slave be suffered to work on the bridge as a Porter about any goods either imported or Exported from or into this City."
In the southern towns too, white craftsmen and traders were protected from Negro competition. The South Carolina legislature prohibited Charleston masters from employing Negroes or other slaves as mechanics or in handicraft trades.
Middle-class Americans might be invited to join a new elite by attacks against the corruption of the established rich. They attacked the wealthy as tax dodgers unconcerned with the welfare of others speaking for the honesty and dependability of "the midling rank of mankind."
They would speak to the many of "our" liberty, "our" property, "our" country.
Similarly, the rich James Otis could appeal to the Boston middle class by attacking the Tory Thomas Hutchinson. There were political jobs available for the moderately well-off, as "cullers of staves," "measurer of Coal Baskets," "Fence Viewer."
There was a class of small planters who were not "the beneficiary" of the planting society as the rich were, but who had the distinction of being called planters, and who were "respectable citizens with community obligations to act as overseers of roads, appraisers of estates and similar duties." It helped the alliance to accept the middle class socially in "a round of activities that included local politics ... dances, horseracing, and cockfights, occasionally punctuated with drinking brawls..,."
The people of this province are generally of the middling sort, and at present pretty much upon a level. They are chiefly industrious fanners, artificers or men in trade; they enjoy and are fond of freedom, and the meanest among them thinks he has a right to civility from the greatest.
To call them "the people" was to omit black slaves, white servants, displaced Indians. And the term "middle class" concealed that, as Richard Hofstadter said: "It was ... a middle-class society governed for the most part by its upper classes."
Those upper classes, to rule, needed to make concessions to the middle class, without damage to their own wealth or power, at the expense of slaves, Indians, and poor whites. This bought loyalty. And to bind that loyalty with something more powerful even than material advantage, the ruling group found, in the 1760s and 1770s, a wonderfully useful device. That device was the language of liberty and equality, which could unite just enough whites to fight a Revolution against England, without ending either slavery or inequality.
Okay, listen to this. At around 1776, certain important people in the English colonies realized that if they created a nation, a symbol, called the United States, they could take over land, profits, and power from the British. And, at the same time, they could stop a bunch of rebellions and get everyone to support them.
The American Revolution, it was this genius move. The Founding Fathers, they created this super effective system of control.
Before that, like way back, there had been all these uprisings trying to overthrow the colonial governments. Black rebellions, too. And a bunch of riots.
Then, this leadership, they realized they could point a lot of that anger at England.
With the French defeated, the British government turned its attention to tightening control over the colonies. It needed money to pay for the war. Also, the colonial trade, it was becoming more and more important to the British.
The American leadership, they didn't need England as much, but the English, they needed the colonists' money.
The war had brought glory for the generals, death to the privates, wealth for the merchants, unemployment for the poor. A newspaper editor wrote about the growing "Number of Beggers and wandering Poor" in the streets of the city. Letters in the papers questioned the distribution of wealth.
By the early 1770s, the top chunk of the taxpayers controlled most of the city's assets. Wills showed that the wealthiest people in the cities were leaving fortunes.
In Boston, the lower classes started using the town meeting to complain. The governor wrote that "the meanest Inhabitants ... by their constant Attendance there generally are the majority and outvote the Gendemen, Merchants, Substantial Traders and all the better part of the Inhabitants."
Lawyers, editors, merchants, like James Otis and Samuel Adams, they organized this "Boston Caucus" and "molded laboring-class opinion, called the 'mob' into action, and shaped its behaviour." They were aware of the resentment of ordinary people, they were mirroring as well as molding popular opinion.
The mobilization of lower-class energy by upper-class politicians, for their own purposes. They gave credibility to laboring-class views.
In 1762, Otis gave a speech that a lawyer could use in mobilizing city mechanics and artisans:
I am forced to get my living by the labour of my hand; and the sweat of my brow, as most of you are and obliged to go thro' good report and evil report, for bitter bread, earned under the frowns of some who have no natural or divine right to be above me, and entirely owe their grandeur and honor to grinding the faces of the poor.. ..
Someone wrote that "a few persons in power" were promoting political projects "for keeping the people poor in order to make them humble."
That's probably why the mob action was so explosive after the Stamp Act of 1765. The British, they were taxing the colonies to pay for the French war. A shoemaker led a mob in destroying the house of a rich merchant. Two weeks later, the crowd turned to the home of Thomas Hutchinson, a rich leader. They smashed up his house with axes, drank his wine, and looted his stuff. Officials said it was part of a scheme to destroy the houses of fifteen rich people, as pan of "a War of Plunder, of general levelling and taking away the Distinction of rich and poor."
It was one of those moments in which fury against the rich went further than leaders like Otis wanted. They leaders of the Revolution would worry about keeping such sentiments within limits.
Mechanics were demanding political democracy. Open meetings of representative assemblies, public galleries in the legislative halls, and the publishing of roll-call votes. They wanted open-air meetings, more equitable taxes, price controls, and the election of mechanics to government posts.
In Philadelphia, especially, the consciousness of the lower middle classes grew. Thomas Paine, Thomas Young, and others "launched a full-scale attack on wealth and even on the right to acquire unlimited private property."
During elections for the 1776 convention to frame a constitution for Pennsylvania, they urged voters to oppose "great and overgrown rich men .. . they will be too apt to be framing distinctions in society." They said that "an enormous proportion of property vested in a few individuals is dangerous to the rights, and destructive of the common happiness, of mankind; and therefore every free state hath a right by its laws to discourage the possession of such property."
In the countryside, the political leaders used the conflict of poor against rich to mobilize the population against England.
The tenant riots, they were long-lasting social movements. They were aimed at a handful of rich landlords. They often had to direct their anger against farmers who had leased the disputed land from the owners. The tenants were seen as "chiefly the dregs of the People," and the posse included the privileged top of the local power structure.
The land rioters saw their battle as poor against rich. They had an equitable Tide but could not be defended in a Course of Law because they were poor.
Ethan Allen's Green Mountain rebels described themselves as "a poor people . . . fatigued in settling a wilderness country," and their opponents as "a number of Attorneys and other gentlemen, with all their tackle of ornaments, and compliments, and French finesse."
Land-hungry farmers turned to the British for support against the American landlords.
As the conflict with Britain intensified, the colonial leaders of the movement for independence adopted policies to win over people in the countryside.
In North Carolina, a powerful movement of white farmers was organized against wealthy and corrupt officials in the period from 1766 to 1771. It consisted of "class-conscious white farmers in the west who attempted to democratize local government in their respective counties." The Regulators referred to themselves as "poor Industrious peasants," as "labourers," "the wretched poor," "oppressed" by "rich and powerful . . . designing Monsters."
The Regulators saw that a combination of wealth and political power ruled North Carolina, and denounced those officials "whose highest Study is the promotion of their wealth." They resented the tax system, and the combination of merchants and lawyers who worked in the courts to collect debts from the harassed farmers. They did not represent servants or slaves, but they did speak for small owners, squatters, and tenants.
In Orange County:
Thus were the people of Orange insulted by The sheriff, robbed and plundered . . . neglected and condemned by the Representatives and abused by the Magistracy; obliged to pay Fees regulated only by the Avarice of the officer; obliged to pay a TAX which they believed went to enrich and aggrandize a few, who lorded it over them continually; and from all these Evils they saw no way to escape; for the Men in Power, and Legislation, were the Men whose interest it was to oppress, and make gain of the Labourer.
They organized to prevent the collection of taxes, or the confiscation of the property of tax delinquents. At one point seven hundred armed farmers forced the release of two arrested Regulator leaders. They petitioned the government on their grievances.
In Anson, a local militia colonel complained of "the unparalleled tumults, Insurrections, and Commotions which at present distract this County." At one point a hundred men broke up the proceedings at a county court.
The assembly passed some mild reform legislation, but also an act "to prevent riots and tumults," and the governor prepared to crush them militarily. There was a decisive battle in which several thousand Regulators were defeated by a disciplined army using cannon. Six Regulators were hanged. They had the support of six thousand to seven thousand men out of a total white taxable population of about eight thousand.
Only a minority of the people in the Regulator counties seem to have participated as patriots in the Revolutionary War. Most of them probably remained neutral.
The key battles were being fought in the North, and there, the colonial leaders had a divided white population. The biggest problem was to keep the propertyless people, who were unemployed and hungry, under control.
In Boston, the economic grievances of the lowest classes mingled with anger against the British and exploded in mob violence. The leaders wanted to use that mob energy against England, but also to contain it so that it would not demand too much from them.
General Thomas Gage:
The Boston Mob, raised first by the Instigation of Many of the Principal Inhabitants, Allured by Plunder, rose shordy after of their own Accord, attacked, robbed, and destroyed several Houses, and amongst others, mat of the Lieutenant Governor.... People then began to be terrified at the Spirit they had raised, to perceive that popular Fury was not to be guided, and each individual feared he might be the next Victim to their Rapacity. The same Fears spread thro' the other Provinces, and there has been as much Pains taken since, to prevent Insurrections, of the People, as before to excite them.
The top taxpayers held most of the city's wealth, while the lowest had no taxable property at all. The propertyless could not vote and so could not participate in town meetings. This included sailors, journeymen, apprentices, servants.
The Revolutionary leadership was drawn from the middling interest and well-to-do merchants. It was a hesitant leadership, wanting to spur action against Great Britain, yet worrying about maintaining control over the crowds at home.
It took the Stamp Act crisis to make this leadership aware of its dilemma. A political group called the Loyal Nine organized a procession to protest it. They put master craftsmen at the head. They needed to mobilize shipworkers from the North End and mechanics and apprentices from the South End. Two or three thousand were in the procession. They marched to the home of the stampmaster and burned his effigy. But after the "gentlemen" who organized the demonstration left, the crowd went further and destroyed some of the stampmaster's property. These were, as one of the Loyal Nine said, "amazingly inflamed people." The Loyal Nine seemed taken aback by the direct assault on the wealthy furnishings of the stampmaster.
The rich set up armed patrols. A town meeting was called and the same leaders who had planned the demonstration denounced the violence and disavowed the actions of the crowd. A dinner was given for certain leaders of the rioters to win them over. And when the Stamp Act was repealed, the conservative leaders severed their connections with the rioters.
When the British Parliament turned to its next attempt to tax the colonies, the colonial leaders organized boycotts. But, they stressed, "No Mobs or Tumults, let the Persons and Properties of your most inveterate Enemies be safe." Samuel Adams advised: "No Mobs- No Confusions-No Tumult." James Otis said that "no possible circumstances, though ever so oppressive, could be supposed sufficient to justify private tumults and disorders...."
Impressment and the quartering of troops by the British were directly hurtful to the sailors and other working people. After 1768, soldiers were quartered in Boston, and friction grew between the crowds and the soldiers. The soldiers began to take the jobs of working people when jobs were scarce. Mechanics and shopkeepers lost work or business because of the colonists' boycott of British goods. A committee considered how to employ the poor.
On March 5, 1770, grievances of ropemakers against British soldiers taking their jobs led to a fight. A crowd gathered in front of the customhouse and began provoking the soldiers, who fired and killed first Crispus AItucks, a mulatto worker, then others. This became known as the Boston Massacre.
There was anger at the acquittal of six of the British soldiers. The crowd at the Massacre was described by John Adams, defense attorney for the British soldiers, as "a motley rabble of saucy boys, negroes, and mulattoes, Irish teagues and outlandish jack tarrs." Ten thousand people marched in the funeral procession for the victims of the Massacre.
Impressment was the background of the Massacre. There had been impressment riots through the 1760s.
In the Boston Tea Party of December 1773, the Boston Committee of Correspondence, "controlled crowd action against the tea from the start." The Tea Party led to the Coercive Acts by Parliament. Still, town meetings and mass meetings rose in opposition. The seizure of a powder store by the British led four thousand men to assemble in Cambridge. The crowd forced the officials to resign. The Committees of Correspondence welcomed this gathering, but warned against destroying private property.
They emphasized moderation and restraint. The officers and committee members of the Sons of Liberty were drawn almost entirely from the middle and upper classes of colonial society. One of the wealthiest of the gentlemen and freeholders" led the Sons of Liberty. The aim was to broaden their organization, to develop a mass base of wage earners.
Many of the Sons of Liberty groups declared their "greatest abhorrence" of lawlessness. John Adams expressed the same fears: "These tarrings and featherings, this breaking open Houses by rude and insolent Rabbles, in Resentment for private Wrongs or in pursuing of private Prejudices and Passions, must be discountenanced.11
Something needed to be done to persuade the lower orders to join the revolutionary cause, to deflect their anger against England. Around the time of the Stamp Act, an orator addressed the poor: "Are not the gentlemen made of the same materials as the lowest and poorest among you? . . . Listen to no doctrines which may tend to divide us, but let us go hand in hand, as brothers...."
Patrick Henry's oratory pointed a way to relieve class tension and form a bond against the British. He found language inspiring to all classes, specific enough to charge people with anger against the British, vague enough to avoid class conflict among the rebels, and stirring enough to build patriotic feeling for the resistance movement.