near the coast. Poor squatters on these lands fought all through that period over rent payments.
Similar battles with proprietors over land were fought by small farmers in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York. It was these same yeomen, constantly in debt, who battled against the colonial governments for the issuance of paper money. In Boston, debtors succeeded in issuing land bank notes worth fifty thousand pounds, and when the merchants refused to accept the paper money, farmers marched on the city. Leaders of the march were jailed, and the bank was outlawed. (Among the ruined men was the father of Sam Adams.) In Rhode Island, Newport merchants succeeded in prohibiting the wide distribution of paper money demanded by debtor-farmers.
New York was the closest thing to a feudal state in the American colonies. Under the patroonship system created by the Dutch along the Hudson River, gigantic landed baronies were created, where the barons held not only economic, but political and judicial control over the lives of their tenants. One Hudson Valley estate alone—Rensselaerswyck—included 700,000 acres. And when the British took over in 1664, the huge estates continued, with the Duke of York, as proprietor, holding the powers of a despot.
Governor Fletcher of New York gave one of his favorites, Captain John Evans, an area of close to a half-million acres, for a token annual payment of twenty shillings. Under Fletcher, three-fourths of the land in New York was granted to about thirty people. The only difference with Lord Cornbury as governor, in the early 1700’s, was that he favored groups of speculators, rather than individuals. One grant was for two million acres.
The desperate revolt in New York of Jacob Leisler and his followers, in 1689, was at bottom a class uprising against a combination of wealthy landowners and merchants, with the religious and political issues of England’s Glorious Revolution supplying a convenient starting point. Leisler was hanged, and despite the gradual introduction of some political reforms, the handing out of huge estates to a privileged few continued, sharpening the lines between very rich and very poor. The period before the American Revolution in New York was full of tenant outbreaks, whose class character was sometimes concealed by the fact that they were frequently led and used by rival groups of land speculators.
Harassed and ignored small farmers were helpless against the power of colonial land speculators, merchants, and government officials. A petition came from the town of Deerfield in 1678 to the Massachusetts General Court: “You may be pleased to know that the very principle and best of the land; the best for soile; the best for situation; as lying in ye center and midle of the town: and as to quantity, nere half, belongs unto eight or nine proprietors.…” Also within the colonial working class should be counted tens of thousands of sailors and dockworkers of various kinds—about thirty-five hundred counted in Salem and Boston alone in the early eighteenth century.
There is not much to be said here about the slaves in colonial society, except to reiterate that no account of class relationships and distribution of wealth and power in America can, in justice, leave the slaves out of the reckoning; to do so is to accept the pre-Civil War judgment of them as less than human beings. It needs to be emphasized that slaves constituted one-fifth of the entire colonial population by the time of the Revolution and were in all of the colonies, North and South, though their heaviest concentration was in Virginia and South Carolina (where they were a majority of the population). That their treatment as the bottom class was universal is shown clearly by the law passed in 1693 by the Quaker legislature of Pennsylvania, authorizing any persons “to take up Negroes, male or female, whom they shall find gadding abroad … to take them to jail, there to remain that night, and that without meat or drink, and to cause them to be publicly whipped next morning with 39 lashes, well laid on their bare backs, at which their said master or mistress shall pay 15 pence to the whipper.”
On March 28, 1771, the Virginia Gazette ran an announcement: “Just arrived at Leedstown, the Ship Justitia, with about one Hundred Healthy Servants, Men Women & Boys.… The Sale will commence on Tuesday the 2nd of April.…” Ranking just above the slave in the colonial class structure, and yet so often close to the slave in misery and deprivation that he has often been termed “a semi-slave” was the indentured servant. Indentured servants, the chief source of labor in the seventeenth century, continued to pour into the colonies in the eighteenth century; two-thirds of Pennsylvania’s immigrants, for instance, were white servants. The institution of indenture did not die out until the early part of the nineteenth century, and it is probable that more than a quarter of a million persons served as indentured servants during the colonial period. These were indigent Europeans who, in return for passage to America, signed contracts (either voluntarily or by force, for many were convicts and vagrants in England) guaranteeing five or seven years of servile labor to an American master.
To this day, the way people travel is a key to their social and economic class; in colonial times this was true to the point of death. The indentured servants were at times packed into ships much like the screaming, dying African slaves, with as many as six hundred forced into a boat meant to carry three hundred. On one trip thirty-two children were thrown into the ocean as a result of starvation and disease.*
Indentured servants had some rights that slaves did not have, like the right to sue in court, but the court was generally friendlier to the owner than to the servant. They could not marry without permission, could be separated from their families at will, could be whipped for various offenses. Pennsylvania law in the seventeenth century said that marriage of servants “without the consent of the Masters … shall be proceeded against as for Adultery, or fornication, and Children to be reputed as Bastards.” 5 The great numbers of ads for runaway servants tell something about the conditions under which they lived and worked, conditions adjudicated by judges who took the word of the master, one contemporary observer noted, “ten to one.” 6
Returning to Germany from America in the mid-eighteenth century, Gottlieb Mittelburg wrote of the privations of his fellow Germans in servitude in Pennsylvania. He said many asked him to let others in Germany know what they were suffering so they would not be enticed into slavery. Contemporary accounts of the good living conditions of indentured servants need to be taken cautiously in view of the fact that most of these were written for the purpose of inducing immigration. They should be placed against letters like the following, written at the time: “Whoever is well off in Europe better remain there. Here is misery and distress, same as everywhere, and for certain persons and conditions incomparably more than in Europe.” And:
O Dear Father, belive what I am going to relate the words of truth and sincerity, and Ballance my former bad conduct to my sufferings here, and then I am sure you’ll pitty your Distressed Daughter, What we unfortunat English people suffer here is beyond the probability of you in England to conceive, let it suffice that I one of the unhappy Number, am toiling almost Day and Night, and very often in the Horses druggery … and then tied up and whipp’d to that Degree that you’d not serve an Annimal, scarce any thing but Indian Corn and Salt to eat and that even begrudged nay many Negroes are better used, almost naked, no shoes nor stockings to wear, and the comfort after slaving dureing Masters pleasure, what rest we get is to rap ourselve up in a Blanket and ly upon the Ground, this is the deplorable condition your poor Betty endures.…7
John Adams wrote about Massachusetts, as late as the Revolutionary period: “Perhaps it may be said that in America we have no distinctions of ranks …; but have we not laborers, yeomen, gentlemen, esquires, honorable gentlemen, and excellent gentlemen?” There were rich and poor in the colonies, and the distinction was clear not only in economic and political power, but in every aspect of daily living. Poor and rich lived in different kinds of houses, ate different foods, entertained themselves in different ways, were addressed with different degrees of respect, and were buried differently. An early eighteenth-century traveler stopped off at “a dirty poor house, with hardly anything in it but children, that wallowed about like so many pigs” and in another home was “forced to pig together” with ten people in a room.
By the latter part of that century, prosperous merchants and planters lived in lavish mansions with ornate Chippendale furniture and elaborate china, drank claret, port, and Madeira (while the poor drank “kill-devil” rum). Even frontier societies can support an idle aristocracy, if the differences in wealth are sharp enough. Josiah