A People's History of the United States: Teaching Edition. Howard Boone's Zinn

am now to acquaint you that very lately we have had a very wicked and barbarous plot of the désigne of the negroes rising with a désigne to destroy all the white people in the country and then to take Charles Town in full body but it pleased God it was discovered and many of them taken prisoners and some burnt and some hang’d and some banish’d.

      Herbert Aptheker, who did detailed research on slave resistance in North America for his book American Negro Slave Revolts, found about 250 instances where a minimum of ten slaves joined in a revolt or conspiracy.

      From time to time, whites were involved in the slave resistance. As early as 1663, indentured white servants and black slaves in Gloucester County, Virginia, formed a conspiracy to rebel and gain their freedom. The plot was betrayed, and ended with executions.

      In New York in 1741, there were ten thousand whites in the city and two thousand black slaves. It had been a hard winter and the poor—slave and free—had suffered greatly. When mysterious fires broke out, blacks and whites were accused of conspiring together. Mass hysteria developed against the accused. After a trial full of lurid accusations by informers, and forced confessions, two white men and two white women were executed, eighteen slaves were hanged, and thirteen slaves were burned alive.

      Only one fear was greater than the fear of black rebellion in the new American colonies. That was the fear that discontented whites would join black slaves to overthrow the existing order. In the early years of slavery, especially, before racism as a way of thinking was firmly ingrained, while white indentured servants were often treated as badly as black slaves, there was a possibility of cooperation.

      And so, measures were taken. About the same time that slave codes, involving discipline and punishment, were passed by the Virginia Assembly, Edmund Morgan writes:

       Virginia’s ruling class, having proclaimed that all white men were superior to black, went on to offer their social (but white) inferiors a number of benefits previously denied them. In 1705 a law was passed requiring masters to provide white servants whose indenture time was up with ten bushels of corn, thirty shillings, and a gun, while women servants were to get 15 bushels of corn and forty shillings. Also, the newly freed servants were to get 50 acres of land.

      Morgan concludes: “Once the small planter felt less exploited by taxation and began to prosper a little, he became less turbulent, less dangerous, more respectable. He could begin to see his big neighbor not as an extortionist but as a powerful protector of their common interests.”

      We see now a complex web of historical threads to ensnare blacks for slavery in America: the desperation of starving settlers, the special helplessness of the displaced African, the powerful incentive of profit for slave trader and planter, the temptation of superior status for poor whites, the elaborate controls against escape and rebellion, the legal and social punishment of black and white collaboration.

      The point is that the elements of this web are historical, not “natural.” This does not mean that they are easily disentangled and dismantled. It means only that there is a possibility for something else, under historical conditions not yet realized. And one of these conditions would be the elimination of that class exploitation which has made poor whites desperate for small gifts of status, and has prevented that unity of black and white necessary for joint rebellion and reconstruction.

      Around 1700, the Virginia House of Burgesses declared:

       The Christian Servants in this country for the most part consists of the Worser Sort of the people of Europe. And since…such numbers of Irish and other Nations have been brought in of which a great many have been soldiers in the late wars that according to our present Circumstances we can hardly governe them and if they were fitted with Armes and had the Opertunity of meeting together by Musters we have just reason to fears they may rise upon us.

      It was a kind of class consciousness, a class fear. There were things happening in early Virginia, and in the other colonies, to warrant it.

      Exercises

      1. Why did Virginians massacre Indians instead of enslaving them?

      2. How does the answer to the above question explain the choice to import black slaves?

      3. Why were Africans vulnerable to enslavement?

      4. Page 27: “…where whites and blacks found themselves with common problems, common work, a common enemy in their master, they behaved toward one another as equals.”

      What were the “problems” that blacks and whites shared? What was the “work” that blacks and whites did? Was it the same? Did they work together? How did the “master” treat his indentured servant? How did the “master” treat his slave? To what degree was the treatment the same?

      5. How do we know that slaves resisted their enslavement?

      6. How do we know that indentured servants resisted their indentured condition?

      7. How did the Virginia ruling class begin to drive a wedge between the white indentured servants and enslaved blacks?

      8. Below are three versions of one essential question. Choose ONE of the three to answer.

      a. Zinn argues that racism is not natural but a product of human choice and historical circumstances. Given the forces that created racism, what choices need to be made to undo it?

      b. What were the historical forces that caused white plantation owners to choose black slaves as their labor source? Was it a “decision” to make a profit, or were Englishmen forced to do it? Would the Powhatans have accepted wages to labor in the fields of the plantation owners? Does that constitute a historical force?

      c. Zinn argues that racism is not natural. Does he mean that it is caused by human decisions or historical forces? Explain your answer by first defining the difference between historical forces and human decision. What is a “historical force”? Do such forces compel humans to make decisions they would otherwise not have made?

      9. At what point in the chronology of American history is the topic of slavery covered in traditional American history texts? At what point is it covered in Zinn’s text? How might you explain the difference in placement? (What are the purposes of including slavery in the traditional texts? What are the purposes for Zinn?)

       Chapter 3

       Persons of Mean and Vile Condition

      In 1676, seventy years after Virginia was founded, a hundred years before it supplied leadership for the American Revolution, that colony faced a rebellion of white frontiersmen, joined by slaves and servants, a rebellion so threatening that the governor had to flee the burning capital of Jamestown and England decided to send a thousand soldiers across the Atlantic, hoping to maintain order among forty thousand colonists. This was Bacon’s Rebellion. After the uprising was suppressed, its leader, Nathaniel Bacon, dead and his associates hanged, was described in a Royal Commission report:

       He seduced the Vulgar and most ignorant people to believe (two thirds of each county being of that Sort) Soe that their whole hearts and hopes were set now upon Bacon. Next he charges the Governour as negligent and wicked, treacherous and incapable, the Lawes and Taxes as unjust and oppressive and cryes up absolute necessity of redress.

      Bacon’s Rebellion began with conflict over how to deal with the Indians, who were close by, on the western frontier, constantly threatening. Whites who had been ignored when huge land grants around Jamestown were given away had gone west to find land, and there they encountered Indians. Were those frontier Virginians resentful that the politicos and landed aristocrats who controlled the colony’s government in Jamestown first pushed them westward into Indian territory and then seemed indecisive in fighting the Indians? That might explain the character of their rebellion, not easily classifiable as either antiaristocrat or anti-Indian, because it was both.

      And the governor, William Berkeley, and his Jamestown crowd—were they more conciliatory to the Indians (they wooed certain of them as spies