In Massachusetts, the law forbade a woman from wearing silk hoods and scarves unless her husband was worth two hundred pounds. The upper class were called Master and Mistress, the ordinary people Goodman and Goodwife. The upper class did not get whippings if they broke the law. The poor did. One-fifth to one-sixth of the population were servants in seventeenth-century Massachusetts.
In a study of five important colonial towns—Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Newport, Charles Town—Carl Bridenbaugh concludes: “The colonists who came to settle in the villages brought with them the social order then existing in England or Holland, and sought with considerable success to set up a similar system in America.” They “were thoroughly indoctrinated with prevailing ideas of social inequality.… and they certainly had never heard of a classless society.” 8 His work enables us to give quick sketches of the class society in these five towns.
BOSTON: “The leaders of early Boston were gentlemen of considerable wealth who, in association with the clergy, eagerly sought 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 in seventeenth century Boston.” 9 Rich merchants erected mansions, persons “of Qualitie” traveled in coaches or sedan chairs, had their portraits painted, wore periwigs, and filled themselves with rich food and Madeira. At times of crisis, the maldistribution of wealth brought food shortages, and one night in 1713, a Bostonian recorded “the Riot Committed that night … by 200 people in the Comon, thinking to find Corn there.”
It was in that year that Cotton Mather wrote: “… the distressed Families of the Poor to which I dispense, or procure needful Relief, are now so many, and of such daily Occurrence, that it is needless for me here to mention them.” The Bostonian rich lived in “elaborate town houses, beautifully appointed, and filled with elegant furniture … a corps of servants, black and white.… Boston gentlewomen dressed in the latest and most expensive London clothese and bedecked themselves with lavish jewelry.” The rich began to spend so much money on elaborate funerals that the General Court had to pass laws against extraordinary funeral expenses.
NEWPORT: As in Boston, Bridenbaugh finds “the town meetings, while ostensibly democratic, were in reality controlled year after year by the same group of merchant aristocrats, who secured most of the important offices. …” A contemporary described the Newport merchant aristocracy: “… the men in flaming scarlet coats and waistcoats, laced and fringed with brightest glaring yellow. The Sly Quakers, not venturing on these charming coats and waistcoats, yet loving finery, figured away with plate on their sideboards.” Common sailors, warehousemen, dockworkers formed the lower strata of town society (with slaves and servants below them). In the summer of 1730 a quarrel between the “gentleman’s party” and one representing town workers led to a mob rising in the town.
NEW YORK: Negro slaves made up a much larger part of the working class in Northern towns than is generally recognized. In 1720, of New York’s population of 7000, 1600 were Negroes, and Wall Street was designated as the market place where slaveowners could hire them out by the day or the week. In the bloody Negro insurrection of 1712 in New York City, twenty-one slaves were executed.
When, in 1735, John Van Zandt horsewhipped his slave to death for having been found on the streets by the night watch, the New York City coroner’s jury said: “The Correction given by the Master was not the Cause of his Death … but it was by the visitation of God.” In 1741, another Negro insurrection in New York led to the burning to death of fifteen Negroes, the hanging of eight more.
The New York aristocracy was the most ostentatious of all. Bridenbaugh tells of: “Window hangings of camlet, japanned tables, gold-framed looking glasses, spinets and massive eight-day clocks.… richly carved furniture, jewels and silverplate.… Black house servants.” The middle classes lived fairly comfortably, but far below the style of the rich; poor laborers and free Negroes, just above the servant-slave rank, lived at the edge of poverty.
A letter to Peter Zenger’s New York Journal in 1737 spoke of the poor children in New York: “I believe it would be a very shocking Appearance to a moralized Heathen, were he to meet with 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.…”
With variations in detail, the sharpness of class distinctions were similar in Charles Town and Philadelphia.
THE PROBLEM OF HISTORICAL SELECTION
If the colonial period of our history constitutes our birth and infancy we were not “born free.” We were born amidst slavery, semi-slavery, poverty, land monopoly, class privilege, and class conflict. And this is not putting it as starkly as we might, for history has always been written by the upper and middle classes, and has only rarely been able to capture even a glimpse of the actual misery of lower-class life. The very nature of intellectual discourse on inequalities in wealth guarantees an overall tone of moderation and detachment, just as American history written by whites tends to complacency on the race issue. It takes the rare artistic talent of a Zola, Dickens, or Melville to even approach the terrible reality masked by historical description.
Three points have been omitted from this discussion so far, all of which support the temper lying behind the concept that we were “born free.” One is that whatever conditions were in America for the lower classes, they were worse in Europe. This is true, if we follow the American historian’s custom of leaving out Negro slavery from assessments of the social condition which are not primarily concerned with race. An amended statement would read: the lower-class white Anglo-Saxon farmer, worker, and servant was better off in America than in England.
The second point is: the mobility from lower to upper classes was much greater in the American colonies. The evidence so far indicates a flat yes to this statement. Much has been made of the social mobility in America but we are beginning now to see, in the emerging countries of Asia and Africa, the same kind of dynamic, shooting mobility that we had in our early years; it seems to come with any fresh, vigorous society and is not unique to our nation. This mobility, even at its best, in America as elsewhere, has always been a prize for the few, and has not affected the position of the vast majority. It gives to society both the zest and the deception that Irish Sweepstakes winners gave not long ago to the Lower East Side of New York City.
The third point in favor of the “born free” idea is that we in America had, almost from the very beginning, a large middle class, something not existent in the feudal-aristocratic societies of the Old World or the despotisms of the Orient, and so, if not luxury, a degree of comfort was spread to larger proportions of the population than had ever been done before. This should also be recorded flatly as a truth, with this reminder: that it was made possible, from the beginning, by slavery and servitude, and that, throughout our history, the laudable fact of a large, well-fed middle class has obscured the existence of an equally large, ill-fed lower class.*
Thus, we have a problem in historical objectivity. We can, as I have just done, make out a case for a class society in colonial America, and for glaring inequalities of wealth and status. We can also, as has been done many times, make out a case for a fluid class structure and a rather prosperous society. Both descriptions focus on different aspects of the same complex reality. It is also possible to do as most historians, and refuse to make out a “case” at all, but to present enough facts to supply the needs of polemicists on both sides. This, while useful, represents a social detachment which ignores human need.
If one wants to avoid neutrality, and if both a case for equality and a case for inequality can be extracted from the same body of historical material, which shall the social analyst emphasize? That depends on his criterion: If his standard of judgment for characterizing American society is the comparable state of equality in most other countries of the world, then the emphasis