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Right-Wing Populism in America
Too Close for Comfort
By Chip Berlet, Matthew N. Lyons The Guilford Press
Copyright © 2000 The Guilford Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-57230-568-7
CHAPTER 1
Rebellious Colonizers
Bacon's Rebellion and the American Revolution
BACON'S REBELLION
In July, 1676, as the leader of a rebellion in the colony of Virginia, Nathaniel Bacon issued a "Declaration of the People." Writing exactly 100 years before a more famous Virginian penned a more famous declaration, Bacon set forth his reasons for defying the authority of Governor William Berkeley. The document charged the governor with imposing "great unjust taxes upon the Commonality," appointing unqualified personal favorites to public office, monopolizing the beaver trade and, to protect that trade, favoring the Indians and failing to defend the colonists against their attacks.
Bacon's Rebellion highlighted a quarter-century of intense unrest in Virginia, during which working people rose up repeatedly against the privileged colonial elite. The colony was deeply polarized between oppressors and oppressed. In the Tidewater region, where most settlers were concentrated, one-half of the economically active population were European indentured servants, who were recruited — sometimes by force — to work for a fixed number of years in exchange for ship-passage and subsistence in Virginia. These European bond laborers worked under similar conditions (and often side by side) with African bond laborers, who at that time formed a small part of the colonial population. During this period there was relatively little difference in status between the two groups of unfree workers. Both African and European bond laborers repeatedly sought freedom through escapes and occasionally direct resistance against their masters. Other rebellious groups included landless free workers and small farmers, whose economic vulnerability often forced them into debt. Such groups resented the power of the big planters, who monopolized much of the land, controlled the colonial government, and often used public office for personal gain.
Not only was the Virginia colony internally divided, but it also faced conflict with the indigenous people it had driven out. Governor Berkeley approached American Indians with a strategy of divide and conquer. Britain's victory in the war of 1644–1646 had reduced members of neighboring Indian nations to the status of British subjects, to be used as a frontier buffer and as allies in wars against other Native nations. The empire-builders' long-term interests called for orderly, controlled expansion of European settlement. As J. Sakai notes, "The Indian nations held, if only for a historical moment, the balance of power in North America between the rival British, French and Spanish empires. Too much aggression against Indian territories by English settlers could drive the Indians into allying with the French."
Many frontier farmers disliked the governor's policy. They were vulnerable to Native counterattacks and were taxed to pay for military defenses they regarded as inadequate. Nathaniel Bacon, a young planter recently arrived in the colony, drew a large following among frontier settlers by denouncing Berkeley's "pro-Indian" stance and calling for a total war of extermination against all Indians without distinction. The rebellion began when Bacon defied the governor's orders and organized a military expedition against neighboring Indians, which culminated in the massacre of almost an entire village of Occaneechee allies. In Wilcomb Washburn's words, "Bacon and his men did not kill a single enemy Indian but contented themselves with frightening away, killing, or enslaving most of the friendly neighboring Indians, and taking their beaver and land as spoils."
But Bacon did not base his rebellion only on a hard-line anti-Indian policy. He also rallied broad support among lower-class colonists who wanted to end their economic misery and political disenfranchisement. After marching to Jamestown and confronting the governor, Bacon's forces became associated with a series of antielite reforms passed by the new colonial assembly in June, 1676, including a law allowing property-less freemen to vote. As the conflict deepened, both sides sought popular support where they could: Governor Berkeley offered freedom to indentured servants of the rebels if they would join his army; Bacon responded with the same offer not only to the European servants, but also to the African bond laborers held by loyalists. The rebels burned the capital city of Jamestown and at one point even captured the governor, but Bacon's sudden death from illness a few months later precipitated the movement's collapse.
A number of historians have cited Bacon's Rebellion as an early example of grassroots activism in the cause of liberty. Sidney Lens, in Radicalism in America, describes it as "the first revolt of the common people — small farmers, impoverished freemen, even some white indentures — against the authority of a royal governor and his privileged class." Theodore W. Allen, in The Invention of the White Race, argues that the rebellion's most important feature was that "in Virginia, 128 years before William Lloyd Garrison was born, laboring-class African-Americans and European-Americans fought side by side for the abolition of slavery." While there is some truth in both of these descriptions, they cannot be separated from the demand for genocidal warfare against American Indians, which was one of the rebellion's central aims.
Theodore W. Allen has described Bacon's Rebellion as a pivotal event leading to "the invention of the white race" and of the U.S. system of racial oppression. By showing the potential power of united resistance by European and African bond laborers, Allen argues, the rebellion scared the colonial elite into creating a more effective system of social control. In the half-century that followed, the colonial elite drove a wedge between the two laboring groups: reducing Africans from the ambiguous status of bond-service to permanent, hereditary slavery, and elevating Europeans over them with a system of legal and social privileges based on skin color and ancestry. The process created both "Black" and "White" as social categories. In this way the ruling elite ensured that it could more fully exploit the plantation labor force, and created a social buffer group with a stake in helping to control those at the bottom of the hierarchy. Viewed in relation to this process, Allen argues, Bacon's Rebellion stands out as a revolutionary struggle in which "Afro-American and European-American proletarians made common cause ... to an extent never duplicated in the three hundred years since."
This analysis is crucial but one-sided. White supremacy indeed developed in the seventeenth century as a system that bolstered elite power, but it was as much about conquering land as it was about controlling labor. The expulsion and mass killing of Native peoples were as central to the formation of racial oppression as was the enslavement of kidnapped Africans. And the anti-Indian conquest was well underway in 1676. British settlers may not yet have defined American Indians as a separate race, but they did generally treat them as malevolent, heathen savages and, often, as fair game for slaughter.
Because Allen regards the European conquest of indigenous peoples as peripheral to the process by which White supremacy was created, he regards the anti-Indian "phase" of Bacon's Rebellion as peripheral to the main event: "a civil war against the Anglo-American ruling class." But these dimensions must be treated together as parts of one contradictory whole. The same applies to the rebellion's later period, when Bacon recruited both African and European workers by offering them freedom. Allen oversimplifies when he characterizes this stage of the rebellion as an attempt to end bond-servitude. We think it more accurate to say that a tactical maneuver by the rebel leaders created an opportunity that bond laborers, both African and European, were ready to exploit. At no time did the rebels repudiate their efforts to enslave those Indians they did not kill.
Most leaders of the rebellion, including Bacon himself, were members of an "outsider" faction of the planter class, who resented the dominance and special privileges enjoyed by the inner circle around Governor Berkeley. They appealed to popular grievances because they needed lower-class support in order to gain power. To a large extent, however, they succeeded in channeling these grievances into anti-Indian violence or forms of antielitism that served their own interests, such as plundering the estates of wealthy people loyal to the governor.
Bacon's Rebellion was a confused, contradictory upheaval. Yet the general pattern of its contradictions — plebian resentment coupled with intraelite conflict, and egalitarianism for a limited group coupled with expansionist, murderous attacks against non-European peoples — set a pattern of repressive populist politics that would be repeated again and again.
THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
The American Revolution provides another example of such contradictions. As in Bacon's Rebellion, an outsider faction of the upper class joined with lower-class European Americans in an effort to wrest power from the King's appointed representatives. In 1776, as in 1676, the rebels fought not simply for an end to excessive taxes and arbitrary government, but also for greater freedom to attack American Indians and expand slavery. Yet the Revolution was better organized and enjoyed a more extensive base of support, reflecting the fact that colonial society had developed dramatically since Nathaniel Bacon's day. By 1776, a color line was firmly in place, and slave labor had become a larger and more crucial component of the economy than a century before. The settler population had grown rapidly and was poised for a big push westward across the Appalachian mountains, and the colonial elite was more stable, interconnected, and articulate.
Unlike Bacon's Rebellion, which "produced no real program of reform, no revolutionary manifesto, not even any revolutionary slogans," the colonial Revolutionary movement was infused with the new language of Enlightenment humanism, natural rights, and a belief that government is a social contract between rulers and the people. Thomas Paine's best-selling pamphlet Common Sense, published in January 1776, denounced belief in the divine right of kings and called for a popularly elected republic. Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence, adopted by the Continental Congress in July 1776, anchored resistance to British rule in the ideals of equality, liberty, popular sovereignty, and the right of "the People" to overthrow tyranny.
Today it is widely acknowledged that the leaders of the American Revolution excluded women, Black people, and American Indians when they declared that "all men are created equal." Many patriots at the time embraced this contradiction, treating human rights as a limited commodity that could only be enjoyed by a select group if others were excluded and subordinated. In this view, as Joan Gunderson has commented, "Independence was a condition arrived at by exclusion ... by not being dependent or enslaved." Thus a male head of the household was independent by contrast with his dependent wife and children; thus White patriot writers expressed outrage that Britain had reduced them to "slavery" — on the grounds that slavery was intended only for Blacks.
Our description of the Revolution as a repressive populist movement focuses on two points. First, by equating tyranny with the British crown, the struggle for U.S. independence promoted a form of antielite scapegoating that deflected discontent away from inequities within colonial society. Second, the drive for independence was also a drive to expand and intensify the system of White supremacy. People of color were not simply "left out" of the Revolution — they were among its major targets.
Colonial Class Conflict
Like Bacon's Rebellion, the independence movement drew on widespread plebian demands for greater economic and political power. In the 1760s and 1770s, tenant-farmer uprisings in New York and New Jersey, the antielite Regulator movement in North Carolina, and lower-class street activism in cities such as Boston and Philadelphia expressed a widespread and deep-seated hostility to established centers of wealth and privilege. Lower-class Whites demanded more representation and popular access to government, more equitable taxes, fairer land distribution, and other political and economic reforms. In the Hudson Valley, 2,000 tenant farmers proclaimed themselves "Levelers" in 1766 and took up arms against the big landlords; two regiments of British troops were needed to crush the uprising. Rebellious small farmers in New Jersey argued that royal grants of land were illegitimate since they were made without consent of the indigenous people who held true title to the area.
Although propelled by lower-class unrest, the drive for independence was spearheaded by a section of the colonial elite. In the short term, the demand for independence offered this upper-class patriot bloc a means to channel popular anger away from itself and onto the British government. In the long term, independence enabled the colonial elite to expand its own wealth and power without external restraints. Wealthy colonists were far from united on the issue; indeed, the American Revolution involved a colonial civil war between rebels and loyalists, each led by a faction of the colonial elite.
Upper-class patriots were not entirely successful in deflecting lower-class White resentment. Despite leaders' efforts to contain them, popular mobilizations against British rulers repeatedly spilled over into attacks on property and elite privilege. During and after the Revolutionary War, poor farmers rioted repeatedly against tax collectors and court seizure of their lands for debt. Most New York tenant farmers sided with the British, whom they hoped would redistribute the huge estates of proindependence landlords. Nevertheless, the movement for cross-class unity against Britain succeeded in winning broad popular support, not simply because of elite manipulation, but also because many European American farmers, artisans, and laborers shared a stake in U.S. independence.
Trade and Westward Expansion
Up until 1763, conflicts between Britain and the colonists had been limited by a shared enmity toward France, Britain's main rival for control of the North American continent. But four years after the British conquest of Quebec in 1759, France ceded all claims to land in continental North America. Not only did this remove the colonists' primary need for protection by the British Empire, but it also gave Britain the imposing tasks of managing vast new lands and pacifying French-Canadian and Native populations. To finance these projects and pay off its war debt, the British government imposed a series of new taxes on the Anglo-American colonists, while simultaneously tightening restrictions on settler expansion and trade. These measures directly precipitated the movement for independence.
Trade was especially important for the northern colonies. Officially, British companies were guaranteed control of most manufacturing and trade within the empire, but this control was enforced only sporadically for most of the colonial period. New England merchants, such as Thomas Hancock and his nephew John Hancock, president of the Continental Congress in 1776, grew rich from smuggling. Smugglers sold North American manufactured goods abroad, imported products from outside the British Empire, and competed with British shippers in the highly profitable triangle trade of finished goods, West Indian sugar, and enslaved Africans. Rum production was the chief source of hard currency for Massachusetts, and the colony's "West Indian trade employed some ten thousand seamen, to say nothing of the workers who built, outfitted, and supplied the ships." Increasingly, such competition threatened British capital and government revenues, and Britain fought back with new efforts at restriction. Eric Williams, in Capitalism and Slavery, argues that
The attempt to render the [Sugar Duties] Act [of 1764] effective and stamp out smuggling led directly to the American Revolution. It was this that John Adams had in mind when he stated that he did not know why the Americans "should blush to confess that molasses was an essential ingredient in American independence."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Right-Wing Populism in America by Chip Berlet, Matthew N. Lyons. Copyright © 2000 The Guilford Press. Excerpted by permission of The Guilford Press.
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