30. Are All Men Equal?

In this text the author traces the social evolution in the from the colonial hierarchical society to the origin of the idea of equality among the frontiersmen. Read on to learn more about this great social change, which followed the emergence of individualism in early 19th century America.

Today in the United States if your rich neighbor buys a Cadillac and you want to do the same, there is nothing to stop you—if you have the money. But in colonial America you might have liked the gold and silver girdle your neighbor wore, or his colorful hatband, or his embroidered cap; you might have saved and saved until finally you had enough money to buy one or all of these things—but you dared not wear them—unless you belonged to the right class. In Massachusetts in 1653 two women were arrested for wearing silk hoods and scarfs, but because their husbands were worth two hundred pounds ($1 000) each they were allowed to go free. But woe betide the luckless poor person who dared to wear silk!

Throughout all the colonies you did or did not have certain rights according to your rank or the amount of property you owned. You did or did not do certain things according to your rank or the amount of property you owned. Rank and wealth. These had some bearing on almost everything you did at any time.

If you went to Harvard College you didn't just take any seat in the classrooms. Nor were you placed according to where your name appeared in the alphabet. Oh no. Not in colonial America. A seat was assigned you according to your rank or property.

Even in church the same arrangement was made. Seats were given out on the usual basis, best seats for those with most money, next best seats for those with some money, and poorest seats for those with little or no money. Occasionally, some of the best seats were separated from the others by a neat handmade balustrade so there would be no contact with the vulgar.

Were two persons found guilty of stealing something together? Then you would expect that both would be publicly whipped, since that was the usual punishment. Well, they might or might not be, depending upon what their rank was. Thus "in 1631, when Mr. Josias Plaistowe was convicted of stealing corn from the Indians, the court merely imposed a fine and directed that thenceforth he should be called by the name of Josias, and not Mr. as formerly! On the other hand, his servants who had assisted in the theft were severely whipped."

Today, you have the right to vote if you are a citizen with the proper age qualification. In colonial America, however, you had to be white, you had to be a man, in many communities you had to belong to a certain religious group, and you had to own so much property or have so much land. For a long time in many of the settlements there were many more people who were not allowed to vote than who were. And of course to be elected to any office in the government, to help make the laws or see that they were carried out, you had to own even more property than you needed in order to vote.

At one time in the Massachusetts Bay settlement the people who made the laws thought that workmen's wages were too high. So they passed a law fixing a certain amount which was to be the highest any employer might pay his workmen. If an employer paid more than this fixed sum or a workman took more than this fixed sum, both were to be fined five shillings. Fair enough. But the next year the court changed the law so that only the workman who took more was to be fined, the employer who paid more received no punishment.

To understand how all these things happened you must have a bird's eye view of the people who lived in the colonies. At the top of the heap were the royal governors and their official friends, sent over by the King of England to help the colonists manage their affairs; rich merchants, rich plantation-owners, holders of large estates—these, too, helped the colonists to manage their affairs. These were the upper classes, the people who signed "Gentleman" after their names or Mr. before it. Some of them had come to the colonies with money; some of them had worked hard and had risen to the top; some of them were just lucky; some of them were friends of the governor and so got huge tracts of land for very little, or even as a favor; at any rate, no matter how they had attained that position, they were now the ruling class. These people wore the finest clothing, latest fashions imported from England; they lived in the finest houses; they had freedmen, or indentured servants, or Negro slaves working for them in one way or another; these were the people who had most of the money; these were the people who had the respect of most of the colonists because of their rank or their money; these were the people who had the power that rank and money gave; these were the people who voted, got themselves elected to high positions in the government, and ran it according to their own ideas of what was best for all the colonists; these were the people who made the laws.

The people called yeomen in old Merrie England had emigrated here and were next in rank to the upper classes. These yeomen in America were the small farmers who formed the largest group in the colonies. They were the people who did most of the hard work; they were the people who in the North sailed ships all over the world, caught fish in nearby waters, and tracked the whale in far-off seas; they were the people who did the fighting, later, when there was fighting to be done; these people, because they did own farms, had the right to vote; sometimes they used that vote to fight against the class of merchants and planters above them; these people were hard working, ambitious, and anxious to raise themselves to the group above.

Next came the free laborers, both skilled and unskilled. The skilled worker was sometimes able to save up enough money to buy a bit of property. This meant that he would be allowed to vote and in general better himself. But until they owned some property these free blacksmiths, carpenters, tailors, rope makers, and those unfortunates without a trade had two groups above them, and so were quite far down in the social scale.

Beneath them were the indentured servants. Their happiness during their term of service depended on the type of master they had. Some were fortunate in getting kind masters who didn't work them too hard and perhaps even helped them get a good start when their term was over. But from the great number of advertisements for runaway servants that appeared in the newspapers we are led to believe that indentured servants had a very hard time. The master might whip them whenever he liked; he might give them the shabbiest clothes and the poorest kind of food; he could say whether or not they might be married; while they were in his service they were no better than slaves. Some servants were even branded by their masters. If they ran away and were caught they might have to serve five days for every one they had been gone—this in addition to a terrible beating. Some of the indentured servants worked very hard, were fortunate, and went step by step up the scale until they became wealthy landowners. But the majority of them had no such luck. At the end of their terms they were given a suit of clothes, some corn, and a few tools. They faced a hard life. Most of them left for the back country where land was cheap. Many of their descendants are today in the hills in the South, living miserable, poor, ignorant lives, just managing to keep from starving. They live on what they raise, shoot, or steal. They might have been better off if Negro slavery in the South had not made it a disgrace for white people to do field work. These people are today called "poor whites" and "hillbillies".

The Negro slaves at the bottom of the scale had very little chance to better themselves. They were slaves for life, and even in those few cases where they were set free, nevertheless, their black skins kept them from ever rising far. With them, as with the indentured servants, everything depended on the type of master they had; a kind master might mean a good comfortable home without much worry, which was more than many poor whites could look forward to. A cruel master might mean horrible punishment, a wretched life, and a miserable death.

But wasn't this division into classes the same sort of thing that many of these people objected to in the Old World? Yes, it was a system modeled after that in Europe. The idea that a small group of rich people, the aristocracy, should run the government and make the laws had long been in practice there. It was true that the distinctions were not as sharp, that here in the colonies you could rise from one class to another more quickly than you could in Europe. That was a very important difference, but, nevertheless, until you climbed to the top of the heap yourself, you were ruled from above. The wealthy upper classes made the laws so it's easy to see why those laws favored the rich.

Did no one challenge the right of the rich to manage things? The small farmers who had the right to vote sometimes did. But the real challenge came from the frontier. The frontiersmen demanded a say in running things. They demanded the right to help make the laws for themselves. The American idea of all men being equal first came from the frontier. This idea had been talked of in Europe before, but it was first put into practice in America. It was a very, very important notion which later affected the whole world.

Where the last settlement ended and the wilderness began, where the edge of civilization met the beginning of savagery, this was the frontier line. Here at the farthest clearing, land was either free or very cheap. Here where the wilderness came right up to your door you could start life all over again.

And that is what happened. To the frontier line came the dissatisfied, the indentured servants, the adventure-lovers, the ambitious who saw no chance to rise in the older settlement. To the frontier, too, came the newer immigrants, hungry for a piece of land of their own. In the older settlements land was expensive and the best land had already been taken up, but here at the farthest edge on the frontier line, good cheap land was obtainable. Thousands of newly arrived Germans and Scotch-Irish went into the back country of Pennsylvania, down the valley into the neighboring colonies of Virginia, Maryland, and the Carolinas.

As more and more people came, the frontier line kept moving westward. The Indian found the line creeping up on him, pushing him farther and farther back. The fur trader left the edge of the settlements and followed the Indian trails to the wilderness. The white hunter and trapper did the same. With these people the Indian had no quarrel except when they cheated him in a trade—which they often did. They carried on the same work he did; they did not destroy his home. But as the edge of the farming settlements moved on and on, the Indian saw his trees cut down and his wilderness home replaced by the white man's clearing. This had been going on long enough for him to understand that farming and hunting could not go on in the same place together, that as the white farmer moved in, he, the hunter, had to move out. The Indian knew this and fought every step of the settlers' advance.

The frontier line was bloodstained. The rifle of the frontiersman was always within easy reach. His wife and children, both boys and girls, must not stray too far from the house; they must learn very early to pay attention to slight noises. No matter what they were doing—building or planting or playing—their ears must be ever alert. Indian attacks were sudden, still and swift, and the penalty for carelessness or unpreparedness was a horrible death.

Life at the frontier was dangerous and hard. There were none of the soft refinements of civilization. It was life in the raw, fighting savages, chopping down trees, planting corn, making furniture—work, hard work and lots of it. This pioneer life made you tough, if you lived. Only the strongest did live. And here there could be no class rule—one man was as good as another. Rich man and poor man were on the same terms. Here a man was successful according to what he himself did, not for what his father or grandfather was. The frontiersman faced hard work all the time; he had to tackle and conquer difficult obstacles at every turn. He succeeded, and carried his head high. He grew independent. The frontiersman heartily believed that "a fool can put on his own coat better than a wise man can do it for him". Having mastered the wilderness, the frontiersman was not now ready to take orders from any upper class. He would be his own boss.

So it was the frontiersman who led in the fierce struggle against rule by a few. There were many such fights. The upper classes, so long the rulers of the old settlements, now used to it, and liking it, were not ready to give up their power. Allow these rough, uneducated, coarse people, who dressed and lived like savages, to question their authority? Absurd! They would teach these vulgar, unrefined upstarts to respect their betters. The rich merchants and landowners of the coast would never turn over their lawmaking power to uncouth backwoodsmen unless they were forced to do so. Here and there armed attacks occurred. The rich merchants and landowners saw their Old World idea of upper-class rule of the few challenged by the American frontiersmen with their New World idea of the equality of man. It was a long, hard, bitterly fought contest.

From We, the People (first published in 1932)

by Leo Huberman.