Crystal Fonseca HIST 107 Professor Zeman January 23,2016 Chapter 3 & 4: Persons of Mean and Vile Conditions & Tyranny is Tyranny The start of Bacon’s rebellion Virginia was founded in 1676 it supplied the leadership for the American Revolution The colony faced rebellion of white frontiersmen as well as slaves and servants England decided to send an army of soldiers across the Atlantic, they did this in hopes of maintaining the peace between the colonist Bacon’s Rebellion began with conflict about how to deal with the Indians Developing an Indian policy that would divide the Indians in order to have control over them Another motive was to teach the poor whites of Virginia that rebellion did not show a superior force, by calling troops from England, which led to mass hanging Violence grew in the frontier of before the rebellion was initiated The doeg Indians took some hogs to redress debt and, the whites retrieving the hogs, murdered two Indians Then after that incident the doeg Indians sent out a war party to kill a white herdsman, then a company of white militia company killed twenty-four Indians Jamestown declared war on the Indians They proposed to exempt any Indians that cooperated, this angered the frontiers people, who wanted total war but hated the high taxes They were experiencing a hard time in 1676 It was a dry summer, ruining the corn crops, which was needed for food. The tobacco crop was also being ruined, which they needed for export. Bacon himself came from an upper-class He had a good chunk of land and was more enthusiastic about killing Indians, than readdressing the needs of the poor He insisted on organizing armed detachments to fight the Indians He was captured by Berkley and proclaimed him a rebel, two thousand Virginians went to go support him Bacon’s ” Declaration of the people” showed a mixture of resentment against the rich as well as frontier hatred of the Indians It showed that the Berkeley administration for unjust taxes, favorites in high position because of the beaver trade and not protecting the west former from the Indians It was a complex chain of oppression in Virginia The Indians were sized by white frontiersmen The whole colony was being exploited by England, which brought the colonists tobacco and made 100,000pounds for the king Those servants who were apart of Bacon’s rebellion were a part of a huge underclass They came to the north American colonies from England cites, whose government was eager to get rid of them From the reign of Elizabeth, laws were passed to punish them, imprison them in work houses, and exile them Persons who were found begging could be stripped and whipped, could be sent out of the city and or country, and sent to workhouses Due to harsh circumstances people had to leave and that soon became profitable to merchants and soon their masters After signing the indenture, in which the immigrants agreed to pay their passage to work for their masters for five of seven years They were imprisoned to make sure that they wouldn’t run away, the voyage to America lasted eight to twelve weeks The servants were packed with the same concerns of profit that marked the slave ships 106 passengers died of starvation, six of them were eaten by survivors, and twenty-three children died of starvation and disease and were thrown in the ocean Indentured servants were brought and sold like slaves Beatings and whippings were common.
, servant women would be raped The masters tried to control completely the sexual lives of their servants It was an economic interest to keep servant women from marrying, because childbearing would interfere from their work Servants could not marry without permission, could be separated from their families, and could be whipped if they had various offenses The English colonies made a discovery that would prove to be useful in the next two hundred years They found that by creating a nation, a symbol which would now call the united states They thought that by creating this they could take over land, profit and political power from the British empire The American Revolution, was a work of genius which created the most effective system of national control It showed future generations of leaders the advantages of combining paternalism with command Starting with bacon’s rebellion, there has been eighteen uprisings against the colonial government England was victorious over France in the sevens year’s war also known as the French and Indian war, ambitious colonial leaders was no longer a threat to the French They now had two rivals left the English and the Indians, soon the proclamation of 1763 came about Since the French were defeated, they could know pay attention to keep the colonies under control The British government needed money to pay for the war, and they expected the colonies to do that The trade of the colonist became really important to the British government The war brought glory to generals and unemployment to the poor The lower class used town meetings to vent about the injustices that were happening to them The accumulated sense of injustice against the rich led to the explosiveness after the stamp act Through this act, the British were able to tax the colonist to pay for the war A shoemaker led a mob in destroying the house of a rich merchant named Andrew oliver They turned to the home of a rich elite named Thomas Hutchinson, which they smashed his house with an axe and drank his wine as well as stoled furniture from his house The mechanics at the time demanded political democracy in the colonial cities They opened representative meetings as well as public gatherings in legislative halls They hosted open air meeting where the population would participate in making policies, making equal taxes, as well as price control The consciousness of lower middle class to the point where it must have been hard thinking The courtside had the same problems of poor against the rich Political leaders would organize the population against England, granting benefits for the poor The rebellion in northeastern New York, led to the modeling of Vermont to get out of the New York state There were social movements, highly organized, it involved the creation of counter governments The land rioters saw their battle as poor against rich The land hungry land owners turned to the British against their American landowners But since they had conflict with the british the colonial leaders, since they knew that they would side with the britsh, adopted policies to win over the courtside A powerful movement of white farmers was organized wealthy and corrupt officials from 1766 to 1771 This movement in North Carolina was called the regulators movement, which consisted of white farmers in the west who attempted to democratize the local government They resented the tax system which was really hurting the poor, merchants and lawyers worked in the courts to collect the debt from the farmers The Regulators didn’t represent servants or slaves, but they did speak for small owners and tenants The regulators organized to prevent the collection of taxes Seven Hundred armed farmers forced the release of two of their regulator leaders The regulators petitioned the government for their injustices in 1768, which they said ” that the poor and weak had unequal chances than the rich and powerful” The result of this was that the assembly passed some mild reform legislation to prevent riots Regulators went to battle in May of 1771, they were defeated by a disciplined army using cannons The regulator movement was really strong, and it had the support of thousands of men of a total white taxable population One of the consequences of this movement was thart only minority people participation as patriots in the revolutionary war It took the stamp act crisis to make the leadership aware of the crisis or dilemma A political group called the loyal nine organized a procession to protest the stamp act They marched homes of the stampmaster, the crowed went further and destroyed some of the stamp masters property The British parliament turned to its next attempt to tax the colonies The soldiers began to take the jobs of the working people because jobs were scarce The mechanics and the shoemakers lost their work because of the colonists’ boycott Tomas Paine’s common sense became the most popular pamphlet in the American colonies It made the bold argument for independence in words that any person that can read could understand Paine discarded the idea of right of kings of the British government and also named some advantages of sticking with England and also of separating of them He also named some bad effects of the connection with the England He appealed to the colonists’ memory of the wars that England involved them, which was costly in lives and money The common sense went through twenty-five editions and this pamphlet appealed to a wide range of colonials who were angered with England Paine denounced the so called balanced government of lords The declaration of independence They organized a small committee to come up with the declaration of independence, after the Boston massacre and the battle of Lexington and concord It was adopted by congress and proclaimed on July 4, 1776, there was already a powerful sentiment for independence The language of popular control over government, there was a right of rebellion and revolution Indians, women, and slaves clearly were omitted from the united interest that were drawn from the declaration of independence Thomas Jefferson had written a paragraph in the declaration of independence accusing the king of transporting slaves from Africa to the colonies The paragraph was soon removed because slaveholder themselves disagreed on the ending of the slave trade The statement “all men are created equal” was not an attempt to make a statement about women, it was just that women were beyond consideration or worthy of inclusion and were politicly invisible The declaration of independence was limited to life, liberty, and happiness The declaration functioned to mobilize certain groups of Americans but it was also ignoring others The philosophy of the declaration of independence states that the government is set by the people to secure their lives and that it should be overthrown if it no longer does that The declaration of independence talked about government and political rights but didn’t cover the inequality of property . John Locke and his Second Treatise Locke himself was a wealthy man, with investments in silk trade and slave trade, and suggested a government of slaveowners run by wealthy land barons He made a statement of people’s government was in support of a revolution in England For free development of mercantile capitalism at home and abroad Locke himself didn’t like child labor and suggested that all children should schools The English revolutions of the seventeenth century brought representative government and it opened discussions of democracy Taxation threatened the security of property was overthrown Two political movements which wanted to carry equality into the equality into the economic sphere Representative government in class divisions and conflicts in england that followed the revolution that Locke supported England was full of riots because of the high prices of bread and the miserable wages that they had
