economic inequality – American History to 1877

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According to Wilentz, early 1800s American democracy was extensively interwoven with social movements. Religious revivals, the Masons, and new economic systems influenced politics by increasing pressures on certain issues, namely slavery and economic stability. The first that Wilentz discusses is the Second Great Awakening, in which new denominations, including the Methodists and Baptists, took root and began heated rivalry. Immediately following the American Revolution, he cites that there were fewer than 1 in 10 committed church members. However, by the 1840s this number had ballooned to 8 in 10. Wilentz holds that the emotional aspects of the newer denominations were largely what attracted American citizens (pg 141-2). I am curious about what other factors drove the people back into religious activities and whether or not the few decades without war encouraged this development. As a social concept, I also wonder whether wars later encourage more attendance to religious activities or push people away from them. The Methodist and Baptist groups, with their increasingly large numbers, began to affect politics with a surge of anti-slavery discussions. These organizations were also far more open to having not only members of all races, but religious leaders of color as well. The community that people found in these groups helped develop the foundation of the “radical” abolitionist movement that began in the 1810s. As Charlotte discusses in her post “The Politics of Slavery and Guilty Bystanders,” these developments began to include the rhetoric that slavery was morally wrong and also unconstitutional. These religious communities encouraged democratic thinking for groups of color and for the lower-class white Americans (142). Even though the religious organizations as groups were later forced to back away from the fight against inequality, they instilled members with a sense of its possibility and potential benefits.

The Freemasons were another group that caused political contention. The upper- and middle-class Americans involved in the secret society were accused of conspiring to control the entirety of American politics through the organization. Freemasonry was very popular in New England, but also grew to include many from the middle Atlantic states. The order became one of exclusivity, and it was of a kind that bred arrogance in combination with a not necessarily positive social distinction. The Freemasons had been long-established, however, it was the movement against them that caught new attention. Those against the order, the Anti-Masons, became a political entity of their own. The issue that they ran into was that many of the leading political figures on both sides, including the ones that they were most ideologically aligned with, were Freemasons.

Much of the pushback against the Freemasons arose from similar ground as the religious movements. The search for a more equitable society was becoming more and more prevalent issue. The differing economic situations throughout the states led to very different theories of how the national government needed to regulate the economy. Hamilton pushed for a national banking system with paper currency, whereas those such as Thomas Benton discouraged this development. His energies were rather spent in reorganizing land policy and creating relief programs for small Southern farmers struggling under heavy debt burdens. The combination of existing debt issues were compounded by falling cotton prices. Many contending forces and plans began to attack these issues. One of the loudest voices came from South Carolina, whose planters rallied against Adam’s ideas of taxation and tariffs on cotton. They perceived that the North was exploiting them in a time of economic need. This increased the divide between the North and South. Antislavery movements and the differing economies caused the North and South to drift even further apart from each other in terms of ideology and desired political involvement.

While disease, access to clean sustenance and Indian interactions certainly played a role in the Chesapeake colonies’ vitality, Taylor stresses that the production of and English demand for tobacco was the most important determinant of the region’s overall success. With the incredible amount of labor necessary for the production of tobacco and the relatively high costs of enslaving Africans in the mid-seventeenth century, wealthy Chesapeake colonists relied on indentured servants to tend to their land. Theses servants were initially drawn to the Chesapeake area due to “unemployment and hunger in England combined with the pull of Virginia opportunity” (142). Taylor notes further that both the prices of tobacco and the economic conditions in England greatly affected the emigration of indentured servants to the Chesapeake colonies throughout the seventeenth century.

Based on the economics of the Chesapeake colonies, and tobacco production being central to its overall success, the opportunities given to indentured servants varied between periods of relative prosperity and financial hardship. As Thomas alludes to in his most recent blog post, however, by 1700 there was a clear gap in economic opportunity between Virginia’s rich and poor, as a very small percentage of wealthy white families controlled a majority of the area’s land. Despite this distinct economic division among whites in the Chesapeake colonies, they were unified socially as the eventual influx of African slaves led to the beginnings of racism and an overall sentiment of racial superiority shared by whites.

Although Taylor observes that racism was not initially noticed in the Chesapeake colonies, he clearly highlights how the increased number of slaves in the area led to legislative changes that ultimately encouraged racism and facilitated white cohesion. An example of legally justified racism was that, “After 1691 no Virginia planter could free slaves unless he paid for their transportation beyond the colony” (156). By providing a financial incentive for owners not to free their slaves, the Chesapeake colonies further divided blacks and whites by keeping blacks enslaved for longer periods of time. Taylor highlights that legislation geared towards restricting the rights of blacks meant that, “A dark skin became synonymous with slavery, just as freedom became equated with whiteness” (157). Therefore, despite the economic inequality that existed between poor and wealthy whites in the late seventeenth century, a sense of racial superiority united all whites and immediately gave them, regardless of their financial status, an elevated position in Chesapeake’s social hierarchy.

Taylor’s description of how the economic conditions in England led the Chesapeake colonies to be based on labor provided by African slaves rather than indentured servants illustrates racism’s roots in the American colonies.

Tag: economic inequality

Social Movements in the Early 1800s

Early Forms of Racism in the Chesapeake Colonies