CHAPTER 9
Inauspicious Beginning

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. —That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, —That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such Principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

The Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Preamble to the Constitution of the United States, March 1789

The history of the United States of America underscores the harsh reality that a declaration of liberty and a new constitution promising tranquility, liberty, and prosperity for all do not suddenly wipe away the cultural and institutional legacy of five thousand years of Empire. In the case of the United States, this legacy includes extremes of plutocracy, theocracy, genocide, slavery, racism, and sexism. This truth is crucial to understanding current U.S. politics and the challenge the Great Turning presents to the nation that has long prided itself on being the world’s beacon of liberty.

We easily forget just how inauspicious the prospects for the foundation of a democratic nation were on July 4, 1776, when the representatives of 160thirteen English colonies in North America issued their declaration of independence from the most powerful nation of their day. Those of sober mind might well have concluded the rebels had taken leave of their senses. General Washington’s ragtag part-time army of volunteers stood against a much larger British force of disciplined professional soldiers. British loyalists controlled most of the institutions of government, and as much as a third of the population was composed of royalists who remained loyal to the English king and the institutions of hereditary rule. As to the prospects for securing the rights of all men even if they were able to outlast the British army, the social condition of the colonies could hardly have been further from Aristotle’s ideal of a “single homogeneous, organized solidary body of citizens capable of totally unified action.”

In the first centuries following Europe’s discovery of the New World, Europe’s ruling class had approached it as an alien land of interest only for what it might yield in slaves, gold, and other forms of natural wealth to support their power and comfort. Kings looked to it as a source of tax revenue, and investors as a source of profit. Later kings would come to see it as a dumping ground for their human refuse to reduce crime and ease revolutionary pressures for the redistribution of wealth and power at home.

At the time of the American Revolution, the ranks of the colonists who aligned with the revolutionary cause included pretentious slave-owning aristocrats, abolitionists, impoverished backwoods farmers, rebellious militiamen, privateers, smugglers, swindlers, former slaves and bonded laborers, profiteering merchants, Enlightenment thinkers, and religious theocrats of a mind to flog, imprison, or hang all who did not share their particular faith. Most of those involved had little if any education, knew only conditions of extreme servitude and hardship, and felt no sense of national identity until well after the Revolutionary War was under way. The motives of those who joined the rebellion were as diverse as their circumstances.

Furthermore, the assertion in the Declaration of Independence, inspired by the Enlightenment philosophers and drafted in a moment of revolutionary fervor, that all men are created equal and that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, defied the evidence of five thousand years of history. It also defied the reality of the genocide, slavery, profiteering, and religious bigotry that were defining features of the North American colonial experience. The idea of creating a democratic nation with equal rights for all had no place in 161the thoughts of the economic plutocrats and religious theocrats who founded the early settlements. Recognition of these early circumstances is essential to any understanding of how far we have come as a nation and how much we have left to do to realize the ideals of the Declaration of Independence.

PLUTOCRACY

Foreshadowing the corporate rule of our own day, the colonial settlements were created more as economic than political jurisdictions— essentially company estates established by corporate charters issued by the Crown to be managed for the profit of their owners. Beginning in 1584, with the permission of Elizabeth I, Walter Raleigh made several unsuccessful attempts to establish the first English colony in America as a private investment on Roanoke Island off the North Carolina coast.¹ Private entrepreneurs and joint stock companies established a dozen permanent English colonies on other sites along the coast of America during the reigns of James I (1603–25) and Charles I (1625–49).

The technology of the time limited communication to letters or word of mouth via small sailing ships, which meant that administration and finance were necessarily in the hands of the individuals who held the charters, with virtually no governmental oversight. A few impoverished settlements struggling for subsistence survival were of little interest to a home government happy to leave their management as semifeudal principalities to their owners. Within the limits of their circumstances, the early settlements generally replicated Europe’s well-defined social stratification. Over time, most settlements developed governing bodies composed of their wealthiest white male property owners.

In the early years, the isolation of the colonies from one another was even greater than their isolation from England. The settlers in the colonies did not begin to think of themselves as belonging to a land with its own distinctive character, destiny, and interests until the eighteenth century.

THEOCRACY

As was characteristic of the countries from which they came, secular and religious authority were closely linked, as evident in the early legal codes of the individual colonies. The official charter that established the 162first colony in Virginia in 1609 stated that one purpose of the colony was to convert the “people in those Parts unto the true Worship of God and Christian Religion,” as practiced by the Anglican Church of England. Anglicanism was also the officially mandated state religion in Maryland and the Carolinas.

The theocratic nature of colonial governance is revealed in the types of crimes assigned the death penalty in The General Laws and Liberties of New Hampshire, published in 1680: these included worshipping any God but the Lord God, taking the name of God in vain, witchcraft, sexual intercourse with an animal, sodomy, and cursing or rebelling against one’s parents. Doing unnecessary work or travel on the Lord’s day was punishable by fine and whipping. The Laws and Liberties of Massachusetts (1647), the Capitall Lawes of Connecticut (1642), and the Articles, Laws, and Orders, Divine, Politic, and Martial for the Colony in Virginia (1610– 11) had similar provisions. In Virginia the death penalty applied as well for false witness and for thrice failing to properly observe the Sabbath.²

Because the southern colonies worshipped the Anglican God and the northern colonies worshipped the Calvinist God, the religious practice legally required in one colony on pain of death was a heresy punishable by death in another. This not only restricted freedom to practice one’s chosen faith but also hampered relationships among the colonies. The Puritan Calvinists were particularly clear in their theocratic designs.

A Special Righteousness

The Puritans, dissenters from the Anglican faith, came to North America in search of the freedom to establish a theocracy based on the teachings of John Calvin, which meant using the authority of government to deny others the same religious freedom they had come to American to gain for themselves.³ Church membership was voluntary, but everyone, whether a member or not, was bound by law to attend Sabbath worship and contribute to the support of the clergy.⁴

John Winthrop, a pious, tough-minded Puritan lawyer and landed gentleman, sailed from England in 1630 to serve as the first governor of the newly chartered Massachusetts Bay Company. On that voyage, Winthrop declared to his fellow passengers that it was their mission to fulfill a biblical prophecy to create the New Jerusalem, the millennial kingdom, the righteous city on a hill of God’s chosen people.⁵ Puritans 163settled Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Hampshire. When they arrived, they established Congregational churches throughout these northern colonies, made Calvinism their officially mandated faith, and banned the practice of any other.⁶

The influential Puritan preacher John Cotton preached without equivocation that theocratic rule, not democracy, was the will of God.

Democracy I do not conceyve that ever God did ordeyne as a fitt government eyther for church or commonwealth. If the people be governors, who shall be governed? As for monarchy, and aristocracy, they are both of them clearely approoved, and directed in scripture, yet so as referreth the soveraigntie to himselfe, and setteth up Theocracy in both, as the best forme of government in the commonwealth, as well as in the church.⁷

The Calvinists defined religious liberty as freedom from the heresies of Anglicanism, Catholicism, and all other deviant faiths. The only religious freedom they granted dissenters from Calvinism was the liberty to choose between silence, voluntary exile, banishment, or execution should they insist on returning.

Mary Dyer was an outspoken Quaker preacher who was twice forced into exile from Massachusetts with the warning that if she returned a third time she would be executed. She returned and became one of four Quakers hanged by Massachusetts between 1659 and 1661 for refusing to stop preaching their faith.⁸

The early New England colonies were divided into parishes, each of which had one church that served as the center of civic life and administration. All competing religious influences were suppressed, and no outside preacher could cross the border into the parish without permission. The early town meetings for which New England has been noted were essentially meetings of the congregation in the parish church.

Although each considered the other to be heretics, Calvinists and Anglicans shared a belief that the moral order of society depended on religious uniformity and a single religiously defined moral standard enforced by the civil administration. Both reckoned that religious freedom was both wrongheaded and a threat to the public order. Eighty-five percent of the nearly half million early settlers lived in colonies in which either the Church of England or the Congregational Church had officially 164sanctioned religious monopolies. Both groups took a dim view of the Quakers who settled in Pennsylvania and other central states, for whom religious pluralism was a basic tenet of their faith.

This is the historical background of the provision for a strict separation of church and state in the U.S. Constitution. The purpose is to preclude use of the secular power of the state to enforce the beliefs of a particular faith. It would otherwise have been impossible to establish the Union.

God Loves Plutocrats

It is with good reason that German sociologist and economist Max Weber, in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, noted a natural affinity between Calvinism and capitalism. Rarely has any religious doctrine aligned more perfectly with the cause of plutocracy, capitalism, and Empire. It not only served to lend moral legitimacy to the concentration of financial wealth and the subservience of lesser mortals to men of wealth and power, it as well lent capitalism a motive force.

The teachings of Calvinism emphasize the depravity of the human condition and maintain that, because of his sinful nature, man can have no role in his own salvation, which is granted to God’s chosen purely as a miracle of divine grace. Embracing a belief in predestination, Calvinism teaches that God settled the question of individual salvation or damnation at the beginning of time. Consequently, the individual is powerless to influence his circumstances in the afterlife through good works in this. Nor can he know until death his true condition.

According to Calvinism, a predisposition to righteous behavior is evidence that one may be among the chosen. Hard work, righteous living, and material prosperity provide no guarantee that one is saved, but they are taken to be favorable signs. Wealth and power are the surest signs that one is among the saved, because it is self-evident that those who are blessed with wealth and power are among God’s chosen since he has clearly favored them. Deference is therefore their natural due.

By contrast, poverty, drunkenness, a propensity to question authority, and other vices are signs that one is out of favor with God and was probably condemned to hell from the beginning of time. By this line of reasoning, the poor are not victims of a failed economic system; they are the damned, the instruments of the devil, and no fate is too harsh for them.

Calvinist belief in human depravity affirms the underlying dehumanizing premise of neoliberal economics that humans are by nature 165capable only of selfish acts. This belief, combined with the belief in the superior righteousness of those blessed with wealth and power, provides a foundation for an easy alliance between contemporary religious theocrats and contemporary corporate plutocrats. The theocrats affirm the moral righteousness of the plutocrats, and the plutocrats provide media and funding support for politicians committed to the theocrats’ restrictive social agenda.

GENOCIDE

When Christopher Columbus landed on a Caribbean island to “discover” America in 1492, a generous Native people greeted him warmly with food, water, and other gifts. It was their first encounter with Empire. Columbus wrote in his log:

They… brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears and many other things, which they exchanged for the glass beads and hawks’ bells. They willingly traded everything they owned.… They were well-built, with good bodies and handsome features.… They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. They have no iron. Their spears are made of cane.… They would make fine servants.… With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.… They are so naïve and so free with their possessions that no one who has not witnessed them would believe it. When you ask for something they have, they never say no. To the contrary, they offer to share with anyone.… As soon as I arrived in the Indies, on the first Island which I found, I took some of the natives by force in order that they might learn and might give me information of whatever there is in these parts.⁹

Similar reports of the generosity and egalitarianism of the Natives of North America from early European visitors and settlers were commonplace.¹⁰ Columbus responded by taking what gold he could find, killing those Natives who displeased him, and abducting others as specimens of the slaves he later promised to deliver to the Spanish crown in return for further support. 166

It is instructive in light of the discussion of pre-Empire civilizations in chapter 5 that in this initial encounter between the “civilized” men of Europe and the “savages” of the pre-imperial tribes of the New World, the latter thought first of sharing their abundance. The former thought only of subjugating and enslaving the innocents and confiscating their gold by force of arms.

According to the historian Howard Zinn, Columbus arrived in a world that in places “was as densely populated as Europe itself, where the culture was complex, where human relations were more egalitarian than in Europe, and where the relations among men, women, children, and nature were more beautifully worked out than perhaps any place in the world.”¹¹ In many tribes, the systems of governance were more democratic than any encountered in the five-thousand-year experience of the empires that historians equate with civilization. There is evidence that America’s founders drew on the lessons of the Native experience in the design of the new nation’s democratic institutions.¹²

Columbus was unimpressed. Dismissing the Natives as primitive and savage, he set the pattern for the genocide that was to decimate Native populations throughout the New World. As Zinn notes, “What Columbus did to the Arawaks of the Bahamas, Cortés did to the Aztecs of Mexico, Pizarro to the Incas of Peru, and the English settlers of Virginia and Massachusetts to the Powhatans and the Pequots.”¹³ The genocide continued throughout the period of westward expansion of what later became the United States.

Historians estimate that at the time Columbus arrived in 1492 some 250,000 indigenous people were living in Hispaniola, a population reduced to only about 400 persons in 1538. During the first hundred years of Spanish rule, the far larger population of Mexico was reduced by some 70 percent.¹⁴ The Native population living north of what became Mexico was ultimately reduced from as many as ten million to one million through disease, physical violence, and despair¹⁵ as waves of invading European immigrants cleared the land of the Native inhabitants with the same lack of moral reservation they brought to clearing the land of trees.

SLAVERY

I use the term slavery here in a broad sense to include all members of the working class who shared the condition that they were not at liberty 167to negotiate the terms of their labor or to leave their master. These included legally defined slaves, bonded workers, and wives considered the property of their husbands.

A 1708 census in South Carolina “counted 3,900 free whites, 4,100 African slaves, 1,400 Indian slaves, and 120 indentured whites.”¹⁶ In 1770, 20 percent of the population of the colonies lived in slavery. At the time the Declaration of Independence was issued, 75 percent of the people who lived in the territories of Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia were or had been slaves or indentured servants.¹⁷

Involuntary Conscripts

Slavery in its many forms was foundational to the colonial economies, which the ruling elites sought to staff with the cheapest and most subservient labor available. The current press to outsource U.S. jobs to the lowest-wage countries and to recruit undocumented workers for those jobs that cannot be outsourced builds on this well-established historical precedent.

Investors who sought to profit from the new land’s physical wealth through trade, resource extraction, and agriculture required cheap labor to fulfill their dreams. Getting settlers to come voluntarily to North America was difficult. Passage from Europe in small wooden sailing vessels was long, dangerous, and for most involved unspeakable crowding, filth, and starvation. Many perished along the way. The harsh conditions did not end with arrival in the new land, even for free whites. The ground was fertile, but new settlers had to construct their own shelter and clear and plant the land with the crudest of tools in unfamiliar climates. Many perished within their first year of arrival.

Supplying investors with slaves from Africa and bonded laborers from Europe to satisfy the demand for cheap labor became a major business in its own right for enterprising merchants who arranged for the collection, shipping, and sale of the unfortunates they acquired from both Europe and Africa. Rulers saw the forced emigration of prisoners as a way to reduce the expense of maintaining them in prisons. Responding to the market demand, gangs of thugs roamed the back streets and slums of London to kidnap the destitute and sell them into bondage with the tacit blessing of officials who considered the clearing of their neighborhoods of paupers, orphans, and other undesirables as something of a public service. 168

The economies of the coastal settlements evolved according to differences in soil and climate. The fertile soil, favorable growing seasons, and level topography of the South were suited to vast plantations worked by slaves to produce tobacco and cotton for export. The stony soil, harsh climates, and narrow coastal plains of the North led to smaller farms and more varied crops that required the skill and determination of experienced free farmers. Looking for more agreeable occupations than farming under such harsh conditions, the privileged classes of the North turned to industry and the sea. Shipbuilding, whaling, fishing, trading, slaving, and privateering became the favored occupations.

Desperate ‘Volunteers’

Some whites came voluntarily from Europe to join the ranks of bonded laborers, but only as a desperate last resort. Land in Europe was scarce and its ownership concentrated. Surplus labor kept wages low and unemployment high. Tales of America’s vast fertile lands and great wealth free for the taking stirred the imagination of Europeans of all classes, but especially the poor and starving whose homelands afforded them neither land nor employment.

Those unable to pay for passage agreed to commit themselves to a period of indentured service to whoever was willing on their arrival to pay their debt to the ship captain who had provided passage. Many a young woman came voluntarily to become the wife of whatever man paid the captain’s fee. Once married, a woman and all she owned, acquired, or produced became the property of her husband. Runaway wives were treated much the same as runaway slaves.¹⁸ The status of an indentured servant differed from that of an outright slave mainly in having a promised date of release.

The Race Card

Widespread hardship and servitude created significant social tension and led to periodic rebellions against the ruling elites of the day. The most famous of these was Bacon’s Rebellion of 1676, which resulted in the near total destruction of Jamestown, Virginia, and rallied a broad alliance of white and black free farmers, black and Indian slaves, white indentured servants, and members of the free white working class eager to take their revenge against Jamestown’s arrogant and brutal propertied 169ruling class. Even the Virginia governor, who was forced to flee as Jamestown burned, acknowledged that the majority of Virginia’s populace supported the rebellion. British troops eventually restored order, but the rebellion left a deep impression on the ruling elites throughout the colonies.¹⁹

Specifically, the experience awakened the propertied classes to the importance of keeping the working classes divided against one another along the lines of race, gender, and trade. Their chosen strategy centered on shifting the focus from class to race by codifying the institution of black slavery into the laws of many of the colonies and denying blacks what few rights and freedoms they had previously enjoyed—thus placing them permanently on the bottom rung of the social ladder. The Calvinists, for example, supported this injustice by declaring that blacks had no soul; thus, not being truly human, they had no claim to human rights—the same argument made down through the ages to justify the enslavement of women.

This gave poor whites a floor of failure below which they could not fall and a human target against which to direct the frustrations of their station, encouraging them to define their identity by their whiteness rather than by their class. It proved to be one of history’s most odious and successful bits of social engineering. At the same time, members of the elite class proceeded to secure their own claim to preeminent status by cultivating the social and intellectual graces of their sons, providing them personal slaves and tutors, and sending them to England for finishing at elite colleges.²⁰

The conditions of race-based slavery became especially harsh. Virginia and other British colonies gave slaves no rights even to such basics as personal security, marriage, or even parenthood of their own children. It was not considered a felony for a Virginia master to kill his slave. After 1721 it was, however, a crime for him to set a slave free except under rare circumstances.²¹ Individual and collective rebellion by slaves was commonplace, and fear of the simmering volcano of the anger of black slaves left whites desperate to maintain control through a reign of terror that included torture, mutilation, and lynching.

By the time the new nation was founded, a clear geographic division of functions had been established. The South owned and managed slaves to work its vast plantations; the North procured the slaves from Africa and transported them in merchant ships for sale to the Southern plantation owners. 170

The realities of life in the English colonies on the Atlantic coast of what was to become the United States of America were not auspicious for the founding of a new nation based on the premise that all men are created equal with an inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The early settlements were operated as privately owned company estates ruled by their overseers. Parishes were ruled as theocracies by preachers who believed democracy to be contrary to the will of God. The colonial economies depended on slaves and bonded labor, and the family structure placed women in a condition of indentured servitude. The lands the colonies occupied were acquired by genocide, and their social structures embodied deep racial and class divisions.

This history exposes the deep cultural and institutional roots of the challenges we citizens of the United States now face in birthing the mature democracy of Earth Community. Before turning to these challenges as they are playing out in our own time, however, there is much else to be learned from our history—including the story of how a group of patriots awakened to possibilities long denied, mobilized to walk away from their king, and thereby created a new political reality.