 threat, having a cooperating majority who greatly outnumber you is just simply not an option. This is another reason that our democratic processes would later be built in a way that is “kinda” democratic. A true democracy would never support the agenda of the ruling elites. Similarly, a majority of oppressed would never allow such injustices to continue once they were gathered as a people.
“In 1698, South Carolina passed a “deficiency law” requiring plantation owners to have at least one white servant for every six male adult negroes”
Now that we have established the pyramid of power, the ruling elites power structure, we can begin to look at the policies enacted to solidify these positions. As I stated previously, Bacon’s Rebellion was a turning point in the philosophy of the colonists. From this point forward it became increasingly clear that colonist needed a plan to keep blacks mentally and physically subdued. They also needed something for poor whites to do. Vagrancy was a severe problem at this time. One of the first racially dividing actions taken was to provide amnesty to whites who had participated in the rebellion. Blacks were forbidden from carrying arms, meanwhile “whites finishing their servitude would get muskets, along with corn and cash.” These types of policies created the divide between poor whites and blacks. Distinctions that would only increase as the position of poor whites was steadily elevated through policy enactment.
Some things never change, and the hands-off nature of the ruling elite of this time is no different from today. Wealthy white land and slave owners at one point did not even have to fight in wartime for themselves. A law allowed them to send a “replacement soldier” to fight for them. I mention this to highlight the stark disconnect between the consequences and actions of the rule makers. One would find it far easier to make the decision to go to war knowing that you personally faced no danger. Similarly, many men who stood to benefit from the engineered race relations had no intentions of tending to disgruntled slaves themselves. The deficiency laws passed in 1698 saw to it that they would not have to. Too many slaves and not enough whips. Mind you the colonists tried to enslave Native Americans first. They were unsuccessful and through recommendation decided to try blacks instead. Hypothetically speaking, what if Native Americans had become the overseers? Would there be the backlash against them today instead of whites? I believe there would be. There was not, however, an abundance of Native American looking to become masters. There was an ample supply of vagrant poor whites, and colonist knew they were more agreeable than any other stock of people available. And agreeable they were when they began to earn wages, and were given nearly unchecked dominance over black male slaves, and black female slaves. Slave patrols were established manned by who else but white males. I am no slave historian, but one could extrapolate this was when slavery became increasingly brutal. Bored drunk overseers raping, and beating the sense out of slaves in the name of pre-crime, and order.
“Parliament, in 1717, made transportation to the New World a legal punishment for crime. After that tens of thousand of convicts could be sent to Virginia, Maryland, and other colonies,”
The aristocrats used poor whites as pawns. Look to education levels today, and it’s easy to see what they were working with then. Sure blacks were forbidden from reading or going to school, but don’t think that all whites were college educated. Illiteracy was rampant, and being the most educated and worldly people of the time, the task of fooling fools was effortless. Edmund Morgan states,
“If freemen with disappointed hopes should make common cause with slaves of desperate hope, the results might be worse than anything that Bacon had done. The answer to the problem,…was racism, to separate dangerous free whites from dangerous black slaves by a screen of racial contempt.”
Behind the screen lies the truth. Racial inequality was built 