A People's History of the United States - Howard Zinn

Question 1

1492 - Present

Where did Columbus first land? And next two?

1: Columbus, the Indians and Human Progress

Answer 1

San Salvador. Cuba. Haiti.

Question 2

1492 - Present

What were Columbus’s observations about the people he encountered in 1492? (‘They do not … / They willingly … / They would … / With …’)

What were they called?

1: Columbus, the Indians and Human Progress

Answer 2

“They do not bear arms and do not know them. They willingly traded everything they owned. They would make fine servants. With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.”

The Arawaks

Question 3

1492 - Present

What mission was Columbus on in 1492? For whom?

1: Columbus, the Indians and Human Progress

Answer 3

He was looking for a sea route to Asia - gold and spices were sought.

He had persuaded the King and Queen of Spain to finance an expedition.

(Isabella I of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon are known for being the first monarchs to be referred to as “Queen of Spain” and “King of Spain”)

Question 4

1492 - Present

What did Columbus’s priest - Bartolome de las Casas - say about the ‘Indians’ they encountered attitude towards sex and women?

On marriage laws..?
On childbirth..?
On abortion..?
On clothing..?

1: Columbus, the Indians and Human Progress

Answer 4

Women in Indian society were treated so well as to startle the Spaniards. Las Casas describes sex relations:

“Marriage laws are non-existent: men and women alike choose their mates and leave them as they please, without offense, jealousy or anger.
They multiply in great abundance; pregnant women work to the last minute and give birth almost painlessly, up the next day, they bathe in the river and are as clean and healthy as before giving birth.
If they tire of their men, they give themselves abortions with herbs that force stillbirths, covering their shameful parts with leaves or cotton cloth; although on the whole, Indian men and women look upon total nakedness with as much casualness as we look upon a man’s head or at his hands.”

Question 5

In modern USA, how many seats in what two legislating bodies?

Answer 5

In the senate and the house, politicians thrive
With seats for 100 and 4 3 5

Question 6

1492 - Present

Describe the condition of Spain in 1492

1: Columbus, the Indians and Human Progress

Answer 6

Spain was recently unified, one of the new modern nation-states, like France, England, and Portugal.

Its population, mostly poor peasants, worked for the nobility, who were 2 percent of the population and owned 95 percent of the land.

Spain had tied itself to the Catholic Church, expelled all the Jews, driven out the Moors.

Like other states of the modern world, Spain sought gold, which was becoming the new mark of wealth, more useful than land because it could buy anything.

Question 7

1492 - Present

What was the lucky mistake Columbus made?

1: Columbus, the Indians and Human Progress

Answer 7

A quarter of the way to Asia, he came upon ‘The Americas’. Uncharted land between Europe and Asia.

Question 8

1492 - Present

What was ‘the first European military base in the Western Hemisphere’?

1: Columbus, the Indians and Human Progress

Answer 8

Navidad (Christmas) - on Hispanolia

Columbus left 39 crew members there with instructions to find and store gold.

Destroyed the following year after natives fought back.

Question 9

1492 - Present

What happened on Columbus’s second expedition?

What had happened by 1650?

1: Columbus, the Indians and Human Progress

Answer 9

He set up a base on Haiti.

He went from island to island capturing slaves and looking for gold.

Half the population of Arawaks were wiped out initially - the rest by 1650.

Question 10

1492 - Present

How does Las Casas describe the lifestyle of the ‘Indians’?

Religion? Living quarters? Value? Commerce? Possessions?

1: Columbus, the Indians and Human Progress

Answer 10

The Indians, Las Casas says, “have no religion, at least no temples. They live in large communal bell-shaped buildings, housing up to 600 people at one time . . . made of very strong wood and roofed with palm leaves. . . .

They prize bird feathers of various colors, beads made of fishbones, and green and white stones with which they adorn their ears and lips, but they put no value on gold and other precious things.

They lack all manner of commerce, neither buying nor selling, and rely exclusively on their natural environment for maintenance. They are extremely generous with their possessions and by the same token covet the possessions of their friends and expect the same degree of liberality. . . .”

Question 11

1492 - Present

What is Zinn’s argument with Samuel Eliot Morison?

1: Columbus, the Indians and Human Progress

Answer 11

Harvard historian, most distinguished writer on Columbus, author of a multivolume biography. His popular book Christopher Columbus, Mariner; written in 1954, he tells about the enslavement: “The cruel policy initiated by Columbus and pursued by his successors resulted in complete genocide.” That is on one page, buried halfway into the telling of a grand romance. In the book’s last paragraph

One can lie outright about the past. Or one can omit facts which might lead to unacceptable conclusions. Morison does neither. He refuses to lie about Columbus. He does not omit the story of mass murder; indeed he describes it with the harshest word one can use: genocide. But he does something else—he mentions the truth quickly and goes on to other things more important to him.

Question 12

1492 - Present

And in such a world of conflict, a world of v…… and e……….. , it is the job of thinking people, as A….. C…. suggested, not to be on the side of the e……….. . Thus, in that inevitable taking of sides which comes from selection and emphasis in history, I prefer to try to tell the story of the discovery of America from the viewpoint of the Arawaks.

1: Columbus, the Indians and Human Progress

Answer 12

And in such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, as Albert Camus suggested, not to be on the side of the executioners. Thus, in that inevitable taking of sides which comes from selection and emphasis in history, I prefer to try to tell the story of the discovery of America from the viewpoint of the Arawaks.

Question 13

1492 - Present

What Columbus did to the ……. of the ……. , Cortés did to the …… of ……, Pizarro to the ….. of …. , and the English settlers of Virginia and Massachusetts to the ……… and the ……. .

Pronounce last two

1: Columbus, the Indians and Human Progress

Answer 13

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.

Pow - at - ans

Pee - quats

Question 14

1492 - Present

Who was the king of the Aztecs?

Who did he think Cortes was?

1: Columbus, the Indians and Human Progress

Answer 14

Montezuma

Aztec man-god - Quetzalcoatl

Question 15

1492 - Present

Describe the birth of Jamestown.

1: Columbus, the Indians and Human Progress

Answer 15

Question 16

1492 - Present

What did Cortes do in Cholula?

1: Columbus, the Indians and Human Progress

Answer 16

And so, in Cholulu, he invited the headmen of the Cholula nation to the square. And when they came, with thousands of unarmed retainers, Cortés’s small army of Spaniards, posted around the square with cannon, armed with crossbows, mounted on horses, massacred them, down to the last man. Then they looted the city and moved on.

Question 17

1492 - Present

What argument did the Pilgrims make as to why they were allowed to take Indian land? Who made the ‘declaration’?

1: Columbus, the Indians and Human Progress

Answer 17

When the Pilgrims came to New England they too were coming not to vacant land … the governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, John Winthrop, created the excuse to take Indian land by declaring the area legally a “vacuum.”

The Indians, he said, had not “subdued” the land, and therefore had only a “natural” right to it, but not a “civil right.” A “natural right” did not have legal standing.

Question 18

1492 - Present

How was the war with the Pequots fought?

1: Columbus, the Indians and Human Progress

Answer 18

So, the war with the Pequots began. Massacres took place on both sides. The English developed a tactic of warfare used earlier by Cortés and later, in the twentieth century, even more systematically: deliberate attacks on noncombatants for the purpose of terrorizing the enemy.

Question 19

1492 - Present

How did the population of Indians change (from … to …)? Causes?

(This was in the area north of Mexico)

1: Columbus, the Indians and Human Progress

Answer 19

The Indian population of 10 million that lived north of Mexico when Columbus came would ultimately be reduced to less than a million. Huge numbers of Indians would die from diseases introduced by the whites.

Question 20

1492 - Present

What does Zinn argue drove the invasion of the Americas?

1: Columbus, the Indians and Human Progress

Answer 20

Behind the English invasion of North America, behind their massacre of Indians, their deception, their brutality, was that special powerful drive born in civilizations based on private property. It was a morally ambiguous drive; the need for space, for land, was a real human need. But in conditions of scarcity, in a barbarous epoch of history ruled by competition, this human need was transformed into the murder of whole peoples.

Question 21

1492 - Present

Is it correct to call the people of the Americas ‘Indians’? Why did Columbus?

1: Columbus, the Indians and Human Progress

Answer 21

Columbus called them Indians, because he miscalculated the size of the earth. In this book we too call them Indians, with some reluctance, because it happens too often that people are saddled with names given them by their conquerors. And yet, there is some reason to call them Indians, because they did come, perhaps 25,000 years ago, from Asia, across the land bridge of the Bering Straits (later to disappear under water) to Alaska.

Question 22

1492 - Present

What is Zinn’s general argument about progress?

1: Columbus, the Indians and Human Progress

Answer 22

We should not assume that these events happened to support ‘progress’ - the societies that were destroyed were complex and in many ways superior to European:

“So, Columbus and his successors were not coming into an empty wilderness, but into a world which in some 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. They were people without a written language, but with their own laws, their poetry, their history kept in memory and passed on, in an oral vocabulary more complex than Europe’s…”

Question 23

1492 - Present

What problem affected colonists in the first twelve years of Jamestown?

2: Drawing the Colour Line

Answer 23

Hunger / shelter

In the Journals of the House of Burgesses of Virginia is a document of 1619 which tells of the first twelve years of the Jamestown colony. The first settlement had a hundred persons, who had one small ladle of barley per meal. When more people arrived, there was even less food. Many of the people lived in cavelike holes dug into the ground, and in the winter of 1609–1610, they were . . . “driven thru insufferable hunger to eat those things which nature most abhorred, the flesh and excrements of man as well of our own nation as of an Indian.”

Question 24

1492 - Present

Why were native Americans not enslaved?

2: Drawing the Colour Line

Answer 24

They couldn’t force Indians to work for them, as Columbus had done. They were outnumbered, and while, with superior firearms, they could massacre Indians, they would face massacre in return. They could not capture them and keep them enslaved; the Indians were tough, resourceful, defiant, and at home in these woods, as the transplanted Englishmen were not. White servants had not yet been brought over in sufficient quantity.

Question 25

1492 - Present

By 1619, what process was well underway?

2: Drawing the Colour Line

Answer 25

But you still did not grow much corn. . . . Black slaves were the answer. And it was natural to consider imported blacks as slaves, even if the institution of slavery would not be regularized and legalized for several decades. Because, by 1619, a million blacks had already been brought from Africa to South America and the Caribbean, to the Portuguese and Spanish colonies, to work as slaves.

Question 26

1492 - Present

What cultural challenges were faced by blacks in the seventeenth century in America?

2: Drawing the Colour Line

Answer 26

The blacks had been torn from their land and culture, forced into a situation where the heritage of language, dress, custom, family relations, was bit by bit obliterated except for the remnants that blacks could hold on to by sheer, extraordinary persistence.

Question 27

1492 - Present

Describe two African kingdoms from the sixteenth century (TM)

2: Drawing the Colour Line

Answer 27

European travelers in the sixteenth century were impressed with the African kingdoms of Timbuktu and Mali, already stable and organized at a time when European states were just beginning to develop into the modern nation. In 1563, Ramusio, secretary to the rulers in Venice, wrote to the Italian merchants: “Let them go and do business with the King of Timbuktu and Mali and there is no doubt that they will be well-received there with their ships and their goods and treated well, and granted the favours that they ask. . . .”

Question 28

1492 - Present

How was slavery in Africa a different institution?

2: Drawing the Colour Line

Answer 28

… as Davidson points out, the “slaves” of Africa were more like the serfs of Europe—in other words, like most of the population of Europe. It was a harsh servitude, but they had rights which slaves brought to America did not have, and they were “altogether different from the human cattle of the slave ships and the American plantations.” In the Ashanti Kingdom of West Africa, one observer noted that “ a slave might marry; own property; himself own a slave; swear an oath; be a competent witness and ultimately become heir to his master.

Question 29

1492 - Present

African slavery lacked two elements that made American slavery the most cruel form of slavery in history: the zrnyef rfo smsietlil roitpf that comes from cipscttaiila airecutrlug; the reduction of the slave to l t h s by the use of r h, with that relentless clarity based on color, where white was master, black was slave.

2: Drawing the Colour Line

Answer 29

African slavery lacked two elements that made American slavery the most cruel form of slavery in history: the frenzy for limitless profit that comes from capitalistic agriculture; the reduction of the slave to less than human status by the use of racial hatred, with that relentless clarity based on color, where white was master, black was slave.

Question 30

1492 - Present

Date and describe the origin of the American slave trade

2: Drawing the Colour Line

Answer 30

First the Dutch, then the English, dominated the slave trade. (By 1795 Liverpool had more than a hundred ships carrying slaves and accounted for half of all the European slave trade.) Some Americans in New England entered the business, and in 1637 the first American slave ship, the Desire, sailed from Marblehead. Its holds were partitioned into racks, 2 feet by 6 feet, with leg irons and bars.

Question 31

1492 - Present

It is roughly estimated that Africa lost …..?

2: Drawing the Colour Line

Answer 31

It is roughly estimated that Africa lost 50 million human beings to death and slavery in those centuries we call the beginnings of modern Western civilization, at the hands of slave traders and plantation owners in Western Europe and America, the countries deemed the most advanced in the world.

Question 32

1492 - Present

Slavery grew as …

By 1700, in Virginia, there were .… s….. .

By 1763, there were…,… s…., about .… of the p………. .

2: Drawing the Colour Line

Answer 32

Slavery grew as the plantation system grew. The reason is easily traceable to something other than natural racial repugnance: the number of arriving whites, whether free or indentured servants (under four to seven years contract), was not enough to meet the need of the plantations. By 1700, in Virginia, there were 6,000 slaves, one-twelfth of the population. By 1763, there were 170,000 slaves, about half the population.

Question 33

1492 - Present

How many blacks in the South in slavery?

2: Drawing the Colour Line

Answer 33

Ultimately their resistance was controlled, and slavery was established for 3 million blacks in the South.

Question 34

1492 - Present

How profitable was slavery to masters?

2: Drawing the Colour Line

Answer 34

Slavery was immensely profitable to some masters. James Madison told a British visitor shortly after the American Revolution that he could make $257 on every Negro in a year, and spend only $12 or $13 on his keep.

Profit is 20 X cost

Question 35

1492 - Present

How were the spirits of slaves crushed?

2: Drawing the Colour Line

Answer 35

The slaves were taught discipline, were impressed again and again with the idea of their own inferiority to “know their place,” to see blackness as a sign of subordination, to be awed by the power of the master, to merge their interest with the master’s, destroying their own individual needs. To accomplish this there was the discipline of hard labor, the breakup of the slave family, the lulling effects of religion

Question 36

1492 - Present

What hideous punishments were legalised to brutalise slaves?

2: Drawing the Colour Line

Answer 36

Dismemberment was provided for in the Virginia Code of 1705. Maryland passed a law in 1723 providing for cutting off the ears of blacks who struck whites, and that for certain serious crimes, slaves should be hanged and the body quartered and exposed. Still, rebellions took place—not many, but enough to create constant fear among white planters.

Question 37

1492 - Present

Describe the first large-scale revolt in the North American colonies.

2: Drawing the Colour Line

Answer 37

The first large-scale revolt in the North American colonies took place in New York in 1712. In New York, slaves were 10 percent of the population. When mysterious fires broke out, blacks and whites were accused of conspiring together. Mass hysteria developed against the accused. After a trial full of lurid accusations by informers, and forced confessions, two white men and two white women were executed, eighteen slaves were hanged, and thirteen slaves were burned alive.

Question 38

1492 - Present

What was Bacon’s Rebellion and what led to its outbreak in Virginia?

3: Persons of Mean and Vile Condition

Answer 38

Bacon’s Rebellion began with conflict over how to deal with the Indians, who were close by, on the western frontier, constantly threatening. Whites who had been ignored when huge land grants around Jamestown were given away had gone west to find land, and there they encountered Indians. In 1676, seventy years after Virginia was founded, a hundred years before it supplied leadership for the American Revolution, that colony faced a rebellion of white frontiersmen, joined by slaves and servants, a rebellion so threatening that the governor had to flee the burning capital of Jamestown, and England decided to send a thousand soldiers across the Atlantic, hoping to maintain order among forty thousand colonists. This was Bacon’s Rebellion.

Question 39

1492 - Present

What were the causes of the distress and poverty faced by the majority of the people in Virginia during the time of Bacon’s Rebellion?

3: Persons of Mean and Vile Condition

Answer 39

Times were hard in 1676. “There was genuine distress, genuine poverty. . . . All contemporary sources speak of the great mass of people as living in severe economic straits,” writes Wilcomb Washburn, who, using British colonial records, has done an exhaustive study of Bacon’s Rebellion. It was a dry summer, draining the corn crop, which was needed for food, and the tobacco crop, needed for export. Governor Berkeley, in his seventies, tired of holding office, wrote wearily about his situation: “How miserable that man is that Governes a People where six parts of seaven at least are Poore Endebted Discontented and Armed.” His phrase “six parts of seaven” suggests the existence of an upper class not so impoverished.

Question 40

1492 - Present

What were the contents of Bacon’s “Declaration of the People” of July 1676 and what did it indicate about the social and political climate in Virginia?

3: Persons of Mean and Vile Condition

Answer 40

Bacon’s “Declaration of the People” of July 1676 shows a mixture of populist resentment against the rich and frontier hatred of the Indians. It indicted the Berkeley administration for unjust taxes, for putting favorites in high positions, for monopolizing the beaver trade, and for not protecting the western farmers from the Indians. Then Bacon went out to attack the friendly Pamunkey Indians, killing eight, taking others prisoner, plundering their possessions.

The reference to Berkeley in the context you provided likely refers to Sir William Berkeley, who was the colonial governor of Virginia during the late 17th century, particularly around the time of Bacon’s “Declaration of the People” in July 1676.

In this document, Nathaniel Bacon and his supporters expressed their grievances against the Berkeley administration. The mention of Berkeley signifies that the document criticized his leadership and policies. Some of the key issues raised in the “Declaration of the People” include unjust taxes, the appointment of favorites to high positions, the monopolization of the beaver trade (a lucrative economic activity at the time), and a failure to protect western farmers from Indian attacks.

Berkeley’s governance was perceived by Bacon and his followers as ineffective and benefiting the wealthy elite at the expense of ordinary people, especially those on the Virginia frontier. This historical event is often seen as a manifestation of populist sentiment and discontent with colonial leadership during that period.

Question 41

1492 - Present

How was the oppression experienced by the people in Virginia, including the white frontiersmen and the Indians, connected and influenced by the exploitation of the colony by England?

(Clue - describe the ‘complex chain’)

3: Persons of Mean and Vile Condition

Answer 41

Indians -> white frontiersmen -> Jamestown elite -> England

It was a complex chain of oppression in Virginia. The Indians were plundered by white frontiersmen, who were taxed and controlled by the Jamestown elite. And the whole colony was being exploited by England, which bought the colonists’ tobacco at prices it dictated and made 100,000 pounds a year for the King.

Question 42

1492 - Present

What was the experience of servants and slaves who came to America during the colonial period and what were the restrictions and punishments imposed on them by their masters?

3: Persons of Mean and Vile Condition

Answer 42

After signing the indenture, in which the immigrants agreed to pay their cost of passage by working for a master for five or seven years, they were often imprisoned until the ship sailed, to make sure they did not run away. In the year 1619, the Virginia House of Burgesses, born that year as the first representative assembly in America (it was also the year of the first importation of black slaves), provided for the recording and enforcing of contracts between servants and masters. As in any contract between unequal powers, the parties appeared on paper as equals, but enforcement was far easier for master than for servant.

Question 43

1492 - Present

What was the typical duration of the voyage to America and what were the conditions on the ships like?

3: Persons of Mean and Vile Condition

Answer 43

The voyage to America lasted eight, ten, or twelve weeks, and the servants were packed into ships with the same fanatic concern for profits that marked the slave ships. If the weather was bad, and the trip took too long, they ran out of food. The sloop Sea-Flower, leaving Belfast in 1741, was at sea sixteen weeks, and when it arrived in Boston, forty-six of its 106 passengers were dead of starvation, six of them eaten by the survivors.

Question 44

1492 - Present

How did the masters attempt to control the sexual lives of the servants?

3: Persons of Mean and Vile Condition

Answer 44

Servants could not marry without permission, could be separated from their families, could be whipped for various offenses. Pennsylvania law in the seventeenth century said that marriage of servants “without the consent of the Masters . . . shall be proceeded against as for Adultery, or fornication, and Children to be reputed as Bastards.” Although colonial laws existed to stop excesses against servants, they were not very well enforced, we learn from Richard Morris’s comprehensive study of early court records in Government and Labor in Early America. Servants did not participate in juries. Masters did.

Question 45

1492 - Present

What percentage of the colonial population was made up of white servants and when did slaves begin to replace them?

3: Persons of Mean and Vile Condition

Answer 45

More than half the colonists who came to the North American shores in the colonial period came as servants. They were mostly English in the seventeenth century, Irish and German in the eighteenth century. More and more, slaves replaced them, as they ran away to freedom or finished their time, but as late as 1755, white servants made up 10 percent of the population of Maryland. What happened to these servants after they became free?

Question 46

1492 - Present

Who wrote the Fundamental Constitutions in the Carolinas and what did it establish?

3: Persons of Mean and Vile Condition

Answer 46

In the Carolinas, the Fundamental Constitutions were written in the 1660s by John Locke, who is often considered the philosophical father of the Founding Fathers and the American system. Locke’s constitution set up a feudal-type aristocracy, in which eight barons would own 40 percent of the colony’s land, and only a baron could be governor.

Question 47

1492 - Present

How did the population and economy of the colonies grow during the 1700s?

From where? What trades? Which cities?

3: Persons of Mean and Vile Condition

Answer 47

The colonies grew fast in the 1700s. English settlers were joined by Scotch-Irish and German immigrants. Black slaves were pouring in; they were 8 percent of the population in 1690; 21 percent in 1770. The population of the colonies was 250,000 in 1700; 1,600,000 by 1760. Agriculture was growing. Small manufacturing was developing. Shipping and trading were expanding. The big cities—Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Charleston—were doubling and tripling in size. Through all that growth, the upper class was getting most of the benefits and monopolized political power.

Question 48

1492 - Present

How did the upper class benefit from the growth and what was their relationship with the other classes?

The colonies, it seems, were societies of cnednotign casessl - a fact obscured by ?

3: Persons of Mean and Vile Condition

Answer 48

The colonies, it seems, were societies of contending classes—a fact obscured by the emphasis, in traditional histories, on the external struggle against England, the unity of colonists in the Revolution. The country therefore was not “born free” but born slave and free, servant and master, tenant and landlord, poor and rich. As a result, the political authorities were opposed “frequently, vociferously, and sometimes violently,” according to Nash.

Question 49

1492 - Present

Why did Parliament make transportation to the New World a legal punishment for crime in 1717?

3: Persons of Mean and Vile Condition

Answer 49

The reasons for passing the Act, as stated in the preamble, included the insufficiently effective sentencing,

recidivism (reoffending),

the fact that many offenders previously extended this mercy had not transported themselves,

“and whereas in many of his Majesty’s colonies and plantations in America, there is great want of servants, who by their hard labour and industry might be the means of improving and making the said colonies and plantations more useful to this nation.”

The passage also derived from the convergence of a number of events at the time, including fears over rising crime and disorder, following the discharge of soldiers after the end of the War of the Spanish Succession in 1714, a contested Hanoverian accession to the British throne, inappropriate punishments for lesser felonies (misdemeanours), concern over crowd behaviour at public punishments, and a new determination by parliament to push through the legislation despite colonial opposition. Transportation thus became a regularly available and normal sentence for the courts to hand down to those convicted of non-capital offences as well as capital crimes.

Question 50

1492 - Present

How did racism develop in the colonies according to Edmund Morgan?

3: Persons of Mean and Vile Condition

Answer 50

According to Edmund Morgan, racism developed in the colonies as a practical device for control and not as a result of “natural” black-white differences. He argues that racism emerged as a way to separate dangerous free whites from dangerous black slaves, who might make common cause and cause problems. Racism was used to prevent potential threats to the ruling class by creating a “screen of racial contempt” between free whites and black slaves.

Question 51

1492 - Present

How did the upper classes maintain their wealth and power and what was the role of the middle class in this?
How did the ruling group use the language of liberty and equality during the Revolution?

3: Persons of Mean and Vile Condition

Answer 51

Those upper classes, to rule, needed to make concessions to the middle class, without damage to their own wealth or power, at the expense of slaves, Indians, and poor whites. This bought loyalty.
And to bind that loyalty with something more powerful even than material advantage, the ruling group found, in the 1760s and 1770s, a wonderfully useful device. That device was the language of liberty and equality, which could unite just enough whites to fight a Revolution against England, without ending either slavery or inequality.

Question 52

1492 - Present

Who arrived in Jamestown in 1619?

Readwise

Answer 52

In 1619, the year that the first black slaves came to Virginia, ninety women arrived at Jamestown on one ship: “Agreeable persons, young and incorrupt . . . sold with their own consent to settlers as wives, the price to be the cost of their own transportation.”

Question 53

1492 - Present

When was the American war of independence and when was the American Civil War?

Personal Research

Answer 53

Question 54

1492 - Present

How long did the voyage to America last for slaves?

2: Drawing the Colour Line

Answer 54

The voyage to America lasted eight, ten, or twelve weeks, and the servants were packed into ships with the same fanatic concern for profits that marked the slave ships. If the weather was bad, and the trip took too long, they ran out of food. The sloop Sea-Flower, leaving Belfast in 1741, was at sea sixteen weeks, and when it arrived in Boston, forty-six of its 106 passengers were dead of starvation…