Even before the rebellion took place, there was tension already present. Some Doeg Indians obtained a few hogs in order to compensate for a debt. The whites then took the hogs and killed the two Indians in the process. This created a war party by Doeg Indians to get revenge by killing a white herdsman. This eventually led a white milita company to kill twenty-four Indians and subsequently, many Indian raids occurred in which the Indians were drastically outnumbered. The House of Burgeeses in Jamestown implemented war on the Indians, but were willing to give clemency to those that assisted them. The frontier people were infuriated with the events, since their taxes paid for the war. The servants took part in Bacon’s Rebellion because they had nothing to lose in their involvement. During this time, people started to view the injustice and unethical part about slavery and saw the corruption concerning indentured servants and their masters. They were part of the poor underclass of whites who came to North America for a better life. In England, during the 1500s and 1600s with the development of commerce and capitalism, those who were poor filled the cities due to the land, concentrated on the production of cotton. During the Elizabethan period, they were treated in a cruel manner and laws were implemented …show more content…
to punish them, imprison them, or exile them. People that were seen begging of money would be stripped to the waist and whipped, deported from the city, sent to workhouses, or deported out of the country, which is why poor people appealed to America. Poor people in England wanted to have a better life. They desired to leave their living conditions and were willing to become “commodities of profit for merchants, traders, ship captains" and for their masters in America”. Immigrants would agree to pay for the trip by working for a master for five or seven years. They were commonly imprisoned until the ship sailed to ensure that they wouldn’t run away. The voyage to America took eight, ten, or twelve weeks. The ships were usually crowded with servants without any discrepancy towards the well-being of the servants. Sometimes when the weather was bad, the trip would take longer and then the food would run out. Beatings and whippings were ways that the master would commonly punish their servants. Servants were treated cruelly physically, mentally, socially, and etc. They weren't allowed to marry or have children because it would conflict with work. If servants participated in marriage without consent of the masters, it would be considered as bad as adultery, or fornication and their children would be considered to be bastards. They couldn't have imagined that they would face such injustice and cruelty. In my opinion, it is kind of sad there was such a large discrepancy between the lower class and higher class.
The lower class people were struggling to survive, whereas the higher classes lived comfortably. There was an immense division of wealth and race. The wealthy had more advantages over the middle class because of bribes and their ability to pay off taxes and fees implemented by the government. This is unfortunate because in the United States, corruption also still exists. The wealthy still have the upper hand and control the people to their preferences. Society is very much like chess in which there would be no game if the pawns refused to
play. The history of the United States seems to mirror how the United States is currently. In the past, the dominant group in society tried to stay in power by destroying the individual needs to merge instead with theirs. Minority groups were forced to submit, so that the dominant group could maintain their labor supply as well as their way of life. The dominant group were able to stay in power by dividing the people. In the same retrospect, people are still divided today through racism and social order, which is still prominent today. If there was unity amongst the people, there could be change inflicted concerning the social class, but like in the past it would never work because people are not willing to see past their differences.
In the Chesapeake region, Bacon’s Rebellion of 1676 led to major changes. This rebellion involved indentured servants revolting against the system, which put an end to indentured servitude and nearly annihilated the city of Jamestown. The servants believed their natural rights had been violated, so they rose up in revolution. As landowners began to fear mutinous servants, the plantation system expanded significantly. This relied heavily on the use of slaves from Africa, and greatly sped up the production of cash crops in the region.
In Jamestown, the settlers had to deal with the Powhatan Indians. The relationships with them were unstable. John Smith, whom was the leader of Jamestown, was captured by these Indians while he was on a little trip with some of his men. As he left two of his men, he came back to find them dead and himself surrounded by two hundred members of the tribe, finding himself being captured. “Six or seven weeks those barbarians kept him prisoner…” 87). After this event, the relationship only grew worse and there was constant fighting between the settlers and Indians. The Indians practiced many methods in capturing settlers such as “scalping” and other dreadful techniques. The settlers did many negative practices also which is the reason they fought so many wars and battles against each other. Later on, the Indians killed the English for their weapons that were rare to them. In contrast to the Plymouth colony, these settlers dealt with the Pequot Indians and the relations were much more peaceful for a certain time frame. At one point, one Indian was brave enough to approach them and spoke to them (in broken English). He taught them the ways of the land, and developed a peace with the man. The settlers from the Plymouth colony learned many ways to grow food from these Indians. “He directed them how to set their corn, where to take fish and to procure other commodities, and was also their
The class structure is built around four different categories of citizens. The lower class, which is made up of the unskilled and semiskilled workers, made up for one-third of the population. The lower middle class, who were the skilled workers, white-collar workers, farmers, and pensioners, made up another third of the Northeim population. The upper middle class that included the craft masters, civil servants, and businessmen made up a little over a fourth of the population. Finally the upper class, which was made up of businessmen, self-employed, and professionals made up barely four percent of the population. Though there was not much difference in the sizes of three of the classes, there were still large differences in the incomes of these classes. From the class breakdown you could see how the Nazi party could be so successful. With the classes set you then begin to see the emergence of the political parties.
The use of labor came in two forms; indenture servitude and Slavery used on plantations in the south particularly in Virginia. The southern colonies such as Virginia were based on a plantation economy due to factors such as fertile soil and arable land that can be used to grow important crops, the plantations in the south demanded rigorous amounts of labor and required large amounts of time, the plantation owners had to employ laborers in order to grow crops and sell them to make a profit. Labor had become needed on the plantation system and in order to extract cheap labor slaves were brought to the south in order to work on the plantations. The shift from indentured servitude to slavery was an important time as well as the factors that contributed to that shift, this shift affected the future generations of African American descent. The history of colonial settlements involved altercations and many compromises, such as Bacons Rebellion, and slavery one of the most debated topics in the history of the United States of America. The different problems that occurred in the past has molded into what is the United States of America, the reflection in the past provides the vast amount of effort made by the settlers to make a place that was worth living on and worth exploring.
The Sioux Uprising started because of broken promises and brutal racism. The Sioux sold their sacred hunting land for gold but the gold was late. The settlers were already sowing their seeds of hate and the Indians were becoming subhuman. So while the arrogance and stupidity of racism caused a war in the South, the white people were too naïve to realize they were about to witness a war in the North. The Sioux Uprising cost innocent people their lives but also brought a family together. Overall, the gold was thought to be the main cause, but it was not the only one. While paying the gold to the Sioux would have delayed the uprising, the Dakota Nations rebellion was inevitable.
Before the 1680's, indentured servitude was the primary source of labor in the newly developed colonies. There were both white and black indentured servants. White servants had even outnumbered black servants three to one. Some black indentured servants were able to complete there time of service, and even had land and servants of their own. After the 1680's, the population of white indentured servants decreased exponentially. There were a number of different reasons why the population of indentured servants had decreased. For whatever reason, indentured servitude was a form of labor that was declining, and the need for labor increased rapidly. #
The role of an indentured servant in the 1700s was not a glamorous one. They came to the New World knowing that, for a time, they would be slaves for someone they did not know and the risk of disease and death was high, but the opportunity that laid ahead of them after their time of servitude was worth everything to these settlers of the New World. They came to America for the same reasons as all of the other settlers. Religious freedom, land, wealth, and a new start were motives for both settlers and indentured servants but the one thing separating most settlers from the indentured servants was that they could afford their voyage across the Atlantic Ocean. Indentured servants couldn’t buy their ticket to the New World, but that didn’t stop
In 1676, the colony of Virginia experienced the first of many American civil wars, called Bacon’s Rebellion. The rebellion was between the Virginian Governor, Sir William Berkley and local plantation owner Nathaniel Bacon. The rebellion was caused by many different reasons, beginning with social unrest in the colony. “There was no one single cause of Bacon 's Rebellion. Rather, the simmering discontent of the [Virginia] people reached full boil with the Indian raids and the governor 's apparent unwillingness to take decisive action against them.” First, due to a change in England’s trade policies, the prices for Virginia’s main crop, tobacco, were being lowered, resulting in economic instability. Secondly, the colonists were agitated because
...owners holding too much political and economic power, as personified by Governor Berkeley. Thus the landless, freed indentured servants revolted in 1676 in Bacon's Rebellion, as is stated in Bacon's Manifesto symbolizing the conflict in Virginia between its aristocratic and poor inhabitants of the back county over the aristocracy's concentration of power and refusal to help those living in the frontier.
With this in mind, some perspective on the society of that time is vital. During this time the industrial revolution is taking place, a massive movement away from small farms, businesses operated out of homes, small shops on the corner, and so on. Instead, machines are mass-producing products in giant factories, with underpaid workers. No longer do people need to have individual skills. Now, it is only necessary that they can keep the machines going, and do small, repetitive work. The lower working class can no longer live a normal life following their own pursuits, but are lowered to working inhumane hours in these factories. This widens the gap between the upper and lower class-called bourgeois and proletariat-until they are essentially two different worlds. The bourgeois, a tiny portion of the population, has the majority of the wealth while the proletariat, t...
When the English landed in Jamestown in 1607, the dominant tribe of the area was the Powhatan (which the English settlers named after the leader of the tribe, Powhatan). At first meeting, the Powhatan considered the settlers as allies, who may be able to aid them in their struggle for land and power over the other tribes in the area. These relations strained when starving settlers started to take food from the Native Americans. In 1610, any notion of alliance between the Powhatan and the Virginia settlers was immediately crushed when Lord De La Warr arrived with a declaration of war against all Indians in the Jamestown area. De La Warr used his "Irish Tactics" of burning houses and crops and taking prisoners to destroy the Native Americans in what was known as the First Anglo-Powhatan war. A peace treaty was signed, but lasted only eight years. The Powhatan killed 347 settlers, which lead to the Virginia Company to give orders for "a perpetual war without peace or truce." Although the Powhatan made one more attempt at destroying the Virginians, they were defeated again in the Second Anglo-Powhatan war. The peace treaty of 1646 eliminated all chance of the Powhatan coexisting with the Virginia settlers. The treaty also banished the Indians from their native lands, which lay the president for what was later known as a reservation. After this the number of Native Americans in Virginia dwindled to a low 10% of the population.
Indentured Servants helped the colonies progress their population. England at the time was over populated, and jobs were hard to find. So many people that could not afford the boat trip over to America offered themselves as to be an indentured servant for a period of time. This contractual term can last from between four to seven years. Many colonists preferred having indentured servants over slaves, cause they also helped ward off Native Americans from attacking settlers. The one big draw back of indentured servant was that they usually did not make it pass the first year of their contract.
The Peasant’s Revolt occurred in 1525 because the wealth of the nation was not being distributed among the people equivalent, in conjunction with the wealth not being equally divided the sharecropper wanted serfdom to be abolished. The farmhands used the Word of God to show they were in the right to rebel. Public affairs also had a role in the revolution. The laborers forced the hand of the nobles to collaborate in the insubordination.
Tension and disputes are sometimes resolved by force but more often by negotiation or treaties. On the other hand, the Natives were described as strong and very innocent creatures awaiting the first opportunity to be christianized. The Indians were called the “Noble Savages” by the settlers because they were cooperative people, but sometimes, after having a few conflicts with them, they seem to behave like animals. We should apprehend that the encounter with the settlers really amazed the natives, they were only used to interacting with people from their own race and surroundings and all of this was like a new discovery for them as well as for the white immigrants. The relations between the English and the Virginian Indians were somewhat strong in a few ways.
Unfortunately the lower class could not afford such great adventures that came from new forms of transportation or big elegant homes, but for the lower class, not much changed at all. They were able to witness, read, and hear about all the amazing life changing inventions, but most of them could not experience such events, due to the need of saving money for food and clothing. Sadly this was not the only part that did not change for the lower class, hygiene and personal wellness was exceedingly poor as well. Cleanliness, or the lack thereof, made poor people more susceptible to diseases and infections that quite often went untreated to avoid paying bill that came along with a physician. Jack Larkin wrote, “The most vulnerable of all to consumption