Race played role in Detroit mob attack on Steven Utash, prosecutor says

[hfojvt]

67. I am sorta reminded of a book I read recently

"The Barbarous Years" by Bernard Bailyn

He writes that the early colonies, particularly Virginia DID import a whole bunch of white servants, who they ruthlessly exploited.

"The records, Warren Billings writes, document 'a dreary litany of privation, overwork, beatings, harassment, and other abuses,' and the court dockets were 'clogged by cases of runaways, bastard bearings, petty thievery and other infractions.' It is hardly surprising that there were two servant uprisings in the early 1660s and that Virginia was obliged to pass a statute defining the rights of servants." 509

"At the base of the free population [in Chesapeake], in the immediate post-Restoration period, was a restive underclass of freedman. Of the fortunes and misfortunes of this fast-growing part of the free population of Virginia - the most powerless of the Europeans, the most viciously exploited, and the most combative - Edmund Morgan has written eloquently. Most were rootless, impoverished, and faced with a grim fact of life." 522

"To the relatively secure, ambitious small and middle-level planters seeking to expand their holdings, as well as to the rising gentry, the freedmen, land poor and desperate, became competitors and constituted a threat that the planters sought to contain. Through their representatives in the House of Burgesses, the planters passed laws that extended, by all sorts of devices, the length of the servants' bondage; imposed penalties for idleness and bastardy; and granted loans that tied the freedmen in webs of debt....In 1642 more than half of Maryland's freedmen were tenants, and they were often indebted." 522

And slavery? Slavery was not just a race issue, it was a class issue. white people did not, for the most part, own slaves. Neither did Southern white people. It was RICH people who created this peculiar institution.

"Slaves were expensive - a healthy adult male was priced at about L23 at midcentury - and required at least a modicum of lifelong care. Ordinary planters could seldom afford them and could not easily include them within the family structure of their farms. But increasingly slaves appear in the records of the more affluent, and by 1675, as the result of hundreds of private, unrecorded decisions, they became common on the region's plantations." 525