Our History
Recently the President
traveled to Virginia to commemorate the Jamestown settlement and the
first legislative meeting held there in 1619. He was celebrating 400
years of democracy on this continent,
that 400 years earlier the first legislative meeting was held in the
Jamestown colony.
The
first English settlers had reached Jamestown about 10 years earlier.
Most of them had been gentlemen unused to working the land or doing
much of anything else for themselves. They were accustomed to having
others – laborers and servants – do the work of maintaining them.
One part of the workforce in the new colony consisted of what were
known as "indentured servants." These were impoverished
English people, some of them petty criminals, who were offered a
choice between going to prison or shipping out to the colonies in the
New World. Indentured servants served without getting paid from 7 to
10 or more years to pay for their passage and their food and
clothing. After serving that time they would be free and be given a
piece of land to farm for themselves.
The
other part of the workforce consisted of black Africans who were
bound for Bermuda on a slave ship that pirates captured and unloaded
in Jamestown.
For
the first 50 years the White indentured English and Black Africans
lived and worked side-by-side (and sometimes married) pretty much
under the same conditions as indentured servants. By 1660 legislation
passed by the new legislative assembly-- so recently celebrated by
our current president-- imposed on the Africans the status of slaves,
a lifetime condition. Once a slave always a slave. The children of
slaves were similarly enslaved for their lifetime. This legislation
created a body of workers who labored year in year out without
getting any reward for their work. Their work served to enrich the
gentlemen in the Jamestown colony as well as the wealthy investors
back in England who had financed the ships and equipment to found the
colony in the expectation of rich rewards.
Barely
hanging on for the first 10 or 15 years, the colony began to thrive
when tobacco was first planted in Virginia. The soil and climate
turned out to be favorable and the indentured servants, black and
white, could be made to do the hard work in the tobacco fields.
The
land needed to raise all this tobacco was taken – stolen – from
the Native Americans who lived in the area. Many different tribes,
organized into a powerful coalition, lived where the English
colonists chose to settle. Initially welcomed by the native
inhabitants, relations between the English and the local inhabitants
soon soured and more than once erupted into bloody warfare. The
colonists received instructions from England to convert the native
peoples to Anglicanism and to civilize them in the ways of the
English. The authors of these instructions did not see the irony of
stealing people's land and then ordering the thieves to civilize the
victims who had been robbed by teaching them the ways of the thieves.
This
irony has been with us ever since. White Americans have ravaged the
lives of the descendants of Black Africans and the descendants of the
Native Americans and taken their own inhumanity as a sign of White
superiority. Appropriating the land of the one and the ability to
work of the other, White Americans have become very rich at the
expense of people who are not White. They have shamelessly
interpreted their success in exploiting other human beings as a sign
of moral and even spiritual superiority.
The
Jamestown assembly, the precursor of the US Congress and of the
varied institutions of the United States government, in passing the
first Black Codes defining slavery as a lifetime condition of utter
deprivation set the precedent for later American legislatures that to
this day, for instance by demanding picture IDs for voting, deny the
humanity and the citizenship rights of Black and Native Americans.
Successor legislatures to the Jamestown assembly have only managed to
expand the range of peoples insulted and exploited and treated as
less than human than White Americans.
That
Donald Trump, arch racist, should celebrate that institution is not
surprising. We, on the contrary should mourn it. In Jamestown, North
America got off to a really bad start. We have never recovered from
that. The efforts of many people to overcome this terrible heritage
have only had very limited success so far.
