In late June, Guy Bosworth, from AFA-CWA, posted the following to the UALE email list:
During the UALE conference there were several references made to Bacon's Rebellion and its aftermath, specifically the way the wealthy class used the rebellion to divide working class whites and blacks. Is anyone aware of any publications (papers or books) that flesh out this concept?
Thanks.
Four people gave quick answers, which are pasted at the bottom of the page.
The fifth reply, from David Slavin, was too long for the email list, and is pasted immediately below. (You might want to read the earlier replies first for context.)
5.) from David Slavin
I agree with Joe that Allen's 2 vol. _Invention_ is the definitive study of Bacon's Rebellion, and Allen's dissection of the Morgan thesis in _Invention_ is most timely. Allen rejects Morgan's affirmative answer to the question: are white supremacy, racial privilege, and the white race, which were "invented" by the planter elite as a system of social control, a benefit to those "whites"?? Morgan said yea: American Freedom is predicated on American Slavery.
Allen's 25 year study of all the colonial county records refutes Morgan. First of all, there were no 'white' people until the planter elites invented the white race to forge a system of social control. Secondly, racial privilege created inequality but proved disastrous to "white" workers as the slave system ground them down. The abject misery imposed on the hereditary bond servants also undermined "free" people of color and poor whites. Allen's inspired insight emerged emerged from DuBois's thesis in _Black Reconstruction_ (the first 2 chapters are called "The Black Worker" and "The White Worker").
Clearly Stephen W. Campbell, author of the HNN essay that kicks off this exchange [http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/163049], has not heard of Allen's work or has intentionally ignored it. From this inauspicious beginning, his essay repeatedly applies the "privilege as benefit" thesis that distorts US history in ways that seem plausible as long as one stays within framework of assumptions that Morgan and others bring to their narratives.
Some examples: Campbell claims Southern poor whites joined the Confederacy because "poor whites benefited economically from slavery in multiple ways" This unsubstantiated claim is refuted in Black Reconstruction where DuBois shows how competition with slave production ruined poor white farmers and mechanics alike. Campbell also ignores the resistance of poor whites to secession and to military service. There was not one Free State of Jones, but many throughout the Confederacy.
Campbell also fails to present Jim Crow in the context of a ruling class response to Southern Populism, which threatened the Democratic control with a third party movement that in the early 1890s tentatively united Black and white farmers and laborers. Jim Crow not only eliminated the Black vote (and the Republican Party) from the states of the former Confederacy, it also eliminated the ruling elites' need for poor white voters to offset Blacks who were often promoting the interests of the working class as a whole. NOTE: see C Vann Woodward _Strange Career of Jim Crow_ and the Frederick Douglass [quoted below] on the dialectics of class and race ignored by progressive activists and scholars alike.
Black citizens were excluded by racially targeted but seemingly neutral Jim Crow proscriptions such as the white primary, voter registration (which had to be filed with all-white local election boards who did the bidding of elites), etc. But many rules like literacy tests also excluded poor whites. The poll taxes and grandfather clauses Campbell references regulated poor whites' access to the franchise. Less than 20% of whites voted in Jim Crow elections. Those who "voted right" were granted exemptions. Jim Crow thus made it easier and cheaper for the new industrial agriculture and textile mill elites to create the Dixiecrat one-party state, defeat labor organizing and strip all workers of power. In the South, where white supremacy falls heaviest on Black people, whites have historically the lowest standard of life. So how is white privilege a benefit?
The Dixiecrat wing of the Democratic party dominated the New Deal and made sure all legislation excluded as many African Americans (and by extension poor whites) from protections and support (such as Social Security), stripped any non-discrimination language out of bills before congress, and insured maximum control of Federal programs such as unemployment insurance by the states. Exclusion of agricultural and domestic workers from social security stripped 80% of Black workers in the South from old age insurance, but also excluded millions of poor whites. As left Democrats in congress such as Vito Marcantonio of NYC pointed out, the bill excluded all eleven million unemployed, since without jobs they could not contribute to the social security program. How did the Social Security Act benefit these "whites"??? [see Ira Katznelson _Fear Itself_, M K Brown Race Money and the American Welfare State; Mary Poole _The Segregated Origins of Social Security_ and other recent research.]
The concept of an exploited AND privileged strata of the US working class appears to be deeply counter-intuitive to most progressives. Yet it is a robust analysis of labor history that integrates labor with African American history into a unified study of class politics, class struggle, and social control. It is the only clear explanation of why efforts to build a working class party in the US have failed so many times and why the union movement has been on a self-destructive downward spiral for 70 years.
To return to Bacon's Rebellion, the best place to start on Ted Allen's work on the significance of Bacon's Rebellion is the aforementioned short essay "Class Struggle and the Origin of Racial Slavery: The Invention of the White Race," the most recent edition with a most useful preface by Jeff Perry, Ted's literary executor. Perry is also author of the biography of Hubert Harrison, Harlem Radical of the 1920s Another important source written by Allen appeared soon after the 2nd volume of Invention was first published in 1997. Allen wrote "Summary of the Argument" to lay out the thesis of the 2 vol work in a condensed, 40 page synopsis. It first appeared in the online journal Cultural Logic, but is also on Jeff's website. In my opinion, "Summary" is a lucid, brilliant, and accessible entry point to Allen's master work. Allen also applied his critical skills to David Roediger's Wages of Whiteness, again challenging the notion that privilege=benefit.
all of these works are accessible, open source. See: jeffreybperry.net
Again in my opinion, Allen's work and that of DuBois Black Reconstruction, along with Lerone Bennett Jr, Harrison's writings (see a collection edited by Jeff Perry), and Frederick Douglass form a continuum that challenges the paradigm of privilege as benefit with the paradigm of privilege as social control. The "knapsack" paradigm, a phrase I coined in reference to the Peggy McIntosh 1988 essay "The Invisible Knapsack of White Privilege," has been a key source of the left's ideological disorientation for decades. It infiltrates all efforts to formulate a critique of the failures of progressive movements and develop a strategy for altering the balance of power between capital and labor in the US.
To find his way out of the paradox of privilege as benefit, Campbell performs an often-used bit of mental legerdemain. When he addresses "dog-whistle politics" of Nixon, Reagan et al, the "white" working class magically becomes THE working class. Only then does he address the declining standard of living etc., with reference to "divide and conquer" as its source. However, the US working class has not been subjected to divide and conquer. Its experience is that of "separate and unequal." Every effort by capital to divide workers who are on more or less equal terms produces its dialectical opposite: spontaneous combination by workers into collective action based on solidarity -- not just an injury to one is an injury to all, but "the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all" -- Marx and Engels vision of the new society in the Manifesto. It's inequality that distorts and diverts the spontaneous impulse to solidarity.
Indeed, as Jeff points out in the announcement below, the struggle against white supremacy is the struggle to overcome old and new Jim Crow, old and new forms of inequality and segregation. And this struggle for equity across racial and gender differences within the working class is essential to the success of social justice movements in the US. But if at the same time as one takes a stand against white supremacy one also holds the belief that racial inequality provides "whites" with benefits, it become very hard to understand why any of these "whites" would join the class struggle alongside working people of color. These inequalities can neither be ignored nor turned into a reason to abandon organizing "white" workers. The crucial question is how to lead "white" workers to choose between clinging to illusory benefits of status and join in solidarity with workers of color to exercise real power [power with, rather than power over, as Lanier Guinier calls it] to defend the real interests of workers against capital's onslaught. Campbell's magical switching of white workers to 'workers' is simply another artful dodge of this central question. [see "Can White Workers [crossed out]/ Radicals Be Radicalized?" a pamphlet by Ted Allen from 1967 also on the Jeff Perry website.]
The tendency in unions has been to ignore racial inequality, to see any focus on race as divisive. The Bernie Sanders-Elizabeth Warren-Robert Reich wing of the Democratic Party has reinforced this tendency. Fight economic inequality, they say. Rally the 99% against the 1% and resolve inequalities within the 99% at a later date. This "thinking and acting white" tries to put the lid back on the mass movements for social equality that have been at the center of progressive politics for a generation -- what is sometimes dismissively referred to as "identity politics." One could argue that Sanders' adjustment of his economic populist message to respect the demands and programs of Black Lives Matter and Dreamers allowed his campaign to have the success it did among young people for whom a commitment to racial and gender equality is essential. But this is another discussion. Here's the Douglass quote:
"The slaveholders, with a craftiness peculiar to themselves, by encouraging the enmity of the poor laboring white man against the blacks, succeeded in making the said white man almost as much a slave as the black slave himself. The difference between the white slave and the black slave was this: the latter belonged to one slaveholder, while the former belonged to the slaveholders collectively. The white slave had taken from him by indirection what the black slave had taken from him directly and without ceremony. Both were plundered, and by the same plunderers. The slave was robbed by his master of all his earnings, above what was required for his bare necessities, and the white laboring man was robbed by the slave system of the just results of his labor, because he was flung into competition with a class of laborers who worked without wages. The slaveholders blinded them to this competition by keeping alive their prejudice against the slaves as men--not against them as slaves. They appealed to their pride, often denouncing emancipation as tending to place the white working man on an equality with negroes, and by this means they succeeded in drawing off the minds of the poor whites from the real fact, that by the rich slave-master they were already regarded as but a single remove from equality with the slave. The impression was cunningly made that slavery was the only power that could prevent the laboring white man from falling to the level of the slave's poverty and degradation."
The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass New York 1962 (Collier) [first published 1881, revised ed. 1892] p 179
1.) from Samir Sonti:
The best that I'm aware of is: Edmund Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom (1975)
2.) from Bob Bussel:
Another good piece in addition to Edmund Morgan is Timothy H. Breen, “A Changing Labor Force and Race Relations in Virginia, 1660–1710,” Journal of Social History, Fall 1973.
I read this 30 years ago in graduate school, and it has stuck with me all these years.
3.) From Mike Prokosch:
Three more accounts:
Theodore W. Allen, "Class Struggle and the Origin of Racial Slavery: The Invention of the White Race," edited/introduced by Jeffrey B. Perry, published in 2006 by the Center for Study of Working Class Life at SUNY Stony Brook (thank you, Mike Zweig!)
Theodore W. Allen, in The Invention of the White Race, vol. II: The Origin of Racial Oppression in Anglo-America, Verso Books, 1997 and 2012.
Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic, Beacon Press, 2000.
4.) from Bill Barry:
Here's a fast summary, starting with Bacon's Rebellion, that was posted this week.
The Rise and Fall of the White Working Class
by Stephen W. Campbell