A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn Page B

Island, Bridenbaugh found, as in Boston, that “the town meetings, while ostensibly democratic, were in reality controlled year after year by the same group of merchant aristocrats, who secured most of the important offices. . . .” A contemporary described the Newport merchants as “. . . men in flaming scarlet coats and waistcoats, laced and fringed with brightest glaring yellow. The Sly Quakers, not venturing on these charming coats and waistcoats, yet loving finery, figured away with plate on their sideboards.”
    The New York aristocracy was the most ostentatious of all. Bridenbaugh tells of “window hangings of camlet, japanned tables, gold-framed looking glasses, spinets and massive eight-day clocks . . . richly carved furniture, jewels and silverplate. . . . Black house servants.”
    New York in the colonial period was like a feudal kingdom. The Dutch had set up a patroonship system along the Hudson River, with enormous landed estates, where the barons controlled completely the lives of their tenants. In 1689, many of the grievances of the poor were mixed up in the farmers’ revolt of Jacob Leisler and his group. Leisler was hanged, and the parceling out of huge estates continued. Under Governor Benjamin Fletcher, three-fourths of the land in New York was granted to about thirty people. He gave a friend a half million acres for a token annual payment of 30 shillings. Under Lord Cornbury in the early 1700s, one grant to a group of speculators was for 2 million acres.
    In 1700, New York City church wardens had asked for funds from the common council because “the Crys of the poor and Impotent for want of Relief are Extreamly Grevious.” In the 1730s, demand began to grow for institutions to contain the “many Beggarly people daily suffered to wander about the Streets.” A city council resolution read:
    Whereas the Necessity, Number and Continual Increase of the Poor within this City is very Great and . . . frequently Commit divers misdemeanors within the Said City, who living Idly and unimployed, become debauched and Instructed in the Practice of Thievery and Debauchery. For Remedy Whereof . . . Resolved that there be forthwith built . . . A good, Strong and Convenient House and Tenement.
    The two-story brick structure was called “Poor House, Work House, and House of Correction.”
    A letter to Peter Zenger’s New York Journal in 1737 described the poor street urchin of New York as “an Object in Human Shape, half starv’d with Cold, with Cloathes out at the Elbows, Knees through the Breeches, Hair standing on end. . . . From the age about four to Fourteen they spend their Days in the Streets . . . then they are put out as Apprentices, perhaps four, five, or six years. . . .”
    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. A historian who studied Boston tax lists in 1687 and 1771 found that in 1687 there were, out of a population of six thousand, about one thousand property owners, and that the top 5 percent—1 percent of the population—consisted of fifty rich individuals who had 25 percent of the wealth. By 1770, the top 1 percent of property owners owned 44 percent of the wealth.
    As Boston grew, from 1687 to 1770, the percentage of adult males who were poor, perhaps rented a room, or slept in the back of a tavern, owned no property, doubled from 14 percent of the adult males to 29 percent. And loss of property meant