Genesis of Status Acquisition and Military Status in Colonial New England
The 2016 presidential elections attest to the fact that America is as divided a society as it has been since the mid-nineteenth century and the War between the States (Civil War). Two hundred and forty years since its declaration of independence, the United States has yet to resolve its racial, sectarian, gender, and socioeconomic divides. Much of this divisiveness is rooted in its perception of social injustice, where the rich 1 percent get richer while the rest of the populace’s quality of life seems to be in decline. Here, social justice is measured by the gap between ideal versus the actual implementation of constitutional guarantees. Both camps, right and left, claim they are championing the Bill of Rights (the first ten amendments to the Constitution enacted in 1791) in their interpretation of laws and other forms of social control, including police and military use of force, incarceration, and the death sentence. Even taking that as an ideal, the Bill of Rights, when initiated, had a very restrictive definition of what constitutes a citizen’s eligibility for these rights. Herein lies a major factor in the administration of justice, notably social justice. Judicial ideals are vested in laws and statutes constituting procedural or de jure justice while the actual administration of these laws constitutes distributive or de facto justice. The divide between procedural and distributive justice constitutes the social justice index, reflecting the difference between America’s judicial ideals and its actual practices. Much contention surrounds the interpretation of the Bill of Rights, which is vested in the federal court system, making presidential appointments (and Senate confirmation) to federal courts, notably the Supreme Court, the august body that interprets the United States Constitution, such an important matter in elections.
The Bill of Rights
First Amendment: Freedom of religion, speech, and the press; rights of assembly and petition. Provides and protects freedom of religion, speech, assembly, and the press.
Second Amendment: Right to bear arms. Allows and protects the right to bear (own) arms (guns).
Third Amendment: Housing of soldiers. Prevents the army from moving into your home.
Fourth Amendment: Search and arrest warrants. Prevents unlawful searches and seizures, meaning the government cannot search or take your property without good reason.
Fifth Amendment: Rights in criminal cases (right to remain silent). Guarantees due processes, requires proper indictments, and prevents you from being tried for the same crime twice.
Sixth Amendment: Right of a fair trial. Guarantees a speedy trial, allows the accused to confront witnesses, and requires you to have a lawyer.
Seventh Amendment: Rights in civil cases. Concerns common law and guarantees a trial by jury.
Eighth Amendment: Bails, fines, and punishment. Guarantees punishment will be fair and not cruel and very large fines will not be imposed.
Ninth Amendment: Rights retained by the people. Promises your rights will not be violated even if you don’t know what they are.
Tenth Amendment: Powers retained by the states and the people. Declares that powers not held by the federal government belong to the states or to the people.1
1. Library of Congress Cataloging In-Publication Data, U.S. Constitution Pocket Guide (2015), 21–35
The social justice divide in contemporary America is reflected not only in the widening economic gap between the ultra-rich and the rest of the country, but is also reflected in the perception of unfair entitlements doled out along racial lines, leading to animosities between whites and minorities of color; the working and middle classes versus the extremely rich (“1 percent”); “Christians” versus other religions and/or nonbelievers—all contributing to the current divisions fueling both “White Right” (alt-right nationalists and white supremacists) racist and anti-immigration fervor, at one end of the continuum, and the “Black Lives Matter” movement at the other end of this contentious divide. Ironically, Donald Trump, a billionaire who is clearly a member of the “1 percent club,” was elected by many of those who fall into the “have not” economic category. And while the economy may have played a role in Trump’s election, a racist, vitriol backlash to having a black president, Barack Obama, seems to be a major contributing factor in this divide. It is imperative to look at the original, colonial foundations of American justice in order to better understand how this situation has played out over 240 years.
The law and order issues plaguing America in the twenty-first century clearly have their roots in the unique Puritan society that emerged in the New England colonies. First and foremost is the concept of Manifest Destiny and its major tenet, the superiority of privileged whites. America’s sense of social justice, selective morality, and entitlement emanates from this theological foundation, most notably its decentralized law enforcement agencies; social status hierarchy; and double-standards of justice. While the Puritan influence was predominate in the New England colonies, the ideal of white supremacy extended to the Southern plantations as well. The American version of the Protestant ethos was also designed to distant itself from the British aristocracy with its lineage of privileged status. By subscribing to the Calvinistic concept of divine predestination, the thirteen British colonies saw the opportunity to grow its own aristocracy, based on wealth and, to a lesser degree, military status. Military status, in turn, justified the exploitation of America’s resources for their personal wealth, thus emerged America’s version of capitalism.
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
Max Weber, the noted German social philosopher, articulated the relationship between Protestantism and capitalism in his work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Weber associates the emergence of capitalism with the Protestant concept of predestination, a marked contrast with the Catholic concept of original sin. This change in the Christian worldview, notably the concept of a god-chosen elite, was associated with the introduction of Calvinism, Pietism, and the Methodist and Baptist sects. Briefly stated, Catholicism, especially the doctrine practiced during the Middle Ages, posited that humans were predisposed with original sin and that life was a trial of good versus evil challenges, with a preponderance of one over the other, along with the appropriate sacraments, determining one’s place in the hereafter.
With the Reformation, especially the works of Calvin and his brand of Protestantism, Calvinism, a new worldview perspective emerged, based on moral predestined superiority, a phenomenon based on divine selection before birth. Accordingly, those selected to the moral elite would be readily evident not only to these individuals, but to all by virtue of their earthly successes. In its religious conception, the Protestant ethic, a predestined individual would be identified by certain virtues: elevated social status, private wealth, and asceticism. The element of social status and private wealth provided the seeds for capitalism. Here, the long-held concept of inherited lineage—whether it be from religious or monastic elites—was debunked and replaced by the myth of predestination. With this new God-given authority, the earth’s resources became the medium for establishing the new capitalist elite. Soon, the sacred element of asceticism was greatly diminished, paving the way for a secular mode of capitalism based on material wealth, social privilege, and conspicuous consumption. Fierce competition soon became the primary vehicle for these desired attributes. An associated feature of secular capitalism was the norm that the “means justifies the ends.” Deceit, cheating, and corruption soon became the mainstay of American capitalism within the government and business community, eventually leading to a double standard of justice in America—white-collar crimes for the privileged elite and harsh criminal recrimination for the lower classes. In assessing American capitalism, Weber noted that it maintained a moral ethos as well; one that provided justification for expansionism at any cost.1 This moral ethos, the proclaimed Covenant of Divine Providence, became the foundation of the U.S. policy of Manifest Destiny. Manifest Destiny fostered the idea of special favors from God, as well as a justification for both extreme wealth and discrimination.2
Not to be ignored are the works of Adam Smith, the Scottish economist and philosopher, whose manifesto, The Wealth of Nations, raised the main elements of Calvinist and secular capitalism into natural law, a philosophy that went on to drive Western-style market economies, especially in the United States. Smith’s work was published the same year the United States declared its independence from Britain, hence providing the resulting justification of wage labor and class division within emerging industrialized societies at this time. Here, Smith linked a nation’s wealth to the wage laborer who, as a class, would generate greater purchasing power that would fuel the society’s industrial/capitalism base—thereby creating an upward cycle of improved living standards for all. Smith alluded to the New England colonies in illustrating the success of the progressive model of capitalism and its tenets of labor satisfaction and its resulting shared trickle-down wealth.3 Conservative Calvinistic Protestantism and its belief in predestinated moral superiority existed from the beginning in the New World American colonies in both New England and Canada.
Max Weber noted that American capitalism, as espoused by Benjamin Franklin, went beyond secular capitalism by attaching a moral ethos as justification for its expansionistic designs: “Now, all Franklin’s moral attitudes are coloured with utilitarianism.”4 This sense of religious and ethnic superiority, supported by the colonists self-proclaimed Covenant of Divine Providence, paved the way for the moral justification of expansionism and ethnic cleansing under the mandate of Manifest Destiny. Contrary to popular mythology, the Puritans did not come to the New England colonies to escape prosecution per se, but rather as part of a capitalist endeavor with the intention of establishing a colony based on their particular conservative and exclusive brand of Protestantism. The Massachusetts Bay Colony (originally including most of the current New England states) was chartered as a business corporation with legal authority to exercise law and order among its inhabitants. Charters were managed by a governor, deputy governor, and a board of eighteen stockholders, also known as freemen. The latter constituted the general court that met four times a year in order to admit new members, elect officers, and make regulations, hence a model for the current general courts in the New England states.
British settlements, often called plantations, consisted of thirteen colonies along the Atlantic seashore, with Georgia being the last settled in 1732. While initially predominately Anglo-Saxon, other white European emigrants began to emerge in the late 1600s, including the Scots-Irish, German, Huguenots, and Swiss, challenging any attempt for a theocracy outside of the New England section of British North America (the thirteen colonies were eventually divided into three groupings—New England, Middle Colonies, and Southern Colonies). The religiously conservative, hence intolerant, Massachusetts Bay Colony was initiated during the British Civil War between the Crown and Oliver Cromwell’s Commonwealth, thus the term the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
The genesis of John Winthrop’s plan for a colonial settlement in New England began with a group of prominent Puritans who controlled a trading company and were successful in acquiring commercial rights to a large land grant in the new world. Winthrop and company were also able to transfer their corporate headquarters to their new home in New England, an unusual move at this time. Essentially, this became the first offshore business corporation, which is commonplace today. Moreover, this corporate charter would also serve as the basis for a civil government. The Crown’s charter defined their legal landholdings and their civil government while corporate officers served as magistrates and stockholder’s meetings served as legislative sessions (General Court). Within this Calvinistic capitalist system, the corporate chairman, John Winthrop, became the de facto governor. Some 20,000 Puritans soon joined Winthrop’s New England Corporation, including many from the educated gentry, providing the foundation for the new White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) aristocracy. Winthrop’s initial Massachusetts Bay charter was good for sixty years. Provincial governors were later appointed directly by the English Crown with the authority to authorize land grants to settlers. After the American Revolution, provinces became states.
What was lacking in the Massachusetts Bay Colony was religious freedom. Indeed, the Puritan leaders held an elitist view of Protestantism, an attitude similar to that held by their British counterpart and mentor, Oliver Cromwell, the Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland, and Ireland. Initially, in New England only church members were enfranchised with membership, strictly restricted so that most colonists were not part of the ruling elite that became the foundation for the U.S. aristocracy. The Puritans were bent on establishing an intolerant religious milieu in the Massachusetts colony instead of the opposite—coming to America to avoid religious persecution. Until 1630, church membership required a minster’s endorsement, creating a strict social stratification even among the free whites. Indentured whites and people of color (blacks and Indians) suffered even more within this social milieu.
Kai Erikson illustrated the extent of religious intolerance among the Puritans in his book, Wayward Puritans: “God has chosen an elite to represent Him on earth and to join Him in Heaven. People who belonged to this elite learned of their appointment through the agency of a deep conversion experience, giving them a special responsibility and a special competence to control the destinies of others.”5 Intolerance toward “outsiders” grew, even among fellow whites, as the Puritans became more isolated from their home base in England and gained dominance in their section of the New World. Cromwell’s Puritan forces not only defeated the King of England, it also split the group into two general groups, the Scottish Presbyterian moderates and the Congregational Independents. The latter eventually represented the New England colonies, becoming the recognized church of state.6
Other religions that challenged the New England Puritan theocracy were met with brutal force, including the Quaker persecutions of 1656–1665 when the anti-Quaker law carried the death penalty for anyone professing to be a Quaker within the Puritan colonies. Other forms of religious intolerance existed in New England following the Revolutionary War and the Declaration of Independence from Great Britain by the Rebels (Patriots). The legislation of morality was a common practice in the colonies. These restrictions on public and private behavior, most notably on the Christian Sabbath (Sunday) were known as the blue laws. While the term is obscured by history, some sources attribute the name to the color of the paper on which the laws were written. Sections of these laws continued to be enforced in New England well into the twentieth century.7
Clearly, the Puritans were adamantly anti-Catholic, a Cromwell prejudice that contaminated the New England colonies and continued into the creation of the new republic. In his “God and Country” article in the October 2010 issue of Smithsonian, Kenneth Davis noted:
Throughout the colonial era, Anglo-American antipathy toward Catholics—especially French and Spanish Catholics—was pronounced and often reflected in the sermons of such famous clerics as Cotton Mather and in statutes that discriminated against Catholics in matters of property and voting. Anti-Catholic feelings even contributed to the revolutionary mood in America after King George III extended an olive branch to French Catholics in Canada with the Quebec Act of 1774, which recognized their religion.8
Social control in the New World was manifested through parochial education where the group’s moral imperative was inculcated through compulsory education. Here, education and state were closely linked during the colonial era. The Puritans followed Calvin’s thesis that the church was supreme in establishing moral standards, with the obligation of the state to enforce the church’s dictates. Indeed, the Calvinist view held that the church was superior to the state and that the state was the primary tool for enforcing church authority. Hence, colonial Puritan New England operated as a Protestant theocracy.9
Education within the New England colonial theocracy existed at three levels: 1) elementary Bible school; 2) classical Latin schools; and 3) colleges. Elementary Bible education was established by Puritans under the direction of the Calvinist Resolution—the Synod of Dort (1618–1619). The instruction was for all children, with Bible instruction being taught both at home and at school. Thus, while the Puritans included females within their elementary schools, the purpose for this education was for them to be better prepared for further instructions in the scriptures under male guidance. However, both the classical Latin high schools and colleges were exclusively for males, a select elite of males at that. The colonial elite, while dismissive of the established European nobility, were bent on creating their own unique system based on Calvinist doctrine of predestination. Toward this end, they created their own elite educational system, one to rival that in England—Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Dartmouth—designed to produce the American aristocracy. These institutions, in turn, were richly endowed by the privileged elite, so as to maintain the semblance of superiority vis-à-vis “lesser colleges and universities”; hence, a self-filling prophecy that continues to the present.10
In 1647, the Massachusetts Bay Colony required towns to establish and support their own schools in order to provide apprenticeship training and elementary Bible training for all children. This law required communities of fifty families or more to maintain an elementary school and a Latin prep school for every community of at least one hundred families, which was patterned after the British common laws relevant to local control. Those elite males selected to attend the Latin prep schools were among those then selected to attend Harvard College, which was established in 1636. In 1650, Connecticut passed a similar law, and soon this educational system became the norm in colonial New England. The Puritan education system provided the foundation for the common school system in the United States. In this sense, the U.S. public school system was initially established as a Protestant school system. Even then, the poor whites were absorbed into society via apprenticeship training, a system based upon the 1562 British Statute of Artificers and the 1601 Poor Laws. The charity school concept, initiated in the Middle Colonies by the Society of Friends, also contributed to the colonial school format that eventually was adopted by the new republic following independence.11
Education in the Southern Colonies differed greatly in that it was a private affair, with the plantation elite providing tutors and special schooling for their children. Few resources were available for plantation laborers, indentured whites, and black and Indian slaves. Little attention is paid to the fact that the South enslaved both Indians and blacks. Indeed, the Indian slave trade continued for over a century, with Indian slavery credited with building Charlestown, South Carolina.12 The absence of a middle class not only restricted the development of public schools but also forced poor whites, black slaves, and indigenous peoples to rely basically upon the charity of the plantations owners for whatever education or training they received, if any. Some researchers noted that some slaves were afforded a limited education within the Southern caste system, with these “educated” blacks later providing the foundation for the black bourgeoisie that emerged during the early republic era and following emancipation. Ostensibly, education in the South, from the colonial era up until the Civil War, was specifically for the purpose of providing the small number of professions needed for the plantation economy. Within this system, public education was clearly discouraged during the antebellum era even within the South’s most progressive communities.13
Manifest Destiny was a unique ideology vested in the conservative Protestantism concept of predestination and divine rights that not only endorsed excessive wealth and ostentatious lifestyles, it also provided license to exploit “lesser” peoples and denude the New World resources along with its indigenous peoples. The unique American WASP aristocracy subscribed to the ethos that not only were they predestined by divine rights to a heavenly superiority in the afterlife, but they were also destined to enjoy the best that a worldly life could provide. Part of this theology was the need for others to recognize their superiority, leading to America’s societies based on class and caste stratification. These tenets of classism were promoted by the educational system that posited these values to everyone, including the “lesser” people who were destined to help the American aristocracy exploit the untapped riches of the New World. For this to happen, a creed of “us” versus “them” needed to be promulgated, justifying the exploitation that was to occur, including slavery and the ethnic cleansing of American Indians. An enforcement agency needed to be created in order to carry out these plans—one clearly controlled by the privileged elite.
The Colonial Militia
During the colonial era, the thirteen British colonies maintained militias (the Provincial Defense Force) to assist the British army in protecting settlements from French and Indian forces. This was part of British common law (Statute of Winchester) that provided for a constable to be in charge of the one hundred families in his district. In the British colonies, the leaders of the corporation vested responsibilities such as collecting tithing and taxes and providing basic community security, such as fire watch to the Committee of Safety, which also was responsible for raising and equipping the provincial militia. And while the British Army had garrisons throughout the thirteen colonies, they were often spread thin, thereby relying on the locally armed defense force. The fact that British troops were often imbedded in private homes, with the homeowner having little recourse to these arrangement—hence, the Third Amendment to the Constitution, forbidding the housing of soldiers in private homes without the consent of the owner. Martial law trumped this provision, as was noted during the Civil War.
Militia officers were part of the privileged colonial elite who often were selected for regular commissions into the British military. George Washington, a slaveholding, wealthy Virginia aristocrat, was made a major in the Virginia militia at age twenty-one during the French and Indian War. The following year, he was promoted to full colonel, leading a force against Fort Duquesne in Pittsburgh under British General Edward Braddock, who died in battle. Due to this military success, Washington, at age twenty-three, was made commander of all Virginia troops. Following General Braddock’s death, Governor William Shirley of Massachusetts, the architect of the Acadian Expulsion, assumed command of all British troops in North America. Discouraged by his failure to obtain a commission in the British military, Washington resigned his militia commission and returned home to serve in the Virginia House of Burgesses.14
The Provincial Defense Force consisted of all able-bodied, Protestant males between the ages of sixteen and sixty. They were required to own their own musket, bayonet, knapsack, and cartridge box, with one pound of black powder, twenty bullets, and twenty flints. They mustered four times yearly and were on call the remainder of the time. Each regiment was headed by a colonel (commanding officer) and a lieutenant colonel (executive officer), with majors heading battalions and captains in charge of companies. These provincial forces were headed by a major general with a brigadier general as his second-in-command. This military structure provided the format for the Revolutionary War, along with the innovations adopted from their American Indian allies who taught the colonial forces “hit-and-run” commando tactics. A New England colonial militia captain (later major), Robert Rogers, created a “commando unit” patterned after the Indian fighters the colonists encountered in battle, with such tactics as living off the land and making hit-and-run strikes into enemy territory. More companies were added, forming a ranger battalion with Major Rogers in charge. Rogers’s “28 Rules of Ranging” provided the foundation for both the Queen’s York Rangers of the Canadian Army and the U.S. Army Rangers.15
In addition to protecting the colonies during the French and Indian War when France and England were battling for control of North America, the colonial forces, the Blue Coats, were heavily complicit in the infamous Acadian Expulsion, the model for ethnic cleansing that the new republic used to extricate American Indians from their traditional homelands. The Blue Coats consisted of colonial militia recruited from New England, notably Massachusetts and its former territories, New Hampshire and Maine. The enticements promoted for this expedition into the Maritimes were both sacred and financial (pay and plunder). The sacred motive was promoted as a Protestant crusade against both the French Catholics and the native Indians. The monthly monetary benefits for signing up, in addition to any bounty, were as follows: colonels, fifteen pounds; captains, four pounds, ten shillings; corporals, one pound, eight shillings; enlisted men, twenty-five shillings, plus a one-time enlistment bonus of one pound, plus a five-shilling weekly subsistence allowance and a daily ration of rum.16
The Rhetoric of Hate and Divisiveness
The Puritan colonies departed from the Native interaction standards dictated by European international laws established in the sixteenth century, whereby it was felt that indigenous peoples in conquered lands were entitled to sovereignty and property rights. These rights were expanded by the French and British to all tribes, even those that did not convert to Christianity. Under these rules, conflict with aboriginal groups was justified only when the local tribes refused Europeans the right to trade and to preach Christianity. Another element of this Christian capitalist colonial pact was the Doctrine of Discovery, a policy that gave exclusive rights of negotiation with tribes to the European colonial power that first claimed the territory. The Puritans, however, had their own view of things and did not feel that they had to comply with international rules. They felt that Old England was still corrupt in that it had not totally broken with the satanic ways of popery and Catholicism, feeling that their divine purpose could flourish only in this new, uncorrupted land once it was rid of the undesirable occupants—the indigenous tribes and French Catholics. Hence, the extreme animosities directed toward both American Indians and French Catholics, especially when these two populations were allied. This sentiment was articulated by Jonathan Edwards, the leading Protestant theologian of the American colonies during the Great Awakening of the 1730s and 1740s, who equated French Quebec with the Whores of Babylon.17
The roots of Manifest Destiny extend to the colonial era with the Puritan’s concept of their God-given predestined supremacy over all others. This social philosophy played a crucial role in the Puritan’s plan to exterminate Indian groups, as well as excluding other whites of different denominational affiliations. The principle of predestination that drove policies of discrimination and genocide was introduced into Nova Scotia, in the Canadian Maritimes, once control over the indigenous Mi’kmaq (Micmac) and French settlers was transferred to the British Colonial governors. The Acadian Expulsion began a hundred years after the Quaker persecutions of the mid-1600s when anti-Quaker laws sanctioned the death penalty for anyone professing to be a Quaker within the Puritan colonies. Less publicized was the systematic expulsion of the indigenous tribes in New England. Those who were not massacred outright were captured and sent to England as slaves. Those who could escape made their way to French Canada.
In the mid-1700s, the Mi’kmaq’s original population was decimated by diseases, inadvertently introduced through European contact, reducing the tribe to several thousand Indians—a mere 10 percent of its pre-Columbian total. The Acadian French, on the other hand, were unique because these male fishermen and coastal farmers lived among the Mi’kmaq, adopting elements of their lifestyle and forming common law families with indigenous women and creating the first substantial metis population in Canada (mixed European/Indian heritage). Thus, the Acadian French differed from most other white colonial settlers in that part of North America that is Canada and the United States in that they integrated into the Mi’kmaq culture, forging a harmonious community of mixed Indian/white people—as well as the wrath of the Puritans.
The expulsion scheme was devised by the British colonial governors of Nova Scotia and Massachusetts (including what is now Maine), who in 1755 authorized the forceful removal of the Acadian French, citing their friendliness with the local Indians as a pretext for this exercise in ethnic cleansing. John Mack Faragher, a Yale University history professor, cited a September 4, 1755, article in the Pennsylvania Gazette that justified the expulsion order:
We are now upon a great and noble Scheme of sending the neutral French out of this Province, who have always been secret enemies, and have encouraged our Savages to cut our Throats. If we effect their Expulsion, it will be one of the greatest Things that ever the English in America; for by all Accounts, that Part of the Country they possess, is as good Land as any in the World: In case therefore we could get some of good English farmers in their Room, this Province would abound with all Kinds of Provisions.18
Consequently, some seven thousand French-speaking, Catholic Acadians were forcefully removed from the rich lands and waterways along the shores of the Bay of Fundy so that English colonists could occupy them. This action also gave the British-American colonists an excuse to displace and disperse the Mi’kmaq Indians. And while the colonial black slave trade was evident mostly in the Southern Colonies, New England captains became wealthy in bringing these slaves to America. The success of the New England slave trade is evident in the ostentatious mansions along the Atlantic seaboard.
In 1763, the Treaty of Paris ended the Seven Years’ War, also known as the French and Indian War. Here, France ceded their North American holdings to England (Canada and all territory east of the Mississippi River). The French that remained in Canada outnumbered the English by fourteen to one (70,000 French; 5,000 British), forcing Britain to delegate local control to the French Catholic hierarchy in Quebec. Ostensibly, this distraction played a role in activating Revolutionary plans within the thirteen colonies, a plan that would pit Colonial Loyalists against the Rebels. In a sense, this was America’s first civil war. The Rebels subscribed to the concept of Puritan divine rights and its brand of exploitative capitalism. This is most evident in the forced expulsion of some 100,000 Loyalists, of which about 50,000 migrated to British Canada. Disillusioned with the Revolutionary mandate, those entering Canada did not attempt to replicate the Puritan standards in their new homeland, even when they were the majority. Canada was more inclusive and less racist than its counterpart that became the United States of America.
The Revolutionary War, regardless of its mythical origins, was a resource war where a segment of the colonies wanted to have total control over the virtually untapped New World resources. The Puritans, in particular, felt that this wealth was part of their divine rights, pitting them against those who wanted to remain loyal to Great Britain. The Italian sociologist Vilfredo Pareto termed this type of fighting for social dominance as the circulation of elites, hence more a civil upheaval than a revolution for internal structural changes. The Rebels felt distanced from the constant European colonial wars and were reluctant to be forced to fund them. At the same time, Great Britain was souring on the commonwealth, assembly type of governance that emerged in their thirteen colonies. Hence, the American Revolution was not for the purpose of extending rights to all adults residing in the colonies, but rather to consolidate these riches for an even smaller elite.19 In fact, the American Revolution impacted greater change in Canada once Loyalists (Tories) were banished from their properties.
This process is illustrated by what happened in New Hampshire, the conservative outpost of the Massachusetts colony, headed by Governor John Wentworth. Following the Declaration of Independence, the Provincial Congress gave the Loyalists (Tories) three months to sell their property and leave the country. The Rebels employed the Committees of Safety (existing police forces) to enforce the banishment laws. Those forced out had their property sold and placed into the newly coined state treasuries. The banished were forbidden to return to their former colonies, often under threat of death. Governor Wentworth, born in New Hampshire, was among those banished and threatened with death.20
Some 50,000 Loyalist fled to Canada, both the Maritime Provinces and Quebec, forcing a considerable adjustment in the Indian, French, and English settlement, which led to the division of Nova Scotia into two provinces—Nova Scotia and New Brunswick—and the division of Quebec into French Quebec (Lower Canada) and Ontario (Upper Canada), along with defined reserves for both the Maritime Indians (Meliseek and Mi’kmaq/Micmac) and other Algonquin and Iroquois tribes in both Lower and Upper Canada. Moreover, the Loyalists, like their English and Canadian counterparts, were not inclined to follow the Puritan example of governance, relying instead on the British parliamentarian form of government, while the French Canadians continued with their autonomous feudal seigneurial system. Canada was a more tolerant and inclusive society than the American severe caste and class structure. Indeed, in 1793, Canada was the first to outlaw slavery in North America (Mexico was second, doing so with their independence from Spain in 1821). The then former New Hampshire colonial governor, banished to Canada during the American Revolution, went on to serve as the lieutenant governor of the newly created province of New Brunswick, serving nearly a decade. He soon was bestowed the title of Sir John Wentworth.21
The seeds of racism were nurtured during the American Revolution, setting the stage for both slavery and Indian extinction as foundations for America’s development and expansionisms. The combination of white supremacy and local control set the stage for the unique form of policing in the United States. While the issue of slavery divided the nation and contributed to the War-between-the-States, the Civil War ended black slavery, even as it set into play another form of social division—segregation. Equally significant was the continued war against the indigenous peoples who had long occupied the New World. The Indian Wars not only continued in the new republic, but it also intensified, providing a model for ethnic cleansing that was replicated elsewhere, including Nazi Germany.
Treatment of American Indians during the Revolutionary War (1775–1783) provided the foundation for their treatment throughout the nineteenth century. This crisis was intensified with the flood of white settlers unleashed onto tribal lands. Calloway noted that the American Revolution elevated acquisition of Indian lands into a national policy:
The new nation, born of a bloody revolution and committed to expansion, could not tolerate America as Indian country. Increasingly, Americans viewed the future as one without Indians. The Revolution both created a new society and provided justification for excluding Indians from it.22