A Young People's History of the United States

The chapter title refers to the first meeting between Europeans and Indigenous peoples of the “New World” (the Americas). Zinn traces themes in European colonialism up through the 1600s in the British settlements that became part of the 13 colonies that resisted British rule during the American Revolution. Throughout the chapter, the author emphasizes the death and destruction that colonialism wrought, first against the Arawaks whom Columbus encountered, but also against the Inca and Aztec civilizations, the Powhatan Confederacy near the Jamestown settlement, the Iroquois Confederacy in the northeastern woodlands, and countless other Indigenous communities that the book does not directly name.

For example, Zinn describes how Columbus characterized the Arawak people he encountered when he mistakenly landed in the Americas: “well-built, with good bodies and handsome features” but, according to Columbus, also naive, ignorant, and worthy of “subjugation” (1). The chapter highlights Columbus’s actions as opportunistic and cruel, as he willingly trading human lives for economic prospects, motivated entirely by greed for gold fabled to be abundant in Arawak homelands. He headed efforts that forced the Arawak people into bondage and corporeal punishment. In the century after Columbus’s arrival and the systems of abuse he established there, Arawak populations diminished from about a quarter of a million to nearly zero due to the harsh conditions of slavery, the rampant diseases that spread from Europeans, or suicide to avoid abuse.

Europeans who settled in Jamestown (in the colony that became Virginia) and New England did not set up the same killing machine of exploitation and physical destruction as Columbus’s party, but they had violent conflicts with proximate Indigenous groups out of desperation and the desire to establish dominance. Forced to eat corpses to stay alive during the first year of their stay, some Jamestown colonists abandoned their settlement “to join the Indians,” who knew how to survive the climate and conditions (17). Decades later, colonists there and further north engaged in “total war” with Native people (17). This angle of analysis combats the dominant popular narrative that has historically celebrated men like Columbus and people like the New England and Jamestown colonists.

Whereas the early colonizers enslaved Indigenous populations, colonists along the eastern seaboard of North America were vastly outnumbered by savvy Indigenous groups. Colonists began importing and auctioning enslaved people through the international slave trade with Africa to engage free labor to grow food and later to tend tobacco plantations and to be house servants. Zinn notes that this trade involved advanced societies in Africa taking captives from proximate groups and marching them to be exported over the Atlantic via the West African coast. Two-fifths of people forced to undertake these marches died en route, and many more died on dirty, overcrowded ships, or jumped overboard to avoid their looming fate. Zinn notes that “American slavery was the most cruel form of slavery in history” because it “was driven by a frenzy for limitless profit” and entirely “based on racial hatred” (27). In fact, Zinn opens the chapter by declaring, “There is no country where racism has been more important than in the United States” (23). Much of the chapter explains how racism became so engrained in American culture and society.

Zinn emphasizes the continual resistance by enslaved people to fight their circumstances and sabotage their enslavers. Some even planned large-scale operations aimed at overthrowing their bondage altogether. Others either ran away or purposefully worked slowly or damaged equipment and property. Although organized resistance in the form of “uprisings” was rare (Zinn cites about 250 known cases of such plots), white settlers feared it immensely and took great measures to prevent it from happening, particularly as the population of enslaved Black people grew at such astonishing rates throughout the 1700s. Lines of race hardened, for example, as white social leaders (usually wealthy men) “gave a few new rights and benefits to poor whites” (36) to prevent the possibility of their joining forces with enslaved Africans. Ensuing chapters elaborate on the intentional creation of race and class divisions and strategic unions.

Here, Zinn highlights class conflict within the colonies during the century leading up to the American Revolution. One of the major examples of this type of conflict was Bacon’s Rebellion, “an uprising of angry, poor colonists against […] Indians [and] rich and privileged leaders” (39) in Virginia. By the 1760s, poor planters had been forced to the “frontier” of Western Virginia, where they risked confrontation with Native people and struggled to accumulate wealth without aid from the colonial government. A man named Nathaniel Bacon organized and rallied thousands of common supporters armed to attack Native people in the area and retaliate against the rich and powerful for maintaining the “chain of oppression in Virginia” (42) that left them at the bottom of the social order.

One of the chapter’s subsections, “The Underclass,” discusses “miserably poor whites” (43). Much of this group was poor, white indentured servants, a form of labor akin to imprisonment. Life for indentured servitude was often crushingly difficult as these people experienced “beatings and whippings” (46) as well as rape. Many died, ran away, or lived out their sentences with no prospect of the financial advancement that they had been promised at the outset.

In general, “class lines hardened during the colonial period” (47). The upper class continually got wealthier and gained political control while “the poor struggled to stay alive, to keep from freezing” (50). Furthermore, the poor noticed the divide and protested. Amid food shortages, overcrowded poorhouses, rising rent on land, and mounting British taxes, the colonies were rife with conflict—and not particularly united as a distinct group of soon-to-be Americans in the decades before the Revolution. The wealthy and influential aimed to stay atop the social order but feared violent uprisings from the masses, so they worked to “turn blacks and Indians against each other” (53) and make whiteness a distinct category even though it would have an internal class division. To achieve this end, they “found a wonderfully useful tool” to appease an emerging white middle class: “the language of liberty and equality” (55). The gap in wealth was fundamental and rigidly maintained in colonial society.

Zinn discusses the immediate lead-up to the American Revolution. Zinn presents the famous revolutionaries and social leaders in the colonies as self-interested opportunists. The chapter starts to explore to what extent the Revolution was really revolutionary, and to what extent it was a shift in political power that maintained a status quo for most everyday people. Zinn presents the war as a means through which colonial leaders—wealthy, white, male landowners—consolidated control over their communities and aimed to squash ongoing class conflict among colonists. The author even describes anti-British sentiment as a deflection of colonial discontent against the upper class.

Historical narratives typically emphasize British taxes as a major harbinger of revolution. Zinn mentions some of the key taxes (like the Stamp Act) that angered colonists and colonial efforts to protest and resist them. Much of the activity occurred in Boston, where famous leader Samuel Adams and others worked to coordinate resistance. Their strategies changed throughout the growing conflict. For example, upper- and middle-class Bostonians created the “Loyal Nine” to protest the Stamp Act in 1765, mobilizing poor workers to join them. When a demonstration became violent and caused property destruction, the leaders “cut all ties” (62) with the larger group they had recruited and articulated a desire to keep property (and people) safe. John Adams, who became the second president of the US, defended British soldiers in court after the Boston Massacre during which “local workers and British soldiers broke into a tumult” (63). As incendiary revolutionary rhetoric circulated, colonial leaders feared the extent to which people might pursue true equality and upset the social order. Zinn explains, “They didn’t want to go too far toward democracy” (65). This would remain a central issue in shaping a new government following the war.

The nation’s founders did not imagine liberty and equality to extend to most in society, especially “Indians, enslaved blacks, or women” (68). The rhetoric of foundational documents, however, was powerful, even if “life, liberty, and happiness” was limited, for the time being, “to white males” (69). When Boston’s Committee of Correspondence, a legislative body, issued a draft for military service that the rich could avoid and the poor had to endure, the divisions in colonial society that would persist through the conflict were on full display. Tyranny came from colonial leaders as much as from the British Crown.

The author continues to emphasize the tension and divisions among colonists as the Revolution continued. The rich continually took advantage of the poor throughout and after the war.

Zinn covers the military sphere of the war in only a few paragraphs. Fighting began in Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts, in April 1775, and the British surrendered at Yorktown, Virginia in 1781. The war had little support from colonists. Many recognized the whole conflict as one group of politically influential men attempting to seize power from another group of politically influential men.

In trying to drum up enough support to challenge the massive British military, revolutionary leaders had promised “rewards of military service” (73)—rewards they never paid out. They were also “seizing men and forcing them to serve” (73), a practice called impressment, which colonists had protested when the British practiced it before fighting broke out. The Americans were ultimately successful in the war because of the help they received from the French army and navy, but in-fighting in the colonies persisted.

Toward the end of the war, a few instances of mutiny occurred among colonial troops. Among the events most indicative of the social mood after the war was Shays’s Rebellion. Former Revolutionary soldiers mobilized against state leaders because of economic practices that rendered them poor and without the means to improve their social and economic standards. The new American political leaders of Massachusetts condemned the insurrection, although its philosophy aligned with the American Revolution they had just promoted.

Shays’s Rebellion indicated a concern that many members of the American elite harbored as they drafted the Constitution: “True democracy was dangerous” (85). Zinn suggests that a special-interest group wrote the Constitution and adopted only because it “did enough for small property owners and middle-income workers and farmers” (87), particularly with the addition of a Bill of Rights that outlined personal liberties. Furthermore, a 1798 law, the Sedition Act, almost immediately conflicted with the Constitution. Zinn concludes that the Founding Fathers did not want a genuine balance of power, “except one that kept things as they were” (88).