Colonial America reproduced Old World class hierarchies rather than founding democracy

Evidence

It is still possible to discover examples or variations of the legend of American foundations in contemporary textbooks. When Milton Cummings and David Wise, under the subtitle “The paradox of colonial democracy,” state that “Colonial America was not a very democratic place by contemporary standards,” their suggestion is that a defense exists of colonial society in its own terms (not to mention the implication that the more contemporary standards of democracy have been achieved). … “Virginians could be so heavily exploited, legally and illegally, partly because they were selected for that purpose: they were brought to the colony in order to be exploited. From the beginning Englishmen had thought of their New World possessions as a place in which to make use of people who were useless at home.” … “Our first settlers brought with them across the ocean the class distinctions of the Old World. The American wilderness modified and complicated these distinctions, but it did not eliminate them. And the more the population grew—the greater the wealth, the more complex the society—the sharper became the differences between upper and lower classes. The white indentured servant supplied the basic lower-class labor force in the seventeenth century, the Negro slave in the eighteenth century, both supplemented by town laborers of various types.” — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1714

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in the rise of the Black radical tradition as a response to inherited class structures being re-imposed in the colonies. — connects to: Jacksonian America was highly democratic in franchise and weak in coercive state apparatus. — Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White, 257
• DEFINE: Clarifies that the ‘colonial democracy’ legend is a retrospective myth that papers over the founding class order.