Howard Zinn and the Us Constitution

The late Howard Zinn is a much respected historian. His views are know to be bold and nonetheless contr everyplacesial. In his book, A Peoples History of the United States, Zinn touches on topics such as indentured servants, savage civilians, and the United States Constitution. Indentured servants were people of a lower frugal social class who worked for people of a higher stinting background. These servants worked for a given summation of time, usually between five and seven years and either worked for money, food, shelter, or freedom.Indentured servants were originally made up of mostly young white males who were traffic their time in prison or their poverty for time functional as a servant. The number of indentured servants began to decrease and soon subsequently side of meat colonists looked for other potential people to enslave. The Virginia colony inevitable labor. They needed to grow corn for subsistence, and needed to grow tobacco for export because they had estimab le learned to grow tobacco.Virginia couldnt make the Indians work for them like Christopher capital of Ohio had done in the past. The colonists would be let onnumbered if they decided to try to take over the Indians even though they were equipped with firearms. The Indians were resourceful, defiant, tough, and practically fearless. The colony needed an successor choice. African slaves were the answer to Virginias labor problem. Blacks had already been imported as slaves to South America and the Caribbean to Spanish and Portuguese colonies.The blacks made enslavement easier because of how pessimistic they were. They were robbed of their homeland and culture and in most cases they were separated from their families. Zinn referred to the slavery against the blacks to be the cruelest form of slavery in history. The British were taxing the colonial universe of discourse to pay for the French war. Many colonists did not agree with the Stamp process and wanted it repealed.That summer, Ebenezer Macintosh, a shoemaker, led a mob in destroying the admit of a voluminous Boston merchants like Andrew Oliver and doubting Thomas Hutchinson. Rioters smashed up their houses with axes, drank all the wine in the cellars, and looted the houses of the furniture and other objects. English officers reported these acts to be a part of a larger turning away in which the houses of 15 rich people were to be destroyed. The riots against the Stamp telephone number swept Boston in 1767.It took the Stamp Act crisis to make the lead aware of its dilemma. After the riots a town meeting was arranged and chiefly upper and middle class citizens were allowed to attend. Zinn argues the Founding Fathers, Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, John Jay, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton, may have had ulterior economic and class preservation motivations that were hidden by the universal language of the opus document.Zinn also argues that the rich, in order to secure their own interests and economic status, moldiness either control the presidential term directly or control the laws by which government operates. Zinn often refers to the views and writings of historian Charles Beard. Beard studied the economic backgrounds and political ideas of the fifty-five men who gathered in Philadelphia in 1787 to be given up the organisation. In his findings a majority of them were lawyers by profession, most of them were monied due to land, slaves, manufacturing, or shipping.Half of them had money loaned out at interest, and that forty out of fifty held government bonds according to the records of the treasury department. Beard also prime that most of the makers of the constitution had some direct economic interest in establishing a strong federal government. Beard did not think the constitution as written to benefit the Founding Fathers personally. The problem of democracy in the post- revolutionary society was not however the constitutiona l limitations on voting.It perplex much deeper beyond the constitution in the division of society into rich and poor. The constitution then illustrates the complexity of the American system that it serves the interests of wealthy elite, entirely also does enough for small owners, for middle-income farmers and mechanics to build a spacious base of support. Alexander Hamilton, Secretary of Treasury and one of the Founding Fathers, believed that the government must ally itself with the richest elements of society to make itself strong.