Conceived in Liberty Volume 2 - Ludwig von Mises Institute

General Court, representing the views of the small-scale artisan employers,
lamented the "oppression" of tanners, glovers, and shoemakers by their
being obliged by the market to pay journeymen employees wages that they
deemed "too high." The committee also attacked the gall of journeymen in
daring to desire and wear expensive clothes, and in asking for wages that
would pay for them. There seemed to be no understanding of how wages are
set in an unhampered market. Finally, in 167 5, an extensive but less-comprehensive
piece of maximum-wage control and sumptuary legislation was passed.
The legislation was clearly designed to keep the lower orders "in their place."
Significant of the class bias of the regulations was the fact that only laborers
were to be punished and heavily fined for receiving wages above the legal
maximum; no penalties were to be levied on employers paying those wages.
By 1690, however, enforcement of the legislation had begun to break down,
and from then on the laws proved to be increasingly ineffective and obsolete.
The collapse of the regulations and of their enforcement accelerated after
1720.
It was not only in the South that the proportion of Negro slaves to white
bondservants greatly increased after the turn of the eighteenth century.
Although forced labor played a less dominant role in the Northern economy,
a similar shift occurred in Massachusetts. From a class of young English
servants bonded to family masters, the coerced laborers became largely an
alienated heterogeneous group of non-English whites and Negro slaves. In
the 1630s, ninety-five percent of forced labor in Massachusetts was white and
five percent Negro; by the 1740s, however, twenty-five percent of forced
labor was white and seventy-five percent Negro. The increasing alienation of
the slaves and the servants led the Puritan members of the oligarchy to try to
win their allegiance by rationalizing their ordeal as somehow natural, righteous,
and divine. So have tyrants always tried to dupe their subjects into
approving—or at least remaining resigned to—their fate. Hence, the Reverend
Samuel Willard, in his A Complete Body of Divinity (1726), slyly
linked the supposed hierarchical order of heaven to the existing order on
earth, to the "ranks and orders among mankind in this world," which "God
rather than the oligarchy hath appointed." Especially, the subjection of servants
to masters was divinely appointed, made necessary by man's fall: "All
servitude began in Curse. . . ." Servants, according to the emphatically nonservant
Willard, were duty-bound to revere and obey their masters, to serve
them diligently and cheerfully, and to be patient and submissive even to the
crudest master. A convenient ideology indeed for the masters! Unfortunately,
the Reverend Mr. Willard lamented, some masters are indeed insufferably
harsh and hence provoke their subjects; and some servants are "disorderly"
enough to be "uneasy, and not willing to bear the Yoke or be under any
Command."
The Reverend Cotton Mather, always an eloquent and leading spokesman
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