The American educational system has brainwashed generations of Americans into believing what I like to refer to as the "Plymouth Fairy Tale," that is, America was founded by hardworking Christians who came to this continent to escape religious persecution (we even created a holiday to support this fairy tale). It is a crime that school children in Great Britain learn the truth about colonial America while our children are taught a fairy tale. The cold hard truth is that early America was settled primarily via the "headright" system. The Virginia Company instituted the headright system in 1618. The Plymouth Company quickly followed the Virginia Company’s lead.
Under the headright system, the amount of land that one was granted was based on how many bond-servants one could bring to a colony. We were taught as children that indentured servitude was a benign labor system that provided a means by which poor people could cover the cost of passage to the colonies. The truth is much darker and onerous. In reality, indentured servitude was a means by which planters received cheap bound labor and England disposed of its vagrant children, surplus poor, criminals (a.k.a. “transportees”), and prisoners of war from Ireland and lowland Scotland. Prostitutes were even brought to the colonies to serve as "breeders."
Maryland has the distinction of having been one of the most exploitative colonies (Maryland is a southern state no matter how one tries to twist logic). It is claimed that up to 80% of the people who came to Maryland from Europe before 1800 did so in bondage. Maryland's lax bond-servant treatment laws and generous headrights combined to make it the cradle of human exploitation in America. Bond-servants were treated so inhumanly along “Tobacco Coast” that Virginia passed a law in 1661 that forbade the private burial of bond-servants. A similar law did not pass in Maryland in 1663.
I know that what I have written goes against the narrative that African Americans were the only people who suffered under the hands of slave masters. However, a trip through the Maryland State Archives should put any doubt about what I am claiming to rest. The institution of oppressing one man for another man's benefit in America was perfected using Europeans.
In 2003, the Lost Towns Project discovered the remains of a teenage boy who was buried in the basement of a seventeenth century home in Anne Arundel County. This poor child was brought to Maryland at around age twelve and sold into bondage. The link that I have included below tells this young man’s story (if this story does not make your blood boil, you do not have a soul). His story is just one of many that have yet to be told.
http://anthropology.si.edu/...
In closing, the mindset that we must side with our oppressors for our own good dates back to the beginning of the seventeenth century. The notion that we can better our lives if we just work a little harder is the result of four hundred years of indoctrination. The fact that Americans supported an economic system that was based on holding other Americans in bondage for two hundred and forty-five years illustrates just how deeply this belief is ingrained in the American psyche. Wealthy Americans have used the class mobility carrot to keep poor people fighting over the scraps for four centuries. Sure, a few lucky people move up each generation. However, most Americans die in the class in which they were born. Being born poor in this country pretty much guarantees that one will die poor.