The Giddy Multitude

The author Takaki takes us on another adventure as we discover the basis of slavery and the many fears of “The Giddy Multitude.”

First, I’ll explain what Giddy Multitude is and then I will guide you to how it started through Takaki’s eyes. “GM is a discontented class of indentured servants, slaves, and landless freemen, both white and black, the Stehpanos and Trinculos as well as the Calibans of Virginia” (pg. 63). Basically all the white landowning men were scared of the growing population of the GM. So they classified them in a category that if spoken of would bring fear to other landowners.

As we all know Americans brought slaves over from Africa and other regions. Some blacks and some indentured servants captured in their sleep and brought against their will. At first, these black and white people didn’t know much about each other, therefore, led to minimal or no racism. But, soon that would all change. Black and White slaves sometimes escaped together. The landowners did not like this congregation. They eventually split up the workers so this wouldn’t happen again. They did this by separating their break times so they would have less contact. They also did so by punishing the black slaves more harshly than whites for the same crime. This led to some segregation. Black slaves would serve life time enslavement for the same crime whereas whites would only serve a few extra years of labor. This in-turn led to the desire to have mostly or all black slaves because they could stay on the plantation for a longer period of time. Whites saw this as an opportunity. They would come to America hoping to serve their few years of labor than they would start their own plantations. Unfortunately that’s not how things turned out. Whites already in America did not like this idea because that would bring down their sales, so they made a law to extend white punishment to serve a much longer sentence. To no surprise this angered the whites coming to America and they started a huge rebellion. Their motto, “either be free or die for it” (pg. 63). With Nathaniel Bacon as their leader the GM grew to a large number of 500 men as they raided threw the towns and streets. This rebellion not only struck fear to many social classes it brought racism more into the seen. The option society chose was to let the free, landless, white men have more powers. In-turn the segregation of blacks now was apparent that they were only here for one purpose, slavery.

This is a very logical explanation of how slavery began and spread in a very short amount of time. Spread to a number that was not wanted, a number that caused panic and fear in white landowner’s hearts. Was the use of slaves a wise decision? Was the segregation of whites and black indentured slaves good in the long-run? The answer seems obvious, NO! This not only caused more problems than to begin with, it started an endless battle of freedom, racism, and segregation.

I believe that the panicked white, landowning, men took action before thought. I’m sure other alternatives could have been provided or seen given time, but waiting for those answers was not an option as the overwhelming increase of the population of slaves was at hand.