by Bob Stannard

“Mudsill theory is the proposition that there must be, and always has been, a lower class or underclass for the upper classes and the rest of society to rest upon.  The term derives from a mudsill, the lowest threshold that supports the foundation for a building.” – Wikipedia

“I’ve been down so long, it looks like up to me” – Jim Morrison, The Doors

For thousands of years the rich and powerful have worked hard to secure a workforce to tend to their needs. 2000 years BC the Egyptians paid men to build their pyramids, but somewhere along the way the wealthy figured out that it would be cheaper to simply have slaves. 

From History: “Many consider a significant starting point to slavery in America to be 1619, when the privateer The White Lion brought 20 enslaved Africans ashore in the British colony of Jamestown, Virginia. The crew had seized the Africans from the Portuguese slave ship São João Bautista. Yet, enslaved Africans had been present in regions such as Florida, that are part of present-day United States nearly one century before.” 

Slavery in America fell out of fashion by the end of the Civil War, but that did not stop the aristocratic ruling class of Southern plantation owners from finding another way to secure cheap labor. 

“Writing home from Alabama in November 1863, an Ohio cavalryman celebrated the overthrow of the Southern aristocracy: “The mud sills of the North roam at will over the plantations, burn rails, forage on the country, and the negroes flock into our camps, leaving their lordly masters helpless and dependent,” he rejoiced. “Alas! for the pride and boasting of the chivalrous subjects of King cotton!” He described not one, but two intertwined revolutions unleashed as slavery collapsed and elite pretensions crumbled. Especially illuminating was his triumphant reference to “mud sills,” a loaded term which connected wartime upheaval to antebellum politics.

“Mudsill” became a political catchword in 1858 thanks to an infamous speech by Senator James Henry Hammond of South Carolina. A separate southern nation, he proclaimed, would thrive, thanks to its control over cotton production and its stable social order. According to Hammond, every civilization needed a class of manual workers: “In all social systems there must be a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life,” he proclaimed. “It constitutes the very mud-sill of society.” Northerners consigned whites to this degraded status, but the South had “found a race adapted to that purpose” and built a society on the bedrock of black labor. “We use them for our purpose, and call them slaves….I will not characterize that class at the North by that term; but you have it; it is there; it is everywhere; it is eternal”

There is little doubt that this mindset; that there should always be a subservient working class that has fewer rights and privileges of the elite, exists in America today. From Stastica: 

U.S. wealth distribution Q1 2025

In the first quarter of 2025, almost two-thirds percent of the total wealth in the United States was owned by the top 10 percent of earners. In comparison, the lowest 50 percent of earners only owned 2.5 percent of the total wealth. 

Income inequality in the U.S.

Despite the idea that the United States is a country where hard work and pulling yourself up by your bootstraps will inevitably lead to success, this is often not the case. In 2023, 7.4 percent of U.S. households had an annual income under 15,000 U.S. dollars. With such a small percentage of people in the United States owning such a vast majority of the country’s wealth, the gap between the rich and poor in America remains stark.

The top one percent

The United States was the country with the most billionaires in the world in 2025. Elon Musk, with a net worth of 342 billion U.S. dollars, was among the richest people in the United States in 2025. Over the past 50 years, the CEO-to-worker compensation ratio has exploded, causing the gap between rich and poor to grow, with some economists theorizing that this gap is the largest it has been since right before the Great Depression.

Will the time come when middle and working class Americans will finally say “enough is enough”?  It appears that Trump thinks so. It might explain why he is building up our troops to protect him and the American billionaires from an overdue revolution. The unleashing of ICE has nothing to do with violent, undocumented immigrants and everything to do with controlling an increasingly angry citizenry. His failed policies along with the Epstein scandal are catalysts for America’s anger. Americans have had it with the mega-rich getting away with sex crimes and feathering their nests, while the rest of Americans are unable to afford to live. 

From Heather Cox Richardson: “In Lincoln’s day, and in the Gilded Age, and in the 1930s, Americans pushed back against those trying to establish an aristocracy in the United States. That project appears to be gaining speed as well in today’s America, where the rich and powerful are increasingly operating in cryptocurrencies and avoiding accountability, but where a majority of people would prefer to live in a world where a child does not have to sell her body to older men in order to save enough money to get braces on her teeth.”

The author is a blues musician and former Vermont Democrat legislator. He lives in Manchester.