Anatomy of the White Ruling Class: The Yankees: Aristocracy of Finance, Architects of Empire (Part 2)

“In the beginning, all ruling classes seize the land. They kill for it, write laws to keep it, and call themselves civilized.”

The white ruling class in the United States did not originate in 1776. Its birth lies in the colonial enterprise of British settler capitalism, stretching back to the early 17th century. Long before the language of liberty and democracy was invoked, the foundational social order of this empire was already being constructed:
land theft, racial slavery, Indigenous extermination, and capitalist accumulation.

The so-called “Founding Fathers” were not the founders of this class—they were its inheritors, its refiners, its nationalizers. Their revolution did not overthrow tyranny. It replaced distant imperial command with a local, homegrown oligarchy of white settler capitalists determined to rule unchallenged over an internally colonized and racialized labor force.

I. Colonial Roots: The English Settler Project and the Capitalist Mode of Conquest

British colonization of North America began in earnest in the early 1600s. The imperial framework was clear from the beginning. Colonial settlements were launched by joint-stock companies, chartered by the English Crown to extract wealth and secure territory for capitalist development.

These companies included:

• The Virginia Company of London (Jamestown, 1607)
• The Massachusetts Bay Company (Boston, 1630)
• The Plymouth Company
• The Hudson’s Bay Company

These were not migrations of desperate poor—but profit-seeking commercial missions, guided by early capitalist elites. Their goals were explicit: seize land, dominate labor, and export goods for European markets.

From the outset, British settlement was a form of corporate military occupation, cloaked in legal documents, Christian ideology, and frontier violence. It was the first act of primitive accumulation on the North American continent.

II. Early Dynasties: The Material Roots of the Settler Ruling Class

Across the colonies, key families and networks rose to prominence through land seizure, slave ownership, trade monopolies, and imperial favor. These were not isolated profiteers—they were the emerging white settler oligarchy.

Northern Merchant Dynasties:

• The Winthrop Family — Founders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. John Winthrop governed as a Puritan theocrat, land speculator, and colonial magistrate.
• The Cabot Family — Boston merchants who enriched themselves through the transatlantic slave trade and invested heavily in New England’s early banks and mills.
• The Delano Family — Whaling and opium traffickers; forebears of FDR; early links to the Asian narcotics economy.
• The Forbes Family — Gained immense capital through illegal opium trade into China; merged into the Brahmin elite.
• The Livingston Family — Feudal landowners in New York with massive estates built on tenant labor and trade profits.

Southern Planter Aristocracy:

• The Washington Family — Early land speculators; George Washington inherited land and enslaved people through his father and half-brother. Used military and surveying roles to expand personal wealth.
• The Jefferson Family — Thomas Jefferson inherited thousands of acres and enslaved Africans from Peter Jefferson, who surveyed and claimed Indigenous land for elite planter use.
• The Carter, Byrd, Randolph, and Lee Families — Interlocked dynasties who monopolized land, state offices, and slave labor across the Southern colonies.

III. Accumulation Through Violence: How the White Ruling Class Was Born

These families built wealth through:

• Mass land dispossession of Indigenous peoples, aided by British law and settler militias
• Slave labor in agriculture, maritime trade, and domestic service
• Imperial commerce, including smuggling, piracy, and opium trafficking
• Government office as a means of insider speculation and class entrenchment

This was not random crime—it was structured, racialized, and ideologically legitimated accumulation. It created the institutional foundation of white settler power in North America.

IV. The American Revolution: Nationalizing White Power

The revolution allowed the settler elite to rebrand themselves as “patriots.” In truth, they nationalized empire under a new flag—expanding their class power while cutting British capital out of the equation.

The U.S. Constitution enshrined property, slavery, and settler expansion into law. The Yankee class—Northern merchants and Southern planters alike—secured their place as rulers of a new settler state whose foundations were
capitalist accumulation, white supremacy, and Indigenous elimination.

The American empire was not born in opposition to colonialism. It was born as its successor.