How did the elite maintain the status quo throughout the British Colonies of North America?

They kept the poor Indians slaves and other people of this group divided kept them fighting amongst one another by passing laws or orders signifying one group had more rights than the other group

I think you need to start reading social histories about "mob" studies. Oliver Bringing the Crowd back in, 1985 is an example of crowd studies. Understanding the capacities of the paid and unpaid (slave) American pre-working class, the position of small farmers, and small shop keepers is important. (DOI: 10.1080/03071027808567427 ; DOI: 10.1080/00236567408584299).

The third section of EP Thompson's Making of the English Working Class explains the development of cohesive class politics in the United Kingdom. You'll note the central role of the mobility, the crowd here.

Another issue is that "the poor" isn't a useful historical category. The division in class interest between a paid white worker, and an unpaid black slave worker is a massive gulf—the development of proletarian unity between workers paid in truck and workers paid in cash, with such a serious status gulf is difficult. Then consider the gap between the artisan and farmer, and the employee.

So we need to look at "traditional" social systems for keeping down the labourers: status, militia, conventional armed forces. On top of this, the British Colonies had an unusually flexible system of status and advancement, which allowed for class transitions within the third estate.

Finally even when emergent class consciousness happened, when there was a concentration of a singular group geographically, with a shared sense of oppression... here think small farmers or renters in highland country... they're geographically removed from the centres of power, their consciousness of their problem readily relates to other systems of restriction (such as that of the British state over the colony, rather than that of the British and British colonial rentier bourgeoisie over land allocation), and even when they do mobilise (Whiskey Rebellion) they can be put down in the traditional way with fire and sword.

Apart from the bourgeois section of the third estate, early-modern and pre-modern poor and labouring classes lacked something that modern proletariats possess: modern proletariats are forged by the labour process of capital itself into a class consciousness of the social worker. Capitalism teaches labour tools to transcend capitalism (here I'd suggest Karl Korsch and Harry Braverman). While bourgeois and petit-bourgeois values eventually saturated the British colonies in the centre and north, a similar process had been occurring in Britain; and as EP Thompson demonstrates, the generation of proletarian consciousness in the United Kingdom resembles the slow development of the generation of proletarian consciousness in the United States. It is not for no reason that Zinn's People's History devotes such a limited attention to this period (You want chapters 1-4, esp. chapters 2 & 3). Zinn claims, by the way, in answer of your question that the ruling class bound a middle class (the small bourgeois and industrial bourgeois, along with the true pet**s bourgeois) to itself through racism, fear, and economic concession (p58 HarperCollins 1995 rev & updt. ed)

A lazy approach to Zinn's bibliography gives us:

• Andrews ed. Narratives of the Insurrections 1675-1690 NY: 1915
• Morris Government and Labor in Early America NY: 1965
• Nash ed. *Class and Society in Early America. Englewood Cliffs: 1970
• Nash "Social change and the growth of prerevolutionary urban radicalism" The American Revolution ed. Young. DeKalb: 1976

from chapter 2 alone

Regardless of the update you're still replicating the same theoretical error. You perceive "the poor" as a unitary category. They're not. There is no natural class status possessed by free pet**s-bourgeois, free labour, slave labour and Indian. Constructing a cross-class alliance in order to oppose British power actually happened—it was the American Revolution, and it was a cross-class alliance hegemonised by a mercantile and planter bourgeoisie against a nascent finance capital and state bourgeoisie. In fact, the reason for the impotence of the Boston Mob in causing revolutionary change was the very nature of the pre-modern class structure in North America: the revolutionary class within the third estate was always going to be the bourgeoisie, completing the bourgeois revolution of Parliament against King.

There was no "natural problem" of maintaining the moral and political order of early America. Resistance was sporadic, localised and discrete. The possibility of the variety of kinds of resisters to unite on a common basis was limited by the absence of a common basis on which to unite. It seems to me that the intent of the question reflects a failure to understand the difference between modernity and early-modernity, which is why I keep pointing to EP Thompson as an account of the transformation of early modern into modern class structures. In 1760 there was no possibility of a union of the labouring class*es* of England to produce a revolution. By 1820 national Chartism was readily visible, and the proletariat had its own theorists. The absence of a natural problem of control means that the periodic riots and uprisings were a systematic part of the structure of Colonial society—they were politics as usual on the whole, and more so when the riot or revolt was exclusively of the "lower orders." I can't emphasise this enough: colonial society despite its openness was a society of orders and not of "classes" in the common useage.

Correspondingly in North America, in 1760 the proletariat was mis-led by the pet**s-bourgeois (at best) or by the haute-bourgeoisie towards a conflict with the UK's bourgeoisie. In fact, the most "revolutionary" segment of the nascent United States was the pet**s-bourgeois, the small farmer, the small artisan, as they had the possibility of forming armed power against the power of parliament, but unlike the planters and shipping magnates were sufficiently small to place personal interest and a society organised around an idealisation of small interests before a society organised around crass gross interests. The penetration of this spirit into the thinkers of the US revolution is remarkable, only to the extent that the penetration of elements of proletarian class war into the Russian intelligentsia is remarkable.

Bacon's rebellion was not an uprising of an oppressed mass in its own self-interest. It was the use of social discontent amongst a diverse set of downtrodden groups, to advance the interest of a middling section of the elite against a greater section of the elite.—There was no natural cross class alliance of the oppressed in the British colonies in the 17th and 18th centuries; and the alliance forged in the late 18th century was one which callously abused the outraged interest of those who benefited least from colonial society, turning the artisinal poor, the poor farmer, the urban and rural labourer's interests against themselves. The support of Indians and unfree blacks for the British clearly demonstrates that they knew which side of the class war the actual revolution was on.