American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia
First edition
AuthorEdmund Morgan
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish
SubjectAmerican history, Virginia, slavery
GenreNon-fiction
PublisherW W Norton & Co Inc
Publication date
September 1975
Media typePrint, ebook, audiobook
Pages464 pages
ISBN039305554X

American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia is a 1975 history text[1] by American historian Edmund Morgan.[2] The work was first published in September 1975 through W W Norton & Co Inc and is considered to be one of Morgan's seminal works.[3][4]

Synopsis

American Slavery, American Freedom is Morgan's answer to the paradox which he himself formulates in the beginning of the book: that of Virginia being both the birthplace of the democratic republican United States and, at the same time, the largest slave-holding colony and later, state.[5][6] Among voluminous other sources, Morgan employs the archives of Virginia's House of Burgesses, circa 1620 and beyond to explore this paradox and find an explanation for it.

Much of the book is a description of the problem of poverty in England during the 1600s, one of the solutions to which was to send the English poor (many of them shiftless troublemakers)[7] over to the American colonies as indentured servants.

Morgan then focuses on the conflict in 17th century Virginia between the self-serving governing oligarchy and the much larger populations of land-owning freemen, poor freemen, white indentured servants, and black slaves (the last, originally a very small percentage of the population); he shows how such uprisings as Bacon's Rebellion left the oligarchs worried about retaining power. Morgan also suggests that rebel leader Nathaniel Bacon, in encouraging his followers' vengeful hatred of Indians—whatever their tribe and peaceableness—provided Virginia with its first instance of "racism as a political strategy."[8][9]

Morgan then describes the economics of the Atlantic slave trade during the 17th century and explains how, over time, enslaved Africans became a cheaper labor source to Virginian planters than indentured servants from England, causing the population of poor whites to stop growing while the population of black enslaved workers grew proportionately larger.[10]

Finally, Morgan asserts that, in the late 1600s and early 1700s,[11] the oligarchs enacted strict slave laws for (he alleges) the deliberate purpose of driving a social wedge between enslaved blacks and poor whites—thus creating, so to speak, American racism.[12]

Reception

Warren M. Billings criticized American Slavery, American Freedom as being too simplistic while also stating that it was "a stimulating book".[13]

The Baltimore Sun commented that the title was "misleading" and that it was more about "the ordeal of living in Seventeenth-Century Virginia" than about slavery.[14]

According to Kathleen Brown, new research has appeared with the passage of several decades, much of which complicates or challenges Morgan's description of the encounter between Native Americans and colonists, the rise of slavery, the availability of white indentured servants in the second half of the seventeenth century, and the implications of Bacon's Rebellion. Nevertheless, she notes, the book continues to be assigned in history courses because of Morgan's "eloquent prose, his ability to link key concepts in American history, and his effort to bring the sensibilities of the post-Vietnam era to one of the central tragedies and ironies of American history."[15]

References

  1. ↑ read online
  2. ↑ Wood, Peter (December 21, 1975). "What went wrong in Virginia, the postwar world, the Middle East; American Slavery American Freedom". The New York Times. Archived from the original on 22 July 2018. Retrieved 4 June 2013.
  3. ↑ Parent, Anthony (2006). Foul Means: The Formation of a Slave Society in Virginia, 1660-1740. University of North Carolina Press. pp. 1, 13, 18, 20. ISBN 0807854867. Archived from the original on 2021-02-22. Retrieved 2016-07-06.
  4. ↑ Boyd, Kelly (1999). Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writing. Routledge. pp. 837–838. ISBN 1884964338. Archived from the original on 2021-02-22. Retrieved 2016-07-06.
  5. ↑ Morgan, Edmund S. (1975). American Slavery, American Freedom. W.W. Norton. p. 4. ISBN 978-0393324945. ...the central paradox of American history.... how a people could have developed the dedication to human liberty and dignity exhibited by the leaders of the American Revolution and at the same time have developed and maintained a system of labor that denied human liberty and dignity every hour of the day.
  6. ↑ Wayne, Michael (2001). Death of an Overseer:Reopening a Murder Investigation from the Plantation South. Oxford University Press. p. 231. ISBN 0195140036. Archived from the original on 2021-02-22. Retrieved 2016-07-06.
  7. ↑ Morgan, Edmund S. (1975). American Slavery, American Freedom. W.W. Norton. p. 67. ISBN 978-0393324945."Laborers were the despair of everyone who employed them, large or small. Robert Loder... an ambitious yeoman farmer... always found reason to bewail the shiftlessness of the men who worked for him."
  8. ↑ Brown, Kathleen (July 2001). "Americans on the James: Re-reading American Slavery American Freedom". Commonplace. Vol. 1, no. 4. Archived from the original on 2013-11-04. Retrieved 7 September 2020.
  9. ↑ Morgan, Edmund S. (1975). American Slavery, American Freedom. W.W. Norton. p. 269. ISBN 978-0393324945. "...it is surprising that he [Bacon] was able to direct their [his followers] anger for so long against the Indians.... But for those with eyes to see, there was an obvious lesson in the rebellion. Resentment of an alien race might be more powerful than resentment of an upper class. For men bent on the maximum exploitation of labor the implication should have been clear. But Virginians did not immediately grasp it. It would sink in as time went on..."
  10. ↑ Morgan, Edmund S. (17 October 2003). American Slavery, American Freedom. p. 299. ISBN 978-0393324945.
  11. ↑ Morgan, Edmund S. (1975). American Slavery, American Freedom. W.W. Norton. p. 330. ISBN 978-0393324945."By a series of acts, the assembly deliberately did what it could to foster the contempt of whites for blacks and Indians."
  12. ↑ Morgan, Edmund S. (17 October 2003). American Slavery, American Freedom. p. 327. ISBN 978-0393324945."The answer to the problem [of social unrest], obvious if unspoken and only gradually recognized, was racism, to separate dangerous free whites from dangerous enslaved blacks by a screen of racial contempt."
  13. ↑ Billings, Warren M. (January 1977). "Review: American Slavery, American Freedom". Virginia Magazine of History and Biography. 85 (1). Archived from the original on 10 September 2012. Retrieved 4 June 2013.
  14. ↑ "Slavery without racism?". Baltimore Sun. Nov 2, 1975. Retrieved 4 June 2013.
  15. ↑ Brown, Kathleen (July 2001). "Americans on the James: Re-reading American Slavery American Freedom". Commonplace. Vol. 1, no. 4. Archived from the original on 2013-11-04.
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