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American Slavery, American Freedom
"Thoughtful, suggestive and highly readable."� New York Times Book Review In the American Revolution, Virginians were the most eloquent spokesmen for freedom and quality. George Washington led the Americans in battle against British oppression. Thomas Jefferson led them in declaring independence. Virginians drafted not only the Declaration but also the Constitution and the Bill of Rights; they were elected to the presidency of the United States under that Constitution for thirty-two of the first thirty-six years of its existence. They were all slaveholders. In the new preface Edmund S. Morgan writes: "Human relations among us still suffer from the former enslavement of a large portion of our predecessors. The freedom of the free, the growth of freedom experienced in the American Revolution depended more than we like to admit on the enslavement of more than 20 percent of us at that time. How republican freedom came to be supported, at least in large part, by its opposite, slavery, is the subject of this book. American Slavery, American Freedom is a study of the tragic contradiction at the core of America. Morgan finds the keys to this central paradox, "the marriage of slavery and freedom," in the people and the politics of the state that was both the birthplace of the Revolution and the largest slaveholding state in the country.
464 pages, Paperback
First published December 31, 1975
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June 7, 2015
This book is pretty dense and long, but it's a brilliant and even somewhat disturbing argument. Morgan's thesis is that the free, egalitarian Virginia that emerged in the 18th century had that freedom and stability largely because of slavery. In other words, the freedom of most white Virginians rested upon the slavery of most black Virginians.
Ok, let me spell this out more thoroughly. The original settlements in VA had a major labor problem. The companies that set up these settlements wanted them to become commodity producing places, so they signed up people with specific craft skills, as well as a significant number of elites, to go to VA. Once they were in VA, there were simply not enough laborers to produce food to keep the colony afloat, and relations with the natives were not good enough to provide supplies. The importing of indentured white servants helped somewhat, but the colony still limped along in the first few decades.
The original vision for the colony of Virginia was actually quite noble. It was largely part of the struggle with Spain. The English saw themselves as potential liberators of the natives from the Spanish yoke and envisioned a biracial society between whites and Indians. This vision collapsed almost instantly,V mainly because of the aggression and stupidity of the colonists and the creation of a vicious cycle of violence.
Virginia was saved by tobacco starting in the 1620's. This profitable export facilitated the rise of a gentleman planter class in VA that seized the reins of political power and used mostly white servants to harvest their crops. This system was highly exploitative. Servants had few rights and usually didn't live long enough to finish their indenture and get some land. This changed with the decline of mortality in the mid-1600's, but the problem of upward social mobility only got worse. The new and large class of freemen found themselves bumping up against glass ceilings established by the planter elite. They lacked political power, often struggled to buy/keep land, and generally suffered a second class status. They increasingly moved out towards the frontier, bringing the colony into greater conflict with Indians.
This powder keg exploded during Bacon's Rebellion in the 1670's. Bacon didn't actually want to overthrow the colonial government; he only wanted it to support his attempts to protect freemen's farms from native raids and to kill off as many threatening Indians as possible. Freemen who resented the planter elite flocked to Bacon's banner, ultimately leading to the burning of Jamestown and the threatening of many elite estates. Bacon eventually died and the revolt died down with him, but for the planter elite, the old system's fundamental weakness had been exposed. They were relying on a labor force that was abused, maligned, and denied socio-economic mobility or political participation.
The solution (a gradual, semi-conscious development) was to switch to a black slave labor force, incorporate the white freemen into a more broadly based social elite, and build a wall of racism between whites and blacks. White men came to have more political say, more socio-economic mobility (mostly through small land holdings further in Virginia), and a sense of superiority over the blacks. Rather than a potentially dangerous labor force that could not simply be brutalized and crushed, Virginians relied increasingly on a labor force that was brought to the colonies as already unfree and could be disciplined extremely harshly. This system had dozens of advantages over the indenture system and eventually became the norm. The legal and social lines between the races were now clearly drawn out in order to prevent any kind of lower-class consciousness from developing against the expanded gentry. Blacks became a permanent, inferior working class while the freemen became respectable citizens, able to vote, own property (including slaves), and be independent.
Hence the freedom of so many middling white Virginians, a major point of pride for American society then and now, was based on the enslavement of blacks as society's new mudsill. The creation of republican government in America and slavery are neither separable nor equivalent processes. This is a fundamentally different way of looking at both American slavery and freedom that I highly recommend to any student of American history.
Ok, let me spell this out more thoroughly. The original settlements in VA had a major labor problem. The companies that set up these settlements wanted them to become commodity producing places, so they signed up people with specific craft skills, as well as a significant number of elites, to go to VA. Once they were in VA, there were simply not enough laborers to produce food to keep the colony afloat, and relations with the natives were not good enough to provide supplies. The importing of indentured white servants helped somewhat, but the colony still limped along in the first few decades.
The original vision for the colony of Virginia was actually quite noble. It was largely part of the struggle with Spain. The English saw themselves as potential liberators of the natives from the Spanish yoke and envisioned a biracial society between whites and Indians. This vision collapsed almost instantly,V mainly because of the aggression and stupidity of the colonists and the creation of a vicious cycle of violence.
Virginia was saved by tobacco starting in the 1620's. This profitable export facilitated the rise of a gentleman planter class in VA that seized the reins of political power and used mostly white servants to harvest their crops. This system was highly exploitative. Servants had few rights and usually didn't live long enough to finish their indenture and get some land. This changed with the decline of mortality in the mid-1600's, but the problem of upward social mobility only got worse. The new and large class of freemen found themselves bumping up against glass ceilings established by the planter elite. They lacked political power, often struggled to buy/keep land, and generally suffered a second class status. They increasingly moved out towards the frontier, bringing the colony into greater conflict with Indians.
This powder keg exploded during Bacon's Rebellion in the 1670's. Bacon didn't actually want to overthrow the colonial government; he only wanted it to support his attempts to protect freemen's farms from native raids and to kill off as many threatening Indians as possible. Freemen who resented the planter elite flocked to Bacon's banner, ultimately leading to the burning of Jamestown and the threatening of many elite estates. Bacon eventually died and the revolt died down with him, but for the planter elite, the old system's fundamental weakness had been exposed. They were relying on a labor force that was abused, maligned, and denied socio-economic mobility or political participation.
The solution (a gradual, semi-conscious development) was to switch to a black slave labor force, incorporate the white freemen into a more broadly based social elite, and build a wall of racism between whites and blacks. White men came to have more political say, more socio-economic mobility (mostly through small land holdings further in Virginia), and a sense of superiority over the blacks. Rather than a potentially dangerous labor force that could not simply be brutalized and crushed, Virginians relied increasingly on a labor force that was brought to the colonies as already unfree and could be disciplined extremely harshly. This system had dozens of advantages over the indenture system and eventually became the norm. The legal and social lines between the races were now clearly drawn out in order to prevent any kind of lower-class consciousness from developing against the expanded gentry. Blacks became a permanent, inferior working class while the freemen became respectable citizens, able to vote, own property (including slaves), and be independent.
Hence the freedom of so many middling white Virginians, a major point of pride for American society then and now, was based on the enslavement of blacks as society's new mudsill. The creation of republican government in America and slavery are neither separable nor equivalent processes. This is a fundamentally different way of looking at both American slavery and freedom that I highly recommend to any student of American history.
April 19, 2023
There are a few books in every field that are considered classics. Books that have become part of the story because the impact that they have had on the study of the subject itself.
Edmund Morgan’s “American Slavery, American Freedom� is one of those books. Morgan won a Pultizer Prize for "for a creative and deeply influential body of work as an American historian that spans the last half century." This is one of those works.
That being said, the book is not the easiest book to read. The difficulty does not lie in the fact that it is poorly written or emotionally charged, but rather because it is extremely dense. Each chapter provides so many facts and details that have to be processed and digested before moving on to the next chapter.
My biggest complaint is that the title is misleading.
The book is titled “American Slavery, American Freedom�, but it is not about slavery. Slavery is barely referenced until Chapter 15 (page 298). That chapter deals primarily with the slave trade and economics of slavery---but not slavery itself!
So what is the book about?
It is about how the culture in America, specifically Virginia, evolved. It is a sociological study about how Virginia came to prized individual freedom without seeing a conflict that some were deemed as less---and in time came to accept slavery.
The early chapters talk about how the people who came to the Colonies initially were not the right types of people. Rather than sending people willing to work for survival, the earliest Virginians were skilled tradesmen or soldiers. The Virginia Company sent people to the colony with certain expectations. The earliest settlers were often soldiers, master craftsmen, minor nobles, or their servants.
Because England enforced a cast system, there was very little cross training between these specialties. Gemologist, metallurgist, silk weavers, tailors, etc did not have the skills necessary to survive in the wilderness, and lacked the willingness to try. This lead to a community that suffered extremely high mortality rates. Life in Virginia was so harsh, that the Virginia Company disbanded because they couldn’t send new settlers there in good conscious!
Yet people continued to go. Those with some money opted might go because of the promise of more wealth, others went as indentured servants---again with the hope of someday achieving more than they might in England. Some were tricked into going and for a short period, England used Virginia as a penal colony.
The upper class in Virginia often paid for the transportation of indentured servants. Indentured servants came to Virginia with the expectation to serve a certain number of years and then be released from their servitude. The duration of these servitudes varied---and the Virginia elite were not above changing the terms after the servant arrived in the colony. Minor infractions were punished by disproportionately extending the servitude.
During the first fifty plus years of Virginia, the vast majority of servants brought to the colony were indentured servants. With the high mortality rate, it did not make financial sense to import slaves. As the land was subdued and people learned how to survive, the mortality rate declined. By the end of the 17th century, the importation of indentured servants (who would be freed and constitute competition to the gentry) declined as slavery increased.
A couple of interesting facts:
*** Prior to becoming an adult, 25, any wages a person earned belonged to the family to compensate the family for the expenses of raising the child. This is significant because in later years, many of the gradual emancipation plans freed the slave after reaching a certain age. Understanding this was part of the heritage helps to understand where the notion came from.
*** In England, having a skill/trade was often a family secret. Apprenticeships were hard to come by and it was very difficult to learn more than one skill. When one apprenticed with another, they were committed to working for the master craftsman for a certain number of years. Profits derived from the apprentice went to the master craftsman. It was not based upon skill, but status. Thus, a true master might be considered an apprentice and make their inept master a fortune. People under the age of 30 were required to work for somebody else!
*** British law was very regimented---required people to work essentially 14 hour days 6 days a week.
*** In early Virginia there was a large disparity between the sexes. By a margin of 4-1 male immigrants exceeded females. Additionally, men (who worked labor and outdoors) had a much higher mortality rate than women. It was not uncommon for women to marry multiple times. Morgan notes that this was one of the earliest ways in which wealth was accumulated by families in the early 17th century. (While he doesn’t state it, this is exactly how George Washington acquired most of his wealth. Martha married into the Custis fortune and then married George.)
*** Most settlers chose to raise Tobacco because it had a higher profit per acre than other crops, but this made the colonist dependent upon trade for sustenance!
NOTE: This was one of the 6 books that I committed to reading for Black History Month. Having finished it, I feel like I owe black history another book.
Edit:. 3 years later and this is a book that I can't help but admire. The ideas and concepts here have shaped a lot of subsequent reading. I have to up the review to 5 stars.
Edmund Morgan’s “American Slavery, American Freedom� is one of those books. Morgan won a Pultizer Prize for "for a creative and deeply influential body of work as an American historian that spans the last half century." This is one of those works.
That being said, the book is not the easiest book to read. The difficulty does not lie in the fact that it is poorly written or emotionally charged, but rather because it is extremely dense. Each chapter provides so many facts and details that have to be processed and digested before moving on to the next chapter.
My biggest complaint is that the title is misleading.
The book is titled “American Slavery, American Freedom�, but it is not about slavery. Slavery is barely referenced until Chapter 15 (page 298). That chapter deals primarily with the slave trade and economics of slavery---but not slavery itself!
So what is the book about?
It is about how the culture in America, specifically Virginia, evolved. It is a sociological study about how Virginia came to prized individual freedom without seeing a conflict that some were deemed as less---and in time came to accept slavery.
The early chapters talk about how the people who came to the Colonies initially were not the right types of people. Rather than sending people willing to work for survival, the earliest Virginians were skilled tradesmen or soldiers. The Virginia Company sent people to the colony with certain expectations. The earliest settlers were often soldiers, master craftsmen, minor nobles, or their servants.
Because England enforced a cast system, there was very little cross training between these specialties. Gemologist, metallurgist, silk weavers, tailors, etc did not have the skills necessary to survive in the wilderness, and lacked the willingness to try. This lead to a community that suffered extremely high mortality rates. Life in Virginia was so harsh, that the Virginia Company disbanded because they couldn’t send new settlers there in good conscious!
Yet people continued to go. Those with some money opted might go because of the promise of more wealth, others went as indentured servants---again with the hope of someday achieving more than they might in England. Some were tricked into going and for a short period, England used Virginia as a penal colony.
The upper class in Virginia often paid for the transportation of indentured servants. Indentured servants came to Virginia with the expectation to serve a certain number of years and then be released from their servitude. The duration of these servitudes varied---and the Virginia elite were not above changing the terms after the servant arrived in the colony. Minor infractions were punished by disproportionately extending the servitude.
During the first fifty plus years of Virginia, the vast majority of servants brought to the colony were indentured servants. With the high mortality rate, it did not make financial sense to import slaves. As the land was subdued and people learned how to survive, the mortality rate declined. By the end of the 17th century, the importation of indentured servants (who would be freed and constitute competition to the gentry) declined as slavery increased.
A couple of interesting facts:
*** Prior to becoming an adult, 25, any wages a person earned belonged to the family to compensate the family for the expenses of raising the child. This is significant because in later years, many of the gradual emancipation plans freed the slave after reaching a certain age. Understanding this was part of the heritage helps to understand where the notion came from.
*** In England, having a skill/trade was often a family secret. Apprenticeships were hard to come by and it was very difficult to learn more than one skill. When one apprenticed with another, they were committed to working for the master craftsman for a certain number of years. Profits derived from the apprentice went to the master craftsman. It was not based upon skill, but status. Thus, a true master might be considered an apprentice and make their inept master a fortune. People under the age of 30 were required to work for somebody else!
*** British law was very regimented---required people to work essentially 14 hour days 6 days a week.
*** In early Virginia there was a large disparity between the sexes. By a margin of 4-1 male immigrants exceeded females. Additionally, men (who worked labor and outdoors) had a much higher mortality rate than women. It was not uncommon for women to marry multiple times. Morgan notes that this was one of the earliest ways in which wealth was accumulated by families in the early 17th century. (While he doesn’t state it, this is exactly how George Washington acquired most of his wealth. Martha married into the Custis fortune and then married George.)
*** Most settlers chose to raise Tobacco because it had a higher profit per acre than other crops, but this made the colonist dependent upon trade for sustenance!
NOTE: This was one of the 6 books that I committed to reading for Black History Month. Having finished it, I feel like I owe black history another book.
Edit:. 3 years later and this is a book that I can't help but admire. The ideas and concepts here have shaped a lot of subsequent reading. I have to up the review to 5 stars.
August 18, 2015
One of the most disturbing facts in American history is that of chattel slavery. So often have I wondered how a thing as terrible as slavery could exist in the land of free. Edmund Morgan examines this in "American Slavery, American Freedom" and shows that the two were in large part dependent upon each other. Though written over 30 years ago,"AS, AM" is still considered by many contemporary historians as one of the definitive, (if not the best) histories of colonial America.
The book is not a social history of slaves in colonial America, but rather an exploration of how the high ideals of freedom and liberty were allowed to coexist with oppression and slavery. Morgan does this by examining the history of colonial Virginia's system of labor, economy, and social structure (Virginia being the most important slaveholding colony).
There were two important factors (most striking to me) that lay at the root of the Virginians thinking on enforced labor. First was the Virginians attitudes toward other nations and races, which was rooted in the Englishmen's distrust and dislike for anything foreign (including the Indians, Irish, French, Spanish, etc.). Second, was the Englishmen's (and in turn Virginia's) disgust with the vices and unrest stemming from the poorer classes. What to do with the poor was a major concern for the English in the mother country as well as in the colony. As the ideals of republicanism became more popular in Virginia, the poor were considered the biggest threat to the promise of a free society. They were dependent upon others and would cause unrest and social disorder rather than contributing to society. Virginians dealt with this by enslaving the poor, considering Africans as a poor class.
This is an excellent and important book for understanding why slavery stubbornly held on after the American Revolution.
The book is not a social history of slaves in colonial America, but rather an exploration of how the high ideals of freedom and liberty were allowed to coexist with oppression and slavery. Morgan does this by examining the history of colonial Virginia's system of labor, economy, and social structure (Virginia being the most important slaveholding colony).
There were two important factors (most striking to me) that lay at the root of the Virginians thinking on enforced labor. First was the Virginians attitudes toward other nations and races, which was rooted in the Englishmen's distrust and dislike for anything foreign (including the Indians, Irish, French, Spanish, etc.). Second, was the Englishmen's (and in turn Virginia's) disgust with the vices and unrest stemming from the poorer classes. What to do with the poor was a major concern for the English in the mother country as well as in the colony. As the ideals of republicanism became more popular in Virginia, the poor were considered the biggest threat to the promise of a free society. They were dependent upon others and would cause unrest and social disorder rather than contributing to society. Virginians dealt with this by enslaving the poor, considering Africans as a poor class.
This is an excellent and important book for understanding why slavery stubbornly held on after the American Revolution.
May 24, 2018
EN / TR
Do not be misled by the fact that this book is about what happened in North America 300 years ago. It's a tale about modern democracies as well.
The stage is set around 1607, on the shores of Virginia. The poor, the outcasts, the bandits who were driven off from the England lest they rebel are brought to a colony. From the very beginning the author makes us reconsider our assumptions: The natives of America, whom the Europeans called barbarians, are able to enjoy their lives with ease whereas most of the civilised Europeans will perish in the face of sickness, starvation and cold. It will take a century for them to build an actually stable community in Virginia.
The irony of this stable and civilised community will be that it rises on the shoulders of black slaves. Some founding fathers of the US, the liberal preachers of freedom against the British enslavement of Americans, G. Washington and T. Jefferson were all masters to hundreds of slaves.
How could this be? asks the author. Isn't it a contradiction? He proceeds by telling us how the American freedom and American slavery grew hand in glove with each other within a period of 150 years. You will learn that it is not a contradiction. Racism and slavery laid the foundations of "the freedom to profit", just as the right-wing politics and immobilisation of the popular movements through massacres and oppression laid the foundations of our so called democracies, freedom of expression and rule of law.
Find the time to read it, i say.
TR
Baksanız 300-400 yıl öncesine dair bir kitap, ama "anlatılan senin hikayendir" diyor. Böylesini okumayalı epey olmuştu.
Tarihçimiz sahneyi 1607 yılında, Amerika'nın Virginia kıyılarında açıyor. İngiltere'nin isyan çıkarırlar diye Yeni Dünya'ya sepetlediği yoksullar, serseriler, kaçaklar yeni bir koloni kurup hayatta kalmaya çalışıyorlar. Daha en baştan kabullerinizi sorgulatıyor size yazar: Avrupalıların 'barbar' dediği Amerikan yerlileri, doğayla yakaladıkları dengede açlık, yoksulluk çekmeden yaşarken, 'medeni' Avrupalılar hastalıktan, yoksulluktan çökme noktasına gelecekler. Gerçekten istikrarlı bir toplum kurmaları 100 yılı bulacak.
Ancak bu istikrarlı, medeni toplumun ironisi, siyah kölelerin kırbaç yemekten yara olmuş omuzlarında yükselmesi. ABD'nin kurucu babaları sayılan 'özgürlükçü' George Washington ve Thomas Jefferson gibilerinin hepsi Virginialı, hepsi de köle sahibi efendiler.
"Bu nasıl olabiliyor," diye soruyor yazar, "bir çelişki mi?" Sonra da 150 yıla yayılan bir tarihi önümüze sererek Amerikan özgürlüğü ile Amerikan köleliliğinin nasıl iç içe büyüdüğünü anlatıyor. Hayır, bu bir çelişki değil. Irkçılık ve kölecilik, geçmişte egemen sınıfların kar etme özgürlüğünün temeliydi, tıpkı günümüz liberal demokrasilerinin temelinde milyonlarca ücretli kölenin alınterinin, iş kazalarının bulunması gibi. Sonra da gür sesleriyle "ifade özgürlüğü, hukukun üstünlüğü" diyorlar.
Vakit yaratıp okuyun derim.
Do not be misled by the fact that this book is about what happened in North America 300 years ago. It's a tale about modern democracies as well.
The stage is set around 1607, on the shores of Virginia. The poor, the outcasts, the bandits who were driven off from the England lest they rebel are brought to a colony. From the very beginning the author makes us reconsider our assumptions: The natives of America, whom the Europeans called barbarians, are able to enjoy their lives with ease whereas most of the civilised Europeans will perish in the face of sickness, starvation and cold. It will take a century for them to build an actually stable community in Virginia.
The irony of this stable and civilised community will be that it rises on the shoulders of black slaves. Some founding fathers of the US, the liberal preachers of freedom against the British enslavement of Americans, G. Washington and T. Jefferson were all masters to hundreds of slaves.
How could this be? asks the author. Isn't it a contradiction? He proceeds by telling us how the American freedom and American slavery grew hand in glove with each other within a period of 150 years. You will learn that it is not a contradiction. Racism and slavery laid the foundations of "the freedom to profit", just as the right-wing politics and immobilisation of the popular movements through massacres and oppression laid the foundations of our so called democracies, freedom of expression and rule of law.
Find the time to read it, i say.
TR
Baksanız 300-400 yıl öncesine dair bir kitap, ama "anlatılan senin hikayendir" diyor. Böylesini okumayalı epey olmuştu.
Tarihçimiz sahneyi 1607 yılında, Amerika'nın Virginia kıyılarında açıyor. İngiltere'nin isyan çıkarırlar diye Yeni Dünya'ya sepetlediği yoksullar, serseriler, kaçaklar yeni bir koloni kurup hayatta kalmaya çalışıyorlar. Daha en baştan kabullerinizi sorgulatıyor size yazar: Avrupalıların 'barbar' dediği Amerikan yerlileri, doğayla yakaladıkları dengede açlık, yoksulluk çekmeden yaşarken, 'medeni' Avrupalılar hastalıktan, yoksulluktan çökme noktasına gelecekler. Gerçekten istikrarlı bir toplum kurmaları 100 yılı bulacak.
Ancak bu istikrarlı, medeni toplumun ironisi, siyah kölelerin kırbaç yemekten yara olmuş omuzlarında yükselmesi. ABD'nin kurucu babaları sayılan 'özgürlükçü' George Washington ve Thomas Jefferson gibilerinin hepsi Virginialı, hepsi de köle sahibi efendiler.
"Bu nasıl olabiliyor," diye soruyor yazar, "bir çelişki mi?" Sonra da 150 yıla yayılan bir tarihi önümüze sererek Amerikan özgürlüğü ile Amerikan köleliliğinin nasıl iç içe büyüdüğünü anlatıyor. Hayır, bu bir çelişki değil. Irkçılık ve kölecilik, geçmişte egemen sınıfların kar etme özgürlüğünün temeliydi, tıpkı günümüz liberal demokrasilerinin temelinde milyonlarca ücretli kölenin alınterinin, iş kazalarının bulunması gibi. Sonra da gür sesleriyle "ifade özgürlüğü, hukukun üstünlüğü" diyorlar.
Vakit yaratıp okuyun derim.
February 24, 2019
It was hard going in the early sections of this book, but it's worth the finish. It's an illuminating and theoretically sound exploration of the roots of America's genesis. Jeffersonian republicanism embedded in the US constitution was inspired by these slave holder's first-hand accounts of oppression. With one hand, they oppressed their slaves while with the other they penned peons to freedom from oppression. They were terrified of being tyrannized by the monarchy because they knew had first hand knowledge of what tyranny was.
January 27, 2018
Despite the term "slavery" being directly in the title, this book by Edmund Morgan spends very little time actually talking about it or the African slaves who were subjected to it. In actuality, his book is more about distinctions between poor/rich Englishmen and colonial Virginia's geographical and political landscape. While it was clear that Morgan meant to connect these ideas to how slavery came to be in the colony, there were only two chapters somewhere towards the end that were devoted to slavery itself and the following chapters again talked about politics and what all the rich white men in the colony were doing.
I also find his thesis--essentially that freedom and slavery were inherently connected and that freedom could not have existed if not for slavery, at least in Virginia--to be entirely problematic and very dangerous territory to venture into. If the wrong person got their hands on this book, they could easily come to the conclusion that slavery was a necessary institution for our ancestors to engage in. In addition, the very concepts of freedom and equality which he explores in the book are only looked at on the surface; what exactly does he mean by freedom? Certainly he can't be referring to the state of the Native Americans, Africans, women, or poor people in the colony. Overall, I wish there would have been less of a Eurocentric and androcentric analysis in this work.
2/5 stars for the interesting information presented, even though it didn't have much to do with what I was led to believe would be the topic at hand.
I also find his thesis--essentially that freedom and slavery were inherently connected and that freedom could not have existed if not for slavery, at least in Virginia--to be entirely problematic and very dangerous territory to venture into. If the wrong person got their hands on this book, they could easily come to the conclusion that slavery was a necessary institution for our ancestors to engage in. In addition, the very concepts of freedom and equality which he explores in the book are only looked at on the surface; what exactly does he mean by freedom? Certainly he can't be referring to the state of the Native Americans, Africans, women, or poor people in the colony. Overall, I wish there would have been less of a Eurocentric and androcentric analysis in this work.
2/5 stars for the interesting information presented, even though it didn't have much to do with what I was led to believe would be the topic at hand.
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January 31, 2021The Nieboer-Domar thesis states that when there's a high ratio of labor to land, you can have a class of proletarians - that is, of people who are formally free but nevertheless pay tribute to others - while in a situation in which there is much land for each laborer, would-be landlords must either enslave/enserf their inferiors or do without their labor. You could profitably turn this into a sort of master theory of early American history; and though Morgan to my recollection only cites once, in an off-handed way, this is sort of what he claims to do, though he's zooming in squarely on colonial Virginia. We see practices of bound labor and land use, and ideologies of racism, slavery, and freedom, develop through what seem like four distinct stages: Elizabethan speculation, early Stuart fiasco, Restoration experimentation with expanded slavery, and evolution of a relatively clear system of slavery and white political equality from the Glorious to American Revolutions.
In the airy heights of the Elizabethan court - where everyone of importance was seemingly a pirate, a wizard, or a poet - a basic plan of action for English imperialism in the Americas was propounded: the masses toiling under Popish tyranny would be allied with to help form an empire that was prosperous, Protestant, and free. That these exploited masses were what we would now call multiracial - natives of the Caribbean, Mesoamerica, and the Congo - didn't play much of a role in their thinking, because this was largely prior to racism, or at least well before racism had really been figured out. At the same time, English "planting" in Ireland was already implementing a model of settler colonialism, one where Protestantism buttressed, rather than cut against, ethnic chauvinism.
The fact that military men with experience in Ireland, perhaps analogous to how Japanese imperialism was carried out by military technocrats with experience in Mantetsu, perhaps doomed from the start the early Stuart attempts to put any of this into practice in the Chesapeake. Low agreement capability - concretely put, the tendency of rowdy young colonists to go massacring random Indians at any perceived slight, regardless of what their governors suggested - made stable cooperation with the Powhattans and the other peoples already present in the area impossible; further, taking the "Spanish model" - using European guns to enserf the natives - proved more in line with the settlers' skill-set. Giving these men private plots of land didn't make them any more interested in growing corn, and imperial blandishments didn't induce them to diversify their production. Instead, their appetites for work were only stimulated by tobacco production, which turned the incipient colony into a boomtown.
The boomtown was dystopian; marked by conditions of servitude essentially equivalent to slavery by English apprentices, who were not technically slaves but could be bought and sold (or, as in one example, traded over cards.) That servitude was for a term of years rather than life was a mere technicality; like the sugar islands, the death rate was sky-high, as was capital depreciation of all sorts: tobacco wore out ragged land, buildings were constructed ramshackle because said land would rapidly be worthless, livestock was poached or literally wolfed down (or started wars when they ate up native cornfields,) even money could literally rot, since they used tobacco as specie. If this was an experiment in gaseous capitalism - of everything solid melting into air, or more literally smoke, of capital only being capital when constantly in motion - it was also, like the sugar islands, an experiment in a new hyperauthoriarian model of society. The Nieboer-Domar thesis would emphasize, like Morgan, the availability of land, the need to capture labor to profit from it. If at least many European Virginians were racist (or simply politically dim-witted) enough to not discriminate between allied and non-allied Indians when going a-raiding, at least many were non-racist (or opportunistic) enough to run away to live among them, too.
At least some of these servants were African, but most were from Europe. And the unfortunates from Africa do not seem to have been treated very differently from the unfortunates from Europe. They lived together, married each other, worked and suffered together, were despised by their betters in strikingly similar terms. When Africans started converting to Christianity, it was uncertain how it would change their legal status.
In the Restoration period, things change. After the devastation of the English Civil War, there were fewer excess laborers to throw into the Chesapeake's meatgrinder, moreover, the Chesapeake became less of a meatgrinder, meaning that servants for a term of years would become independent landholders producing profit for no-one but themselves. The Duke of York and future king Charles the II - a real piece of work whom history would not treat kindly - had created and was expanding a slave-trading operation as part of his absolutist designs. Virginia's burgesses settled the question of slave conversions to Christianity, rather cynically concluding that allowing it to effect a change in status would be a disincentive to the evangelism efforts of their masters. (The incentive effect for potential converts was not mentioned.) Rather rapidly, we get slave codes, miscegenation laws, the works. Meanwhile, Bacon's rebellion- early enough in the process that it included black servants as well as white - showed that you could not easily keep armed men from demanding representation and land.
All the ingredients, then, were put in place for a model that would be incredibly successful on its own terms: a population of productive black laborers producing commodity exports, a class of gentlemen given dominion over them, and a class of armed white smallholders who were treated well enough - land, representation, personal freedoms - that they identified with the gentlemen. Although the basic social structure was figured out during the Restoration, the heirs of the Glorious Revolution developed a republican ideology that would articulate it, allowing the slaveholder-smallholder alliance to articulate common interests against native land, black labor, and overseas royal prerogative. And as Morgan notes in the beginning, almost all of the Presidents of the Early Republic, and a good number of its most important theoreticians and ideologists, were Virginian planters.
This book has earned its reputation as a classic; though from that reputation, I was expecting more of an emphasis on Bacon's rebellion, which seems to have played a central role in so many stories of how America invented, alongside other slave societies, race. Here we see more of a slow working out of opportunities, changing conditions, eventually stumbling on a model that can reproduce and expand itself. Would that they had stumbled on something else, but here we are.
In the airy heights of the Elizabethan court - where everyone of importance was seemingly a pirate, a wizard, or a poet - a basic plan of action for English imperialism in the Americas was propounded: the masses toiling under Popish tyranny would be allied with to help form an empire that was prosperous, Protestant, and free. That these exploited masses were what we would now call multiracial - natives of the Caribbean, Mesoamerica, and the Congo - didn't play much of a role in their thinking, because this was largely prior to racism, or at least well before racism had really been figured out. At the same time, English "planting" in Ireland was already implementing a model of settler colonialism, one where Protestantism buttressed, rather than cut against, ethnic chauvinism.
The fact that military men with experience in Ireland, perhaps analogous to how Japanese imperialism was carried out by military technocrats with experience in Mantetsu, perhaps doomed from the start the early Stuart attempts to put any of this into practice in the Chesapeake. Low agreement capability - concretely put, the tendency of rowdy young colonists to go massacring random Indians at any perceived slight, regardless of what their governors suggested - made stable cooperation with the Powhattans and the other peoples already present in the area impossible; further, taking the "Spanish model" - using European guns to enserf the natives - proved more in line with the settlers' skill-set. Giving these men private plots of land didn't make them any more interested in growing corn, and imperial blandishments didn't induce them to diversify their production. Instead, their appetites for work were only stimulated by tobacco production, which turned the incipient colony into a boomtown.
The boomtown was dystopian; marked by conditions of servitude essentially equivalent to slavery by English apprentices, who were not technically slaves but could be bought and sold (or, as in one example, traded over cards.) That servitude was for a term of years rather than life was a mere technicality; like the sugar islands, the death rate was sky-high, as was capital depreciation of all sorts: tobacco wore out ragged land, buildings were constructed ramshackle because said land would rapidly be worthless, livestock was poached or literally wolfed down (or started wars when they ate up native cornfields,) even money could literally rot, since they used tobacco as specie. If this was an experiment in gaseous capitalism - of everything solid melting into air, or more literally smoke, of capital only being capital when constantly in motion - it was also, like the sugar islands, an experiment in a new hyperauthoriarian model of society. The Nieboer-Domar thesis would emphasize, like Morgan, the availability of land, the need to capture labor to profit from it. If at least many European Virginians were racist (or simply politically dim-witted) enough to not discriminate between allied and non-allied Indians when going a-raiding, at least many were non-racist (or opportunistic) enough to run away to live among them, too.
At least some of these servants were African, but most were from Europe. And the unfortunates from Africa do not seem to have been treated very differently from the unfortunates from Europe. They lived together, married each other, worked and suffered together, were despised by their betters in strikingly similar terms. When Africans started converting to Christianity, it was uncertain how it would change their legal status.
In the Restoration period, things change. After the devastation of the English Civil War, there were fewer excess laborers to throw into the Chesapeake's meatgrinder, moreover, the Chesapeake became less of a meatgrinder, meaning that servants for a term of years would become independent landholders producing profit for no-one but themselves. The Duke of York and future king Charles the II - a real piece of work whom history would not treat kindly - had created and was expanding a slave-trading operation as part of his absolutist designs. Virginia's burgesses settled the question of slave conversions to Christianity, rather cynically concluding that allowing it to effect a change in status would be a disincentive to the evangelism efforts of their masters. (The incentive effect for potential converts was not mentioned.) Rather rapidly, we get slave codes, miscegenation laws, the works. Meanwhile, Bacon's rebellion- early enough in the process that it included black servants as well as white - showed that you could not easily keep armed men from demanding representation and land.
All the ingredients, then, were put in place for a model that would be incredibly successful on its own terms: a population of productive black laborers producing commodity exports, a class of gentlemen given dominion over them, and a class of armed white smallholders who were treated well enough - land, representation, personal freedoms - that they identified with the gentlemen. Although the basic social structure was figured out during the Restoration, the heirs of the Glorious Revolution developed a republican ideology that would articulate it, allowing the slaveholder-smallholder alliance to articulate common interests against native land, black labor, and overseas royal prerogative. And as Morgan notes in the beginning, almost all of the Presidents of the Early Republic, and a good number of its most important theoreticians and ideologists, were Virginian planters.
This book has earned its reputation as a classic; though from that reputation, I was expecting more of an emphasis on Bacon's rebellion, which seems to have played a central role in so many stories of how America invented, alongside other slave societies, race. Here we see more of a slow working out of opportunities, changing conditions, eventually stumbling on a model that can reproduce and expand itself. Would that they had stumbled on something else, but here we are.
August 7, 2013
Morgan is not only a revered and accomplished historian, he is a gifted writer. While the book could be a work of inaccessibly dry scholarship, Mogan brings the inherent philosophical conflict of West Virginia to life in this well-crafted book. American Slavery, American Freedom covers the history of Virginia from its founding past the establishment of the race-based slavery with copious primary source material. Through the material, Morgan explores the inherent conflict between the Age of Reason ideal of freedom in a slave-based economy. No other book I've encountered presents such a clear and illuminating narrative on the development of institutional racism while the leaders of the same society grandly tout ideals of "inalienable rights". Combined with David W. Blight's brilliant analysis of the same tensions revisited after Reconstruction in his book Race and Reunion, you will have a solid foundation of how race has played and continues to play into American politics.
February 6, 2013
“There it was. Aristocrats could more safely preach equality in a slave society than in a free one. Slaves did not become leveling mobs, because their owners would see to it that they had no chance to. The apostrophes to equality were not addressed to them. And because Virginia’s labor force was composed mainly of slaves, who had been isolated by race and removed from the political equation, the remaining free laborers and tenant farmers were too few in number to constitute a serious threat to the superiority of the men who assured them of their equality. Moreover, the small farmers had been given a reason to see themselves as already the equals of the large. The majority of households in Virginia, as we have seen, contained more than one tithable, and in such cases the working members of the household, other than the head, were probably by this time slaves. The small planter’s small stake in human property placed him on the same side of the fence as the large man, whom he regularly elected to protect his interests. Virginia’s small farmers could perceive a common identity with the large, because there was one, even more compelling than those we have already noticed. Neither was a slave. And both were equal in not being slaves.
This is not to say that a belief in republican equality had to rest on slavery, but only that in Virginia (and probably other southern colonies) it did. The most ardent American republicans were Virginians, and their ardor was not unrelated to their power over the men and women they held in bondage. In the republican way of thinking, as Americans inherited it from England, slavery occupied a critical, if ambiguous, position: it was the primary evil that men sought to avoid for society as a whole by curbing monarchs and establishing republics. But it was also the solution to one of society’s most serious problems, the problem of the poor. Virginians could outdo English republicans as well as New England ones, partly because they had solved the problem: they had achieved a society in which most of the poor were enslaved.� (pg. 380-81)
“Virginia, in spite of her abundant lands, had already encountered a rebellion of the unenslaved poor in 1676. Since then she had gradually replaced her free labor force with slaves, and by 1776, she enjoyed the situation that Andrew Fletcher had wished to achieve in Scotland. Two-fifths of Virginia’s people were as poor as it is possible to get, but they were all enslaved, and all worked productively, for private masters, who were thereby strengthened in their independence and able to take the lead in resisting British tyranny. As if to underline the connection, the Virginia assembly voted in 1780 to reward its soldiers in the fight for freedom with a bounty of 300 acres of land and a slave.
Virginia’s republicans had the decency to be disturbed by the apparent inconsistency of what they were doing. But they were far more disturbed by the prospect of turning 200,000 slaves loose to find a place in their free society. ‘If you free the slaves,� wrote Landon Carter, two days after the Declaration of Independence, ‘you must send them out of the country or they must steal for their support.� They would be, after all, what they were, poor, and they would exhibit the congenital laziness and immorality of the poor. Jefferson himself thought that slaves could not safely be freed unless they were exiled. And the only serious plan for their emancipation, proposed by St. George Tucker in 1796, would have transformed their slavery into a kind of serfdom, under which they would still be compelled to labor, lest they become ‘idle, dissipated, and finally a numerous banditti.� But even Tucker’s plan seemed too dangerous to receive serious consideration.
One wonders if it might not have been taken more seriously if Virginia’s slaves had belonged to the same race as their masters. The fact that they did not made it easier for Virginians to use slavery as a flying buttress to freedom. The English had come to view their poor almost as an alien race, with inbred traits of character that justified plans for their enslavement or incarceration in workhouses. Almost, but not quite. It required continual denunciations from a battery of philosophers and reformers; it even required special badges, to proclaim the differentness of the poor to the undiscerning, who might otherwise mistake them for ordinary men.
In Virginia neither badges nor philosophers were needed. It was not necessary to pretend or to prove that the enslaved were a different race, because they were. Anyone could tell black from white, even if black was actually brown or red. And as the number of poor white Virginians diminished, the vicious traits of character attributed by Englishmen to their poor could in Virginia increasingly appear to be the exclusive heritage of blacks. There were ungrateful, irresponsible, lazy, and dishonest. ‘A Negroe can’t be honest,� said Landon Carter and filled his diary with complaints of the congenital laziness and ingratitude of black men.
Racism thus absorbed in Virginia the fear and contempt that men in England, whether Whig or Tory, monarchist or republican, felt for the inarticulate lower classes. Racism made it possible for white Virginians to develop a devotion to the equality that English republicans had declared to be the soul of liberty. There were too few free poor on hand to matter. And by lumping Indians, mulattoes, and Negroes in a single pariah class, Virginians had paved the way for a similar lumping of small and large planters in a single master class.
Virginians knew that the members of this class were not in fact equal, either in property or in virtue, just as they know that Negroes, mulattoes, and Indians were not one and the same. But the forces which dictated that Virginians see Negroes, mulattoes, and Indians as one also dictated that they see large and small planters as one. Racism became an essential, if unacknowledged, ingredient of the republican ideology that enabled Virginians to lead the nation� (pg.385-86).
This is not to say that a belief in republican equality had to rest on slavery, but only that in Virginia (and probably other southern colonies) it did. The most ardent American republicans were Virginians, and their ardor was not unrelated to their power over the men and women they held in bondage. In the republican way of thinking, as Americans inherited it from England, slavery occupied a critical, if ambiguous, position: it was the primary evil that men sought to avoid for society as a whole by curbing monarchs and establishing republics. But it was also the solution to one of society’s most serious problems, the problem of the poor. Virginians could outdo English republicans as well as New England ones, partly because they had solved the problem: they had achieved a society in which most of the poor were enslaved.� (pg. 380-81)
“Virginia, in spite of her abundant lands, had already encountered a rebellion of the unenslaved poor in 1676. Since then she had gradually replaced her free labor force with slaves, and by 1776, she enjoyed the situation that Andrew Fletcher had wished to achieve in Scotland. Two-fifths of Virginia’s people were as poor as it is possible to get, but they were all enslaved, and all worked productively, for private masters, who were thereby strengthened in their independence and able to take the lead in resisting British tyranny. As if to underline the connection, the Virginia assembly voted in 1780 to reward its soldiers in the fight for freedom with a bounty of 300 acres of land and a slave.
Virginia’s republicans had the decency to be disturbed by the apparent inconsistency of what they were doing. But they were far more disturbed by the prospect of turning 200,000 slaves loose to find a place in their free society. ‘If you free the slaves,� wrote Landon Carter, two days after the Declaration of Independence, ‘you must send them out of the country or they must steal for their support.� They would be, after all, what they were, poor, and they would exhibit the congenital laziness and immorality of the poor. Jefferson himself thought that slaves could not safely be freed unless they were exiled. And the only serious plan for their emancipation, proposed by St. George Tucker in 1796, would have transformed their slavery into a kind of serfdom, under which they would still be compelled to labor, lest they become ‘idle, dissipated, and finally a numerous banditti.� But even Tucker’s plan seemed too dangerous to receive serious consideration.
One wonders if it might not have been taken more seriously if Virginia’s slaves had belonged to the same race as their masters. The fact that they did not made it easier for Virginians to use slavery as a flying buttress to freedom. The English had come to view their poor almost as an alien race, with inbred traits of character that justified plans for their enslavement or incarceration in workhouses. Almost, but not quite. It required continual denunciations from a battery of philosophers and reformers; it even required special badges, to proclaim the differentness of the poor to the undiscerning, who might otherwise mistake them for ordinary men.
In Virginia neither badges nor philosophers were needed. It was not necessary to pretend or to prove that the enslaved were a different race, because they were. Anyone could tell black from white, even if black was actually brown or red. And as the number of poor white Virginians diminished, the vicious traits of character attributed by Englishmen to their poor could in Virginia increasingly appear to be the exclusive heritage of blacks. There were ungrateful, irresponsible, lazy, and dishonest. ‘A Negroe can’t be honest,� said Landon Carter and filled his diary with complaints of the congenital laziness and ingratitude of black men.
Racism thus absorbed in Virginia the fear and contempt that men in England, whether Whig or Tory, monarchist or republican, felt for the inarticulate lower classes. Racism made it possible for white Virginians to develop a devotion to the equality that English republicans had declared to be the soul of liberty. There were too few free poor on hand to matter. And by lumping Indians, mulattoes, and Negroes in a single pariah class, Virginians had paved the way for a similar lumping of small and large planters in a single master class.
Virginians knew that the members of this class were not in fact equal, either in property or in virtue, just as they know that Negroes, mulattoes, and Indians were not one and the same. But the forces which dictated that Virginians see Negroes, mulattoes, and Indians as one also dictated that they see large and small planters as one. Racism became an essential, if unacknowledged, ingredient of the republican ideology that enabled Virginians to lead the nation� (pg.385-86).
February 23, 2013
This is a fantastic, must read book for anyone interested in the origins of American racism. Morgan recounts the cultural, economic and political evolution of the 17th and early 18th century Virginia, and with it, makes comprehensible the reasons why racial slavery emerged as an integral component to the development of the white community’s pre-revolutionary ideals of independence and liberty.
At the founding of the Jamestown colony in 1607, Virginia offered vast tracts of land available to anyone willing to make the trip and who could survive their first season (or two or three) in the New World. Unlike in England where opportunities for land ownership were constrained, the fact that Virginia land was to be had for the taking made the economic equation simple � more labor = more profits. To provide this labor, England’s surplus poor (of which there was an overabundance) were sent to Virginia as indentured servants for a period of four to seven years in order to work off the costs of their relocation. Once their indenture period was over, they were free�..and poor. Over time, as established interests grabbed more and more of the land, opportunities for released bondsmen decrease, essentially creating an ever-growing class of destitute (and thoroughly despised) whites who threatened the social and political stability of the colony. Racial slavery was introduced over time to stem this proliferation of poor whites, who, after having served the term of their indenture, were free to be a “blight� on the community.
These planter elites were also constantly at political war with a succession of governors appointed by the crown to manage the affairs of the colony in a manner most beneficial to the king. By enfranchising poor whites and enlisting their support for the colonial assembly, the elites were able to exercise political power over affairs of the colony in a manner most beneficial to the colonists, rich and poor alike. The result of these forces caused a major adjustment in white social strata � the role of detested poor who would only work under the threat of the lash was imposed upon enslaved blacks, and poor whites were elevated to the level of political partners with the elites. This simultaneously endowed all whites with a fierce sense of entitlement over their political rights and the prerogatives of power on the one hand, and contempt for their black slaves on the other. Liberty and equality came to be seen as inalienable birthrights while slavery was the means by which the “shiftless, lazy, indolent� poor could be transformed from burdens on society to positive (albeit brutally coerced) contributors. In other words, Virginia whites came to think of blacks with the same sense of scorn and contempt that English aristocrats held for the poor in England while, at the same time, assuming as a birthright the same sense of political entitlement enjoyed by the elite class in England. It was this, to our modern eyes, bizarre combination of egalitarian and tyrannical ideals that informed and inspired Jefferson, Washington and Madison (among others) as they participated in the formation of what would become the United States.
The implication of this history on modern political discourse is obvious. Those who today passionately cite the liberty-loving ethos of the founding fathers while simultaneously exhibiting contempt for the poor are only looking at one side of the equation. For the Virginians, slavery and liberty went hand in hand; without the one there could not have been the other. A full, rich and nuanced understanding of our heritage compels us to recognize the human inclination to despise and exploit the powerless with the same vigor and passion that we celebrate the ennobling power of freedom.
On a final note of criticism � while the book does a masterful job of making the origins of colonial racism comprehensible, it does so at the expense of “black experience� narratives. The story addresses issues of slavery only to the extent of discussing laws passed throughout the pre-revolutionary period in order to institutionalize it and the effect these laws had on the attitudes of whites towards blacks. I started the book expecting a far deeper dive in this area, and was disappointed by how little was presented concerning the evolution of slavery throughout the 17th century from a black perspective. After having read the book, I concede that this deeper dive was not strictly necessary in order for the author to prove his thesis, yet it would have been a stronger work had greater efforts in this area been made.
At the founding of the Jamestown colony in 1607, Virginia offered vast tracts of land available to anyone willing to make the trip and who could survive their first season (or two or three) in the New World. Unlike in England where opportunities for land ownership were constrained, the fact that Virginia land was to be had for the taking made the economic equation simple � more labor = more profits. To provide this labor, England’s surplus poor (of which there was an overabundance) were sent to Virginia as indentured servants for a period of four to seven years in order to work off the costs of their relocation. Once their indenture period was over, they were free�..and poor. Over time, as established interests grabbed more and more of the land, opportunities for released bondsmen decrease, essentially creating an ever-growing class of destitute (and thoroughly despised) whites who threatened the social and political stability of the colony. Racial slavery was introduced over time to stem this proliferation of poor whites, who, after having served the term of their indenture, were free to be a “blight� on the community.
These planter elites were also constantly at political war with a succession of governors appointed by the crown to manage the affairs of the colony in a manner most beneficial to the king. By enfranchising poor whites and enlisting their support for the colonial assembly, the elites were able to exercise political power over affairs of the colony in a manner most beneficial to the colonists, rich and poor alike. The result of these forces caused a major adjustment in white social strata � the role of detested poor who would only work under the threat of the lash was imposed upon enslaved blacks, and poor whites were elevated to the level of political partners with the elites. This simultaneously endowed all whites with a fierce sense of entitlement over their political rights and the prerogatives of power on the one hand, and contempt for their black slaves on the other. Liberty and equality came to be seen as inalienable birthrights while slavery was the means by which the “shiftless, lazy, indolent� poor could be transformed from burdens on society to positive (albeit brutally coerced) contributors. In other words, Virginia whites came to think of blacks with the same sense of scorn and contempt that English aristocrats held for the poor in England while, at the same time, assuming as a birthright the same sense of political entitlement enjoyed by the elite class in England. It was this, to our modern eyes, bizarre combination of egalitarian and tyrannical ideals that informed and inspired Jefferson, Washington and Madison (among others) as they participated in the formation of what would become the United States.
The implication of this history on modern political discourse is obvious. Those who today passionately cite the liberty-loving ethos of the founding fathers while simultaneously exhibiting contempt for the poor are only looking at one side of the equation. For the Virginians, slavery and liberty went hand in hand; without the one there could not have been the other. A full, rich and nuanced understanding of our heritage compels us to recognize the human inclination to despise and exploit the powerless with the same vigor and passion that we celebrate the ennobling power of freedom.
On a final note of criticism � while the book does a masterful job of making the origins of colonial racism comprehensible, it does so at the expense of “black experience� narratives. The story addresses issues of slavery only to the extent of discussing laws passed throughout the pre-revolutionary period in order to institutionalize it and the effect these laws had on the attitudes of whites towards blacks. I started the book expecting a far deeper dive in this area, and was disappointed by how little was presented concerning the evolution of slavery throughout the 17th century from a black perspective. After having read the book, I concede that this deeper dive was not strictly necessary in order for the author to prove his thesis, yet it would have been a stronger work had greater efforts in this area been made.
September 29, 2011
I had expected this book to address in detail the role of slavery in colonial America, but to my surprise it presents by far the most lucid account I have read of the first 100 years of the Virginia colony. During those early years, slavery was rare (although legal). The book recounts the economic circumstances that led to a demand for cheap labor: almost unlimited land and an easy cash crop in tobacco if the owner had access to labor. The book suggests that increased life expectancy made the purchase of slaves less costly than indentured servants. Finally, it makes the surprising assertion that the development of a permanent and degraded underclass, the slaves, leveled all other social strata, which led to a strong common bond and desire for independence among the whites. It mentions, but does not explore in detail, the incongruity of a slave-holding society trampling the rights of many while asserting human rights. This is the type of history book that is easy to read, and seamlessly mixes orignial sources into the narrative. Raelly an excellent book.
September 20, 2012
There is no doubt that Morgan carefully dissects a quintessential paradox within American history: the emergence of American freedom (namely white, male freedom) in the midst of slavery. What Morgan astutely argues is that the specific strain of American freedom he outlines is, in actuality, wedded to slavery. Morgan uses the history of Virginia to examine how these seemingly incompatible institutions and ideologies became strange bedfellows that still rest at the foundation of the United States. Morgan's prose is charged and bold--he doesn't seek to impress but to convince, and in many ways he does. The book's strength also lies it in its materialist analysis. At times his treatment of Native Americans appears peripheral, and for a book so deeply entrenched in understanding the relationship between slavery and freedom there is not much talk of the former. The chief characters in this narrative are white landed elites, yet from their perspectives one can glean a better understanding of how certain freedoms were constructed in the midst of slavery.
February 4, 2013
At times this book seems to drone on and on and Morgan has a taste for the tangential. However, it makes for compelling reading. This a dark work of consensus history in which America’s racism and liberty are seen as both connected and long in the making. The darkness comes with Morgan’s assertion that freedom and slavery can exist together. This book represents a shift in American scholarship, away from sunny optimism and hopeful activism, and towards the idea that there is something inherently wrong with America, something that can be traced back to our very origins.
September 10, 2015
What a fantastic book. The parts about how the ruling elite passed legislation with the direct purpose of creating a rift between poor whites and black slaves and free blacks because they feared a servile insurrection would topple their extortionist state was depressing.
I thought his discussion on the interaction between the views of the poor in England and America, the Commonwealth Men thought, the eventual alliance of small white landholders and large landholders, and the seemingly contradictory relationship between American slavery and American freedom was absolutely fascinating. It really explains so much.
To them, it was not contradictory. They saw the poor as threats to liberty because they were dependents. They could always be bribed, bought and used to threaten the liberty of others. Only through land could a person remain independent. Consequently, the biggest proponents of republicanism were amongst the most ardent supporters of enslaving, dispersing, or in some way neutralizing the poor. Raising up the poor to become independent did not occur to them because there simply was not enough land in England to make them independent.
VA 'solved' this issue by enslaving a portion of its poor, blacks. Eventually, through reduced competition, the ruling elites not having to ruthlessly exploit them, and greater political power, the poor whites became less poor and more and more became small landowners. This made them independent and people who could partake in liberty, freedom and equality. The dependents, the slaves, were controlled by their masters and thus could not threaten liberty nearly as well as the free poor because they were under control and had no hope.
What also SP and LP was republican ideology advocated by those haters of the poor, the Commonwealth men. It was, interestingly, a leveling ideology, and an ideology that opposed arbitrary monarchical power and any nefarious influence on it. In fact, it was VA that imbibbed these views the most, and English diplomats remarked that VA was the area of the nation where social distinction mattered least and that leveling thought was most prominent. New England, there was more issues of social distinction and defference.
I always wondered why Virginia and the South became the party that were ones who charged the federalists of monarchism, aristocraticsm, etc, and were the ones who were really the impetus for expanding democracy and taking on very plain, simple republic airs when they were slave-holding aristocrats. I think this definitely helps explain it
In America then, the language that used to describe all poor in England and America, white and black, started to only become associated with blacks, and was conceived to be a particular characteristic of blacks. Full blown societal racism is born.
This also helped me better understand Jefferson's opposition to debt and manufacturing. He was opposed to it because both created dependency, and thus created people who were threats to liberty and equality. I find it kind of funny then that basically every VA planter was mired in debt. So yea, he didnt oppose Hamilton because of some naive idealistic traditionalism, he opposed it because he thought it was a grave threat to the liberty that was just won in the Revolutionary War.
I really want to read The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution now. I know that book goes into much greater detail about the influence of the Commonwealth men on our founders, which was absolutely fascinating here, so I am interested to see it giving a much fuller treatment.
It is also rather depressing that a lot of the anti-poor rhetoric hasnt disappeared
I am about 3/4ths of the way through American Slavery, and American Freedom, and I have to say these large Virginia planters are definitely masters at self-delusion and self-justification while pursuing wealth at all costs. Truly impressive.
"What? The the general populace is discontented? Well, clearly they are just rabble from the dregs of society who don't know how to show proper deference to their betters"
"Our servants need a firm hand and the populace needs to be properly controlled and kept out of power because they can't handle the 'responsibility' of power since they arent wealthy landowners like us."
I really do think that most of those planters probably believed such nonsense since everyone likes to think they are the hero of their own story and are a good person, and some people have to do some impressive mental jujitsu to get to that conclusion.
The populace is discontented? Well, that probably has more to do with you large scale planters using the government as a means to rob, extort and cheat the general populace, create laws that will benefit the large planter class, and make it much easier to trap servants into more indentured time, and buy up all the land available land to ensure that the newly freed servants are either paying rent or forced to work for you as a hired hand because they can't find safe land of their own. Not to mention the various ways that the planters were able to get the newly freedmen in debt, and then back working for them to pay off that debt.
The populace isnt educated or doesnt own large amount of prorperty? hmm! I wonder why?! Perhaps all those measures that you took to ensure that they remained uneducated and remained a dependent lower class were the cause of it.
What was truly impressive is that even after Bacon's Rebellion, the 'loyal' government of Virginia robbed, plundered, executed, brought lawsuits against, and person they felt like they could in order to steal their wealth, against the express written instruction of the King. And in a mind-boggingly disregard for the stability and health of the society.
Well, we just had a rebellion on our hands caused by the economic discontent of our populace. I know, lets plunder and exploit them even more! That sounds like a good idea!
I think I am now better understanding the origins of 'Southern Honor' though. This VA government brought all sorts of suits against people that expressed even the tiniest bits of slander, because that is how they attempted to grill into people's brains who were the 'betters', who were owned deference to, and who were the inconsequential rabble. Obviously, VA planters didnt have the birth, education, or pedigre of traditional nobels. They only had wealth, and the VA colony certainly didnt have any institutions besides a exploitive and extortive government to help solidify that 'gentry status'
So yea, it seems like we might have VA to also thank for Southern gentlemen demanding duels and murdering people whenever their 'honor' was sullied.
I did honestly expect a lot more about slavery, but it hasnt talked about it really at all. I do think it was a smart idea though since you can clearly see how slavery developed from this shit hole society. They were trying to come up with BS excuses to extend indentured servants contracts, did not like it when indentured servants became free since that meant less labor for them and more competition. Not to mention the whole racist attitudes against Indians, Bacon's rebellion, and the planter elite's disregard of basically everytrhing besides their own wealth. All of that seems to flow logically into the adoption of slavery as an intstitution.
I don't think he limits himself to a certain class of people since he also makes the broader point that the English government tried to solve their overpopulation and unemployment by making sure that everyone had a master/employer. They 'solved' this massive unemployment (not really) through significant underemployment and specialization. We associate specialization with improved efficiency and progress, but this was not the case then and there.
He argues that this underemployment specialization resulted in much less efficiency and a lot more time wasted, and this sort of excessive specialization was rampant throughout society. So one specific person did the plowing with the ox, and if someone else tried to do it because he was late or being slow, then that was a huge taboo. As a result, the people who were waiting on that ox plow person to plow the land had to wait around for him. Obvious this sort of insane specialization was more pervasive in the trades and guilds.
I also liked his examples of masters running away from his servants and Nobles and gentry being forced to take on servants, even if they didnt want to. All of this was for the purpose of sticking people in their proper place and under control. And even the nobles and gentry couldn't get out of it.
So yea, I would agree that he is mostly talking about a specific class of people in Jamestown because like a 1/4th of the people went were gentry and nobles who by definition did not work. They also had their servants and butlers who were also used to not working, because their indolence reflected well on their master. They also brought over a bunch of craftsmen in very specific fields who quickly found out that they could not practice their trades in Jamestown so stopped working because doing something else wasn't 'proper'. So basically all the work was left to a very small portion of the Jamestown settlement and they didnt do it either because they didn't have the skills, werent used to working these long hours, etc.
It really was all quite fascinating. I was listening to a course on the English tudors before I got on my American history binge and that speaker talked about the Great Chain of Being, and how that was the conception of how a proper society should be ordered. Obviously reality did not really reflect that, but I think the Englsih government's underemployment and insane specialization solution was definitely influenced by this idea of the Great Chain of Being, that everyone needs to be in their proper place and if not all the world will go to shit, which, in this period, it probably looked like it was.
I thought his discussion on the interaction between the views of the poor in England and America, the Commonwealth Men thought, the eventual alliance of small white landholders and large landholders, and the seemingly contradictory relationship between American slavery and American freedom was absolutely fascinating. It really explains so much.
To them, it was not contradictory. They saw the poor as threats to liberty because they were dependents. They could always be bribed, bought and used to threaten the liberty of others. Only through land could a person remain independent. Consequently, the biggest proponents of republicanism were amongst the most ardent supporters of enslaving, dispersing, or in some way neutralizing the poor. Raising up the poor to become independent did not occur to them because there simply was not enough land in England to make them independent.
VA 'solved' this issue by enslaving a portion of its poor, blacks. Eventually, through reduced competition, the ruling elites not having to ruthlessly exploit them, and greater political power, the poor whites became less poor and more and more became small landowners. This made them independent and people who could partake in liberty, freedom and equality. The dependents, the slaves, were controlled by their masters and thus could not threaten liberty nearly as well as the free poor because they were under control and had no hope.
What also SP and LP was republican ideology advocated by those haters of the poor, the Commonwealth men. It was, interestingly, a leveling ideology, and an ideology that opposed arbitrary monarchical power and any nefarious influence on it. In fact, it was VA that imbibbed these views the most, and English diplomats remarked that VA was the area of the nation where social distinction mattered least and that leveling thought was most prominent. New England, there was more issues of social distinction and defference.
I always wondered why Virginia and the South became the party that were ones who charged the federalists of monarchism, aristocraticsm, etc, and were the ones who were really the impetus for expanding democracy and taking on very plain, simple republic airs when they were slave-holding aristocrats. I think this definitely helps explain it
In America then, the language that used to describe all poor in England and America, white and black, started to only become associated with blacks, and was conceived to be a particular characteristic of blacks. Full blown societal racism is born.
This also helped me better understand Jefferson's opposition to debt and manufacturing. He was opposed to it because both created dependency, and thus created people who were threats to liberty and equality. I find it kind of funny then that basically every VA planter was mired in debt. So yea, he didnt oppose Hamilton because of some naive idealistic traditionalism, he opposed it because he thought it was a grave threat to the liberty that was just won in the Revolutionary War.
I really want to read The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution now. I know that book goes into much greater detail about the influence of the Commonwealth men on our founders, which was absolutely fascinating here, so I am interested to see it giving a much fuller treatment.
It is also rather depressing that a lot of the anti-poor rhetoric hasnt disappeared
I am about 3/4ths of the way through American Slavery, and American Freedom, and I have to say these large Virginia planters are definitely masters at self-delusion and self-justification while pursuing wealth at all costs. Truly impressive.
"What? The the general populace is discontented? Well, clearly they are just rabble from the dregs of society who don't know how to show proper deference to their betters"
"Our servants need a firm hand and the populace needs to be properly controlled and kept out of power because they can't handle the 'responsibility' of power since they arent wealthy landowners like us."
I really do think that most of those planters probably believed such nonsense since everyone likes to think they are the hero of their own story and are a good person, and some people have to do some impressive mental jujitsu to get to that conclusion.
The populace is discontented? Well, that probably has more to do with you large scale planters using the government as a means to rob, extort and cheat the general populace, create laws that will benefit the large planter class, and make it much easier to trap servants into more indentured time, and buy up all the land available land to ensure that the newly freed servants are either paying rent or forced to work for you as a hired hand because they can't find safe land of their own. Not to mention the various ways that the planters were able to get the newly freedmen in debt, and then back working for them to pay off that debt.
The populace isnt educated or doesnt own large amount of prorperty? hmm! I wonder why?! Perhaps all those measures that you took to ensure that they remained uneducated and remained a dependent lower class were the cause of it.
What was truly impressive is that even after Bacon's Rebellion, the 'loyal' government of Virginia robbed, plundered, executed, brought lawsuits against, and person they felt like they could in order to steal their wealth, against the express written instruction of the King. And in a mind-boggingly disregard for the stability and health of the society.
Well, we just had a rebellion on our hands caused by the economic discontent of our populace. I know, lets plunder and exploit them even more! That sounds like a good idea!
I think I am now better understanding the origins of 'Southern Honor' though. This VA government brought all sorts of suits against people that expressed even the tiniest bits of slander, because that is how they attempted to grill into people's brains who were the 'betters', who were owned deference to, and who were the inconsequential rabble. Obviously, VA planters didnt have the birth, education, or pedigre of traditional nobels. They only had wealth, and the VA colony certainly didnt have any institutions besides a exploitive and extortive government to help solidify that 'gentry status'
So yea, it seems like we might have VA to also thank for Southern gentlemen demanding duels and murdering people whenever their 'honor' was sullied.
I did honestly expect a lot more about slavery, but it hasnt talked about it really at all. I do think it was a smart idea though since you can clearly see how slavery developed from this shit hole society. They were trying to come up with BS excuses to extend indentured servants contracts, did not like it when indentured servants became free since that meant less labor for them and more competition. Not to mention the whole racist attitudes against Indians, Bacon's rebellion, and the planter elite's disregard of basically everytrhing besides their own wealth. All of that seems to flow logically into the adoption of slavery as an intstitution.
I don't think he limits himself to a certain class of people since he also makes the broader point that the English government tried to solve their overpopulation and unemployment by making sure that everyone had a master/employer. They 'solved' this massive unemployment (not really) through significant underemployment and specialization. We associate specialization with improved efficiency and progress, but this was not the case then and there.
He argues that this underemployment specialization resulted in much less efficiency and a lot more time wasted, and this sort of excessive specialization was rampant throughout society. So one specific person did the plowing with the ox, and if someone else tried to do it because he was late or being slow, then that was a huge taboo. As a result, the people who were waiting on that ox plow person to plow the land had to wait around for him. Obvious this sort of insane specialization was more pervasive in the trades and guilds.
I also liked his examples of masters running away from his servants and Nobles and gentry being forced to take on servants, even if they didnt want to. All of this was for the purpose of sticking people in their proper place and under control. And even the nobles and gentry couldn't get out of it.
So yea, I would agree that he is mostly talking about a specific class of people in Jamestown because like a 1/4th of the people went were gentry and nobles who by definition did not work. They also had their servants and butlers who were also used to not working, because their indolence reflected well on their master. They also brought over a bunch of craftsmen in very specific fields who quickly found out that they could not practice their trades in Jamestown so stopped working because doing something else wasn't 'proper'. So basically all the work was left to a very small portion of the Jamestown settlement and they didnt do it either because they didn't have the skills, werent used to working these long hours, etc.
It really was all quite fascinating. I was listening to a course on the English tudors before I got on my American history binge and that speaker talked about the Great Chain of Being, and how that was the conception of how a proper society should be ordered. Obviously reality did not really reflect that, but I think the Englsih government's underemployment and insane specialization solution was definitely influenced by this idea of the Great Chain of Being, that everyone needs to be in their proper place and if not all the world will go to shit, which, in this period, it probably looked like it was.
October 17, 2008
We paint a utopic picture, quite literally straight out of Thomas More (Morgan, 23)—and we paint with broad and inspired brush strokes “…the ingenious innovation of the Elizabethan conquistadores and their circle of promoters of American colonization was their forging of a discourse of conquest that spoke with intense and legitimating passion to their countrymen’s own emerging and merging sense of material and spiritual manifest destiny. The Elizabethan could passionately pursue either side of the colonizing equation of religious reformation and imperial revenue, for English colonizing discourse of the early Discovery era confirmed a faith that in pursuing the one goal, the Elizabethan New World crusader also assuredly secured the other� (Robert Williams, 185).
We mix a civilizing mission with the promise of economic gain and cosmopolitan civility. In the meantime, and this is crucial, we avert our gaze from the eyesore closer to our hearts. Aesthetics. It’s a beautiful formulation. We paint over the mistakes and hope our colours don’t run. In an effort to rescue the rabble of the homeland, we first directly export the problem of persistent poverty, this time from England to the North American coastline. Ah, the ideals: “If all had gone as planned, Virginia should have presented an idyllic scene: tenants producing new commodities for the English market, enriching their sponsors while they laid up a nest egg for themselves, Indians learning English technology and religion in the bosom of the English settlement, the two races blending in a new community of good will. Instead, once again, good intentions paved the way to race war, famine, disease, death, and tobacco� (Morgan, 98).
We have some baser motives, of course, that accompany the land and wealth promised to the masses sent on ships for stints of indentured servitude: “although the hoped-for transformation was supposed to be morally uplifting to those who experienced it, the purpose was not merely charitable. The wretches who were rescued from idleness and unemployment must be sufficiently able-bodied to make the rescue worth the rescuer’s trouble� (235), but all in all, it’s an exchange of equality. A contract. But what to do when, after all the trouble of shipping them, of giving them resources, of saving them (along with ourselves), the indentured servants don’t follow the rules? When they are insolent, for example? When they don’t want to work? When they drink and fornicate and run off to the nearby Native Americans? When they are given freedom only to become competitors that depreciate the value of tobacco? Or worse still, when they don’t circulate any value at all? When their mutinies are exacerbated to the height of civil war? Well, we whip them, we tax them, we fine them, we ignore high mortality rates, we create an artificial scarcity of land, we extend the terms of their service, we reduce their possibilities for participating in a meaningful civil society, we take away their weapons (295). We inure them and corral them into workhouses, when they let us. We do everything but actually enslave them. Why? Because we fear the transition period. We fear rebellion, we fear loss in revenue.
But not to worry, we have a scapegoat or two. Bring on the lively (and deadening) dialectic of race and class.
We have people whose differences are so divergent so as to not even constitute as accessible for salvation. These are the others we’ve externalized so much that they can never be brought within the fold. People who massacres we’ve justified for the grave crime of remaining on their land and retaining their traditions. We so don’t want to be like them that we would rather starve for decades than debase ourselves by planting corn in so vulgar a fashion. For, “If you were a colonist�, and no doubt we are, “you knew that your technology was superior to the Indians�. You knew that you were civilized, and they were savages. It was evident in your firearms, your clothing, your housing, your government, your religion. The Indians were supposed to be overcome with admiration and to join you in extracting riches from the country. But your superior technology had proved insufficient to extract anything. The Indians, keeping to themselves, laughed at your superior methods and lived from the land more abundantly and with less labor than you did. They even furnished you with the food that you somehow did not get around to growing enough of yourselves. To be thus condescend to by heathen savages was intolerable. And when your own people started deserting in order to live with them, it was too much…So you killed the Indians, tortured them, burned their villages, burned their cornfields. It proved your superiority in spite of your failures. And you gave similar treatment to any of your own people who succumbed to the savage way of life. But you still did not grow much corn. That was not what you had come to Virginia for� (90). The unfortunate thing about these Native Americans is that they know the lay of the land. It isn’t as efficient to keep them enslaved because they keep running off to their godless dens. But they are similar enough to another peoples� readily available, at a cost.
And eventually, after a few decades, the cost is worth it. The indentured servants aren’t coming with such regularity as they’ve caught word of our brutality. And the ones that do stay are so increasingly belligerent that their rebellious maneuverings are too dangerous. So we import slaves. African slaves. And we relate to them with the same hostility and disgust that we do the Native Americans, if we have to relate to them at all.
The funny thing is, they remind us of our very own impoverished class, the poor are that “vile and brutish part of mankind� and the slaves too are “a brutish sort of people� (325). Because of their similarities, we can only guess what sort of vile and savage uprising would result if “the freemen with disappointed hopes should make common cause with slaves of desperate hope� (328). When they get together, oh what a ruckus: they plot, they steal, they fuck, they escape. They disrupt our tidy categories and unsettle our sense of place and purpose. So we must again take charge. We must, once again, set out to save our own poor lot with “social, psychological, and political advantages that turn[s] the thrust of exploitation away from them and align[s] them with the exploiters�, with us (344), must take property from the black and give to the white, we must delink Christian conversion from emancipation (331-7), we must police and punish sexual relationships whose offspring challenge categories we are working so hard to solidify, we must do this all by codifying racism into the heart of law. And we must believe it. With these measures in place, we can now collude with the poor whites, for those freedmen who once plagued us so are now smaller planters themselves, and our interests have become similar enough—we are both affected by taxes and by debt and by the rise and fall of prices of our cash crop and we are united and equal members of the tripartite “Christianity, whiteness and freedom� against “heathenism, non-whiteness and slavery� (331).
We see now slavery everywhere, and we thrive off of it. It is the air we breathe. And you know what’s great? We can “more safely preach equality in a slave society than in a free one� (380). For we have built a world that encourages us to beat, silence, rape, maim and exterminate the fight out of all those might challenge our definitions of freedom; we write laws that condone and make just our tyranny.
We are commissioned by those across the land to pen declarations of independence, and we are celebrated and loved for our plans.
And I’m guessing when explicit slavery becomes too costly, we will plan again. And again and again. And we’ll call this planning the free market. And we’ll shock everyone into bowing down before us and they will quiver in our wake.
We mix a civilizing mission with the promise of economic gain and cosmopolitan civility. In the meantime, and this is crucial, we avert our gaze from the eyesore closer to our hearts. Aesthetics. It’s a beautiful formulation. We paint over the mistakes and hope our colours don’t run. In an effort to rescue the rabble of the homeland, we first directly export the problem of persistent poverty, this time from England to the North American coastline. Ah, the ideals: “If all had gone as planned, Virginia should have presented an idyllic scene: tenants producing new commodities for the English market, enriching their sponsors while they laid up a nest egg for themselves, Indians learning English technology and religion in the bosom of the English settlement, the two races blending in a new community of good will. Instead, once again, good intentions paved the way to race war, famine, disease, death, and tobacco� (Morgan, 98).
We have some baser motives, of course, that accompany the land and wealth promised to the masses sent on ships for stints of indentured servitude: “although the hoped-for transformation was supposed to be morally uplifting to those who experienced it, the purpose was not merely charitable. The wretches who were rescued from idleness and unemployment must be sufficiently able-bodied to make the rescue worth the rescuer’s trouble� (235), but all in all, it’s an exchange of equality. A contract. But what to do when, after all the trouble of shipping them, of giving them resources, of saving them (along with ourselves), the indentured servants don’t follow the rules? When they are insolent, for example? When they don’t want to work? When they drink and fornicate and run off to the nearby Native Americans? When they are given freedom only to become competitors that depreciate the value of tobacco? Or worse still, when they don’t circulate any value at all? When their mutinies are exacerbated to the height of civil war? Well, we whip them, we tax them, we fine them, we ignore high mortality rates, we create an artificial scarcity of land, we extend the terms of their service, we reduce their possibilities for participating in a meaningful civil society, we take away their weapons (295). We inure them and corral them into workhouses, when they let us. We do everything but actually enslave them. Why? Because we fear the transition period. We fear rebellion, we fear loss in revenue.
But not to worry, we have a scapegoat or two. Bring on the lively (and deadening) dialectic of race and class.
We have people whose differences are so divergent so as to not even constitute as accessible for salvation. These are the others we’ve externalized so much that they can never be brought within the fold. People who massacres we’ve justified for the grave crime of remaining on their land and retaining their traditions. We so don’t want to be like them that we would rather starve for decades than debase ourselves by planting corn in so vulgar a fashion. For, “If you were a colonist�, and no doubt we are, “you knew that your technology was superior to the Indians�. You knew that you were civilized, and they were savages. It was evident in your firearms, your clothing, your housing, your government, your religion. The Indians were supposed to be overcome with admiration and to join you in extracting riches from the country. But your superior technology had proved insufficient to extract anything. The Indians, keeping to themselves, laughed at your superior methods and lived from the land more abundantly and with less labor than you did. They even furnished you with the food that you somehow did not get around to growing enough of yourselves. To be thus condescend to by heathen savages was intolerable. And when your own people started deserting in order to live with them, it was too much…So you killed the Indians, tortured them, burned their villages, burned their cornfields. It proved your superiority in spite of your failures. And you gave similar treatment to any of your own people who succumbed to the savage way of life. But you still did not grow much corn. That was not what you had come to Virginia for� (90). The unfortunate thing about these Native Americans is that they know the lay of the land. It isn’t as efficient to keep them enslaved because they keep running off to their godless dens. But they are similar enough to another peoples� readily available, at a cost.
And eventually, after a few decades, the cost is worth it. The indentured servants aren’t coming with such regularity as they’ve caught word of our brutality. And the ones that do stay are so increasingly belligerent that their rebellious maneuverings are too dangerous. So we import slaves. African slaves. And we relate to them with the same hostility and disgust that we do the Native Americans, if we have to relate to them at all.
The funny thing is, they remind us of our very own impoverished class, the poor are that “vile and brutish part of mankind� and the slaves too are “a brutish sort of people� (325). Because of their similarities, we can only guess what sort of vile and savage uprising would result if “the freemen with disappointed hopes should make common cause with slaves of desperate hope� (328). When they get together, oh what a ruckus: they plot, they steal, they fuck, they escape. They disrupt our tidy categories and unsettle our sense of place and purpose. So we must again take charge. We must, once again, set out to save our own poor lot with “social, psychological, and political advantages that turn[s] the thrust of exploitation away from them and align[s] them with the exploiters�, with us (344), must take property from the black and give to the white, we must delink Christian conversion from emancipation (331-7), we must police and punish sexual relationships whose offspring challenge categories we are working so hard to solidify, we must do this all by codifying racism into the heart of law. And we must believe it. With these measures in place, we can now collude with the poor whites, for those freedmen who once plagued us so are now smaller planters themselves, and our interests have become similar enough—we are both affected by taxes and by debt and by the rise and fall of prices of our cash crop and we are united and equal members of the tripartite “Christianity, whiteness and freedom� against “heathenism, non-whiteness and slavery� (331).
We see now slavery everywhere, and we thrive off of it. It is the air we breathe. And you know what’s great? We can “more safely preach equality in a slave society than in a free one� (380). For we have built a world that encourages us to beat, silence, rape, maim and exterminate the fight out of all those might challenge our definitions of freedom; we write laws that condone and make just our tyranny.
We are commissioned by those across the land to pen declarations of independence, and we are celebrated and loved for our plans.
And I’m guessing when explicit slavery becomes too costly, we will plan again. And again and again. And we’ll call this planning the free market. And we’ll shock everyone into bowing down before us and they will quiver in our wake.
October 7, 2021
The historiography is excellent. Morgan traces what the rise of black slavery in the Virginia colony meant for the rise of American democracy. Starting from the first landed English settlers who owned the largest tracts of land, to the bringing of young (mostly English) men who were indentured servants, and who, along with other indentured servants of various races, could work their way to the status of freemen, to Bacon's rebellion and finally to the establishment of black slavery, Morgan details the conditions that made American slavery possible, and with it, the very founding of the nation.
The thesis is that it was slavery that made America what it came to be; that furnished Madison and Jefferson with the time and focus to read books and declare those lofty republican principles that led to the country's independence. Thus, that it was slavery - which itself would tear the country apart some eighty years later- that created the country in the first place.
This thesis is not new. Aristotle's Politics had clearly made the case that a certain kind of freedom - arising from being reprieved from the need to meet life's bare material needs - was only possible under conditions of slavery. Thus oekonomia - Attic for home management- was thought to be the preserve of the slave (and the woman) who, having nothing to contribute to political life (which was what enabled freedom and eudaimonia) took care of the household so that the citizens could pursue the conditions of freedom.
Thus, as Morgan notes, historians interested in tracing the rise of democracy and liberty in America must contend with those interested in tracing the history of oppression, exploitation and slavery. In the American story, one history was made possible by the other: slavery was not an exception to the American ideal of freedom but the very condition for its existence. This might perhaps sound obvious to the people of my generation, but I reckon that many Americans in the 20th century didn't really give it much thought. And with the blow back happening against critical race theory right now, I reckon that many Americans, even today, do not want to think about what this says about them and about their country. Also many of them are still profoundly racist.
The thesis is that it was slavery that made America what it came to be; that furnished Madison and Jefferson with the time and focus to read books and declare those lofty republican principles that led to the country's independence. Thus, that it was slavery - which itself would tear the country apart some eighty years later- that created the country in the first place.
This thesis is not new. Aristotle's Politics had clearly made the case that a certain kind of freedom - arising from being reprieved from the need to meet life's bare material needs - was only possible under conditions of slavery. Thus oekonomia - Attic for home management- was thought to be the preserve of the slave (and the woman) who, having nothing to contribute to political life (which was what enabled freedom and eudaimonia) took care of the household so that the citizens could pursue the conditions of freedom.
Thus, as Morgan notes, historians interested in tracing the rise of democracy and liberty in America must contend with those interested in tracing the history of oppression, exploitation and slavery. In the American story, one history was made possible by the other: slavery was not an exception to the American ideal of freedom but the very condition for its existence. This might perhaps sound obvious to the people of my generation, but I reckon that many Americans in the 20th century didn't really give it much thought. And with the blow back happening against critical race theory right now, I reckon that many Americans, even today, do not want to think about what this says about them and about their country. Also many of them are still profoundly racist.
October 28, 2017
Edmund Morgan’s American Slavery, American Freedom tells the story of how colonial-era Virginians created a society in which the ideals of freedom and liberty were publicly championed while, at the same time, hundreds of thousands of human beings were being held in chattel slavery. Morgan explains how these two contradictory ideas evolved to not just coexist but to rely so heavily on each other that it is impossible to separate the two. In fact, they became so dependent on each other that by the time the American Founding Fathers were drafting the Declaration of Independence, they saw fit to include such phrases as “all men are created equal� while, in that same moment, most of them owned enslaved men and women. While it is easy for us to call out the hypocrisy here, Morgan goes to great lengths to try and explain how early Virginians came to live in this system. He claims there was never a single decision but rather over two centuries of events around the world which, piece by piece, helped to contribute to “the central paradox in American history.� (4)
Morgan’s explanation for the rise of slavery in Virginia can be broken down into three major arguments: a need for manual labor in the colony, a fear of rebellion by an idle lower class, and a desire for maximum profits by everyone involved, especially those already in the upper classes. From the beginning, the English saw themselves as liberators to the Native Americans who had already been living under Spanish enslavement for decades. Over time, however, their priorities shifted and slavery was allowed to creep into their society until it became such an integral part of the economy that it would take a civil war end it.
The need for manual laborers in the fledgling colony of Jamestown was such a dire one that it came extremely close to collapsing several times in its first few years of existence, due mostly to the English colonists� attitude towards manual labor. English laborers had become accustomed to not working very hard due to a culture of underemployment. Many of the colonist were also from the gentleman and artisan classes and saw manual labor as beneath them. So they were simply not prepared to do the work required. The assumption that Natives would be willing to work for the English also proved to be tragically incorrect.
Their remedy for this shortage of labor was an almost constant influx of lower class workers from England being brought to Virginia as indentured servants. Although they weren’t seen as slaves, they did have virtually their entire lives controlled by their “masters�, the person who had bought their contract and paid for their passage to Virginia. Until the servant’s years-long term was up, their master could beat, abuse, and punish the servant in virtually any way they saw fit. There were also laws passed that caused servants� terms to be extended for any number of infractions. This system was meant to simply bring more laborers to Virginia but in it we can see “Virginians beginning to move towards a system of labor that treated men as things.� (129) Although this is not yet slavery, we can see that Virginian culture was moving its way towards it.
Fear of a rebellion by the lower class was also seen as a contributing factor to the rise of slavery. The English had seen many cases of revolution against the upper class, from the English Civil War to Bacon’s Rebellion, and the Virginia government wanted to prevent any more. A large group of idle poor people was seen as a threat, but slavery was seen as a way to keep the poor so destitute that thoughts of rebellion would be impossible. By 1776, thoughts of freeing the slaves were rebuffed unless the slaves were to be exiled as well. They feared that poor former-slaves were more dangerous than extremely poor current-slaves.
A desire to maintain profit margins also contributed to slavery’s rise. Everyone was trying to make money off tobacco, from the small farmers to the king himself. For decades it was cost effective to buy servants, work them as hard as possible, and then buy another. By the 1660s however, “as life expectancy (of the workers) rose, the slave became a better buy that the servant.� (299) If they could be kept alive, then slaves were a better long-term investment. Even when laws were passed by Gov. Berkeley to encourage colonist to congregate into cities and towns, planters resisted because they could make more money working servants and slaves on plots of land along the rivers.
Interestingly, Morgan makes the case that, at least initially, race does not seem to have played a major role in the emergence of slavery in Virginia’s economy. Although the first Africans were brought to Virginia as early as 1619, the trait of having dark skin was not necessarily seen as a fault. Rather, just the trait of being poor, regardless of race, was seen as an inherent trait. At first, most workers, whether servant or slave, Indian, Black, or White, were seen as equal. (327) Over time though, attitudes as well as laws changed and institutional racism became a part of life in Virginia. The African slaves and their descendants were kept disenfranchised and powerless while the poor Englishmen’s status rose. They felt more closely aligned with the upper classes as they took their previous opinions and prejudices about the English poor and instilled them onto the Africans.
In the end, slavery had become so ingrained into Virginia’s culture and economy that it seemed impossible to end it. So when the Founding Fathers penned the Declaration, any cognitive dissonance they felt was outweighed by the real-world issues of how to maintain a functioning state in the face of a Revolution.
Morgan’s argument seems to be that the evolution of slavery in colonial Virginia was not a deliberate choice so much as it was a natural evolution of the circumstances and goals of the people living there. He is trying to explain that it took over two centuries of gradual change to reach the point that we can barely fathom today: our American heroes declaring freedom for all while simultaneously owning humans as slaves. While not always the most exiting read, this is, in my opinion, exactly what historical writing should be like. He takes historical question that modern people have trouble understanding and offers up not only an answer but also an extensive amount of evidence-supported context to help us understand that answer.
Morgan’s explanation for the rise of slavery in Virginia can be broken down into three major arguments: a need for manual labor in the colony, a fear of rebellion by an idle lower class, and a desire for maximum profits by everyone involved, especially those already in the upper classes. From the beginning, the English saw themselves as liberators to the Native Americans who had already been living under Spanish enslavement for decades. Over time, however, their priorities shifted and slavery was allowed to creep into their society until it became such an integral part of the economy that it would take a civil war end it.
The need for manual laborers in the fledgling colony of Jamestown was such a dire one that it came extremely close to collapsing several times in its first few years of existence, due mostly to the English colonists� attitude towards manual labor. English laborers had become accustomed to not working very hard due to a culture of underemployment. Many of the colonist were also from the gentleman and artisan classes and saw manual labor as beneath them. So they were simply not prepared to do the work required. The assumption that Natives would be willing to work for the English also proved to be tragically incorrect.
Their remedy for this shortage of labor was an almost constant influx of lower class workers from England being brought to Virginia as indentured servants. Although they weren’t seen as slaves, they did have virtually their entire lives controlled by their “masters�, the person who had bought their contract and paid for their passage to Virginia. Until the servant’s years-long term was up, their master could beat, abuse, and punish the servant in virtually any way they saw fit. There were also laws passed that caused servants� terms to be extended for any number of infractions. This system was meant to simply bring more laborers to Virginia but in it we can see “Virginians beginning to move towards a system of labor that treated men as things.� (129) Although this is not yet slavery, we can see that Virginian culture was moving its way towards it.
Fear of a rebellion by the lower class was also seen as a contributing factor to the rise of slavery. The English had seen many cases of revolution against the upper class, from the English Civil War to Bacon’s Rebellion, and the Virginia government wanted to prevent any more. A large group of idle poor people was seen as a threat, but slavery was seen as a way to keep the poor so destitute that thoughts of rebellion would be impossible. By 1776, thoughts of freeing the slaves were rebuffed unless the slaves were to be exiled as well. They feared that poor former-slaves were more dangerous than extremely poor current-slaves.
A desire to maintain profit margins also contributed to slavery’s rise. Everyone was trying to make money off tobacco, from the small farmers to the king himself. For decades it was cost effective to buy servants, work them as hard as possible, and then buy another. By the 1660s however, “as life expectancy (of the workers) rose, the slave became a better buy that the servant.� (299) If they could be kept alive, then slaves were a better long-term investment. Even when laws were passed by Gov. Berkeley to encourage colonist to congregate into cities and towns, planters resisted because they could make more money working servants and slaves on plots of land along the rivers.
Interestingly, Morgan makes the case that, at least initially, race does not seem to have played a major role in the emergence of slavery in Virginia’s economy. Although the first Africans were brought to Virginia as early as 1619, the trait of having dark skin was not necessarily seen as a fault. Rather, just the trait of being poor, regardless of race, was seen as an inherent trait. At first, most workers, whether servant or slave, Indian, Black, or White, were seen as equal. (327) Over time though, attitudes as well as laws changed and institutional racism became a part of life in Virginia. The African slaves and their descendants were kept disenfranchised and powerless while the poor Englishmen’s status rose. They felt more closely aligned with the upper classes as they took their previous opinions and prejudices about the English poor and instilled them onto the Africans.
In the end, slavery had become so ingrained into Virginia’s culture and economy that it seemed impossible to end it. So when the Founding Fathers penned the Declaration, any cognitive dissonance they felt was outweighed by the real-world issues of how to maintain a functioning state in the face of a Revolution.
Morgan’s argument seems to be that the evolution of slavery in colonial Virginia was not a deliberate choice so much as it was a natural evolution of the circumstances and goals of the people living there. He is trying to explain that it took over two centuries of gradual change to reach the point that we can barely fathom today: our American heroes declaring freedom for all while simultaneously owning humans as slaves. While not always the most exiting read, this is, in my opinion, exactly what historical writing should be like. He takes historical question that modern people have trouble understanding and offers up not only an answer but also an extensive amount of evidence-supported context to help us understand that answer.
August 23, 2020
This book is every bit as good as praised. One of the best histories I have ever read. Book-length reply to Samuel Johnson's line, "How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes? I don't think I've ever read a history book that was as *suspenseful* as this book. You know he's going to get to slavery sooner or later, but the tension builds after chapter upon chapter looking at the roots of English imperialism, tensions with Native Americans, labor and class in early Virginia. And then he gets to the point when exploitation of white servants gives way to the use of enslaved Africans, it's just devastating. It's also hard to imagine a better depiction of American pathologies: dehumanization of the poor, the interpretation of liberty as enabling "big men" to exploit free from interference, and the poisoned stream of racism running through it all. Even the link of firearms to all of the above.
November 20, 2012
The first thing I notice about a history book is how fast it reads, and this one ready pretty fast � I’m guessing some of that is because an average of 1/4 of each page was filled by citations/annotations � most of which I could skip � but even beyond that it was written in an accessible manner and moved through it pretty quickly as these things go.
This book was basically a history of Virginia, with focus on the social and political constructs that paved the way for slavery. You don’t get to the actual system of slavery until page 275/390ish so� yeah there’s a lot of other buildup.
Even with the focus on Virginia, the book wasn’t as boring as I would have expected. The writing style was clear and engaging � and the non-tiny font probably didn’t hurt ;p.
So yeah, not so much focus on slavery itself but there’s a lot of good foundation here � I think when I get to something more specific to slavery itself, this laid some really solid groundwork. Stuff that should be common knowledge by now � like the early bonds between white servants and slaves, and the legal and institutional systems the slaveholders enacted to drive the two lower classes apart and solidify the slave caste’s role at the dead bottom of the social ladder. It’s good to be reminded that the slaveholding lawmakers knew exactly what they were doing when they institutionalized racism.
It’s also interesting to think about the mental circles the founding fathers (a good chunk of whom where Virginian) had to run themselves in in order to justify slavery while at the same time espousing freedom and liberty.
Another thing worth thinking about is the way history has been driven by the wealthy/top classes and their strategies of dealing with “the problem of the poor”�.
THREE STARS
This book was basically a history of Virginia, with focus on the social and political constructs that paved the way for slavery. You don’t get to the actual system of slavery until page 275/390ish so� yeah there’s a lot of other buildup.
Even with the focus on Virginia, the book wasn’t as boring as I would have expected. The writing style was clear and engaging � and the non-tiny font probably didn’t hurt ;p.
So yeah, not so much focus on slavery itself but there’s a lot of good foundation here � I think when I get to something more specific to slavery itself, this laid some really solid groundwork. Stuff that should be common knowledge by now � like the early bonds between white servants and slaves, and the legal and institutional systems the slaveholders enacted to drive the two lower classes apart and solidify the slave caste’s role at the dead bottom of the social ladder. It’s good to be reminded that the slaveholding lawmakers knew exactly what they were doing when they institutionalized racism.
It’s also interesting to think about the mental circles the founding fathers (a good chunk of whom where Virginian) had to run themselves in in order to justify slavery while at the same time espousing freedom and liberty.
Another thing worth thinking about is the way history has been driven by the wealthy/top classes and their strategies of dealing with “the problem of the poor”�.
THREE STARS
February 23, 2012
This is truly fantastic, another book that I thought I was going to have to "grad student read" (intro, conclusion, skim the rest) and then I couldn't put it down. Morgan sets a grand goal for his work here: to examine the central paradox in American history, the fact that the rise of liberty somehow was tied together with the rise of slavery. The perfect place to study this paradox, he argues, is Virginia- first colony, leading Revolutionary state, and eventually staunch slave state.
Morgan's main point here is that from the very start, this whole American experiment was centered on exploitation of labor. Somebody had to do the work. At first it was mainly indentured servants, and that worked well for a long time, but eventually those people became free and the people who ran Virginia didn't know what to do with free laborers. They were too poor, and they seemed scary and unstable. The powers that be tried to limit the available land, or extend the terms of service, but they could never quite bring themselves to actually enslave white people permanently. They were willing to do it to black people though. So they eased the exploitation off the whites and onto the blacks, and solidified racial differences with new laws. The poorer whites fell in line behind the leaders. The really fascinating conclusion is that the whole liberty/slavery paradox isn't really a paradox, in fact, racism made American liberty possible.
Morgan's style is wonderful too, he is just a pleasure to read. Just the right mix of profound analysis and anecdotally interesting history. Great, great book.
Morgan's main point here is that from the very start, this whole American experiment was centered on exploitation of labor. Somebody had to do the work. At first it was mainly indentured servants, and that worked well for a long time, but eventually those people became free and the people who ran Virginia didn't know what to do with free laborers. They were too poor, and they seemed scary and unstable. The powers that be tried to limit the available land, or extend the terms of service, but they could never quite bring themselves to actually enslave white people permanently. They were willing to do it to black people though. So they eased the exploitation off the whites and onto the blacks, and solidified racial differences with new laws. The poorer whites fell in line behind the leaders. The really fascinating conclusion is that the whole liberty/slavery paradox isn't really a paradox, in fact, racism made American liberty possible.
Morgan's style is wonderful too, he is just a pleasure to read. Just the right mix of profound analysis and anecdotally interesting history. Great, great book.
January 9, 2011
This is a masterful examination of the extent to which slavery influenced republican ideals made famous by the prominent Virginians among the nation's founders. Interestingly, slavery and racism hardly come up until the final third of the book. The previous sections begin with the late 16th century, tracing Virginia's early development, with particular attention to the big landowners and the attitudes they developed toward small planters and the poor. Racial attitudes developed while pushing natives off the land became instrumental in the emergence of the racialized slavery on which the big men relied for both economic and political advantage. When the small planter emerged as a political force to be courted, their social betters needed a way to placate them. In effect, to maintain a favorable social order, the poorest whites and smallest planters had to be placed on even footing with the elites. The creation of a sub-class, slaves, instantly recognizable by their phenotype, meant, indeed, all White men were created equal, not to be subjugated to slavery by tyrants. The time and energy spent brushing up on colonial Virginian history becomes worth while as Morgan's thesis unfolds. Truly an excellent work.
November 20, 2017
While I enjoyed reading this book and appreciated the way that Morgan directly addressed his methods and reasoning for some of his conclusions, I think my overall impression was hampered by the fact that I have about those conclusions in other places for so long. Thus, the main crux of the book did not feel new. Still, it is a fine example of historical writing and provided some very interesting details of early Virginia.
July 3, 2010
This ranks as one of the non-fiction history books I wish I would've written. Truly foundational to the understanding of early American history, and relating the evolution of the two ends of the spectrum of freedom in a way that fully relates the uniqueness of the American experience.
March 9, 2016
Very nimble and clear writing for such a book packed with data and narrative. The author argues that the experience of the Virgina colonies show the natural and inevitable rise in slavery as an American solution to a very real problem of labor shortages, excess capacity, and open markets.
June 14, 2013
Morgan, Edmund S. American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia. Francis Parkman Prize ed. New York: History Book Club, 2005.
Edmund Morgan’s classic work was first published in 1975 and won the Society of American Historians� prestigious Parkman Prize for the best book in American history in 1976. I bought the book a couple of years ago from the History Book Club which had produced hardcover reprints of many Parkman Prize winners from the past. I was still in graduate school; and while I was interested in Morgan’s classic, the book’s subject did not enter into my current studies, and so it sat on my bookshelf until now (summer 2013).
Morgan’s text sought to explain “how a people could have developed the dedication and liberty 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.� (pp. 4-5) Morgan suggested that the key to this paradox lay in Virginia which was the largest of the colonies in territory, population, influence, and slaveholding. To solve the ideological puzzle he traced the history of Virginia from the initial English reasons for launching the colony all the way to the Virginians of the Revolution, particularly Thomas Jefferson. Morgan’s purpose was to follow both the evolution of republican ideas of liberty while at the same time examining the rise of slavery. As such, while he discussed many significant episodes from 1607 to 1776, the book is not a straight-up history of Virginia’s colonial period.
American Slavery, American Freedom is divided into four sections (or books as Morgan calls them). The first covered the initial English efforts to establish a colony in North America, background on Virginia’s Indian and England’s poor populations before and during these efforts, Jamestown’s founding and early struggles to survive, and finally the introduction of tobacco as the colony’s cash crop. The second book investigated Virginia’s stabilization and the anxiety tobacco caused the colony and England both socially and economically. The third book dealt with the growing discontent of freed indentured servants and their opposition to the rising planter class which culminated in Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676. The fourth book told of the rise of slavery as indentured servitude disappeared, the evolution of racism in the English mind at the same time as populist politics brought small farmers into shared interests with large planters. The last chapter of this section tied all the themes Morgan had covered together to show how the events and ideals discussed led to republicanism and liberty advanced on the back of slavery.
Along the way this reader learned many things. Liberty and freedom had been behind England’s wish to establish a colony to compete with Spanish colonies in the Caribbean. Spain had built slavery into their empire, but Virginia was originally to be a place where whites and Indians lived together as one. Jamestown’s struggles to survive its first twenty years destroyed that vision, and would eventually lead to racist opinions like “the only good Indian is a dead Indian.� Although the first African slaves arrived in Virginia in 1619, indentured servants were the principal source of labor until the 1690s. Morgan’s analysis of indentured servitude is one of the highlights of the book. Another stand-out episode in the book is its discussion of Bacon’s Rebellion which brought civil war to the colony. This chapter displayed Morgan’s balanced opinions of several historical figures. While he favors the colonial governor over Bacon in the rebellion; in the next chapter Morgan shows the governor in a poor light while trying to reestablish the status quo. But once the status quo had been regained, planters and small farmers united in many of the political interests as indentured servitude died out and slavery replaced it as tobacco culture’s source of labor. Morgan speeds through the last sixty years of colonial Virginia to reach a fantastic final chapter on the growth of republican ideals. Having covered the influence of English republican thinkers, Morgan then camps out in Thomas Jefferson’s writings on the subject. The final chapter is illuminating and successfully answers the book’s “thesis� question mentioned earlier.
I believe that Morgan was indebted to Bernard Bailyn’s 1967 classic, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, for his final chapter on republicanism. If anyone reading American Slavery, American Freedom wishes for an in-depth study of the English republican ideals that crossed the Atlantic to the colony, they should definitely read Bailyn’s masterpiece. On the other hand, I was almost sorry that Morgan wrote his book in 1975 while I read his chapter on the growth of racism. While the chapter was solidly researched and argued, later works on the subject may have given him further insight on the subject. I’m thinking particularly of an essay by Jennifer Morgan published in William and Mary Quarterly in 1997 entitled “Some Could Suckle Over Their Shoulder: Male Travelers, Female Bodies, and the Gendering of Racial Ideology.� I read her essay during my historiography course in graduate school, and I think it is convincing in its discussion of the rise of racist thought in the early modern period. Jennifer Morgan might take issue with Edmund Morgan on his opinions of the late rise of racism in Virginia. But that’s the great thing about history—opinions are rarely definitive, and by reading the works of others on the same subject one’s knowledge truly increases.
All in all I found Edmund Morgan’s book an excellent investigation of the dichotomy between republican liberty and slavery in American society. He did well to choose Virginia as the background as it was the largest colony in area, population, and slaves. Do not forget though that slavery came to other colonies in different ways and times. American Slavery, American Freedom is thus not authoritative for all thirteen colonies. Peter Wood’s Black Majority traces the growth of slavery in South Carolina, but does not discuss that colony’s republicanism. Bailyn’s Ideological Origins� covers the growth of republicanism in all the colonies, but does not delve into slavery. I am now interested in learning about the growth of republicanism and slavery throughout the Southern colonies, and so I think Morgan’s book has successfully done its job. Not only has it convincingly answered a key question in American history, the book has left me with more questions to pursue—which is what a great history should do.
Kenneth H. Dasher
Edmund Morgan’s classic work was first published in 1975 and won the Society of American Historians� prestigious Parkman Prize for the best book in American history in 1976. I bought the book a couple of years ago from the History Book Club which had produced hardcover reprints of many Parkman Prize winners from the past. I was still in graduate school; and while I was interested in Morgan’s classic, the book’s subject did not enter into my current studies, and so it sat on my bookshelf until now (summer 2013).
Morgan’s text sought to explain “how a people could have developed the dedication and liberty 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.� (pp. 4-5) Morgan suggested that the key to this paradox lay in Virginia which was the largest of the colonies in territory, population, influence, and slaveholding. To solve the ideological puzzle he traced the history of Virginia from the initial English reasons for launching the colony all the way to the Virginians of the Revolution, particularly Thomas Jefferson. Morgan’s purpose was to follow both the evolution of republican ideas of liberty while at the same time examining the rise of slavery. As such, while he discussed many significant episodes from 1607 to 1776, the book is not a straight-up history of Virginia’s colonial period.
American Slavery, American Freedom is divided into four sections (or books as Morgan calls them). The first covered the initial English efforts to establish a colony in North America, background on Virginia’s Indian and England’s poor populations before and during these efforts, Jamestown’s founding and early struggles to survive, and finally the introduction of tobacco as the colony’s cash crop. The second book investigated Virginia’s stabilization and the anxiety tobacco caused the colony and England both socially and economically. The third book dealt with the growing discontent of freed indentured servants and their opposition to the rising planter class which culminated in Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676. The fourth book told of the rise of slavery as indentured servitude disappeared, the evolution of racism in the English mind at the same time as populist politics brought small farmers into shared interests with large planters. The last chapter of this section tied all the themes Morgan had covered together to show how the events and ideals discussed led to republicanism and liberty advanced on the back of slavery.
Along the way this reader learned many things. Liberty and freedom had been behind England’s wish to establish a colony to compete with Spanish colonies in the Caribbean. Spain had built slavery into their empire, but Virginia was originally to be a place where whites and Indians lived together as one. Jamestown’s struggles to survive its first twenty years destroyed that vision, and would eventually lead to racist opinions like “the only good Indian is a dead Indian.� Although the first African slaves arrived in Virginia in 1619, indentured servants were the principal source of labor until the 1690s. Morgan’s analysis of indentured servitude is one of the highlights of the book. Another stand-out episode in the book is its discussion of Bacon’s Rebellion which brought civil war to the colony. This chapter displayed Morgan’s balanced opinions of several historical figures. While he favors the colonial governor over Bacon in the rebellion; in the next chapter Morgan shows the governor in a poor light while trying to reestablish the status quo. But once the status quo had been regained, planters and small farmers united in many of the political interests as indentured servitude died out and slavery replaced it as tobacco culture’s source of labor. Morgan speeds through the last sixty years of colonial Virginia to reach a fantastic final chapter on the growth of republican ideals. Having covered the influence of English republican thinkers, Morgan then camps out in Thomas Jefferson’s writings on the subject. The final chapter is illuminating and successfully answers the book’s “thesis� question mentioned earlier.
I believe that Morgan was indebted to Bernard Bailyn’s 1967 classic, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, for his final chapter on republicanism. If anyone reading American Slavery, American Freedom wishes for an in-depth study of the English republican ideals that crossed the Atlantic to the colony, they should definitely read Bailyn’s masterpiece. On the other hand, I was almost sorry that Morgan wrote his book in 1975 while I read his chapter on the growth of racism. While the chapter was solidly researched and argued, later works on the subject may have given him further insight on the subject. I’m thinking particularly of an essay by Jennifer Morgan published in William and Mary Quarterly in 1997 entitled “Some Could Suckle Over Their Shoulder: Male Travelers, Female Bodies, and the Gendering of Racial Ideology.� I read her essay during my historiography course in graduate school, and I think it is convincing in its discussion of the rise of racist thought in the early modern period. Jennifer Morgan might take issue with Edmund Morgan on his opinions of the late rise of racism in Virginia. But that’s the great thing about history—opinions are rarely definitive, and by reading the works of others on the same subject one’s knowledge truly increases.
All in all I found Edmund Morgan’s book an excellent investigation of the dichotomy between republican liberty and slavery in American society. He did well to choose Virginia as the background as it was the largest colony in area, population, and slaves. Do not forget though that slavery came to other colonies in different ways and times. American Slavery, American Freedom is thus not authoritative for all thirteen colonies. Peter Wood’s Black Majority traces the growth of slavery in South Carolina, but does not discuss that colony’s republicanism. Bailyn’s Ideological Origins� covers the growth of republicanism in all the colonies, but does not delve into slavery. I am now interested in learning about the growth of republicanism and slavery throughout the Southern colonies, and so I think Morgan’s book has successfully done its job. Not only has it convincingly answered a key question in American history, the book has left me with more questions to pursue—which is what a great history should do.
Kenneth H. Dasher
December 23, 2020
I have Ta-Nehisi Coates (and his compelling reading list) to thank for reading what turned out to be an absolutely vital work for anyone wishing to understand what principles and values our country was truly founded upon.
Remarkably, Morgan employs original, 1st-person research -- principally letters and laws -- to deduct a convincing, authentic analysis of how the U.S.'s first colony was built and upon which principles it operated. Spoiler alert: it's not a pretty picture. Begun in earnest as a for-profit settlement of the Virginia Company, the colony was born as an almost stereotypical caricature of land barons exploiting indentured servants in virtual slavery conditions.
Actual slavery, too, was born here, and the ostensible purpose of the book is to examine how the most ardent, liberty-loving Republicans -- Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton -- all hailed from the birthplace of slavery. Morgan determines, in fascinating fashion, that perhaps the biggest determinant of Virginia switching from servant-exploitation to slavery was the fact that servants stopped dying due to disease and malnutrition.
Before the mid-17th century, laborers reliably died after 5-7 years (often before their indenture was over), making slaves not only redundant but less cost-effective, since they were more expensive to purchase, died just as fast as servants, and if surviving had to be fed/clothed even past their utility. By mid-century, however, improved diet, wealth, and habituation to the environment meant that many more servants were obtaining liberty. Consequently, because the colony's elite had hoarded all of the available land, these freed servants were becoming indigent and angry. It was only at this point that landowners turned to slavery in earnest.
Much of the first half of the book is too exhaustively detailed for my taste, reporting the minutiae of early colonial government and explaining all of the various dynamics at play. The roundabout approach to the thesis arguably pays off at the end, but I think it would have been just as effective minus a hundred or so pages. Slavery isn't even directly addressed until the last third of the book.
The last chapters, however, are terrific: as revelatory as they are compelling. Morgan traces racism from its sprouting against Native Americans to its full flower, well after Blacks became the dominant source of labor. He notes, surprisingly, how the comments made about "brutish" Natives and Blacks weren't substantively different from the claims made about poor whites in England, and that miscegenation laws weren't even considered until it began to affect the prospects of landowning whites, i.e. when white women began having "mulatto" babies. In essence, Morgan convincingly argues that racism was just a convenient displacement of the already prevalent class hatred, a contempt which already had English aristocrats wondering aloud whether they should just go ahead and enslave poor whites.
Morgan's powerful (and under-recognized, even 40 years later) implication is that racism is artificial and has much more to do with class than race. In Virginia, it was developed almost organically as a way to stymy rebellion from non-elite whites. And shockingly, Morgan observes that slavery itself may well be responsible for the uniquely fervent Republicanism among Virginians, and for the resulting conspicuous representation of Virginians in our revolution and young nationhood. By turning the poorest class into slaves, Virginia achieved a unification among its white inhabitants -- a dedication to liberty and equality among peers -- that existed nowhere else.
Most shockingly, Morgan suggests that U.S. values of liberty and equality, indeed the very birth of our nation, were not only linked to slavery but were dependent upon it. Further, until we recognize and address this inextricable connection, we will not be able to progress as a nation. His closing paragraphs are profound:
This book is essential and should be read by every thinking North-American.
Remarkably, Morgan employs original, 1st-person research -- principally letters and laws -- to deduct a convincing, authentic analysis of how the U.S.'s first colony was built and upon which principles it operated. Spoiler alert: it's not a pretty picture. Begun in earnest as a for-profit settlement of the Virginia Company, the colony was born as an almost stereotypical caricature of land barons exploiting indentured servants in virtual slavery conditions.
Actual slavery, too, was born here, and the ostensible purpose of the book is to examine how the most ardent, liberty-loving Republicans -- Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton -- all hailed from the birthplace of slavery. Morgan determines, in fascinating fashion, that perhaps the biggest determinant of Virginia switching from servant-exploitation to slavery was the fact that servants stopped dying due to disease and malnutrition.
Before the mid-17th century, laborers reliably died after 5-7 years (often before their indenture was over), making slaves not only redundant but less cost-effective, since they were more expensive to purchase, died just as fast as servants, and if surviving had to be fed/clothed even past their utility. By mid-century, however, improved diet, wealth, and habituation to the environment meant that many more servants were obtaining liberty. Consequently, because the colony's elite had hoarded all of the available land, these freed servants were becoming indigent and angry. It was only at this point that landowners turned to slavery in earnest.
Much of the first half of the book is too exhaustively detailed for my taste, reporting the minutiae of early colonial government and explaining all of the various dynamics at play. The roundabout approach to the thesis arguably pays off at the end, but I think it would have been just as effective minus a hundred or so pages. Slavery isn't even directly addressed until the last third of the book.
The last chapters, however, are terrific: as revelatory as they are compelling. Morgan traces racism from its sprouting against Native Americans to its full flower, well after Blacks became the dominant source of labor. He notes, surprisingly, how the comments made about "brutish" Natives and Blacks weren't substantively different from the claims made about poor whites in England, and that miscegenation laws weren't even considered until it began to affect the prospects of landowning whites, i.e. when white women began having "mulatto" babies. In essence, Morgan convincingly argues that racism was just a convenient displacement of the already prevalent class hatred, a contempt which already had English aristocrats wondering aloud whether they should just go ahead and enslave poor whites.
Morgan's powerful (and under-recognized, even 40 years later) implication is that racism is artificial and has much more to do with class than race. In Virginia, it was developed almost organically as a way to stymy rebellion from non-elite whites. And shockingly, Morgan observes that slavery itself may well be responsible for the uniquely fervent Republicanism among Virginians, and for the resulting conspicuous representation of Virginians in our revolution and young nationhood. By turning the poorest class into slaves, Virginia achieved a unification among its white inhabitants -- a dedication to liberty and equality among peers -- that existed nowhere else.
Most shockingly, Morgan suggests that U.S. values of liberty and equality, indeed the very birth of our nation, were not only linked to slavery but were dependent upon it. Further, until we recognize and address this inextricable connection, we will not be able to progress as a nation. His closing paragraphs are profound:
How Virginian, then, was America? How heavily did American economic opportunity and political freedom rest on Virginia's slaves? If Virginia had continued to rely on the importation of white servants, would they have headed north when they turned free and brought insoluble problems of poverty with them? Would they have threatened the peace and prosperity of Philadelphia and New York and Boston, where the poor were steadily growing in numbers anyhow? Would Northerners have embraced republican ideas of equality so readily if they had been surrounded by men in "a certain degree of misery"? And could the new United States have made a go of it in the world of nations without Virginia and without the products of slave labor? Northern republicans apparently thought not. Some could not condone slavery and talked of breaking loose from the South in their own independent confederation. But the fact is that they did not. They allowed Virginians to compose the documents that founded their republic, and they chose Virginians to chart its course for a generation.
Eventually, to be sure, the course the Virginians charted for the United States proved the undoing of slavery. And a Virginia general gave up at Appomattox the attempt to support freedom with slavery. But were the two more closely linked than his conquerors would admit? Was the vision of a nation of equals flawed at the source by contempt for both the poor and the blacks? Is America still colonial Virginia writ large? More than a century after Appomattox the questions linger.
This book is essential and should be read by every thinking North-American.
February 22, 2020
This is a most fascinating narrative. I suppose that Morgan will likely take a huge amount of flak for posing that early slavery in Virginia was not directed at Africans - not that forced labor for American Indians was any better. But Morgan explains that some of the economics of England dumping its unemployment problem on its Colony played a decisive role in (not)guiding slavery as servitude morphed into slavery. The other element of the narrative is the role that tobacco played in being the cash crop that kept Virginia tied to the Crown. Very close to five-star territory - maybe on a future listen.
October 3, 2014
This is one of the most amazing pieces of history I have ever read. Morgan's thesis is this:
"Racism made it possible for white Virginians to develop a devotion to the equality that English republicans had declared to be the soul of liberty...[B]y lumping Indians, mulattoes, and Negroes in a single pariah class, Virginians had paved the way for a similar lumping of small and large planters into a single master class" (386).
This statement is on the second to last page, and for the first 14 chapters, it's not clear where Morgan was going. He details the early history of the Virginia colony, stuff I was barely aware of. But he emphasizes from the beginning the central problem the idea of Virginia had solved for it's mother country, England: the problem of the poor.
England basically had an overabundance of poor, and since they were not willing to give them anything, and they didn't really have enough jobs (this is when workhouses were developed), they sent as many as possible to Virginia. In the early years the death rate was over 50% (problem solved!), but as time went on, and indentured servants began to live long enough to be freed, these became the small landholders.
Except - that they didn't. The big men of Virginia (most of whom were not big men in England) basically gobbled up as much land as absolutely possible. This meant that as the 1600s wore on and the death rate went down, Virginia started having the same problem as England - the poor! This became crystal clear in 1676 with Bacon's rebellion - where Virginians saw the possibility of a rabble of landless, armed men plunder their lands (which they got more than sufficient revenge for afterwards).
Yet, the further problem for the Virginians was that they still needed lots more labor than England because of the abundance of land. At first the big planters tried all they could to re-indenture their freeman. As this practice was curbed, the only solution seemed to be importing more poor from England as servants. But around the 1690s a different solution presented itself: African Slavery.
At first the sale wasn't very efficient. England required Virginians to buy either from Barbados (which had had slaves for a while, but whose average lifespan was 6 years in that colony) or from the official English company (which was apparently very bad at the trade). Yet as the Dutch got more involved more slaves came in.
But slavery was the perfect solution. As Morgan puts it: "Salves offered the planter a way of disposing his profits that combined the advantages of cattle and of servants, and these had always been the most attractive investments in Virginia" (310). In other words, with slavery you could have a productive population without that population ever needing any of your land.
So Virginia stopped importing slaves, and those who were free and white were basically transformed into landholders by the 18th century. And so the big planters - the Patricians who became the Washington's, the Jefferson's, the Madison's (i.e., those who would draft our constitution and lead the course of our government - with the exception of two New Englanders, a Tennesseean, and a New Yorker that might as well been a Tennesseean - until 1861) - were able to preach republicanism.
What is republicanism? The belief that true liberty required equality. Our Declaration of Independence (written by a Virginian Big Man with over 200 slaves). But the problem with this is that no Virginian, as no English republican, was anywhere near ready to remediate the situation of the poor. In fact, they saw the poor as the enemy, since they would be dependent on other people, and the third pillar of "Liberty, Equality" would have been "Independence" (owning land, a gun, and having virtue). So if there had been a mass of poor in Virginia, you couldn't preach equality, since that poor would one day take a notion in their head to become equal (Bacon's rebellion all over again).
The solution to this dilemma was racism. Because the labor force in Virginia were almost exclusively slaves by the Revolution, there was no issue of equality. By pointing out their race to the small land holder, the big men could say "look, you're equal to us; it's the Negro who is not." And that unifying factor became the basis for asserting equality without actually giving small freeholders the benefits of that equality.
In my opinion, every child in America should know this argument. This is why we had a Civil War. This view of freedom was so tied to a culture of slavery that it only makes sense that by the 1850s virtually every political argument was shot through with the question of slaves, even in territories (like Kansas and Nebraska) that did not depend on slaves.
In addition, some of the same type of thinking from the Virginians are certainly present in today's political culture (like the problem of the poor, and our main solution right now - policing and incarceration). While today's "republicans" (I don't mean necessarily "Republicans," i.e. the party) have attitudes that are not dissimilar in terms of "dependence" and such.
It's something to think about.
"Racism made it possible for white Virginians to develop a devotion to the equality that English republicans had declared to be the soul of liberty...[B]y lumping Indians, mulattoes, and Negroes in a single pariah class, Virginians had paved the way for a similar lumping of small and large planters into a single master class" (386).
This statement is on the second to last page, and for the first 14 chapters, it's not clear where Morgan was going. He details the early history of the Virginia colony, stuff I was barely aware of. But he emphasizes from the beginning the central problem the idea of Virginia had solved for it's mother country, England: the problem of the poor.
England basically had an overabundance of poor, and since they were not willing to give them anything, and they didn't really have enough jobs (this is when workhouses were developed), they sent as many as possible to Virginia. In the early years the death rate was over 50% (problem solved!), but as time went on, and indentured servants began to live long enough to be freed, these became the small landholders.
Except - that they didn't. The big men of Virginia (most of whom were not big men in England) basically gobbled up as much land as absolutely possible. This meant that as the 1600s wore on and the death rate went down, Virginia started having the same problem as England - the poor! This became crystal clear in 1676 with Bacon's rebellion - where Virginians saw the possibility of a rabble of landless, armed men plunder their lands (which they got more than sufficient revenge for afterwards).
Yet, the further problem for the Virginians was that they still needed lots more labor than England because of the abundance of land. At first the big planters tried all they could to re-indenture their freeman. As this practice was curbed, the only solution seemed to be importing more poor from England as servants. But around the 1690s a different solution presented itself: African Slavery.
At first the sale wasn't very efficient. England required Virginians to buy either from Barbados (which had had slaves for a while, but whose average lifespan was 6 years in that colony) or from the official English company (which was apparently very bad at the trade). Yet as the Dutch got more involved more slaves came in.
But slavery was the perfect solution. As Morgan puts it: "Salves offered the planter a way of disposing his profits that combined the advantages of cattle and of servants, and these had always been the most attractive investments in Virginia" (310). In other words, with slavery you could have a productive population without that population ever needing any of your land.
So Virginia stopped importing slaves, and those who were free and white were basically transformed into landholders by the 18th century. And so the big planters - the Patricians who became the Washington's, the Jefferson's, the Madison's (i.e., those who would draft our constitution and lead the course of our government - with the exception of two New Englanders, a Tennesseean, and a New Yorker that might as well been a Tennesseean - until 1861) - were able to preach republicanism.
What is republicanism? The belief that true liberty required equality. Our Declaration of Independence (written by a Virginian Big Man with over 200 slaves). But the problem with this is that no Virginian, as no English republican, was anywhere near ready to remediate the situation of the poor. In fact, they saw the poor as the enemy, since they would be dependent on other people, and the third pillar of "Liberty, Equality" would have been "Independence" (owning land, a gun, and having virtue). So if there had been a mass of poor in Virginia, you couldn't preach equality, since that poor would one day take a notion in their head to become equal (Bacon's rebellion all over again).
The solution to this dilemma was racism. Because the labor force in Virginia were almost exclusively slaves by the Revolution, there was no issue of equality. By pointing out their race to the small land holder, the big men could say "look, you're equal to us; it's the Negro who is not." And that unifying factor became the basis for asserting equality without actually giving small freeholders the benefits of that equality.
In my opinion, every child in America should know this argument. This is why we had a Civil War. This view of freedom was so tied to a culture of slavery that it only makes sense that by the 1850s virtually every political argument was shot through with the question of slaves, even in territories (like Kansas and Nebraska) that did not depend on slaves.
In addition, some of the same type of thinking from the Virginians are certainly present in today's political culture (like the problem of the poor, and our main solution right now - policing and incarceration). While today's "republicans" (I don't mean necessarily "Republicans," i.e. the party) have attitudes that are not dissimilar in terms of "dependence" and such.
It's something to think about.
October 19, 2021
There are moments when I thought, “another paragraph about the change in the number of single-person households in late-17th century Virginia?� But when you see the argument coming together, the book is really quite powerful. Full of juicy historical tidbits to keep you reading, a very approachable prose style and a very convincingly argued thesis. If you’ve ever asked yourself, “how could George Washington and Thomas Jefferson have owned slaves,� then you should give it a read.
June 19, 2017
I picked up this book hoping to learn about the experience of poor whites and African slaves in the early years of the Virginia colony, and in particular the story behind Bacon's rebellion in 1676, a rebellion that included poor whites and slaves joining together to oppose the elitist rulers of the Virginia colony. While there was a chapter on that rebellion, most of the book was written ( like most history) from the perspective of the rich and wealthy. He portrays Native Americans (which he referred to as Indians) as rebellious and uncivilized, and never really sought to tell their side of the story. Likewise, his discussion of the experience of African slaves was very limited, even thought 80 slaves and 20 white servants were the last to surrender in the rebellion. The history is decidedly Eurocentric and so looks at the relationship of the thousands of poor British citizens "shipped" to Virginia, a huge number of suffered and died due to the difficult conditions and the elitist attitudes. While overall, I felt the history was very limited in telling the "whole story", the book does give credence to Nancy Isenberg's basic thesis in White Trash that a class based perspective was part of the American colonial experience from the very beginning of the colonial period. While well researched and filled with good information, it is a producer of its time (the book was written in the 1970's), and needs to be supplemented with a more inclusive narrative.
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