On American Slavery, American Freedom

Edmund Morgan posed the central paradox of American history in his title and then spent a book explaining it. American Slavery, American Freedom, published in 1975, asks how it could be that the colony of Virginia, which produced the most eloquent spokesmen for liberty and equality in the founding generation, Jefferson, Madison, and the rest, was also the colony most thoroughly built on slavery. How did the same soil grow both the language of freedom and the institution of bondage? Morgan's answer is unsettling: the two were not contradictions that happened to coexist but were causally linked, each making the other possible.

His argument traces the development of colonial Virginia from a society that relied heavily on white indentured servants, who were dangerous because they eventually went free, armed, landless, and resentful, into a society that relied on enslaved Africans held in permanent bondage. The shift to racial slavery, Morgan argues, solved a problem for the colony's elite. A permanent enslaved labor force, marked by race, removed the threat of a growing class of poor, free, angry white men, because it gave even the poorest white colonists a status above the enslaved and a stake in the racial order. Race became the line that united whites across class and defused the conflicts that might otherwise have set poor whites against the wealthy.

This is the disturbing heart of the book. The freedom and equality that white Virginians celebrated, and that their leaders articulated so memorably, rested on a foundation of racial slavery that made that freedom feel secure and universal precisely because it was reserved for whites. The republican equality of white men was underwritten by the bondage of Black people. Liberty for some was built on slavery for others, and the men who wrote most beautifully about the rights of man could do so partly because slavery had removed the class tensions that might have complicated their vision.

The book belongs in this library because it refuses the comfortable story in which slavery is merely an unfortunate exception to the founding's ideals, a stain to be noted and moved past. Morgan insists on the harder truth, that the ideals and the institution were entangled at the root, and that understanding American freedom means understanding how it was bound up with American slavery. This is the kind of clear-eyed reckoning with the country's origins that an engaged citizen has to be able to face.

It sits alongside the founding histories and the works on slavery and Reconstruction throughout this collection, supplying the paradox they all in some way confront. American Slavery, American Freedom is in copyright and widely available in print and digital editions. Read it for the most penetrating account of the contradiction at the center of the American founding.