American Slavery, American Freedom

"Morgan's examination of the paradox of liberty and bondage in early America fits Ta-Nehisi Coates's interest in the historical roots of racial inequality and the founding ideals of the United States. It aligns with his work exploring how American freedom was built upon the institution of slavery."

"This is the most readable book of my choices. I would say this book is not only the best book on the slave trade, but among the best books on the United States . I mean, the depth of insight generated by this idea of the slavery paradox in the context of America is difficult to put limits on. Let me just explain the slavery paradox again in this context, which is to say, following Samuel Johnson, why were the leaders of the independence movement in the American colonies slave owners? Morgan traces the sociological importance of the connection between owning people and being interested in ostensibly egalitarian republican ideology. He goes right back through the colonial period—hence the subtitle, the ‘ordeal of colonial Virginia’—and he usefully connects the beginnings of American colonies to the early modern—that is, 16th and 17th century—English context. What he traces is the beginnings of political tensions, class tensions, in the colonies in the 1660s and 1670s. And he notices that slavery is introduced in earnest at around about this time and develops the insight that slavery is a way of achieving political stability in the colonies—because if you introduce a racial underclass, then you make the existing white population bond together: this idea that ‘I might be poorer than you, but at least I’m the same race as you.’ “This book is not only the best book on the slave trade, but among the best books on the United States” So, this is race trumping class. It’s a way of dissolving class stratification, which the Americans would always see as a European thing, by introducing race. And that’s why you get this fixation on egalitarianism in the republican thought of the founders of the United States. It’s really just a reworking of racial solidarity amongst white people. I think that does begin to shed light on all sorts of things about the United States as a place. You know, why do Americans sometimes think of themselves as classless? What is the relationship between race and class? What sociological function does the introduction of the slave population provide? Everybody’s familiar with the economic advantages, or assumed economic advantages, of using enslaved people, but what effect does it have on your society and what benefits does it bring to your society in stabilizing the relationship between poor white people and rich white people? That’s all in the book and trying to replicate that analysis in a British context was what I sought to do in Freedom’s Debt . It’s, if you like, a kind of projection of some of those ideas and a testing of some of those ideas in a discussion of the Glorious Revolution in England. The latter. That’s certainly the case with Jefferson, who’s much more explicit about his views on this issue. He lived a long time and he shifted his opinion. As president, his views were somewhat different to those he held earlier in his life and they were different again later. But it’s very clear that, however uncomfortable he might have been in principle with the idea of slavery, he did very little about it, not just with his own slaves, but also with the enslaved population of the country. At various different points he works up towards doing something about it, but doesn’t. I think you’re absolutely right that one of the reasons he is uncomfortable with it is because he doesn’t know what to do with the emancipated slave population, those who’d been formerly enslaved. He’s absolutely convinced that if the slaves are freed what he would see as inherent tensions between the two races will lead to an undermining of his republican project. And that’s why he becomes an advocate—at certain points—for colonisation, that is shifting former American slaves of African origin back to Africa. He just doesn’t think that the two races can live alongside each other. There was the precedent of the Sierra Leone colony and Liberia. I think Jefferson has all sorts of ideas about where you might send the formerly enslaved population, but although these were mainstream views as the United States descends into civil war , the plans weren’t usually well developed or thought through. They were dismissed as impractical as well. In the 1970s. I think the 1970s context is quite interesting because, again, it shifts the analysis away from economics and towards class analysis, that race trumps class, but that racial stratification is itself inspired by class stratification. That’s one of the things he’s done a good job of demonstrating. I wouldn’t say it’s un-addressable. My correspondence with historians of slavery and the slave trade who are descendants of enslaved people would suggest to me that actually, yes, there has been, perhaps, a more wide-ranging debate about the history of the United States and the painful durability of racism , but none of that, so far, has translated into a consensus that would actually do much about it. In fact, it’s still in a painful process of discovering and revealing these issues, rather than moving to the next stage, which is to say, ‘Look, we have this original sin. Our country was established with slavery and race at the beginning. How are we going to detach our republican egalitarian ideas from their roots and turn them into the means of creating a society that encourages racial equality?’"

"By the time he released this book, Edmund Morgan had been known as a historian of the American Revolution for decades. In exploring the story of Virginia, the true pioneer colony, which began before the Puritans arrived in Plymouth, Morgan is exploring the paradox or the irony of the fact that it was largely slaveholders who wrote the American Revolution’s most eloquent documents about freedom. I’m referring, of course, to Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of independence and James Madison, the author of the Constitution, both of whom were born as slaveholders and died as slaveholders. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter We like to imagine that our history was the history of freedom, and that slavery was a footnote. Morgan turned that upside down. American Slavery, American Freedom argued that it was no accident that the men who wrote these founding documents came from a slave society. He argues that it was because they came from a slave society, in which the working class was marked by their skin color and held in perpetual bondage, that they could imagine freedom for all white people. The only way that the founders of Virginia could get British people to come here was through indentured servitude. In the 17th century, there was very little chance for young men in Bristol or Liverpool to succeed, so it made sense that they take a ship to the New World. If they survived for seven years as indentured servants, they would get what was called a ‘right of land,’ 50 acres. After generations, the indentured servants, who had supplied so much of the labor in the early years of the Virginia colony, were not enough and were considered too difficult to control. So, they started to tap into the vast Atlantic slavery system. Nell is right; the great majority of people in Virginia, in the first decade of settlement, would have been in some form of servitude. One of the great things about American Slavery, American Freedom is that it shows us that it was only after great trial and error that these English people—who had no experience enslaving people, although they had been active in the slave trade—adapted their law, religious practices, and customs for slavery. It took them decades to say, ‘it doesn’t matter if you become Christian, you’re still going to be in bondage.’ It took them decades to settle on the idea that the children born to slaves would be slaves. Laws had to be changed before skin color became a badge of enslavement. It took the English a long time to convert from a world of many kinds of servitude to a system in which African Americans were in perpetual servitude."

"When I was starting out, three books drew me toward the study of American history: Richard Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition; C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow; and Edmund Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom."