Edmund S. Morgan's American Slavery, American Freedom

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One of the great questions Americans could ask of history is: How could a nation be founded upon freedom and liberty but enslave twenty percent of its citizens? Edmund S. Morgan attempts to answer this question in American Slavery, American Freedom. This is a magnificently researched book that sets out to cut to the root of this great topic, slavery and freedom. His thesis, how freedom came to be supported by slavery, a relationship of exact opposites, is one that many Americans continue to have trouble accepting. Morgan asserts that the answers to this hypocritical situation lie in Virginia since that state was the most influential and most populated in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. To begin, Morgan addresses the hypocrisy of …show more content…

Morgan ably describes how the weed saved the new colony of Virginia and gave rise to servitude and eventually led to racial slavery. The first colonists who planted tobacco exported their crop to England. As this practice became more and more profitable, the crop became the only thing Virginians wanted to plant. Even after the English government tried to control and limit the planting of tobacco to raise the price, wealthy Virginians continued to export the plant. However, these Virginians could not farm tobacco alone. Labor was required.
Initially, Morgan attests that forms of indentured servitude furnished the necessary labor to farm tobacco. Englishmen were shipped across the Atlantic Ocean and would enter into servitude for a period of time as payment for their passage to the New World. Morgan goes into great detail chronicling the ins and outs of this early servitude, including the trade-off of transportation versus amount of time to be served, punishments allocated to servants, and the high mortality rate of those servants. This information is just fascinating and Morgan’s dedication to the subject is …show more content…

For the reasons behind the seemingly simultaneous growth of slavery and freedom, he points to a slave force who had become isolated by race and racism, a large group of wealthy, politically minded planters who were extremely loyal to Virginia, and an even larger group of poorer farmers who had become convinced that their interests would be best served by those wealthy plantation barons. Plantations needed labor to grow their tobacco and other crops. African-American slaves proved to be the solution to the labor question. The wealthy Virginians wanted to control the economics of Virginian society. Poor whites realized that it would be better to have relative liberty and go along with the wealthy plantation owners than to be the blood, sweat, and tears behind the wealthy plantation labor. These three components, mixed with the rise of republican ideas, allowed American slavery and American freedom to prosper side by

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