American slavery, American freedom
The men who came together to found the independent United States either held slaves or were willing to join hands with those who did. George Washington, hero of the Revolution, was the master of several hundred slaves. Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence, owned more than 200 men, women, and children while eloquently defending the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. In this classic work, originally published in 1976, through a meticulous history of Virginia from its earliest settlement through the seventeenth century boom in tobacco, the gradual replacement of servitude with slavery, and the rise of republican ideology, historian Morgan reveals the deep and interlocking relationship between these seemingly contradictory ideas.--From publisher description.
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What Hacker News says
- The whole era was immensely corrupt. You might try reading Edmund Morgan's American Slavery, American Freedom, which is a summary of one folly after another, even before getting to slavery.
After going through all that, it's pretty amazing anything good at all came out of colonial Virginia.
- I encourage you to read American Slavery, American Freedom to help reconcile how and why this came about.
- American Slavery, American Freedom by Edmund Morgan
Best American history book I've read.
- Money quote: »The ancient republican societies to which the American revolutionaries looked for ideas and inspiration also had a problem with the fusion of freedom and slavery. As classicist Moses Finley explains about the ideological development of the old republics, “One element of freedom was the freedom to enslave others.” This had legal and political ramifications that rippled through Western history. The United States, from colonial times to the Civil War, inherited and reinvigorated the ancient republican values but did so in a setting of chattel slavery and settler colonialism, which caused white freedom to take its most virulent form. As Edmund S. Morgan explains in American Slavery, American Freedom (1975), white people could extol the entire republican package of equality, freedom, and democracy more effectively in a slave society than they could in a free one. As he puts it, what developed was “a rough congruity of Christianity, whiteness, and freedom and of heathenism, non-whiteness, and slavery.”«
