Andrew S. Terrell - HIST 6393: Atlantic History to 1750!

Wednesday; 22 September 2010

Précis: Morgan, Edmund S.. American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial
Virginia. New York: Norton, 1975.

Dr. Edmund Morgan is the Emeritus Sterling Professor of History at Yale. In his 1975
monograph, American Slavery, he explored what he called the American paradox pertaining to
the question over how the republic was dedicated to liberty for all while also being involved with
a system of labor that denied human liberty on such a massive scale. He focused his study on
Virginia, the largest state by population, size, power and influence, and slave numbers.
Morgan began with a look at Elizabethan Britain that revealed the irony of what would
come to pass in Virginia: natives and blacks allied with the British to puncture Spanish control in
the New World. Morgan creates a persuasive argument that early colonists looked upon Native
Americans and the Cimarron without racial prejudices, which brought him into direct conflict
with other the consensus school that asserted racism was a core value in early American culture.
In fact this monograph was in itself part of the move from the traditional school of American
historians to the revisionist in the 1960s and 1970s.
After the vast, yet informational, survey of early colonial America, Morgan turned to
address his larger thesis over how the American paradox came into being and what its greater
ramifications were. He asserted the problem with the British Empire in the late sixteenth, early
seventeenth centuries, was ultimately overpopulation. A remedy to this situation was beneficial
doubly for Virginia and other colonies, as well as the British Isles, because it allowed for the
expansion of the plantation system while moving less productive citizens from the motherland.
The Virginia experience began as a failed experiment of simply relocating landless, jobless
individuals. Morgan then explored how the minority elite class in Virginia quickly transformed
the predicaments into a labor system of exploitation. In essence, by the 1670s servitude in
Virginia approached closer to slavery than any other institution or practice did at the time. The
well known revolt, Bacon’s Rebellion, then marked the watershed of the labor system from
indentured servitude, to slavery. Morgan explains that up to Bacon’s Rebellion, African slaves
were rarer because there was already a sufficient supply of indentured servants who would work
for a set amount of time to earn their passage. Of course, high mortality rates slackened
overtime and these servants began to outlive their contracts and Virginia again found itself in a
similar situation of discontent reminiscent of the motherland’s problem when the institution
began.
The move to African slavery, Morgan contended, marked a point of unification for the
white classes; newly freed white servants found ways to reciprocate their experiences by
obtaining land and buying slaves who would work for their entire life. To Morgan, this signified
a new age, or ideology, of freedom and equality uniform at rudimentary levels across Virginia. It
was this crucial link between rising racial animosity and demands for freedom of the white
population that was the greatest tragedy and oversight in the founding of the United States.