Book Review: American Slavery, American Freedom

Morgan, Edmund S. American Slavery, American Freedom. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1975.

          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 our Founding Father’s separation from England because of tax enslavement. While white Virginians attempted to wrest control of the fledgling American government from England, those same wealthy plantation owners had no problems enslaving an entire race of people. There may be no exact answer, but Morgan places himself and Virginia in the best position to account for the hypocrisy. Morgan centers his research on Virginia and his reasons are clear and important: “Virginia was the largest of the new United States, in territory, in population, in influence – and in slaveholding.” Tobacco, the crop that Morgan claims helped buy American independence, was grown in great quantities in Virginia by Virginian slaves. Plus, many of the Founding Fathers were from Virginia. Many of our country’s great documents were written by Virginians. Morgan’s point is that Virginia was the center of early American economics and politics. Without Virginia, it would be hard to answer the paradoxical question of the simultaneous growth of slavery and freedom. American Slavery, American Freedom is also the story of Virginian Slavery, Virginian Freedom.

Detouring slightly from his proclaimed thesis, Morgan has a fascinating chapter on the lost colony of Roanoke Island. What happened to the colonists on Roanoke Island remains a great mystery in the history of the colonization of the New World. While Morgan has no new theories as to where the colonists disappeared to, his storytelling and research is hard to discredit. To be sure, Morgan has an interesting topic to being with, but “The Lost Colony” is made all the more better by his writing and attention to detail.

The tale of slavery and freedom cannot be told without mentioning tobacco. 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 the 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 appreciated.  

Morgan points out that over time the impressed servitude of English servants gave way to outright racial slavery. Although it is hard to pinpoint a moment in time that racial slavery took hold, Morgan seems certain that the switch happened on Virginian tobacco plantations. Admittedly, Morgan has a little trouble stating exactly why Virginians began enslaving imported African slaves and why this practice accelerated. He points out that it made better economic sense to buy servants rather than slaves. Granted, slave owners would own slaves for a lifetime, that lifetime would be statistically short in early Virginian society. On the other hand, a servant would serve a master for a period of years and then be freed. The plantation owners were faced with paying a high price for a slave who probably would not live for an extended amount of time, or pay a price for a servant during their peak working years.

Finally making his way to his thesis, Morgan begins to specifically address the relationship between slavery and freedom. 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 side.

One of W.J. Cash’s main theories was the continuity of American history. He claimed that there were no definite breaks in American history. Morgan’s impeccably research American Slavery, American Freedom pinpoints the changes in how wealthy Virginians obtained their labor. What began as impressed servitude of Englishmen developed into full-blown racial slavery in about one hundred years. If one compares the two forms of servitude at their respective heights, the differences are blatant. It could be argued that as racial slavery developed from English servitude, the differences were a little more subtle, however, given the standpoint of time, there is no continuity of the history of American enslavement practices.

American Slavery, American Freedom is more valuable for the minutely researched information on early Virginian society than for the conclusions drawn. Morgan provides a comprehensive look at the driving forces of Virginian economics and society. Students of Southern history or Virginian history should make time for this informative book.