Overall, this is a very good book. I particularly enjoyed the author's deft use of irony and wry humor. It was very informative to read another discussion of the inconsistency between the Virginians' proclamation of liberty and their heavy reliance on slave labor, and on how this reliance developed. Of course, the basic point is not an original one; even in his "Outline of History", H. G. Wells, in considering the questions of freedom and slavery, comments on the "splendid comedy" of the American story.

I agree with a previous reviewer that the title may mislead a prospective reader. The book does not give a comprehensive discussion of American slavery. Rather, while the author certainly disapproves of slavery, his main interest seems to be in how it tended to release the humbler class of whites from many pressures and in how it may have provided Virginia thinkers with perspectives that increased their appreciation for liberty. Also misleading, in the paperback edition, is the use on the cover of a painting of an early trial of Whitney's cotton gin, introduced in the 1790's, well after the period covered by the author, when tobacco and corn were still the principal crops.

The author does not say so explicitly, but there is the suggestion that a republican form of government ought to be antithetical to slavery. Surely Virginia and the other American colonies are not the only contrary examples. I believe I have read that in the glory days of Athens, with its democratic impulses, perhaps half of the population was slave.

Again, this is a very informative and interesting book, but more specialized than the title indicates.

This very well written and researched book is an effort to answer a single interesting question; why were so many of the great Founders slaveholding Virginians? To address this apparent paradox, Morgan investigates the history of colonial Virginia from its founding to the mid-18th century, reconstructing the evolution of the planter caste and their attitudes. Morgan shows that despite the intentions of the founders of the Virginia colony, its economic life rapidly became centered on production of tobacco, a crop requiring intense labor and considerable land. The demands of this form of commercially oriented staple agriculture required forms of coerced labor, initially indentured servants from Britain. Morgan shows very well how these needs interacted with English attitudes towards the poor and the desire of many in the mother country to export the apparently able-bodied poor. The result, by the mid-17th century, was rather brutal and strongly oligarchic society dominated by a planter class with a get rich quick mentality. Morgan's description of the high mortality and general brutality of life in the Virginia colony in the first half of the 17th century is unsparing and vivid. Part of the brutality of the colony was the often vicious treatment of the native peoples, whose existence was a continuous source of anxiety for the European settlers. Conflicts between Europeans and Native Americans greatly exacerbated racist attitudes. From early in the colony's history, Morgan identifies another persistent theme, that of conflict with the government in England. Morgan shows well the basic economic and political conflicts between the demands of the Crown and the planter oligarchy. After the Glorious Revolution, the Crown adopted an essentially hands off approach to governing Virginia, allowing the planter oligarchy virtually complete autonomy.
In the 17th century, however, the oligarchic nature of the colony created considerable social and political problems because of planter dominance and exploitation of poorer Europeans. This led intermittantly to considerable social unrest, including Bacon's Rebellion, the largest uprising against colonial/royal authority prior to the Revolution. Morgan argues that the adoption of African chattel slavery was not only economically advantageous as European immigration fell off but also politically advantageous because it led to a declining number of poor whites. Particularly after the Glorious Revolution, the absence of a large number of poor Europeans and the particular form of electoral politics in Virginia allowed the planter class to pursue social leadership in a kind of republican format. This form of leadership and social deference was undoubtedly enhanced by the presence of so many Africa slaves, who provided a stimulus for ethnic solidarity among white Virginians. Morgan argues that these social and political realities were reinforced by the spread of the dissident Whig republican ideologies that were common in the colonies in the 18th century.
This is brilliant piece of historical analysis. Morgan shows that the revolutionary attitudes of the planter class, exemplified by individuals such as Madison, Jefferson, Washington, Henry, et al. were the result of a specific historical process in which chattel slavery played a crucial role. Paradox resolved though the conflict between the ideals of liberty enunciated by the Founders and the reality of African chattel slavery presented a subsuquent paradox whose consequences are still with us.

I wanted a better understanding of day-to-day life in Colonial Virginia, from the founding of Jamestown forward to 1776. I also wanted a better understanding of the origins of slavery in Virginia. Mr. Morgan brings this information home in staggering detail, yet his writing style makes it an "easy read". The research that must have gone into this book is truly amazing, as reflected by the thorough footnotes and citations. Though I am no expert myself, an amateur history buff at best, I was certainly left with the impression that this is THE definitive book on the history of colonial Virginia. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in this topic.

There is, Edmund Morgan observes in American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia, a contradiction at the heart of the American Revolution: the greatest champions of liberty in 1776 were, themselves, slave owners. However, far from finding a contradiction in the paradox, Morgan sees the institution of slavery as an essential precondition for Virginians' ultimate embrace of revolutionary republican ideology. "To a large degree," he writes, "it may be said that Americans bought their independence with slave labor." (5)

Morgan locates the origins of this paradox in the economic development of the Virginia colony in the 17th century. Although the colony was originally supposed to be self-supporting, and capable of producing a wide range of crops and products for export to Britain, the introduction of tobacco cultivation a decade after its founding determined the evolution of the colonial economy. A highly prized commodity, tobacco provided the colonists with a stable economic foundation, despite the initial resistance of the Crown, and would soon become their dominant cash crop.

However, tobacco cultivation required considerable manpower, and the leading men of the colony - who were, after all, according to Morgan, disinclined to hard labour themselves - solved the problem through the importation of large numbers of indentured servants. "Most workers were either tenants or servants bound for a period of years," Morgan writes. "Servants were what the planters most wanted." (106)

According to Morgan, coerced labour, initially in the form of indentured servitude, was a necessary precondition for Virginia's tobacco economy. However, by the middle of the 17th century, the system had run headlong into two problems. The first was that the economic conditions that had encouraged Englishmen to indenture themselves to the Virginia colony had eased, resulting in a reduction of the number of servants available. The second, and more serious problem, was that, with the improvement of conditions within the colony, freed servants were living long enough to form a substantial dispossessed class that threatened its stability.

While other strategies for minimizing class antagonism failed, the importation of African slaves was eminently successful. Morgan notes that "the substitution of slaves for servants gradually eased and eventually ended the threat that freedmen posed: as the annual number of imported servants dropped, so did the number of men turning free." (308)

Morgan argues that was not a "necessary ingredient of slavery," but "it was an ingredient." (315) Indeed, by creating a perpetually un-free workforce distinct from, and thus not entitled to the rights of Englishmen, Virginia was able to establish a kind of class solidarity. With former freedmen becoming small planters, and with the elimination of an exploited white workforce, the white classes of Virginia could see mutual interests. The poorer white colonists "were allowed not only to prosper, but also to acquire social, psychological, and political advantages that turned the trust of exploitation away from them and aligned them with the exploiters." (344)

With the introduction of Whig ideas to the colony following the Glorious Revolution in 1688, that alignment fostered a sense of common cause against tyranny and political equality based on slavery. Indeed, Morgan notes that "Aristocrats could more safely preach equality in a slave society than in a free one." (380)

Morgan makes a convincing case for his argument with a painstakingly detailed analysis of the economic structure of Virginian society, revealed principally in the legal and financial records of the colony. However, American Slavery, American Freedom has some curious flaws. Though Morgan devotes a fair amount of space to discussing a similar trajectory to slavery in Barbados at about the same time, he never quite explains what made the Virginia experience special. Why, after all, did Bermuda not join the American Revolution?

More serious is his failure to connect the slave-based class accommodation of the early 18th century with the apparent contradiction of Jefferson and Washington defending freedom while owning slaves. Although he begins the book with a desire to explain "the seeming inconsistency, not to say the hypocrisy, of slaveholders devoting themselves to freedom," (4) Morgan's one-page treatment of Jefferson himself never quite answers the question. While he expertly documents the foundation of the revolutionaries' ideological paradox, he fails to elucidate its content.