American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia

Edmund Morgan departs from his usual topic of colonial New England for this painstaking, yet incisive examination of colonial Virginia. Morgan finds Virginia to be a most inhospitable place after the arrival of Europeans. It became inhospitable for the Indians because of the Europeans attitudes and actions towards them (that is, after the Indians kept them alive for the first number of years). Morgan's focus, however, is on the Europeans (almost entirely English) and their relations amongst one another and vis a vis the Crown in England. For many years, the English struggled to survive. They either could not or would not perform the tasks necessary to feed themselves. Once tobacco emerged as a cash crop it became almost impossible to get any English Virginian to grow mere corn. The death toll of diseases and, yes, starvation, were fearsome. Despite regular and sizable infusions of new immigrants, the population of Virginia grew at a snail's pace. Early Virginia verged on the lawless. The English elites sent to govern the colony instead took the lead in exploiting the labor of servants and small landholders. After tobacco prices dropped, the only people making money in Virginia were the members of the Royal Council who flagrantly used their places to assign government revenues to themselves. Small landholders had very little ability to resist the council members. Large landholders had collected many of their acres without actually farming it (in violation of the law). This artificial scarcity of good land pushed the small landholders farther away from the main settlements, which exposed them top greater risk of Indian attacks. Bacon's Rebellion in 1676 was more the result of small landholders' desire to exterminate the local Indians than an attack on Governor Berkeley's administration. The Crown began to pay a bit more attention to the plight of the small landholders, but progress in that direction remained slow - until the advent of slavery. As Morgan tells it, slavery was slow to catch on in Virginia mainly because of the frightful death rate of new servants. Slaves were simply too costly to risk. Once the survival rate improved, it made economic sense to invest in slaves (obviously the slaves took a different view of the matter, but were powerless to act on those views). Slaves brought greater prosperity to white Virginians. Small landholders were able to obtain a greater voice in the government (usually as voters and supporters not as actual candidates for office). The large landholders did not resist this power-sharing because they viewed their interests as much aligned with the small landholders. They all raised and sold tobacco, they all paid the tobacco-related fees and taxes imposed by the royal government, and they all owned slaves to grow the tobacco. Thus, when they promoted liberty and freedom, the Virginians had little to fear that "the mob" would get carried away with leveling tendencies because there was no mob available;

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 th

"Racism became an essential, if unacknowledged, ingredient of the republican ideology that enabled Virginians to lead the nation." writes Edmund S. Morgan in 1975, and ends this book with the rhetorical question: "Is America still colonial Virginia writ large?"These are deeply disturbing questions - questions one is compelled to ponder as one reads this lucid and dispassionate presentation of the how primitive accumulation in Virginia at the beginning of the 17th century was replaced a century later by an orderly and opulent society based on slavery. The answer to such questions is not made easy by the realisation that the only other successful republican experiment - the Athenian democracy - blossomed too on a bed of slavery.Do these questions matter today? Have we not moved on from racism? I'm afraid not. Again the voice of Morgan: "In the republican way of thinking, zeal for liberty and equality could go hand in hand with contempt for the poor and plans for enslaving them." Sounds eerily familiar? Just as today's language used to describe terrorist threats is redolent of the rhetoric that once surrounded the lynching of black bodies. Racism (albeit globalised) is re-visiting the land today, and so are republican virtues and values.The book is long, and in some ways, too detailed. Morgan delights in the telling particular, and at times one wishes he would not linger on some specifics. But this has a purpose. He wants to show the imperceptible and surreptitious mechanisms by which a society acquires its ugly and immoral traits until they become so natural as to be invisible. Step by step, event by event, law by law a construction emerges that would have horrified its founders. Yet, at the time, it seamed the logical, and the right thing to do.A strong point in Morgan's narrative is the links he highlights between the developments in Virginia and the Britain's commercial interests, migration policies, population growth and control, state revenue, and political history or thought. One can better appreciate the import of Virginia for Britain and the mother country's fixation and fascination for the North American colonies.Brash and brutal, Virginian slavery stood openly as godmother at the foundation of the American Republic. Other aspects of slavery also contributed significantly - but as they were indirect, they remained veiled and are hardly recognised even today. New England benefited greatly from its cod trade to the Caribbean, where the product that was found to be unfit for European markets was fed to the slaves, thus freeing up land that otherwise would have been used to sustain them. When will we get a total picture of slavery's import for America's economic foundations?

To be sure, this book deals with the paradox of a nation trying to liberate themselves from the British while they, the Patriots, themselves hold slaves. But, Morgan also hits on a big topic of the evlotuion of racism through the history of colonial Virginia. This book is a great narrative for what Morgan accomplishes, it is very informative and after your done with the book it makes you think and say to yourself, "hey, what is he saying!" See for yourself.

This book dealt with the colonization of Virigina in the 18th Century. It was good and informative reading.