Scholarly Review of Edmund Morgan American Slavery American Freedom
Author | Edmund Morgan |
---|---|
State | United States |
Language | English |
Subject | American history, Virginia, slavery |
Genre | Non-fiction |
Publisher | W W Norton & Co Inc |
Publication date | September 1975 |
Media type | Print, ebook, audiobook |
Pages | 464 pages |
ISBN | 039305554X |
American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia is a 1975 history text[i] by American historian Edmund Morgan.[ii] The piece of work was first published in September 1975 through W Due west Norton & Co Inc and is considered to exist one of Morgan's seminal works.[iii] [4]
Synopsis [edit]
American Slavery, American Freedom is Morgan's answer to the paradox which he himself formulates in the commencement of the book: that of Virginia existence both the birthplace of the democratic republican United States and, at the same time, the largest slave-holding colony and later on, country.[five] [vi] Amid voluminous other sources, Morgan employs the archives of Virginia'due south House of Burgesses, circa 1620 and beyond to explore this paradox and find an explanation for it.
Much of the book is a clarification of the problem of poverty in England during the 1600s, i of the solutions to which was to send the English language poor (many of them shiftless troublemakers)[7] over to the American colonies as indentured servants.
Morgan then focuses on the conflict in 17th century Virginia between the self-serving governing oligarchy and the much larger populations of land-owning freemen, poor freemen, white indentured servants, and black slaves (the last, originally a very small percentage of the population); he shows how such uprisings as Bacon's Rebellion left the oligarchs worried virtually retaining power. Morgan also suggests that rebel leader Nathaniel Bacon, in encouraging his followers' vengeful hatred of Indians—any their tribe and peaceableness—provided Virginia with its first example of "racism as a political strategy."[eight] [9]
Morgan and so describes the economics of the Atlantic slave merchandise during the 17th century and explains how, over time, enslaved Africans became a cheaper labor source to Virginian planters than indentured servants from England, causing the population of poor whites to terminate growing while the population of black enslaved workers grew proportionately larger.[10]
Finally, Morgan asserts that, in the late 1600s and early 1700s,[eleven] the oligarchs enacted strict slave laws for (he alleges) the deliberate purpose of driving a social wedge between enslaved blacks and poor whites—thus creating, then to speak, American racism.[12]
Reception [edit]
Warren M. Billings criticized American Slavery, American Liberty as being too simplistic while besides stating that information technology was "a stimulating book".[thirteen]
The Baltimore Dominicus commented that the championship was "misleading" and that it was more about "the ordeal of living in Seventeenth-Century Virginia" than about slavery.[xiv]
According to Kathleen Brown, new research has appeared with the passage of several decades, much of which complicates or challenges Morgan'southward description of the encounter between Native Americans and colonists, the rise of slavery, the availability of white indentured servants in the second half of the seventeenth century, and the implications of Bacon's Rebellion. Nevertheless, she notes, the volume continues to be assigned in history courses because of Morgan'southward "eloquent prose, his ability to link key concepts in American history, and his effort to bring the sensibilities of the mail-Vietnam era to one of the fundamental tragedies and ironies of American history."[15]
References [edit]
- ^ read online
- ^ Forest, Peter (Dec 21, 1975). "What went incorrect in Virginia, the postwar globe, the Heart Eastward; American Slavery American Freedom". The New York Times. Archived from the original on 22 July 2018. Retrieved 4 June 2013.
- ^ Parent, Anthony (2006). Foul Means: The Formation of a Slave Lodge in Virginia, 1660-1740. University of North Carolina Press. pp. 1, 13, 18, xx. ISBN0807854867. Archived from the original on 2021-02-22. Retrieved 2016-07-06 .
- ^ Boyd, Kelly (1999). Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writing. Routledge. pp. 837–838. ISBN1884964338. Archived from the original on 2021-02-22. Retrieved 2016-07-06 .
- ^ Morgan, Edmund S. (1975). American Slavery, American Freedom. 131: Westward.Due west. Norton. p. 4. ISBN978-0393324945.
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: CS1 maint: location (link)"...the fundamental paradox of American history.... how a people could have adult the dedication to man liberty and dignity exhibited by the leaders of the American Revolution and at the aforementioned time accept adult and maintained a arrangement of labor that denied human liberty and dignity every hour of the 24-hour interval." - ^ Wayne, Michael (2001). Decease of an Overseer:Reopening a Murder Investigation from the Plantation Southward. Oxford University Press. p. 231. ISBN0195140036. Archived from the original on 2021-02-22. Retrieved 2016-07-06 .
- ^ Morgan, Edmund S. (1975). American Slavery, American Freedom. 1321: W.W. Norton. p. 67. ISBN978-0393324945.
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: CS1 maint: location (link)"Laborers were the despair of anybody who employed them, big or small. Robert Loder... an ambitious yeoman farmer... ever found reason to bewail the shiftlessness of the men who worked for him." - ^ Brown, Kathleen. "Americans on the James". Common-Place. Archived from the original on 2013-11-04. Retrieved vii September 2020.
- ^ Morgan, Edmund S. (1975). American Slavery, American Freedom. 5631: Due west.W. Norton. p. 269. ISBN978-0393324945.
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: CS1 maint: location (link) "...it is surprising that he [Bacon] was able to straight their [his followers] anger for so long against the Indians.... Just for those with eyes to see, in that location was an obvious lesson in the rebellion. Resentment of an alien race might be more than powerful than resentment of an upper class. For men bent on the maximum exploitation of labor the implication should have been clear. But Virginians did not immediately grasp it. It would sink in equally time went on..." - ^ Morgan, Edmund S. (17 Oct 2003). American Slavery, American Freedom. 6288. p. 299. ISBN978-0393324945.
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: CS1 maint: location (link) - ^ Morgan, Edmund S. (1975). American Slavery, American Freedom. 6885: West.Due west. Norton. p. 330. ISBN978-0393324945.
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: CS1 maint: location (link)"By a serial of acts, the assembly deliberately did what it could to foster the antipathy of whites for blacks and Indians." - ^ Morgan, Edmund S. (17 October 2003). American Slavery, American Freedom. 6838. p. 327. ISBN978-0393324945.
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: CS1 maint: location (link)"The answer to the problem [of social unrest], obvious if unspoken and only gradually recognized, was racism, to separate unsafe free whites from unsafe enslaved blacks by a screen of racial contempt." - ^ Billings, Warren Thou. (January 1977). "Review: American Slavery, American Freedom". Virginia Magazine of History and Biography. 85 (1). Archived from the original on ten September 2012. Retrieved 4 June 2013.
- ^ "Slavery without racism?". Baltimore Sun. November 2, 1975. Retrieved 4 June 2013.
- ^ Brownish. "Americans on the James: Re-reading American Slavery American Liberty". Archived from the original on 2013-eleven-04.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Slavery,_American_Freedom
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