Author | Edmund Morgan |
---|---|
Country | 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 [1] by American historian Edmund Morgan. [2] The work was first published in September 1975 through W W Norton & Co Inc and is considered to be one of Morgan's seminal works. [3] [4]
American Slavery, American Freedom is Morgan's answer to the paradox which he himself formulates in the beginning of the book: that of Virginia being both the birthplace of the democratic republican United States and, at the same time, the largest slave-holding colony and later, state. [5] [6] Among voluminous other sources, Morgan employs the archives of Virginia's House of Burgesses, circa 1620 and beyond to explore this paradox and find an explanation for it.
Much of the book is a description of the problem of poverty in England during the 1600s, one of the solutions to which was to send the English 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 about retaining power. Morgan also suggests that rebel leader Nathaniel Bacon, in encouraging his followers' vengeful hatred of Indians—whatever their tribe and peaceableness—provided Virginia with its first instance of "racism as a political strategy." [8] [9]
Morgan then describes the economics of the Atlantic slave trade 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 stop growing while the population of black enslaved workers grew proportionately larger. [10]
Finally, Morgan asserts that, in the late 1600s and early 1700s, [11] 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, so to speak, American racism. [12]
Warren M. Billings criticized American Slavery, American Freedom as being too simplistic while also stating that it was "a stimulating book". [13]
The Baltimore Sun commented that the title was "misleading" and that it was more about "the ordeal of living in Seventeenth-Century Virginia" than about slavery. [14]
According to Kathleen Brown, new research has appeared with the passage of several decades, much of which complicates or challenges Morgan's 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 book continues to be assigned in history courses because of Morgan's "eloquent prose, his ability to link key concepts in American history, and his effort to bring the sensibilities of the post-Vietnam era to one of the central tragedies and ironies of American history." [15]
Bacon's Rebellion was an armed rebellion held by Virginia settlers that took place from 1676 to 1677. It was led by Nathaniel Bacon against Colonial Governor William Berkeley. It was the first rebellion in the North American colonies in which discontented frontiersmen took part. The alliance between European indentured servants and Africans disturbed the colonial upper class. They responded by hardening the racial caste of slavery in an attempt to divide the two races from subsequent united uprisings with the passage of the Virginia Slave Codes of 1705. While the farmers did not succeed in their initial goal of driving the Native Americans from Virginia, the rebellion resulted in Berkeley being recalled to England.
Slavery in the colonial history of the United States, from 1526 to 1776, developed from complex factors, and researchers have proposed several theories to explain the development of the institution of slavery and of the slave trade. Slavery strongly correlated with the European colonies' demand for labor, especially for the labor-intensive plantation economies of the sugar colonies in the Caribbean and South America, operated by Great Britain, France, Spain, Portugal and the Dutch Republic.
The legal institution of human chattel slavery, comprising the enslavement primarily of Africans and African Americans, was prevalent in the United States of America from its founding in 1776 until 1865. Slavery was established throughout European colonization in the Americas. From 1526, during early colonial days, it was practiced in Britain's colonies, including the Thirteen Colonies that formed the United States. Under the law, an enslaved person was treated as property and could be bought, sold, or given away. Slavery lasted in about half of U.S. states until abolition. In the decades after the end of Reconstruction, many of slavery's economic and social functions were continued through segregation, sharecropping, and convict leasing.
Indentured servitude is a form of labor in which a person is contracted to work without salary for a specific number of years. The contract, called an "indenture", may be entered voluntarily for eventual compensation or debt repayment, or it may be imposed as a judicial punishment. Historically, it has been used to pay for apprenticeships, typically when an apprentice agreed to work for free for a master tradesman to learn a trade. Later it was also used as a way for a person to pay the cost of transportation to colonies in the Americas.
Edmund Sears Morgan was an American historian and an eminent authority on early American history. He was the Sterling Professor of History at Yale University, where he taught from 1955 to 1986. He specialized in American colonial history, with some attention to English history. Thomas S. Kidd says he was noted for his incisive writing style, "simply one of the best academic prose stylists America has ever produced." He covered many topics, including Puritanism, political ideas, the American Revolution, slavery, historiography, family life, and numerous notables such as Benjamin Franklin.
In the British colonies in North America and in the United States before the abolition of slavery in 1865, free Negro or free Black described the legal status of African Americans who were not enslaved. The term was applied both to formerly enslaved people (freedmen) and to those who had been born free.
In societies that regard some races or ethnic groups of people as dominant or superior and others as subordinate or inferior, hypodescent refers to the automatic assignment by the dominant culture of children of a mixed union or sexual relations between members of different socioeconomic groups or ethnic groups to the subordinate group. The opposite practice is hyperdescent, in which children are assigned to the race that is considered dominant or superior.
A headright refers to a legal grant of land given to settlers during the period of European colonization in the Americas. Headrights are most notable for their role in the expansion of the Thirteen Colonies; the Virginia Company gave headrights to settlers, and the Plymouth Company followed suit. The headright system was used in several colonies, including Maryland, Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina. Most headrights were for 1 to 1,000 acres (4.0 km2) of land, and were granted to those who were willing to cross the Atlantic and help populate the colonies. Headrights were granted to anyone who would pay for the transportation costs of an indentured laborer. These land grants consisted of 50 acres (0.20 km2) for someone newly moving to the area and 100 acres (0.40 km2) for people previously living in the area. By ensuring the landowning masters had legal ownership of all land acquired, the indentured laborers after their indenture period had passed had little opportunity to procure their own land. This kept a large portion of the citizens of the Thirteen Colonies poor and led to tensions between the laborers and the landowners.
Partus sequitur ventrem was a legal doctrine passed in colonial Virginia in 1662 and other English crown colonies in the Americas which defined the legal status of children born there; the doctrine mandated that all children would inherit the legal status of their mothers. As such, children of enslaved women would be born into slavery. The legal doctrine of partus sequitur ventrem was derived from Roman civil law, specifically the portions concerning slavery and personal property (chattels).
Tobacco and Slaves: The Development of Southern Cultures in the Chesapeake, 1680–1800, is a book written by historian Allan Kulikoff. Published in 1986, it is the first major study that synthesized the historiography of the colonial Chesapeake region of the United States. Tobacco and Slaves is a neo-Marxist study that explains the creation of a racial caste system in the tobacco-growing regions of Maryland and Virginia and the origins of southern slave society. Kulikoff uses statistics compiled from colonial court and church records, tobacco sales, and land surveys to conclude that economic, political, and social developments in the 18th-century Chesapeake established the foundations of economics, politics, and society in the 19th-century South.
The history of George Washington and slavery reflects Washington's changing attitude toward enslavement. The preeminent Founding Father of the United States and a slaveowner, Washington became increasingly uneasy with slavery which was then a longstanding institution. He provided for the immediate emancipation of one of his slaves in his will, with the remaining 123 forced to work for his wife, but to be freed upon her death.
The Virginia Slave Codes of 1705, was a series of laws enacted by the Colony of Virginia's House of Burgesses in 1705 regulating the interactions between slaves and citizens of the crown colony of Virginia. The enactment of the Slave Codes is considered to be the consolidation of slavery in Virginia, and served as the foundation of Virginia's slave legislation.
John Casor, a servant in Northampton County in the Virginia Colony, in 1655 became the first person of African descent in the Thirteen Colonies to be declared as a slave for life as a result of a civil suit. In an earlier case, John Punch was the first man documented as a slave in the Virginia Colony, sentenced to life in servitude for attempting to escape his captors.
Anthony Johnson was a black Angolan known for achieving wealth in the early 17th-century Colony of Virginia. He was one of the first African American property owners recognized by the Virginia courts. Held as an indentured servant in 1621, he earned his freedom after several years, and was granted land by the colony.
Elizabeth Key Grinstead (Greenstead) was one of the first black people of the Thirteen Colonies to sue for freedom from slavery and win. Key won her freedom and that of her infant son John Grinstead on July 21, 1656, in the colony of Virginia. Key based her suit on the fact that her father was an Englishman who had acknowledged her and arranged her baptism as a Christian in the American branch of the Church of England. He was a wealthy planter who had tried to protect her by establishing a guardianship for her when she was young, before his death. Based on these factors, her attorney and common-law husband, William Grinstead, argued successfully that she should be freed. The lawsuit was one of the earliest "freedom suits" by an African-descended person in the English colonies.
Slavery in Maryland lasted over 200 years, from its beginnings in 1642 when the first Africans were brought as slaves to St. Mary's City, to its end after the Civil War. While Maryland developed similarly to neighboring Virginia, slavery declined here as an institution earlier, and it had the largest free black population by 1860 of any state. The early settlements and population centers of the province tended to cluster around the rivers and other waterways that empty into the Chesapeake Bay. Maryland planters cultivated tobacco as the chief commodity crop, as the market was strong in Europe. Tobacco was labor-intensive in both cultivation and processing, and planters struggled to manage workers as tobacco prices declined in the late 17th century, even as farms became larger and more efficient. At first, indentured servants from England supplied much of the necessary labor but, as their economy improved at home, fewer made passage to the colonies. Maryland colonists turned to importing indentured and enslaved Africans to satisfy the labor demand.
Slavery in Virginia began with the capture and enslavement of Native Americans during the early days of the English Colony of Virginia and through the late eighteenth century. They primarily worked in tobacco fields. Africans were first brought to colonial Virginia in 1619, when 20 Africans from present-day Angola arrived in Virginia aboard the ship The White Lion.
The treatment of slaves in the United States often included sexual abuse and rape, the denial of education, and punishments like whippings. Families were often split up by the sale of one or more members, usually never to see or hear of each other again.
John Punch was an enslaved African who lived in the colony of Virginia. Thought to have been an indentured servant, Punch attempted to escape to Maryland and was sentenced in July 1640 by the Virginia Governor's Council to serve as a slave for the remainder of his life. Two European men who ran away with him received a lighter sentence of extended indentured servitude. For this reason, some historians consider John Punch the "first official slave in the English colonies," and his case as the "first legal sanctioning of lifelong slavery in the Chesapeake." Some historians also consider this to be one of the first legal distinctions between Europeans and Africans made in the colony, and a key milestone in the development of the institution of slavery in the United States.
Irish indentured servants were Irish people who became indentured servants in territories under the control of the British Empire, such as the British West Indies, British North America and later Australia.