American Slavery, American Freedom

Synopsis

The book uses archival research of Virginia's House of Burgesses circa 1620 and beyond. Morgan focuses on the conflicting political and economic history of the planter class oligarchy versus the diminutive freeman, the indentured servant, and the newly created slave class. Morgan finds the key to this central paradox in the people and politics of the state that was both the birthplace of the revolution and the largest slave-holding state in the country.

Reception

Warren M. Billings criticized American Slavery, American Freedom as being too simplistic while also stating that it was "a stimulating book". 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. 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, 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.