Book 54: American Slavery--American Freedom

American Slavery--American Freedom
Edmund S. Morgan

A friend who was dissatisfied with my previous review of Morgan's The Birth of the Republic thrust this book at me along with a challenge, asserting Morgan's prominence as an early American historian and this particular book as a revolutionary work in the historiography of the Revolution. I must say that either the previous book was actually quite poor or I wasn't quite paying attention, because this book is an excellent and well-written, if slightly overreaching, history of colonial Virginia. Most astonishing is the fact that Morgan is able to write what amounts to a dry and slow-paced economic narrative in prose engaging enough to keep reluctant readers interested, though a strong interest in the subject matter may in fact be a prerequisite to any attempts on this book. The prose is far from remarkable, but in being adequate, let alone on the good side of adequate on which he falls, Morgan already vastly outpaces most historical academics. Unfortunately, he routinely falls into some similar traps, including some chronological zig-zagging that doesn't quite make sense thematically. It is understandable and expected, for example, that some figures will need to be borrowed from years in which records actually survive, but this can lead to achronological data that leads to distractions and which ultimately distances both Morgan and the reader from the narrative threads at hand. Many aspects of the book's timeline are, on reflection, somewhat puzzling. The book, which purports to be a history of colonial Virginia and the ideology of the Revolution fermenting among the tobacco fields and within a slave-holding society, but the bulk of the text centers firmly on the 1600s. This is important background, of course, but when Morgan finally realizes that he has a thesis to prove, there is a rapid 100-year jump that surely warrants far more than the two chapters devoted to it.

This lack of focus occurs repeatedly within the book, as Morgan confuses important- and relevant- background information with fluff. All of the information contained herein is interesting, and it all relates to other information within the book, but Morgan's thesis regarding the parallel development of representative government and slavery would be better-served with a more deliberate focus or with a longer narrative that more fully covers post-seventeenth century development. As it is, Morgan does an excellent job covering important attitudes that colored Virginian rhetoric through the turbulent 1700s but only pulls them together in what feels like a desperate last gasp for his thesis. The arguments he presents are compelling, but his rush to end everything so swiftly in the final chapter relies heavily on the reader's trust as he flings assertions around without nearly as much deliberation as previously. Despite a lackadaisical pace, however, American Slavery-American Freedom does make some excellent, original, and well-articulated points about the economic and ideological environment in which both slavery and liberty (though this is an afterthought in Morgan's book) concurrently took such a firm grasp. As a history of colonial Virginia, the book is an excellent resource for historians with a thorough look at societal attitudes both home and abroad that inevitably shaped the colonial experience. American Slavery-American Freedom may not live up to its billing, but it is nonetheless a reasonably readable book exposing, if not quite expanding upon, the ways in which freedom and slavery could become so inextricably linked.

Grade: A-