On American Slavery American Freedom

As Karen Kupperman aptly states in The Jamestown Project: “This is the creation story from hell.”

This is an important contribution to the scholarship, although Morgan’s arguments can be a bit hard to untangle from the overarching narrative that he’s telling. The clearest bit of his argument is that American conceptions (and emphasis) on “liberty” and the importance of slavery rose simultaneously in the colonial period. This is not a mere correlation, Morgan argues that these two concepts were inextricably linked and one cannot be understood without the other. The details that constitute the argument are difficult to make sense of, but my reading of this book tells me that it goes something like this:

First of all, like Kupperman, Morgan finds that the United States’s “true” founding is not to be found with the family farms of New England but with the plantations of the Chesapeake Bay and, in particular, Virginia. The first decade of English colonization of Jamestown was little more than hell-on-earth, to the point where some of the anecdotes that Morgan shares are outright hysterical. For instance, contemporary writers pointed out that few settlers did any planting, instead choosing to “bowl in the street,” and, when winter came, they would all starve. As a result, they had to rely on gifts (and, to lesser extent, trading) with Algonquin Indians in the area. If they had wanted, the native peoples of the region could have simply walked away and English colonists would have all starved to death. Yet, upset with the indigenous people of the region, it was not uncommon for Englishmen to burn Indian cornfields, effectively destroying their own source of food. However, the “starving years” effectively came to an end with the cultivation of West Indian tobacco.

Unfortunately for the remarkably lazy settlers at Jamestown (honestly, I feel for them here, I would much rather bowl in the street), the cultivation of tobacco was a labor-intensive occupation. While there were some slaves introduced to Virginia in the early years of tobacco cultivation, slavery was not the dominant mode of production. In fact, life expectancies in Virginia were so low due to disease and starvation that plantation owners preferred to important large numbers of indentured servants from England, who served seven-year contracts and were half the price of slaves. Given that plantation owners were uncertain that servants or slaves would even survive the seven years of the contract, it was in their best interest to “hire” indentured servants. However, indentured servants chafed under the brutality of their master’s rule and were often treated little better than slaves (note: I am not saying that indentured servitude=slavery, the very nature of the two are entirely different, but there are similarities between the two). The turning point for indentured servitude occurred under Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676, where a coalition of English indentured servants (who made up the bulk) and African slaves rebelled against Virginia’s colonial government, desiring liberty from their shackles. Although the rebellion was crushed by the colonial government, it had lasting effects on Virginia society.

In response to Bacon’s Rebellion, the colony of Virginia promulgated a slave code that uniquely targeted black subjects, taking away their right to bear arms, creating separate courts of white and black subjects, and took away the right of black people to employ white people, plus much more. In doing so, Virginia’s lower classes were pushed in two different directions: white lower-class people continued to fight for liberty over the course of the eighteenth century, while black people faced increasingly brutal and dehumanizing subjugation.

Importantly, fewer indentured servants came to colonial Virginia in the late-seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Moreover, the rate of death plummeted, meaning slaves become more lucrative and common throughout the colony. While the percentage of white population in servitude declined, the percentage of black slaves in the population increased exponentially. By the Seven Years’ War, 40% of Virginia’s population was made up of African slaves.

In the end, Morgan goes so far to argue that American independence was bought with slavery. In order to become a nation viewed as equal by the Great Powers of Europe (namely, Britain, France, and Spain), the newly-born United States needed to be able to export goods for a low price, something that it straight-up could not do with the labor (and wages) of its white population. Instead, the bulk of the most lucrative goods being shipped to Europe were produced by black slaves, effectively garnering legitimacy for the entire American project.

This is a really bleak story, and Morgan tells it well. Yet, I do question his interpretation a bit. The implication here is that the American drive for “liberty” largely comes out of a movement of poorer, white British subjects (the indentured servants). And still, the most prominent Virginians clamoring for American independence (e.g. Patrick Henry, George Washington, James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, Nathaniel Pendleton, Charles Lee) were all members of the Virginian aristocracy—the very class that Bacon’s Rebellion saw itself as fighting against. This, then, is an enigma, and it’s unclear was Morgan would have to say about this. It seems like a glaring oversight, and I wish there was more about it.