Full name: American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia

Author: Edmund S. Morgan Year: 1975 Rank: Rating: Original Rating: Pop Rating: Genres/categories: History, Award winners, Non Fiction, Politics Purchase/reserch links: LibraryThing Goodreads Amazon ISBNs: 9780393324945 039332494X

In the American Revolution, Virginians were the most eloquent spokesmen for freedom and quality. George Washington led the Americans in battle against British oppression. Thomas Jefferson led them in declaring independence. Virginians drafted not only the Declaration but also the Constitution and the Bill of Rights; they were elected to the presidency of the United States under that Constitution for thirty-two of the first thirty-six years of its existence. They were all slaveholders. In the new preface Edmund S. Morgan writes: "Human relations among us still suffer from the former enslavement of a large portion of our predecessors. The freedom of the free, the growth of freedom experienced in the American Revolution depended more than we like to admit on the enslavement of more than 20 percent of us at that time. How republican freedom came to be supported, at least in large part, by its opposite, slavery, is the subject of this book. American Slavery, American Freedom is a study of the tragic contradiction at the core of America. Morgan finds the keys to this central paradox, "the marriage of slavery and freedom," in the people and the politics of the state that was both the birthplace of the Revolution and the largest slaveholding state in the country. Similar books: Mutiny on the Amistad by Howard Jones The Peculiar Institution by Kenneth M. Stampp Inhuman Bondage by David Brion Davis Many Thousands Gone by Ira Berlin The Slave Community by John W. Blassingame Complicity by Anne Farrow Gabriel's Rebellion by Douglas R. Egerton The Amistad Rebellion by Marcus Rediker Soul by Soul by Walter Johnson The Fires of Jubilee by Stephen B. Oates American Colonies by Alan Taylor The Empire Of Necessity by Greg Grandin Fire and Fury by Michael Wolff America by Dinesh D'Souza Unfreedom of the Press by Mark R. Levin A Warning by Anonymous From Slavery to Freedom by John Hope Franklin American Nations by Colin Woodard Evicted by Matthew Desmond