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Edmund S. MorganAmerican Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1975A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 15-16Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Book 4: “Slavery and Freedom”
Chapter 15 Summary: “Toward Slavery”
Morgan explains why and how Virginians started to turn toward a slave-labor economy.
Virginians imported workers from England to ensure their profits. Morgan suggests that as soon as Virginians found tobacco, the colony was on the road to slavery. But forcing servants into slavery might have led to massive rebellion, so rather than enslave Virginians, they bought “men who were already enslaved” (297). So, in 1660, with a decline in immigration largely due to an end to England’s population problems, it likely became more advantageous for Virginia planters to buy slaves. But the Navigation Acts prevented buying and transporting them to the colony.
Virginia planters had advantages over other planation economies: They could replace slaves at a lower rate than sugar planters, giving a greater return on investment; a rise in the price of tobacco meant they could pay for them; and tobacco required “a smaller outlay of capital for production equipment” (303). Therefore, men who wanted to get into plantation production went to Virginia. The men who arrived garnered more prestige in England. They brought slavery to Virginia by buying “slaves instead of servants” (304). By century’s end, more than half of Virginia’s labor force was enslaved. In 1708, 5,928 slaves had been purchased from private traders in the previous 10 years, and 679 from the Royal African Company, founded by Charles II, which held the monopoly for the English slave trade.
While Virginia had developed its plantation system without slaves, the system had one critical downfall: It created freedmen, viewed as “Virginia’s dangerous men” (308). Yet Virginians feared that slaves would “magnify the danger of insurrection” and understood the problem of taking slaves into their families who had “every reason to hate them” (308).
With slavery, the colony could “maximize production:” masters worked the slaves harder, feeding and clothing them only enough to ensure they could keep working, including slave women working in the fields, unlike servant women (309). The lingering problem was that “slaves [had] no incentive to work” (310). But Virginians accepted the fact that masters had to compel slaves to work. In 1669 slaves could be killed under certain conditions and dismembered. Masters then had to be prepared to harm or kill slaves for profit, and society had to back them.
This system was established and such treatment of the enslaved allowed because Africans were different. A planter could cut off the toes of a slave, but somehow could not, and did not, cut off the toes of a servant. Morgan suggests that while it is not clear whether race “was a necessary ingredient of slavery,” it was part of it (315). Slavery did arrive to the colony of Virginia with racism.
Chapter 16 Summary: “Toward Racism”
This chapter outlines how racism and slavery came to support one another in late 17th-century colonial Virginia.
Enslaved Africans were brought into a well-established “system of production” in colonial Virginia (316). The difference between the treatment of servants and tenants, however, was discipline and linking that discipline to “racial contempt” (316). Masters viewed slaves much like they did servants and freedmen: They never worked hard enough, and they were “shiftless, irresponsible, unfaithful, ungrateful, dishonest” drunks (319). While slaves and servants did not like to work, for slaves refusal to do so meant “the lash” (319).
In England the workhouses answered the problem adjusting the poor’s behavior so they could become productive workers. England’s attitudes toward the poor never reached “actual enslavement,” even though many in England believed they were “fit for slavery” (325). Indeed, these discussions made it appear as if poverty was “culturally hereditary,” leading to legislation separating the poor from the rest of society, an “inferior breed” who could be shipped to Virginia, and who on arrival were treated with the same contempt (326).
Yet, in 1668, even though racial prejudice was always “present in Virginia,” servants and freedmen saw enslaved Africans as nothing more than another group in similar conditions subjected similar treatment. Thus, class prejudice and race prejudice was “indistinguishable” (327). To prevent freedmen and servants from joining cause, then, racism was necessary to “separate dangerous free whites from dangerous slave blacks” (328).
This task was aided by the racial hatred churned up by Bacon’s Rebellion and the decision to enslave Indians. But in 1670 those servants who were not Christian and “brought into the colony by land” would be in servitude for 12 years (329). However, non-Christians shipped in from overseas, the Africans, were to be enslaved for life. Therefore, from 1670, Indians were presumed to be servants, and Africans presumed to be slaves. By 1682, Indians and Africans were both viewed as non-Christian; legally they were “uncivil, unchristian, and above all, unwhite” (329). Thus, although public policy was not needed to enact slavery, the assembly “deliberately did what it could to foster the contempt of whites for blacks and Indians” (331) by preventing mixing and by giving white servants the upper hand over enslaved Indians and Africans. By 1667, even if Africans or Indians converted to Christianity, conversion would not change enslaved status.
Importantly, children of interracial unions, mulattoes, blurred “the distinction between slave and free, black and white” (336). While nothing could be done about the free blacks and mulattoes toward the end of the 17th century, the colony could limit their numbers. In 1691 the assembly made law that masters could not free their slaves. If the master tried, the government could seize the slave and sell them.
Chapters 15-16 Analysis
American Slavery, American Freedom is a book about ideas as much as it is the history of colonial Virginia and America more broadly. Morgan clearly demonstrates how ideas can transcend geography, culture, and history, and how they can move with people but look quite different in a new place.
For example, Morgan shows how ideas about the poor traveled through the decades in England and crossed the oceans with the settlers in Virginia to become part of the argument that led to slavery. But these ideas took on a whole new meaning when they became the foundation for exploiting labor in Virginia. The poor of all races in colonial Virginia were lazy, lying, cheating drunks. And, while the English were still using these ideas to try to rehabilitate the poor, the Virginians used them to dehumanize theirs. As Morgan notes, the poorest of the poor in Virginia on the eve of the American Revolution were the enslaved, those who lost their freedom because they were poor and because they were African.
Freedom took on new meanings in Virginia too. It was initially associated with economic livelihood in a new way. In England the workhouses did not provide a path to freedom; they provided a path to productive work, to patriotic work to help the country diversify its economy. But in Virginia the end of servitude was thought of as freedom. It led to opportunity, to the right to step up in life, to be free to determine one’s own future.
Of course, freedom as an idea meant other things to Virginians, because freedom in Virginia became tied to slavery. The people who agreed to share their interests against those of enslaved Africans built their freedom on a foundation of bondage.
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