47 pages • 1 hour read
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 17-18Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 17 Summary: “Toward Populism”
This chapter shows how increasing racist contempt was accompanied by an increase in the “status of lower-class whites” (338). Once Africans and Indians were moved to the plantations, life for white poor, servants, and freedmen started to improve.
Problems with homelessness and poverty remained, however. In 1723 the assembly passed a law akin to the workhouse laws in England. The colony’s parishes were responsible for caring for their destitute, and masters too were not allowed to free slaves, in part because they might try to free the old and those who could no longer work, to remove their responsibility to clothe and to feed them. By the middle of the 18th century, “small planters” were the majority of the “free population” (343). With a temporary rise in the price of tobacco, the lives of small and big planters alike improved.
The main changes wrought by slavery, however, were the “social, psychological, and political advantages” (344) that accrued to the small planter when they aligned with the big planters against the enslaved. Because the ruling class feared slave and servant insurrection, they told all whites that they were superior, then they offered new benefits to bring small planters and other whites into the fold. In 1705, when servants ended their term, the new law forced masters to provide them with a gun, corn, “thirty shillings in money,” and a proper suit of clothes (344). Then they reduced the poll tax, which meant an improvement in the freedmen’s social and economic position while slavery was on the rise.
After the fall of James II in England, and calls for a stronger legislature in England, a new governor was eventually installed in Virginia who changed the political position of non-elite whites. The colony still had enough land to distribute to freedmen, which gave them the vote in the assembly and allowed their votes to matter. With the changes, by the end of the 17th century, “the men who wished to rule Virginia could no longer do it” without the consent of white freedmen (358).
Accordingly, the assembly passed a law in 1699 that forbade candidates for election to the assembly from accepting gifts in exchange for votes. Yet in the 1714 elections, the elected burgesses were still mostly upper class. But the politics had changed: Populism, including the voices of ordinary Virginians, was on the rise even though the freedmen had yet to be elected.
Chapter 18 Summary: “Toward the Republic”
This chapter shows how the republican spirit was cultivated in the colony.
The “common identity” large and small planters shared was based in part on access to land; most white Virginians were landowners (364). Both groups also relied on tobacco for their livelihoods. Their common interests allowed the small farmer to trust the large farmer. By 1725, Virginia’s society was a “mixture of slavery and freedom” that lasted to the Civil War: a labor force of enslaved Africans, and a small group of large planters and a larger group of small planters whose interests had converged (369).
Neither this social structure nor increased voting can explain the rise of republicanism. Virginians were at the “forefront” of opposing England’s laws and “took leading roles in creation of the American republic” (373). Morgan does not know why “Virginia’s great planters” (376) became republicans, but he offers a number of possibilities, such as Jefferson’s idea that many were yeoman farmers, and that farmers had matured and shared an ideal of equality. This notion of equality in a society of enslaved labor was possible because enslaved Africans and Indians were isolated and removed from politics, and the number of free whites was too small to threaten the “superiority of the men who assured them of their equality” (380).
Large planters and small planters’ equality came from not being slaves. Therefore, Morgan argues that in Virginia, “republican equality” rested on slavery as America’s “most ardent republicans were Virginians,” and their love of equality was related to their “power over the men and women they held in bondage” (381). The English, like John Locke, also excluded the poor. Therefore, in republican thought, the poor were just as much of a threat to liberty as the monarchy. And in republican Virginia, Jefferson agreed that dangers surrounded “freedom of the dependent poor” (384). But in Virginia, where two-fifths of Virginia’s poor were “as poor as it is possible to get,” they were enslaved and worked for their masters to improve the masters’ independence, and the masters in turn were free to fight “British tyranny” (385).
So, even though republican Virginians were “disturbed by the apparent inconsistency of what they were doing,” they were even more horrified by the idea of freeing 200,000 slaves into a free society (385). England cast the poor as an “alien race” to justify its exploitation of them, but since the enslaved in Virginia were of a different race, there was nothing to construct. Thus, racism for Virginians held the same “fear and contempt” as feelings toward the poor did for the English. Since only a small number of poor in Virginia were free—and Negroes, Indians, and mulattoes were in one “pariah class”—free whites joined together as a “master class” (386). Those in the North threatened to leave the United States over slavery, but they did not.
But in the end, the path for the United States that the Virginians had charted led to slavery’s end.
Chapters 17-18 Analysis
These two chapters highlight how the title of Morgan’s book, American Slavery, American Freedom, could just have easily been reversed, since the freedmen’s freedom led to American slavery.
When the great master class was created, it was done to advance the interests of both the big planters and the small planters, the freedmen. From one point of view, the freedmen deserved all they got; they had worked hard to climb up the servitude ladder. Some came to the colony as young boys, stayed in servitude until they were 30 years of age, got their land, and made something of themselves. In some ways, the master class exemplifies the success of the American story of pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps.
Moreover, the freedmen achieved what no other group of former servants were achieving around the world: They had a say in their lives. Even though they had the vote taken away by the assembly after the rebellion, they were a large enough group, with enough years into the colony, that they could finally really influence what the big farmers did, and the governing elites had to listen to them, given the threat they posed to rebel again.
But the negative view is that the freedmen were bought off with a few trinkets, then sold out for the promise of being part of a racist social system that gave them power by virtue of their skin color. The only true power they wielded was oppressing those weaker than themselves. Unlike the big planters, they had survived that system, and they knew its horrors. Their new freedom in turn became the freedom to join the big planters in oppressing another group of people.
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