Will I love American Slavery, American Freedom?

How did the Virginia slaveholders somehow become the most celebrated spokesmen for “liberty” and “equality” in the Revolutionary Era even though they all owned hundreds of slaves? Morgan contends that to understand this paradox one has to go back to 17th-century colonial Virginia where American slavery and American freedom emerged together. Moreover, argues Morgan, those days not only had a profound effect on the American Revolution and the Early Republic, but on everything that has happened since.

This is a classic of American history from one of our greatest historians. Morgan was a master of both the art and the craft of history, and that skill is on full display in this account of the Virginia Colony from its early seventeenth-century founding, through a series of Native American/colonial wars, to the rise and solidification of American chattel slavery. Morgan insightfully probes the question of how a nation founded on liberty could give rise to the extremes of slavery and freedom.