Introduction
The origins of slavery and racism in colonial America have been hotly debated issues among historians. Edmund S. Morgan’s article “Slavery and Freedom: The American Paradox” argues that slavery enabled the growth of liberty and democracy in colonial Virginia. Specifically, Morgan contends that importing enslaved Africans reduced threats from poor whites to the social order and allowed an expansion of rights for propertied whites. This interpretation has been challenged by other scholars like Oscar and Mary Handlin, who view racism as an outgrowth of slavery rather than a cause. In “The Origins Debate: Slavery and Racism in Seventeenth-Century Virginia,” Alden T. Vaughan provides an overview of this historiographical debate. He argues that “a racist ideology existed [in early Virginia], though incomplete,” and was “virulent” in contributing to the enslavement of blacks (Vaughan 1989, 350). While acknowledging points of consensus, Vaughan highlights areas where major disagreements persist. Although Morgan examines significant depth in his argument and examination of leaders, he is not persuasive because of a lack of breadth, hasty generalization, and confirmation bias.
Strengths of Morgan’s Argument
A major analytical strength of Morgan’s work is the depth he brings to exploring the myriad social dynamics and economic motivations catalyzing Virginia’s rapidly growing slave system by the late 17th century. He thoroughly investigates the complex incentives and class tensions undergirding slavery’s entrenchment rather than simplistically reducing it to racism alone. As Morgan notes, “Racism made it possible for white Virginians to tolerate, and even to sanction, the subjection of Indians and Negroes to a treatment that they would have resisted for themselves.”[1] Morgan methodically examines economic interests, like the profitability of slavery for elite planters, rising in tandem with racial ideologies. He extensively covers how growing reliance on slave labor aligned with the economic motivations of colonial Virginia’s gentry class. Morgan calculates that “slave labor was considerably more valuable than free labor” based on production output comparisons.[2] He traces over decades how colonial leaders perpetuated slavery growth through legislation catering to wealthy planters’ priorities like expanded tax exemptions. Rather than a reductionist portrait of slavery as an inevitable outgrowth of racism, Morgan’s detailed analysis captures the symbiotic social and economic variables allowing Virginia’s slave regime to evolve incrementally. His comprehensive inspection of the profit-making addiction and class tensions slavery fueled provides a deeper understanding than a simplistic attribution to bigotry alone.
Another strength of Morgan’s argument is his extensive use of supporting detail and examples to substantiate his claims regarding social tensions in early Virginia between elite planters and poorer colonists. He comprehensively chronicles the historical progression of how the Virginia colony “developed its special brand of slavery” over time.[3] Morgan leverages substantial documentary evidence like legislative petitions and laws to showcase the mounting conflicts between wealthy planters and landless freemen. For instance, he highlights a 1676 petition requesting restrictions on servant freedoms signed by over 1,000 Virginian property owners nervous about rising class antagonisms from poor whites.[4] Morgan bolsters the petition’s credibility as hard evidence for heightening elite planter fears over losing social control by including specifics like signature numbers. Also, Morgan examines how colonial Virginia laws evolved to increasingly concentrate power and land ownership with the gentry class while expanding the enslavement of Blacks. He notes relevant legislation like the 1950’s “Act Concerning Servants and Slaves” that specifically differentiated rights and status between indentured servants, enslaved people, and freemen.[5] The subtle details Morgan provides across official petitions, laws, and records substantiate rising elite domination bolstered by slavery’s growth. The depth of supportive documentation firmly grounds his arguments about widening inequality and social dissension based on racial lines.
Morgan’s work examines the complex paradoxes in Virginia’s evolving conceptualizations of liberty. Specifically, he insightfully explores contradictions underpinning Founding Fathers like Thomas Jefferson rather than simplistically dismissing them as hypocrites. Morgan notes that by the 1770s, Jefferson’s era, “Virginians had found ways to talk about freedom that avoided the awkwardness of the contradiction between slavery and freedom.”[6] He explains how Virginia’s gentry class reconciled enslaving people themselves while advocating for colonial liberties from British impositions. Jefferson could condemn tyranny in the Declaration of Independence yet still depend economically on human bondage in his personal affairs. Rather than critiquing Jefferson’s glaring personal hypocrisy, Morgan seeks to unpack the societal mindsets allowing such paradoxical thinking. He argues that the rise of racism and belief systems privileging white freedoms over Black equality enabled plantation owners like Jefferson to advocate abstract liberties still premised on slavery’s persistence.[7] Morgan’s analysis acknowledges inconvenient paradoxes in Virginia’s evolving ideologies instead of oversimplifying. His contextual examination of how such contradictions developed gives an insightful, balanced perspective into the complicated figure of Jefferson himself. Morgan moves beyond facile accusations of surface hypocrisy to trace the complex evolution of paradoxical concepts allowing slavery and liberty to coexist unchallenged in Virginian mentalities.
Weakness of the Argument
While Morgan provides a thorough, nuanced analysis of how slavery enabled the rise of liberty, specifically in Virginia, a weakness of his argument is its limited breadth in not comparing Virginia’s development to other colonies wrestling with similar tensions between freedom and bondage.[8] The article focuses solely on Virginia in its attempt to explain away the paradox of slavery rather than situating Virginia in the broader colonial context, mainly colonies like “South Carolina,” where the rise of slavery preceded the rise of freedom.[9] Morgan hyper-focused on tobacco’s role, arguing the crop’s boom after 1640 increased white mortality rates and eventually reliance on enslaved people. Still, it does not compare to rice farming in the Carolinas or sugar farming in the Caribbean. As historian Alden Vaughan argues in “The Origins Debate,” while racism and economic structures enabled slavery’s rise across British colonies, “the rate and timing of enslavement varied from colony to colony according to local circumstance,” including religious beliefs, political structure, availability of free labor and existing forms of coerced labor.[10] While Morgan thoroughly analyzes Virginia’s shift to racial slavery, examining other colonial regions could better highlight distinctiveness versus similarities in economic and social tensions shaping the growth of bonded labor and ideas of freeman rights across colonial British America in the 17th and 18th centuries.
In attempting to contextualize planter elites’ distrust towards landless laborers, Morgan sometimes makes sweeping categorizations that could reflect selective perception and oversimplify complex groups’ motives. He states that impoverished English workers were “predominantly single men” who masters viewed as holding little interest in the country while prone to rebellion, and that masters believed freed servants, if emancipated, would inevitably “‘steal for their support”.[11] For example, slavery had shallow roots in New England compared to the Chesapeake, so the nexus between rising liberty and slavery played out differently there. Historian Alden T. Vaughan notes that while many freed servants lacked resources, others prospered from land ownership, and some even participated in civil positions, diversities obscured by generalizing labels like “‘rabble.”[12] Rather than simply idleness or ingratitude, artisans and indentured servants frequently rebelled against exploitation and unjust extensions of contracts. While unemployment and inequality contributed to unrest, categorically presuming impoverished workers as uniformly apathetic risks legitimizing elite biases. As the Elements of Thought by Elder and Paul contend, the “absence of precision” leaves arguments vulnerable to questions of accuracy.[13] Through oversimplification, parts of Morgan’s framing reflect the selective perceptions of privileged planters rather than accounting for divergent realities across Virginia’s diverse labor force.
Edmund Morgan argues that the rise of slavery and ideas of freedom developed interdependently, each relying on the other for sustenance. While Morgan makes a persuasive case, he may exhibit confirmation bias by emphasizing evidence that supports his perspective on economic motivations driving slavery’s growth while minimizing conflicting viewpoints. As one example, Morgan contends that “the freedom of some was built on the slavery of others” primarily based on economic needs, specifically the profitability of slavery for Southern landowners.[14] He details extensively how the Southern economy depended on slave labor. However, he gives less consideration to social rationales influencing slavery’s expansion. Critics like Vaughan have argued that Morgan “underestimated cultural factors” as equally impactful.[15] Focused on proving his economic motivation thesis, Morgan privileged supporting evidence like profit data while excluding cultural components from his analysis. His selective use of evidence seemingly exhibiting confirmation bias weakens his argument by overlooking complex interacting dynamics, allowing slavery to persist. Vaughan notes that “a single-factor explanation” falters in encapsulating slavery’s multifaceted logical framework intersecting economic, cultural, and social elements.[16]
Conclusion
Morgan masterfully exposes the central paradox of American liberty thriving alongside racial subjugation. However insightful, his dependence on the Virginia model led him to overstate slavery’s role in relieving class tensions throughout colonial America. Similarly, his focus fixed so tightly on elite white perspectives obscures blacks’ lived experience of emerging racism and bondage. Nevertheless, Morgan’s analysis powerfully spotlights American freedom’s roots in inequality and oppression. As he concludes, the Revolution only rendered “the contradictions more glaring” in a new nation advocating sweeping rights yet denying them to millions. The profound challenge he issued over fifty years ago to interrogate this paradox remains as urgent as ever if we hope to redeem the failed promise of 1776. However, by primarily fixating on financial incentives, Morgan fails to address alternative viewpoints exploring cultural mentalities and societal norms critical for slavery’s acceptance. Consequently, his narrow analytical lens suffers from confirmation bias in emphasizing solely confirmatory perspectives.
Bibliography
“15 Logical Fallacies You Should Know Before Getting into a Debate.” Accessed September 12, 2021. https://www.aresearchguide.com/15-logical-fallacies-you-should-know-before-getting-into-a-debate.html
Harvey, Mark. “Slavery, indenture and the development of British industrial capitalism.” In History Workshop Journal, vol. 88, pp. 66-88. Oxford University Press, 2019.
Morgan, Edmund S. “Slavery and Freedom: The American Paradox.” The Journal of American History Vol. 59, no. 1 (Jun 1972): 5-29.
Paul, Richard. “Critical Thinking and Ethics” Inquiry: Critical Thinking Across the Disciplines.” Accessed September 12, 2021. https://www.criticalthinking.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Critical-Thinking-Ethics-and-Community.pdf
Vaughan, Alden. “The Origins Debate: Slavery and Racism in Seventeenth-Century Virginia.” The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, vol. 97, no. 3, (1989), 312. JSTOR.
[1] Edmund S. Morgan, “Slavery and Freedom: The American Paradox,” Journal of American History 59, no. 1 (June 1972): 25.
[2] Morgan, “Slavery and Freedom: The American Paradox,” Journal of American History 59, no. 1 (1972): 12.
[3] Morgan, “Slavery and Freedom: The American Paradox,” Journal of American History 59, 4.
[4] Morgan, “Slavery and Freedom: The American Paradox,” 17.
[5] Morgan, “Slavery and Freedom,” 19.
[6] “Slavery and Freedom,” 18.
[7] “Slavery and Freedom,” 24.
[8] “15 Logical Fallacies You Should Know Before Getting into a Debate.” Accessed September 12, 2021.
[9] Vaughan, Alden. “The Origins Debate: Slavery and Racism in Seventeenth-Century Virginia.” The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, vol. 97, no. 3, 1989, p. 311. JSTOR.
[10] Vaughan. “The Origins Debate: Slavery and Racism in Seventeenth-Century Virginia.” The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, vol. 97, no. 3, 1989, p. 312.
[11] Harvey, Mark. “Slavery, indenture and the development of British industrial capitalism.” In History Workshop Journal, vol. 88, pp. 69. Oxford University Press, 2019.
[12] Vaughan. “The Origins Debate: Slavery and Racism in Seventeenth-Century Virginia.” The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, vol. 97, no. 3, 1989, p. 332.
[13] Paul, Richard. “Critical Thinking and Ethics” Inquiry: Critical Thinking Across the Disciplines.” Accessed September 12, 2021.
[14] Edmund S. Morgan, “Slavery and Freedom: The American Paradox,” (1972).
[15] Vaughan, “The Origins Debate: Slavery and Racism in Seventeenth-Century Virginia,” no. 3 (1989): 323.
[16] “The Origins Debate: Slavery and Racism in Seventeenth-Century Virginia,” no. 3 (1989): 324.
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