There is, Edmund Morgan observes in American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia, a contradiction at the heart of the American Revolution: the greatest champions of liberty in 1776 were, themselves, slave owners. However, far from finding a contradiction in the paradox, Morgan sees the institution of slavery as an essential precondition for Virginians' ultimate embrace of revolutionary republican ideology. "To a large degree," he writes, "it may be said that Americans bought their independence with slave labor." (5)
Morgan locates the origins of this paradox in the economic development of the Virginia colony in the 17th century. Although the colony was originally supposed to be self-supporting, and capable of producing a wide range of crops and products for export to Britain, the introduction of tobacco cultivation a decade after its founding determined the evolution of the colonial economy. A highly prized commodity, tobacco provided the colonists with a stable economic foundation, despite the initial resistance of the Crown, and would soon become their dominant cash crop.
However, tobacco cultivation required considerable manpower, and the leading men of the colony - who were, after all, according to Morgan, disinclined to hard labour themselves - solved the problem through the importation of large numbers of indentured servants. "Most workers were either tenants or servants bound for a period of years," Morgan writes. "Servants were what the planters most wanted." (106)
According to Morgan, coerced labour, initially in the form of indentured servitude, was a necessary precondition for Virginia's tobacco economy. However, by the middle of the 17th century, the system had run headlong into two problems. The first was that the economic conditions that had encouraged Englishmen to indenture themselves to the Virginia colony had eased, resulting in a reduction of the number of servants available. The second, and more serious problem, was that, with the improvement of conditions within the colony, freed servants were living long enough to form a substantial dispossessed class that threatened its stability.
While other strategies for minimizing class antagonism failed, the importation of African slaves was eminently successful. Morgan notes that "the substitution of slaves for servants gradually eased and eventually ended the threat that freedmen posed: as the annual number of imported servants dropped, so did the number of men turning free." (308)
Morgan argues that was not a "necessary ingredient of slavery," but "it was an ingredient." (315) Indeed, by creating a perpetually un-free workforce distinct from, and thus not entitled to the rights of Englishmen, Virginia was able to establish a kind of class solidarity. With former freedmen becoming small planters, and with the elimination of an exploited white workforce, the white classes of Virginia could see mutual interests. The poorer white colonists "were allowed not only to prosper, but also to acquire social, psychological, and political advantages that turned the trust of exploitation away from them and aligned them with the exploiters." (344)
With the introduction of Whig ideas to the colony following the Glorious Revolution in 1688, that alignment fostered a sense of common cause against tyranny and political equality based on slavery. Indeed, Morgan notes that "Aristocrats could more safely preach equality in a slave society than in a free one." (380)
Morgan makes a convincing case for his argument with a painstakingly detailed analysis of the economic structure of Virginian society, revealed principally in the legal and financial records of the colony. However, American Slavery, American Freedom has some curious flaws. Though Morgan devotes a fair amount of space to discussing a similar trajectory to slavery in Barbados at about the same time, he never quite explains what made the Virginia experience special. Why, after all, did Bermuda not join the American Revolution?
More serious is his failure to connect the slave-based class accommodation of the early 18th century with the apparent contradiction of Jefferson and Washington defending freedom while owning slaves. Although he begins the book with a desire to explain "the seeming inconsistency, not to say the hypocrisy, of slaveholders devoting themselves to freedom," (4) Morgan's one-page treatment of Jefferson himself never quite answers the question. While he expertly documents the foundation of the revolutionaries' ideological paradox, he fails to elucidate its content.