In the American Revolution, Virginians were the most eloquent spokesmen
for freedom and quality. George Washington led the Americans in battle
against British oppression. Thomas Jefferson led them in declaring
independence. Virginians drafted not only the Declaration but also the
Constitution and the Bill of Rights; they were elected to the presidency
of the United States under that Constitution for thirty-two of the first
thirty-six years of its existence. They were all slaveholders. In the
new preface Edmund S. Morgan writes: Human relations among us still
suffer from the former enslavement of a large portion of our
predecessors. The freedom of the free, the growth of freedom experienced
in the American Revolution depended more than we like to admit on the
enslavement of more than 20 percent of us at that time. How republican
freedom came to be supported, at least in large part, by its opposite,
slavery, is the subject of this book. American Slavery, American
Freedom is a study of the tragic contradiction at the core of America.
Morgan finds the keys to this central paradox, the marriage of slavery
and freedom, in the people and the politics of the state that was both
the birthplace of the Revolution and the largest slaveholding state in
the country.
