Ed Larson: Liberty and Slavery in the Birth of Our Nation

Pulitzer Prize-winner Ed Larson returns to The Commonwealth Club with a revealing look at how the twin strands of liberty and slavery were joined in the nation’s founding. New attention from historians and journalists has been raising pointed questions: Was the American revolution waged to preserve slavery? Was the Constitution a pact with slavery, or was it a landmark in the antislavery movement? Leaders who called for American liberty are scrutinized for enslaving Black people themselves, such as George Washington’s consistent refusal to recognize the freedom of those who escaped his Mount Vernon plantation.

Larson insightfully synthesizes these issues in his new history of the founding that fully includes Black Americans in the Revolutionary protests, the war, and the debates over slavery and freedom that followed. With slavery thriving in Britain’s Caribbean empire and practiced in all of the American colonies, the independence movement’s calls for liberty proved far too narrow — though some Black observers and others made their full implications clear. In the war, both sides employed strategies to draw needed support from free and enslaved Blacks, whose responses varied by local conditions. But by the time of the Constitutional Convention, a widening sectional divide shaped the fateful compromises over slavery that would prove disastrous in the coming decades.

Larson delivers poignant moments that deepen our understanding: We witness New York’s tumultuous welcome of Washington as liberator through the eyes of Daniel Payne, a Black man who had escaped enslavement at Mount Vernon two years before. Indeed, it is the voices of Black Americans that prove the most convincing of all on the urgency of liberty.

Speaker photo by Cronhall Photography.

January 24, 2023

Speakers

Edward Larson
University Professor of History, and Darling Chair in Law, Pepperdine University; Author, American Inheritance: Liberty and Slavery in the Birth of a Nation, 1765-1795

In Conversation with George Hammond
Author, Conversations With Socrates

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[johnkelly]

In 17th and 18th century in colonial America, the majority of Americans were immigrants, and a majority of immigrants were either indentured servants or slaves.

[Patriot]

Slavery was a major economic money maker in the South because of the kind of crops that could be grown using it. This was not a profitable institution in the Northern states. Slavery was able to be continued for centuries because the color of the slaves allowed them to be seen as separate from white settlers and indentured white servants. In addition, the Christian religion was used as an excuse to “save black souls” — at least initially in the colonies. Slavery was never an ethical or moral issue at the time of the Revolution except for a small percentage of the colonial population, especially those whites in the South, who were making the most money from it.  

As with all else in this country: follow the money. Many of the Constitutional “compromises” that today allow a minority to control national decisions à la Electoral College are the consequence of the fact that the majority of the money making and GNP of the colonies were in the South although the general population was mostly in the North. That difficult moral decision was postponed by cutting off importation after 1808 but, of course, the population already here was allowed to increase and interstate trading of slaves remained perfectly legal.

Meanwhile, people today also don’t realize that most people could not vote at the time. You had to be a certain age and you had to have some property and you had to be male. Need
Ess to say: slaves never had a vote. Our Constitution is a patchwork of compromises and we are still paying for the compromises we made with slave states. Only those who live in a Dream World think of the nation as some perfect construction from the beginning.