When they imagined their own colonies, they pictured submissive natives, laboring cheerfully to support their colonizers. Motivated by an intense imperial rivalry with Spain and a desire to bring glory to the English nation, early English explorers fantasized about liberating Indians oppressed by ruthless Spanish conquistadores. Morgan used these pages to sketch the genealogy of the Virginia Company’s plan for the North American mainland. It takes the reader of American Slavery, American Freedom forty-five pages to get to the British North American mainland, with stops in Spanish Florida and the doomed colony at Roanoke. Why, when so many other scholarly books can barely provide their authors with fifteen minutes of fame, has Morgan’s withstood twenty-five years of new research and changing scholarly fashion? How can we account for the persisting appeal of his narrative for students born long after it was written? I continue to assign Morgan’s classic study of British North America’s first slave society to my students, and they continue to read it with enthusiasm. Although the pages of the oldest copy are no longer attached to the paperback binding, it still enjoys a prime spot on my bookshelf because of its extensive marginalia and sentimental value–this is the copy I read in graduate school, the copy that inspired my first book. I own three copies of Edmund Morgan’s American Slavery, American Freedom (New York, 1976), the legacy of a decade of teaching early American history.
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