In 1776, Virginia held 40 percent of all enslaved people in the mainland colonies. As a result, white free laborers and tenant farmers numbered too few in Virginia to challenge the white men in power. The historian Edmund S. Morgan argues in his classic book American Slavery, American Freedom that well-off white Virginians, most of whom enslaved people, could champion a form of republican representative government defined by the absence of a formal ruling class or monarchy without threatening their own status as elites for one simple reason: they knew that the system of slavery meant that most
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