American Slavery, American Freedom Quotes

“And he wanted no more of those other Puritan specialties: schools and books. In Virginia, he said, “I thank God, there are no free schools nor printing, and I hope we shall not have these hundred years; for learning has brought disobedience, and heresy, and sects into the world, and printing has divulged them, and libels against the best government. God keep us from both!”
― Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom

“What, then, of the liberated slaves and Indians? The saddest part of the story and perhaps the most revealing is that no one bothered to say. None of the accounts either of Drake’s voyage or of the Roanoke colony mentions what became of them.”
― Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom

“There is no denying that Francis Drake was a pirate and that the enterprise he conducted four years later in Panama was highway robbery, or at best, highjacking. But it was on the scale that transforms crime into politics.”
― Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom

“How, then, did Virginia gentlemen persuade the voters to return the right kind of people to the House of Burgesses? How could patricians win in populist politics? The question can lead us again to the paradox which has underlain our story, the union of freedom and slavery in Virginia and America.”
― Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom

“These numbers gave Virginia’s population about six times as large a proportion of gentlemen as England had. Gentlemen, by definition, had no manual skill, nor could they be expected to work at ordinary labor.”
― Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom

“… the great and fundamental principles of their policy are, that every man is naturally free and independent, that no one … on earth has any right to deprive him of his freedom and independency, and that nothing can be a compensation for the loss of it.” Robert Rogers, A Concise Account of North America (London, 1765),”
― Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom

“The answer lies in the fact that slave labor, in spite of its seeming superiority, was actually not as advantageous as indentured labor the first half of the century. Because of the high mortality among immigrants to Virginia, there could be no great advantage in owning a man for a lifetime rather than a period of years, especially since a slave cost roughly twice as much as an indentured servant. If the chances of a man's dying during his first five years in Viriginia were fifty-fifty – and it seems apparent that they were- and if English servants could be made to work as hard as slaves, English servants for a five-year term were the better buy.”
― Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom

“Like other imperialists, Hakluyt was convinced that the world would be better off under his country’s dominion, and indeed that all good people would welcome it. Who would not gladly abandon the tyranny of Spain for the benevolence, the freedom of English rule?”
― Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom