The Scholar
Edmund S. Morgan (1916–2013) was born in New York City and educated at Yale. He taught American history at Yale for forty-five years, becoming a towering figure in early American historiography. His work on Puritan New England, the American Revolution, and colonial Virginia earned him multiple Pulitzer Prize nominations and the National Book Award.
Morgan approached American history from the perspective of political culture and ideology. He sought to understand how ideas about liberty and governance took root in colonies that practiced unfree labor.
The Central Paradox
In American Slavery, American Freedom (1975), Morgan identified what he called the central paradox of American history: that the nation’s devotion to liberty and its practice of slavery grew up together in colonial Virginia, each enabling the other. The same elite class that preached freedom for white planters depended on Black labor to sustain the tobacco economy that funded it.
Morgan argues that Virginia’s ruling class turned to racial slavery deliberately – not because African labor was naturally suited to bondage, but because enslaving Black people solved multiple problems at once: it provided stable labor supply, defused class conflict among poor whites, and created a permanent underclass that could not demand rights. Slavery was not an accident of colonization. It was a policy choice.
The Bridge to the Archive
Morgan supplies the Archive with its explanation of motive. Why did a colony founded on English ideals of rights become a society built on bondage? Because the planter class calculated that racial slavery secured their power more reliably than class solidarity ever could. This is not moral failure – it is structural design.
The archive uses Morgan to show that slavery was not imposed on Americans from outside. It was chosen by them, rationalized by them, and defended by them as necessary to the republic’s survival. That distinction matters. The interruption was not just the auction block – it was the deliberate calculation that Black bodies must be rendered disposable so that white citizenship could be absolute.