Jon Meacham reviews AMERICAN INHERITANCE: Liberty and Slavery in the Birth of a Nation, 1765-1795, by Edward J. Larson in this weeks New York Times Book Review. Here are some excerpts from the review:
…As early as 1680, a contemporary noted, the “two words, Negro and Slave,” had “by Custom grown Homogenous and Convertible” in the New World. On a visit to British North America around 1730, the cleric and philosopher George Berkeley reported finding “an irrational contempt of the blacks, as creatures of another species.” Note his terminology: Irrationality was a cardinal sin in a supposed Age of Reason.
Our own age has been hard on both reason and history. Too often the past has been deployed to fight the ideological wars of the moment, a tendency that reduces history to ammunition. And so Edward J. Larson’s “American Inheritance” is a welcome addition to a public conversation, in the wake of The New York Times’s 1619 Project, that has largely produced more heat than light.
“The role of liberty and slavery in the American Revolution is a partisan minefield,” Larson writes. “Drawing on a popular narrative presenting the expansion of liberty as a driving force in American history, some on the right dismiss the role of slavery in the founding of the Republic. Appealing to a progressive narrative of economic self-interest, and racial and gender bias in American history, some on the left see the defense of state-sanctioned slavery as a cause of the Revolution and an effect of the Constitution.” Larson, a prolific historian whose “Summer for the Gods” won a Pulitzer Prize in 1998, writes that this polarity “has opened the way for rigorous historical scholarship” in the tradition of Edmund Morgan and Benjamin Quarles.
“American Inheritance,” then, comes to us as an effort to step into the blood-strewn chaos of the present to calm the madness of a public stage where passion has trumped reason. As Larson argues, liberty, slavery and racism — an essential element of slavery — have always been entwined. “One way or another,” he writes, “the American Revolution resulted in the first great emancipation of enslaved Blacks in the New World.”
Yet to deny that a liberty-seeking people largely denied freedom and equality to the enslaved is to deny a self-evident truth. Mindless celebration of the American past is just that — mindless. But so is reflexive condemnation. The messy, difficult, unavoidable truth of the American story is that it is fundamentally a human one. Imperfect, selfish, greedy, cruel — and sometimes noble. One might wish the nation’s story were simple. But that wish is in vain.
A key lesson from Larson’s narrative is that ages past were not benighted by a lack of knowledge of the immorality of race-based slavery. To me, Larson’s unemotional account of the Republic’s beginnings confirms a tragic truth: that influential white Americans knew — and understood — that slavery was wrong and liberty was precious, but chose not to act according to that knowledge and that understanding.
And it was a choice: one made for convenience. Slavery and racism were not externally imposed forces that lay beyond human control. They were, rather, economic, political and cultural constructs that served the purposes of the powerful — in this case, white people — and because of this, they stood for centuries.
“Our forefathers came over here for liberty,” John Adams argued in 1765. “Providence never designed us for negroes, I know, for if it wou’d have given us black hides, and thick lips, and flat noses, and short woolly hair, which it han’t done, and therefore never intended us for slaves.” And yet in the same era Benjamin Rush could write: “Where is the difference between the British Senator who attempts to enslave his fellow subjects in America, by imposing Taxes upon them contrary to Law and Justice; and the American Patriot who reduces his African Brethren to Slavery, contrary to Justice and Humanity?” How, the Quaker Richard Wells asked in 1774, can Americans “reconcile the exercise of SLAVERY with our professions of freedom?”
The answer is painful, but must be stated plainly: Americans reconciled the gap between the ideal and the real, profession and practice, by blaming the Old World for imposing what was called a “necessary evil,” by crafting racist lies about Black inferiority, and by manipulating Scripture to find biblical sanction for slavery. “Race,” Larson observes, “offered a way for them to enslave others without the fear of becoming enslaved themselves.”
Does this make the national experiment irredeemable? Are the shadows of our failures so dark and so long that no light can emanate from our past? In Larson’s terms, does our inheritance of slavery overwhelm our legacy of liberty?
The centuries since America’s founding suggest the answer is a qualified no. The antislavery tradition in the country — one older than even the Revolutionary vernacular of liberty — offers a positive moral and political example of how a people can move from error to truth. For all the Constitution’s compromises with slaveholders, James Madison noted that the document did not explicitly recognize “property in man,” thus giving the antislavery project room to maneuver and to grow. Such was Frederick Douglass’s view when he insisted that the Constitution was a “glorious Liberty document.”
In a 1791 letter to Thomas Jefferson, who had written of Black inferiority in his “Notes on the State of Virginia,” the free Black man and almanac author Benjamin Banneker argued for the natural extension of Jefferson’s own assertions in the Declaration of Independence to all human beings. “However variable we may be in Society or religion,” Banneker wrote, “however diversified in Situation or colour, we are all of the Same Family.” That is a truth we, too, must hold to be self-evident, even if our forebears chose not to do so.
Neither as rigorously argued as Sean Wilentz’s “No Property in Man” nor as original as Manisha Sinha’s “The Slave’s Cause,” Larson’s sober new book nevertheless repays reading, for it has a good deal to teach those who want to see the American story in overly simplistic terms. Which means someone should send several copies to Tallahassee — with express shipping.
