American Indians were most clearly deemed free by Virginia law early in the 1800s, and Indians who were unable to gain their freedom often became assimilated within the predominantly African enslaved communities. Some scholars argue that Indian enslavement had declined by 1800 because Indians were prone to illness or escape, but others maintain that it was only when Indians, wracked by war and enslavement, could not provide a sufficient quantity of cheap workers that English colonists turned primarily to chattel African slavery. Virginia’s laws were neither clear nor effective with respect to the enslavement of Indians, at times banning the practice and at other times encouraging it. While there are examples of continued enslavement of Indians throughout the early settlement period, mass enslavement typically coincided with the upheaval of war that led to Indian prisoners who could be sold. Europeans sold guns for enslaved captives in an existing indigenous trading market and encouraged allied tribes to provide these enslaved people by targeting Indian groups on the periphery of English settlements. African slavery took nearly a century to develop, however, and in the meantime those white Virginians who required men and women to work as servants or in tobacco fields mostly relied on indentured servants and enslaved Indians. By this time the Atlantic slave trade was at its peak, flooding Virginia with cheaper African labor. Morgan finds the keys to this central paradox, "the marriage of slavery and freedom," in the people and the politics of the state that was both the birthplace of the Revolution and the largest slaveholding state in the country.Indians were enslaved in Virginia by settlers and traders from shortly after the founding of Jamestown until the end of the eighteenth century, peaking late in the seventeenth century and providing a workforce for English plantations and households. American Slavery, American Freedom is a study of the tragic contradiction at the core of America. How republican freedom came to be supported, at least in large part, by its opposite, slavery, is the subject of this book. The freedom of the free, the growth of freedom experienced in the American Revolution depended more than we like to admit on the enslavement of more than 20 percent of us at that time. Morgan writes: "Human relations among us still suffer from the former enslavement of a large portion of our predecessors.
Virginians drafted not only the Declaration but also the Constitution and the Bill of Rights they were elected to the presidency of the United States under that Constitution for thirty-two of the first thirty-six years of its existence. Thomas Jefferson led them in declaring independence. George Washington led the Americans in battle against British oppression. In the American Revolution, Virginians were the most eloquent spokesmen for freedom and quality.
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