Slavery and freedom is said to be the central paradox of American history. Since the rise of United States as a nation, historians have long thought of the emergence of slavery and freedom in our society as a great contradiction. This pushed many critics to think that how could it be possible that slavery can co-exist for so long in a nation that upholds liberty and freedom? During the early 1970s, a great historian Edmund Morgan articulated that slavery and freedom can be far from being a contradiction. Fact is that American slavery and American freedom are a paradox. This is because these two concepts may seem contradictory, but in reality they are true elements of one another. In his book American Slavery, American Freedom, Morgan (1975) informed that the people who united together seek the independence of the United States had felt uncomfortable about the fact that they are “dedicated to freedom and equality” yet “they either held slaves or were willing to join hands with those who did”.
However, most of these “masters” have just inherited “both their slaves and their attachment to freedom from an earlier generation, and they knew that the two were not unconnected”. This is why Morgan (1975) thought that: “The rise of liberty and equality in America had been accompanied by the rise of slavery. That two such seemingly contradictory developments were taking place simultaneously over a long period of time, from the seventeenth century to the nineteenth, is the central paradox of American history” (Morgan, 1975).
Source: Morgan, Edmund S. American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia. New York: Norton, 1975.
