Slavery and Freedom

Edmund S. Morgan's conclusion in The Challenge of the American Revolution states "It was slavery, I suggest, more than any other single factor, that had made the difference, slavery that enabled Virginia to nourish representative government in a plantation society". This conclusion is important because it suggests that slavery was essential to the establishment of America as a country. At first, this proposal seems absolutely crazy, or at least I thought so. Isn't American slavery a giant contradiction? Edmund Morgan argues that although it is hypocritical, that America could not be a free country if it weren't for slavery. Slavery solved the problem of an excess of freemen without work. The aristocrats of the early New World were threatened by the growing number of liberated men (previously indentured servants) because they were hungry and had weapons. Enslaving Africans united the white men, the plantation owner and yeoman farmer, and allowed for the upper-class men to create an organized government. It is important to clarify that the men who enslaved the blacks were not racists, but they had no other population to enslave as it would have been impossible to enslave English-born laborers. I think that slavery expanded in a way that the first slave owners were unable to predict and would not have wanted. The origins of American slavery were not based on cruelty and racism, but on the necessity to calm the increase of free men without work.