• DOI:10.1111/hisn.12420
• Corpus ID: 151454311

Liberty and Slavery in Colonial America: The Case of Georgia, 1732–1770

@article{Lannen2017LibertyAS,
  title={Liberty and Slavery in Colonial America: The Case of Georgia, 1732–1770},
  author={Andrew C. Lannen},
  journal={The Historian},
  year={2017},
  volume={79},
  pages={32 - 55}
}

• Andrew C. Lannen
• Published 1 March 2017
• History
• The Historian

IN 1775, DURING heated debates between Great Britain and its American colonies over issues of taxation and government, Samuel Johnson famously asked: “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?” Johnson exposed a puzzling contradiction at the heart of American society: How could a people so fiercely proclaim a commitment to individual freedom while practicing slavery? However, American colonists in the eighteenth century did not see a contradiction. Rather, colonists saw both slavery and liberty as essential components of their world: White liberty could not be fully realized without the existence of black slavery. Two centuries after Johnson raised his question, Edmund Morgan published a groundbreaking study investigating the origins of the connection between white freedom and black slavery. He suggested that seventeenth-century Virginia planters had grown concerned over economic problems caused by a reliance on white indentured servants for labor. Ex-servants had difficulty acquiring good land of their own, and instead found themselves pushed out towards the frontier or down into landless poverty. The resulting underclass of poor white men, argued Morgan, presented a series of challenges to the established order, most notably expressed in Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676. In response, Virginians turned to the use of African slaves. The importation of slaves from Africa over time reduced the number of poor and landless whites. The presence of slaves also altered the social order, drawing a sharp racial divide and uniting different classes of whites through their shared free status. It was the presence of African