An impoverished Englishman looks out the window of the ship’s leaky hold. The year is 1639, and he has fallen victim to debt. In his already precarious social position, this indebted Englishman faced demoralization, disenfranchisement, and the as-of-yet unbreached social and economic wall of the Ancien Regime. The authorities of the time had little concern for his plight. The rapid population growth of the lowest classes in monarchic Europe made them eager to dispense of as many of the masses as possible. Our poor Englishman is, among many others, shipped to the American colonies, and sold into indentured servitude or made to spend his life in a penal colony. The trauma of this displacement and subsequent assimilation into a new, constructed colonial society was passed on
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Laws were passed which segregated African Americans and codified not only their economic enslavement but their social inferiority. In his work The Challenge of the Revolution, Edmund S. Morgan links white colonists’ destitute, restricted origins to their motives in establishing chattel slavery. Bathed in the third estate cultural trauma of marginalization in their European homeland, poor white Americans’ origins in poverty, debt and displacement led to a perceived need to protect their own interests by constructing and upholding the enslavement and under-class status of Africans in America.
Morgan on the American Fear of Debt and Impoverishment
In The Challenge of the Revolution, Morgan examines closely the relationship between the foundation of American slavery and white American fear of debt. He begins with Thomas Jefferson, an influential figure in the founding of the United States and their third President. Jefferson, himself both an eloquent supporter of freedom and a slave owner, embodied the paradox of American slavery in a nation allegedly founded on Enlightenment ideals of liberty and equality. The Enlightenment was, of course, rife with nascent
Laws were passed which segregated African Americans and codified not only their economic enslavement but their social inferiority. In his work The Challenge of the Revolution, Edmund S. Morgan links white colonists’ destitute, restricted origins to their motives in establishing chattel slavery. Bathed in the third estate cultural trauma of marginalization in their European homeland, poor white Americans’ origins in poverty, debt and displacement led to a perceived need to protect their own interests by constructing and upholding the enslavement and under-class status of Africans in America.
Morgan on the American Fear of Debt and Impoverishment
In The Challenge of the Revolution, Morgan examines closely the relationship between the foundation of American slavery and white American fear of debt. He begins with Thomas Jefferson, an influential figure in the founding of the United States and their third President. Jefferson, himself both an eloquent supporter of freedom and a slave owner, embodied the paradox of American slavery in a nation allegedly founded on Enlightenment ideals of liberty and equality. The Enlightenment was, of course, rife with nascent