Slavery And Freedom And Myne Owne Ground

The idea of slavery throughout the origins of American history is one coated in heavy fog. Both Breen and Innes in “Myne Owne Ground”, and Morgan in his article “Slavery and Freedom” make an attempt to clear the fog around it in different ways. Breen and Innes focus on cases of black slaves who found their way to freedom through manumissions and eventually owned slaves, to show that property had more to do with it than race. While Morgan approaches the idea of slavery from the rather traditional view of race based and an idea of Africans lacking rights regardless of the liberty the founding fathers wanted to grant. The two are similar in nature due to the driving force of slavery each lays a claim to not being race based. Breen and Innes …show more content…
“On this level blacks and whites dealt with each other essentially as equals”. The idea of blacks and whites on an even playing field is one that is completely foreign to the common person’s historical context. While in the context of the Northhampton community it makes perfect sense. This is the same community in which Anthony Johnson, a black slave, bought his way to freedom and would go on to own his own black slaves. Looking at this community in a vacuum you will always get this skewed version of colonial America in which there was equal rights between blacks and whites based on the amount of property the person owns. They offer an additional example of another black man named Francis Payne whose master signed a document for court records that claims that Payne would buy two white male indentured servants to assist him in gaining his freedom. Presenting a case in which a black man technically …show more content…
To think of it from a business prospective and not under the lens of history for a brief moment, you want to cut spending as much as possible to create the greatest possible ROI, and for them that was the cheapest labor which would have been slaves. While this doesn’t justify the horrendous things that happened to the African slave population it does refute the idea that racism played the majority role in the grand scheme of things. Morgan doesn’t completely shelf the idea of racism though, he even says for a fact that “racism was surely an essential element”. These two things combined to form what slavery would become, and eventually formulated a gaping logical hole in American philosophy of society and general ideologies. Yet racism still didn’t lay claim to that logical hole entirely part of it would’ve came from the founding fathers distaste towards the lack of freedom one gets from being in debt. In short Morgan uses the fears of the founding fathers and need for cheap labor as a justification for slavery in colonial America while shelfing the idea racism being the majority driving