Anders Walker

Edward J. Larson will probably be banned in Florida. His new book, American Inheritance: Liberty and Slavery in the Birth of a Nation, 1765-1795, plunges headfirst into a roiling debate over America’s racist origins, a debate that splashed across Internet platforms five years ago when The New York Times Magazine published The 1619 Project, a collection of hard-hitting essays on America’s anti-Black past. Headed by investigative journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, the project claimed that the true founding of the United States was 1619, the year the first Africans arrived in British North America, and that the true story of the United States was – and remains – one of relentless racism against Black people. Even the Revolution, argued Hannah-Jones, was motivated by a racist desire to preserve slavery.

Hannah-Jones received mixed reviews for her polemic from historians, but she captivated progressive audiences with a national speaking tour, a Hulu documentary, and a “1619 Curriculum” for public schools. Conservatives countered with their own “1776 Project” (sponsored by the Trump White House) and a Senate bill aimed at “Saving American History” sponsored by Tom Cotton, Marsha Blackburn, and others. “The 1619 Project is based on false narrative,” declared Senator Blackburn, “and a stack of lies about our country.”¹

Into this “partisan minefield,” as he puts it, steps Larson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and law professor who takes up many of the points made by The 1619 Project and elaborates on them by deftly weaving together an array of familiar secondary sources and not-so-familiar primary ones. Out of this comes a frank look at just how prevalent racial prejudice was in America during the late 18th Century, both North and South. For example, Larson provides us with a startling look at the racial views of Benjamin Franklin, a Framer who did not own enslaved people but nevertheless imagined that America would be better off without Blacks. “Why increase Sons of Africa,” complained Franklin, “by Planting them in America [?]”

Larson also takes up the controversial argument that racism fueled the Revolution and argues that yes, some Americans did indeed fight Britain to save slavery and preserve white supremacy, including white southerners who rankled at Lord Mansfield’s 1772 opinion in Somerset v. Stewart, and white Americans generally who balked at the 1775 announcement by Virginia governor John Murray, the Earl of Dunsmore, that all Black men who joined the British army during the Revolution were free. Dunsmore’s Proclamation, argues Larson, “probably [did] more to boost the patriot cause than the loyalist one,” for many white Americans were simply not prepared to see themselves subdued by Black soldiers. (P. 98.)

Larson shows persuasively that a general prejudice against Black people existed throughout the thirteen colonies, even in places where the majority opposed slavery. And slavery, Larson continues, provided colonists with a useful trope for opposing Britain. Again and again, white colonists compared their plight to that of slaves, and argued that the British were treating them like Black people, a rhetorical move that helped them build support not simply for reform, but for revolution. “[P]rosperous colonial lawyers, planters, and merchants from New England to the Carolinas,” writes Larson, asserted that they “would become Parliament’s Negroes” if they did not resist oppressive measures like the Stamp Act. (P. 34.) Even John Adams, who never owned slaves, stoked revolutionary sentiment by invoking race, arguing on the one hand that Parliament was enslaving whites and – on the other – that whites had to either resist or become Black. “We won’t be their negroes [sic],” he declared, using racism to fuel patriotism. (P. 44.)

Here, Larson’s account dovetails with Edmund S. Morgan’s story about colonial Virginia in his Pulitzer Prize winning book American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia. Published in 1975, Morgan’s book suggests there was nothing hypocritical about white slave owners like Jefferson, Madison, and Washington lobbying for liberty, since their very status as slave-owners was precisely what made them free.

Larson locates his work firmly “in the tradition” of Morgan, pitching it as sort of a sequel to American Slavery, American Freedom. “Where Morgan focused on seventeenth-century Virginia,” argues Larson, “this book center on the thirty core years of the Revolutionary Era, 1765-1795, and broadens the lens to include Blacks and whites, patriots and loyalists, politics and warfare, and all the states from New England to the lower South.” Morgan’s argument therefore dances in the background of Larson’s tale.

Both historians suggest that slavery and race were not problems in American history, so much as solutions. For Morgan, race solved the problem of class by dividing the poor and reducing the odds of armed uprisings like Bacon’s Rebellion. For Larson, race galvanized white colonists by giving them a unifying identity that transcended their ancient European grudges, and rallying cry that helped them to cast obedience to England as racial betrayal. Whether they were English, Irish, German or Dutch, in other words, white Americans all agreed that they were not Black, and only Blacks could – in their minds – be treated like slaves. The very fact that they identified themselves as white people was – in a way – revolutionary. (P. vii.)

Often cast as America’s “original sin,” racism in Larson’s book looks more like original glue, a bonding agent that united whites – North and South, rich and poor – and helped them stick together as they embark on a risky political voyage without a monarch or a church. Which leads to a question that Larson does not answer. If racism truly is part of America’s inheritance from the founding generation on, just like the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution, how can we ever hope to be rid of it? What other “glue” might there be to hold us together as we begin to imagine a truly interracial democracy?

Perhaps it is, as Jill Lepore argues, “these truths,” the very abstract ideals that Thomas Jefferson invoked in the Declaration of Independence. Though he and his founding brothers may have been racists, as Larson demonstrates, their ideals were not. And the future need not be either.

1. Tom Cotton, Cotton, McConnell, Colleagues Introduce Bill to Defund 1619 Project Curriculum (June 14, 2021).