Countryman, Ed., How Did American Slavery Begin?

Abstract

In a recent essay in The New York Review of Books (3 December 1998), Edmund Morgan called slavery "The Big American Crime." Indeed, it has remained, for the past fifty years, one of the central themes of the American experience, explored by some of the best minds and writers of our history. In many ways, our national genesis, our most basic values, and identity as a nation lay in the paradox of the simultaneous creation of freedom and slavery in early American history.