Morgan, Edmund S. American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia. New York: W. W. Norton, 1976.

== Summary ==
This
book examines how a people developed the dedication to human liberty and
dignity and at the same time developed and maintained a system of labor that
denied human liberty and dignity. Morgan argues that the rise of liberty and
equality in America was enabled by the rise of slavery. “The freedom of the
free, the growth of freedom experienced in the American Revolution depended
more than we like to admit on the enslavement of more than 20 percent of us at
that time.” Planters wanted more immigrants each year (labor) but “as more and
more turned free each year, Virginia seemed to have inherited the problem that
she was helping England to solve.” Thus, the presence of a growing class of
poverty-stricken Virginians was threatening to the planters who had made it to
the top or who had arrived in the colony already at the top, with ample supplies
of servants and cattle. “A free society divided between large landholders and
small was much less riven by antagonisms than one divided between landholders and
landless, masterless men.” Slavery was the means to account for labor shortages
and reduce antagonisms. Morgan thus argues, “It was slavery…more than any other single factor…made the difference,
slavery enabled Virginia to nourish representative government in a plantation
society, slavery that transformed the Virginia of Gov. Berkeley to the Virginia
of Jefferson, slavery that made the Virginians dare to speak a political
language that magnified the rights of freemen…” Slavery allowed aristocrats
to preach equality more safely (threat of rebellion reduced). 
See also: Kathleen Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches