American Inheritance: Liberty and Slavery in the Birth of a Nation, 1765-1795 -- Edward J. Larson, Hardcover

New attention from historians and journalists is raising pointed questions about the founding period: was the American revolution waged to preserve slavery, and was the Constitution a pact with slavery or a landmark in the antislavery movement? Leaders of the founding who called for American liberty are scrutinized for enslaving Black people themselves: George Washington consistently refused to recognize the freedom of those who escaped his Mount Vernon plantation. And we have long needed a history of the founding that fully includes Black Americans in the Revolutionary protests, the war, and the debates over slavery and freedom that followed.

We now have that history in Edward J. Larson's insightful synthesis of the founding. With slavery thriving in Britain's Caribbean empire and practiced in all of the American colonies, the independence movement's calls for liberty proved narrow, though some Black observers and others made their full implications clear. In the war, both sides employed strategies to draw needed support from free and enslaved Blacks, whose responses varied by local conditions. By the time of the Constitutional Convention, a widening sectional divide shaped the fateful compromises over slavery that would prove disastrous in the coming decades. Larson's narrative delivers poignant moments that deepen our understanding: we witness New York's tumultuous welcome of Washington as liberator through the eyes of Daniel Payne, a Black man who had escaped enslavement at Mount Vernon two years before. Indeed, throughout Larson's brilliant history it is the voices of Black Americans that prove the most convincing of all on the urgency of liberty.

Author: Edward J. Larson
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 01/17/2023
Pages: 368
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.43lbs
Size: 9.29h x 6.34w x 1.22d
ISBN: 9780393882209

Review Citation(s):
Library Journal Prepub Alert 08/01/2022 pg. 17
Kirkus Reviews 11/15/2022
Publishers Weekly 12/12/2022