American Inheritance by Edward J. Larson
Fans of 1619 will like this book. Haters of 1619 will probably hate it. Florida might ban this book soon.
The critical founding events of the American Revolution continue to have a powerful emotional meaning to contemporary Americans. These are the (often mythologized) origins of our nation, our political system, and our very identity as a country and “a people”. Many of us project our own contemporary beliefs, hopes, and anxieties onto the messy ideology, pragmatic politics, and personal quirks that resulted in events 250+ years ago.
In recent years we have seen fierce, emotional political fights over how these events should be taught to children, and, by inference, how all citizens should remember the history and conceive of ourselves. While these fights reflect our contemporary anxieties and power struggles, they are phrased in terms of history, and make (contested) claims about the past.
One of the hotly contested questions has become, “was the American Revolution, and the founding of the United States, a pro- or an anti-slavery movement?” Was the United States originally designed to be a racist, slave state? Or was the United States originally designed to promote freedom and equality for everyone (if only eventually)?
The answer to this question is taken to mean that “America” is inherently racist, or inherently non-racist. These are highly emotional claims, which have been taken up by contemporary politicians.
In American Inheritance, Larson examines the actual events from 1765 through Washington’s presidency, the critical period when the US was declared, fought for, and formally created. He examines the politics of the time, which was all about the concept of “liberty” and its antithesis, “slavery”.
So– what did the actual founders think, what did they intend to do, and what did they actually achieve? Was the US originally pro- or anti-slavery?
Shockingly enough, the answer is, “It was complicated”. Furthermore, it was almost 300 years ago, so we have to examine things carefully to understand what things meant to people then, not to us today.
The first complexity is that there were many people in the American Colonies, and the formal founders were a tiny minority (rich, white, male, English descendents). Indeed, the entire question of who counts as “an American” was contested. Which makes any understanding of what “America” means complicated.
The book covers three distinct phases, before, during, and after the American Revolution. The second complexity is that Ideas, actions, and laws changed rapidly during this revolutionary era. Indeed, the very notion of what was happening evolved from claiming the “rights of Englishmen”, to a long fight for “liberty”, to the creation of a new nation and government.
Larsen is a law professor, and this is a useful background. The politics of these questions were deeply informed by English law and history. It takes a lawyer to grok the complicated and contested legal status of slavery in Britain and British colonies overseas. When American colonists invoked “Liberty”, they were following a tradition from English politics. American colonists also complained of being “enslaved” by the home government.
The terms “liberty” and “slavery” were widely used in revolutionary politics, but not necessarily the way we use them today. In particular, “liberty” meant the freedom to make local laws, including laws that defined some people as property. I.e., for some patriots, “liberty” meant the right to keep slaves.
But, of course, many patriots really wanted “liberty” for all. However conservative the original intentions, revolution tends to radicalize everyone. As the struggle unfolded, many patriots came to believe that the fighting and sacrificing for “liberty” meant nothing if it wasn’t liberty for all.
Notably, at the start of the revolution, slavery was legal, if not necessarily practiced, in all the colonies. By the end of the revolution, many colonies were outlawing slavery. This was a real change, and for these patriots America was intended to be “for everyone”.
So—America was born both pro- and anti-slavery. This split became sectional, as the north east states banned slavery, and the south enshrined it.
After the war was won, it became necessary to create a federal government. Section tensions over slavery had to be overcome, or there would be no America at all.
Larson’s legal background helps us understand the creation of the US Constitution and original government. The framers of the constitution were mostly lawyers, and much of the process and result can only be understood by a lawyer.
In particular, the framers had to make compromises on the intractable issue of slavery. Unrepresentative as they might have been, the framers of the constitution wanted a unified federal government, whatever it took to get it.
So, the constitution and the original federal government were designed to protect the right of states to deal with slavery however they wanted to. Effectively, the federal government protected slavery where it was legal, but did not require slavery to be legal. It was both pro- and anti-slavery.
Some of the compromises only make sense to a lawyer, especially the 3/5 rule. Larsen helps us understand how these lawyers ended up there, but no one has ever been happy with the result.
So—is the US Constitution, pro- or anti-slavery? It was both, though the first version was quite a bit more friendly to slavery than the amended version is now. With the reconstruction era amendments, the US Constitution is definitely anti-slavery, and, for that matter, anti-racist.
Larson’s book is a nice bit of history, both clear and nuanced. He helps us understand what the people of the time actually were thinking, what their words meant, and what they were trying to do.
In many cases, they use words differently than we do, and they were trying to do things different than we want today. Plus, there were a lot of “we, the people” who weren’t represented in the official documents and decision making.
Which means that an argument about whether “America is inherently racist” or not cannot be resolved by reference to history books. Arguments about the essential nature of “America” are philosophical, not historical.
This book will not resolve any contemporary political argument. But if you are curious about what “We, the people” thought they were doing, American Inheritance has a lot of useful information.
- Edward J. Larson, American Inheritance: Liberty and Slavery in the Birth of a Nation 1765-1795, New York, W. W. Nortaon & Company, 2023.
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