[READ PDF] EPUB American Inheritance Liberty and Slavery in the Birth of a Nation 1765-1795 Ebook READ ONLINE

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A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice From a Pulitzer Prize winner, a powerful history that
reveals how the twin strands of liberty and slavery were joined in the nation’s founding.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. 8
pages of illustrations