American Inheritance

From a Pulitzer Prize winner,a powerful history that reveals how the twin strands of liberty and slavery were joined in the nationΓÇÖs founding. New attention from historians and journalists is raising pointed questions about the founding period: was the American revolution waged to preserve slaveryand 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 proteststhe warand the debates over slavery and freedom that followed. We now have that history in Edward J. LarsonΓÇÖs insightful synthesis of the founding. With slavery thriving in BritainΓÇÖs Caribbean empire and practiced in all of the American coloniesthe independence movementΓÇÖs calls for liberty proved narrowthough some Black observers and others made their full implications clear. In the warboth sides employed strategies to draw needed support from free and enslaved Blackswhose responses varied by local conditions. By the time of the Constitutional Conventiona widening sectional divide shaped the fateful compromises over slavery that would prove disastrous in the coming decades. LarsonΓÇÖs narrative delivers poignant moments that deepen our understanding: we witness New YorkΓÇÖs tumultuous welcome of Washington as liberator through the eyes of Daniel Paynea Black man who had escaped enslavement at Mount Vernon two years before. Indeedthroughout LarsonΓÇÖs brilliant history it is the voices of Black Americans that prove the most convincing of all on the urgency of liberty.