American Inheritance: Liberty and Slavery in the Birth of a Nation, 1765–1795 by Edward J. Larson (review)

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• American Inheritance: Liberty and Slavery in the Birth of a Nation, 1765–1795 by Edward J. Larson
• Matthew R. Hale

American Inheritance: Liberty and Slavery in the Birth of a Nation, 1765–1795. By Edward J. Larson. (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2023. Pp. x, 358. Paper, $17.99, ISBN 978-1-324-07521-9; cloth, $32.50, ISBN 978-0-393-88220-9.)

As Edward J. Larson notes in the preface to his new book, American Inheritance: Liberty and Slavery in the Birth of a Nation, 1765–1795, “The role of liberty and slavery in the American Revolution is a partisan minefield” (p. vii). While “some on the right,” he states, “dismiss the role of slavery in the founding of the republic,” “some on the left see the defense of state-sanctioned slavery as a cause of the Revolution and an effect of the Constitution” (p. vii). Despite this opening reference to politics, Larson does not mention, although he is clearly aware of, the more intellectually rigorous, intrapartisan debate on the left concerning related issues. That omission is suggestive, as Larson fully enters neither the Left-Right “minefield” nor the Left’s intrapartisan dispute. Rather, he attempts to traverse lightly both conflicts for the sake of providing a popular audience with a readable overview of the career of liberty and slavery in late-eighteenth-century American society.

In many ways, that attempt is successful. In less than 270 pages of main text, Larson ingeniously surveys virtually every well-known phenomenon dealing with slavery and liberty between 1765 and 1795. Even a partial list of the topics discussed in the first 120 pages—John Locke; the relationship between chattel slavery and the rhetoric of political slavery; Crispus Attucks, John Adams, and the Boston Massacre; the Somerset case; Black and white antislavery activism; the Declaration of Independence; George Washington’s stance on African Americans in the military; Lord Dunmore’s Proclamation; Phillis Wheatley; Rhode Island’s recruitment of Black soldiers; and various state constitutions—reveals the scope of authorial ambition. The book’s big idea—that “the American Revolution and the new American nation became less about liberty or slavery than about liberty and slavery”—is less a well-developed original thesis than an organizing theme (p. 15). Even so, Larson, a Pulitzer Prize winner and gifted storyteller, offers insightful commentary at every turn and deftly glides from one topic to another.

The adroit narration of so many developments could allow this text to work well in undergraduate surveys or American Revolution classes. Students sometimes benefit from wrestling with a book that is less than fully invested in carving out a clear historiographical position because it affords them the opportunity to draw out historical meaning on their own. The book’s surfeit of characters and events also means that an instructor could readily construct a selective reading assignment to suit both the particular course and students’ skill level. [End Page 410]

Graduate students and scholars in the field might find Larson’s inclination to downplay or occlude the existence of certain intrapartisan academic debates problematic. For instance, successive endnotes for a paragraph on Lord Dunmore’s Proclamation cite in full, respectively, one sentence by Woody Holton and Sean Wilentz (pp. 295–96nn81–82). Yet Larson does not stipulate, in either the notes or the main text, that those two historians are at loggerheads over the significance of that proclamation, even though the specific Wilentz sentence cited by Larson is part of a strongly worded critical review of Holton’s scholarship. It is possible, of course, that Larson does not openly acknowledge the Holton-Wilentz argument because he considers their views susceptible to synthesis. If so, there is no explanation of how that synthesis could be achieved. Every reader of this book will therefore be deprived of the chance to think more deeply about the relationship between Dunmore’s Proclamation and the coming of the American Revolution. Nonacademic readers will be deprived, in addition, of the chance to meditate on the role that such scholarly debate plays in the production of knowledge.

In the end, American Inheritance is a valuable overview of liberty and slavery in...