Morgan, Edmund S. American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia. New York: W. W. Norton, 1976.

Summary
This book examines how a people developed the dedication to human liberty and dignity and at the same time developed and maintained a system of labor that denied human liberty and dignity. Morgan argues that the '''rise of liberty and equality in America was enabled by the rise of slavery'''. “The freedom of the free, the growth of freedom experienced in the American Revolution depended more than we like to admit on the enslavement of more than 20 percent of us at that time.” Planters wanted more immigrants each year (labor) but “as more and more turned free each year, Virginia seemed to have inherited the problem that she was helping England to solve.” Thus, the presence of a growing class of poverty-stricken Virginians was threatening to the planters who had made it to the top or who had arrived in the colony already at the top, with ample supplies of servants and cattle. “A free society divided between large landholders and small was much less riven by antagonisms than one divided between landholders and landless, masterless men.” Slavery was the means to account for labor shortages and reduce antagonisms. Morgan thus argues, “''It was slavery…more than any other single factor…made the difference, slavery enabled Virginia to nourish representative government in a plantation society, slavery that transformed the Virginia of Gov. Berkeley to the Virginia of Jefferson, slavery that made the Virginians dare to speak a political language that magnified the rights of freemen''…” Slavery allowed aristocrats to preach equality more safely (threat of rebellion reduced).

See also: Kathleen Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches