I recently reread this book, originally published in 1975 by the late Edmund S. Morgan. The tome was upheld as a classic when I was in grad school (I bet it’s still held in high esteem). Initially, Morgan’s book sets out to explain a familiar paradox in American history: how could it be that during the Revolution, slaveholding Virginians fought for the ideals of liberty and freedom, ideals that were at odds with their own way of life? The answer, as you might guess, is dismally straightforward: most of the Virginian revolutionaries simply did not consider Black, enslaved individuals worth including in their understanding of “we, the people.” Morgan does not leave off the analysis at this, however. He instead goes a further step and questions why racism arose in Virginia in the first place. The origins of racism end up being the actual focus of his book. I’ll try to summarize his argument—if you’re a Morgan fan, please forgive any oversights as I boil down a 300+ page work of nonfiction into a few paragraphs!

To get at the roots of racism’s historical development, Morgan starts his story at the very beginnings of Virginia. When English settlers founded Virginia in 1607, their initial idea was that the colony would act as a check against any northward expansion of the Spanish Empire. As it turned out, though, the Spanish were not really all that interested in the Atlantic coast north of Florida. The English quickly repurposed Virginia to be a cash crop producing colony, and throughout most of the seventeenth century, Virginia was a place where Englishmen of means could go, plant tobacco, and make some money for themselves along with tax revenue to the Crown. (I guess governments have always been taxing tobacco).

To work the tobacco fields these English gentlemen needed laborers. For the first three quarters of the seventeenth century, workers came to Virginia mostly in the form of indentured servants from England. It is true that planters purchased enslaved Black workers from Africa throughout this period—but such laborers were in the minority of the workforce at first.

When a servant came over to Virginia from England, he or she usually did not pay their own way. Rather, they paid their cost of transportation in the form of their labor to the planter for a term that was typically seven years long. It appears that those seven years were hellish. Planters barely fed their workers, they dressed them in rags, and they whipped them. Nevertheless, poor folk from England kept coming over to Virginia because if you could survive your term of service there, the colony granted you fifty acres of land for your own. There was no way you could acquire anything similar in England.

But you had to survive. Until the 1650s, Virginia was more or less a death trap, according to Morgan. Disease, food insecurity, and wars with Native Americans kept English Virginian mortality rates horrifically high. Starting around the 1650s, however, non-native Virginians started to live longer for various reasons I won’t get into here. The point is that more and more servants made it through their terms of service and claimed their fifty acres in the Virginian backcountry.

So at the start of the third quarter of the seventeenth century Virginia was, in Morgan’s words, a “volatile society.” Former indentured servants—who had no love for their former employers—kept claiming their fifty acres only to find that the economic independence for which they had suffered still eluded them. They could grow their own tobacco, sure, but how could they get their harvest to market? Most of the land by the coast where the ships from England came in had long ago been purchased by wealthier planters. Poor, formerly indentured farmers ended up selling their crop to their former masters for prices that did not please them at all. The American dream, if you will, wasn’t working for a lot of Virginians in the 1670s. And then along came Nathaniel Bacon.

Bacon was not a poor man, but he was an outsider to the Virginia elite. He lived closer to the inland fringes of the colony where the poorer, formerly indentured farmers resided, and he shared their concerns. English settlers on the frontier of the colony were more vulnerable to attacks from Native American warriors than were the established, wealthier planters who lived closer to the coast. Bacon and his neighbors wished that the Virginian government would protect backcountry folk by means of preemptive violence against neighboring native nations. The Virginian government, for its part, sought to work through diplomatic channels, which did not suit the mood of most backcountry settlers. Bacon and his neighbors felt that their plight was not taken seriously by the government.

And so a large group of impoverished, land-owning, gun-toting farmers who resented a government that they perceived as oblivious to their predicament found their leader in Bacon. In the mid-1670s, Bacon gathered around him an armed militia and overthrew the Virginian government. He died from illness shortly afterward, however, and soon enough England intervened and restored order.

After Bacon’s Rebellion, Virginian planters soured on the notion of bringing more servants over from England to work the tobacco fields. From their point of view, the indentured servants of today only become the rebellious backcountry malcontents of tomorrow. Instead of English laborers, planters brought more and more enslaved Africans into the colony.

As planters bought more slaves, Virginian lawmakers changed the rules of the colony to ensure that people of African extraction or descent were trapped into a subordinate status marked by the color of their skin. In doing so, these new laws created a new way for Virginians to categorize themselves. Prior to Bacon’s Rebellion, English Virginians typically saw the world through the binary of “Christian or heathen:” the English and other Europeans were in the Christian category, the Native Americans and people from Africa were in the heathen category. After Bacon’s Rebellion, however, the language of laws changed. A law from 1680 prescribed thirty lashes of the whip upon any “negroe or other slave” who presumed “to lift up his hand in opposition against any christian” (pg. 331, seventeenth century spelling and capitalization). Now “negro” has come to be the opposite “Christian” in Virginian law. This legal distinction continued in a 1682 law that stipulated that all non-Christian servants who were brought into Virginia from elsewhere were to remain slaves for life. A law from the 1660s had already stipulated that an enslaved person who converted to Christianity was not eligible for emancipation. Since only Africans or Native people would be “non-Christian” servants in the first place, the actual effect of the 1682 was to align skin color, rather than religion, with involuntary servitude. By the end of the century, the transformation was complete and “white” came to be the opposing category to “negro.” A 1691 law forbade sexual activity between “negroes, mulatoes, and Indians” with “English, or other white women” (pg. 335). The act stipulated that any child a white woman had by a non-white man would be a servant until he or she turned thirty. That same year, Virginia passed a law mandating that all masters who emancipated their slaves pay for their former slaves’ transportation out of the colony.

Virginian lawmakers took an already existing institution—slavery—and rebuilt society around that institution through by making racial identity a legal reality. By the start of the eighteenth century, enslaved Africans were no longer the curious exception in a labor force largely composed of indentured English servants. Rather, Virginian society was one in which darker skin signaled servitude and otherness and pale skin signaled freedom and privilege.

The new, post-Bacon, racialized society worked well for Virginia’s wealthy planters. To explain why, I can put it in no better words than Morgan himself: “the small planter’s small stake in human property placed him on the same side of the fence as the large man, whom he regularly elected to protect his interests. Virginia’s small farmers could perceive a common identity with the large, because…both were equal in not being slaves” (pg. 381). Whiteness was the glue that kept small property owners politically aligned with the truly wealthy. This alliance was so strong that many wealthy Virginians did not feel the need for the English aristocratic system to support their own position in society—just the opposite. As we all know, many wealthy Virginians such as Jefferson and Washington made common cause with poorer folk by opposing the king. What need was there of the English king in a colony where any white man could in theory own another human being? Virginia was awash in kings and potential kings. No wonder, Morgan suggests, that it produced so many ardent republicans.

I’ll leave Morgan with the last word, from pg. 387: “Eventually, to be sure, the course the Virginians charted for the United States proved the undoing of slavery. And a Virginian general gave up at Appomattox the attempt to support freedom with slavery…Was the vision of a nation of equals flawed at the source by contempt for both the poor and the black? Is America still colonial Virginia writ large? More than a century after Appomattox the questions linger.”