The Origin of American Freedom

In Professor Edmund S. Morgan’s, The Challenge of the American Revolution, he eloquently articulates the past’s justification with the norm of slavery in America. In this particular respect, Americans capitalized on the resources of slaves because of their fear of economic turmoil, which was a widely shared belief of the populace during the eighteenth century. While it was considered to be a norm, slavery is currently characterized as an atrocious act defined as being in bondage and oppression. The establishment of slavery in American history was presented to be a conundrum in terms of exploring its ethics and essential values in America. In this paper, I will examine the context of Morgan’s concept of Americans’ fear of debt and Hannah Arendt’s concern of the pursuit of happiness and America’s primordial sin. Arguably, I will discuss how slavery provided a sense of freedom for all Americans at the ultimate expense of servitude of slaves.

The history of America is fundamentally filled with contradictions in regards to the commitment of freedom for all its citizens on one spectrum, and the increase and dependency of slaves on the opposite continuum. The preservation of freedom for the common man is based on the primary factor of financial prosperity reliant upon the existence of slavery. By forcing slaves to forfeit their own freedom to secure the economic stability in the United States, it provided slavery as a solution to offer economic and social benefits to the colonists. Economically, free labor provided an abundant of amount of wealth and eliminated the expensive costs of indentured servants. Other than an economic viewpoint, slavery additionally provided a socially constructed hierarchy that established the mere concept tha...

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... is that slavery essentially promoted a sense of freedom that Americans had taken for granted. Historically, those who stood up for abolitionism came to the realization that it would not create economic prosperity for the country by forfeiting the idea of free labor. They solely acted on the rights of morality, succumbed by the ethical issue of their own existence. By depriving the right of humans to live free and act accordingly to their own will, it does not make us any better than mere barbarians that our ancestors had wrongfully labeled the slaves. The primordial sin still remains the same to this day: slavery. While the word sin has a negative connotation to it, the reality of the situation is that slavery did contribute to the economic prosperity and freedom that Americans truly loved—the freedom to not constantly worry about their economic or social status.