Seeking the High Ground
Slavery and Political Conflict in the British Atlantic World
Matthew Mason
How American slavery engendered a new political vocabulary used on both sides of the Atlantic
How is it, Samuel Johnson famously asked on the eve of the Revolution, that Americans could so vociferously demand freedom for themselves while so conspicuously continuing to deny it to those they held in slavery? With Seeking the High Ground, Matthew Mason helps answer that piercing question. As he shows, the language of slavery and freedom had long suffused Anglo-American political debates in the eighteenth century, with the Revolution emerging as one particularly hyperdramatic act during which combatants on both sides of the war of words connected the idea of slavery to the headline issues of the day. Mason details how Patriots and Loyalists alike deployed the rhetoric of slavery in their debates about all the crucial questions of the day, including republicanism, taxation and representation, and—by claiming the moral high ground—the nature of the Revolutionary War itself. These debates left complex rhetorical and political legacies for those seeking to abolish and defend slavery in both the new US and the remaining British Empire.
No one understands the politics of slavery and the rise of antislavery better than Matthew Mason. This is because he knows the original sources and deeply understands what historians have done and where they've taken detours. He keeps his eye on the big picture and his feet on the ground even while explaining the achievements and the limits of those who reached for the higher ground.- David Waldstreicher, The Graduate Center, City University of New York, author of The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley: A Poet’s Journeys Through American Slavery and Independence
Matthew Mason's important new book cuts through some of the sharpest historiographical debates on the role of slavery and abolition in the Revolutionary Era to reveal a textured and dynamic portrait of the transatlantic political world.- Rachel Shelden, Pennsylvania State University, author of Washington Brotherhood: Politics, Social Life, and the Coming of the Civil War
Matthew Mason is Professor of History at Brigham Young University and the author of Slavery and Politics in the Early American Republic.
