Beyond Freedom and Slavery : Autonomy, Virtue, and Resistance in Early American Political Discourse

Introduction :

Did the liberal and republican traditions of the United States subvert slavery ? No, argues François Furstenberg ; in the early republic they could justify slavery. Furstenberg shows that the narrative of the American Revolution presented in early national print culture grounded freedom and virtue in resistance. If those who resisted oppression earned their freedom, it followed that those who remained enslaved must be tacitly consenting to their own subjugation. The liberal-republican principle of consent thus legitimated slavery. Furstenberg suggests that the professional division between intellectual history and the historiography of slavery has led scholars to overemphasize the contributions of American liberal and republican traditions to the history of liberation and to neglect their equally significant contributions to the history of oppression.


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