In American Inheritance the historian Edward J. Larson deals with topics that have recently become politically divisive—the Founding Fathers and the American Revolution. He doesn’t explicitly comment on today’s cultural divide, but he presents important information that illuminates the arguments on both sides.
According to the widely publicized 1619 Project, the American Revolution was largely driven by whites who fought to protect the institution of slavery against British abolition.1 In this interpretation, the proclamation of emancipation by the British governor of Virginia, Lord Dunmore, in November 1775 becomes central. As a military measure, Dunmore offered freedom to enslaved people if they joined the British Army, setting off a rush to his banner by Black fugitives. Anger over the sudden loss of enslaved workers, the argument goes, prompted formerly reluctant southerners to join northerners in the rebellion against England. America’s Founders hypocritically preached liberty despite holding people in bondage, and traditional historians have wrongly minimized the enslavement, segregation, and legal maltreatment of Blacks, whose ongoing fight against injustice contributed significantly to democratic rights. The boldest expression of this view came from the journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, who created the 1619 Project: “Our founding ideals of liberty and equality were false when they were written. Black Americans fought to make them true. Without this struggle, America would have no democracy at all.” As for Abraham Lincoln, although he issued the Emancipation Proclamation, he “opposed black equality.”
Several historians publicly challenged Hannah-Jones’s interpretation of the Revolution and Lincoln.2 The right, meanwhile, inflamed the issue. During his first term Donald Trump declared:
Critical race theory, the 1619 Project, and the crusade against American history is toxic propaganda, ideological poison that, if not removed, will dissolve the civic bonds that tie us together. It will destroy our country.
Aiming to promote “patriotic education,” Trump issued an executive order establishing the jingoistic 1776 Commission, which Joe Biden canceled on his first day as president. Trump revived the issue in the 2024 campaign. “Kamala Harris,” he said in a speech in North Carolina,
supports the 1619 Project. [Audience boos.] Think of that. She supports it strongly. That teaches children to hate their country, that’s what it does….Harris’s administration tried to push it into schools all across America.
The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 argued that on the eve of the nation’s 250th anniversary (July 4, 2026), it is crucial to protect patriotic values because
America is now divided between two opposing forces: woke revolutionaries and those who believe in the ideals of the American revolution. The former believe that America is—and always has been—“systemically racist” and that it is not worth celebrating….The latter believe in America’s history and heroes.
The Trump administration has ties to the America First Policy Institute, which lambasts “liberal academics and demagogues” and states, “Instead of dividing our country by teaching an alternative version of our country’s story, our Nation’s schools should affirm and celebrate America.”
The classroom has been the battleground in the war over the nation’s origins. Thousands of schools nationwide have adopted the 1619 Project as part of their curriculum. On the other hand, eighteen states have banned the teaching of critical race theory, sometimes denouncing the 1619 Project by name. Other states are considering similar bans.
Most professional historians resist the simplifications they witness in the culture wars. It is generally agreed that the Founding Fathers, while forward-thinking idealists, were hardly paragons by today’s standards and that people of different ethnicities made significant contributions to the creation of the United States. In American Inheritance, Larson, a professor at Pepperdine University whose previous books include the Pulitzer Prize–winning Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion (1997), develops this more evenhanded interpretation, providing a wonderful overview of the American Revolution from both the African American and the white perspectives.
Larson mines the speeches, laws, private writings, and newspaper articles of the Revolutionary era to discover the actual motivations, North and South, for joining the battle against Britain. He reveals a complex history. Several of the Founders, slaveholders or not, opposed slavery, though the institution survived because of compromises struck at the Constitutional Convention in 1787. Larson shows that the involvement of enslaved and free Blacks in bringing about justice for all was more important than is generally acknowledged. The same is true of women, who have been unfairly marginalized in many histories of the period.
Larson’s balanced approach is exemplified by his treatment of Lord Dunmore’s influence on the Revolution. It is true, he points out, that many enslaved people responded to Dunmore’s offer of freedom by fleeing to the British side, impelling some wavering southerners to join the patriot cause. Within two months of Dunmore’s announcement of emancipation, around eight hundred enslaved people had escaped to the British. Among them was Harry Washington, who was owned by George Washington, one of Virginia’s largest slaveholders. Wherever the British forces went, the enslaved flocked to them. Washington lost sixteen enslaved people from Mount Vernon in one day and another twenty-two from his plantation in Virginia’s Great Dismal Swamp. Thomas Jefferson reported that in 1781 about thirty of his bondspeople had run off to the enemy. James Madison heard from a cousin who reported, “Some have lost 40, others 30, every one a considerable Part of their Slaves.” Thousands of Blacks fled to the British during the war.
Despite the loss of their enslaved people, the patriots, Larson notes, “did not necessarily view themselves as fighting a war to preserve slavery—likely few if any of them did.” Actually, there were moments when the patriots made antislavery appeals. Jefferson in 1774 wrote that “the abolition of domestic slavery” was “the great object of desire” in the American colonies. He advised the First Continental Congress “to exclude all further importations from Africa.” It passed a resolution in October 1774 to “wholly discontinue the Slave Trade,” though some states, notably South Carolina, continued, and a national ban did not take effect until 1808.
Most of the fugitive Blacks who fled to the British side, Larson demonstrates, did not have happy fates. Dunmore formed an Ethiopian Regiment, but it had little success as a fighting force. Larson writes:
Ill trained, poorly armed, and prematurely sent into battle, these hastily assembled troops proved no match for the patriot militia and a smallpox epidemic that killed hundreds of uninoculated blacks in Dunmore’s camp.
Thereafter some Black loyalist soldiers proved effective, such as Titus, who served the British cause bravely in New Jersey for two years. But the British usually restricted Blacks to menial, noncombatant tasks. At the end of the war, the overwhelming majority of those who had sought freedom were reenslaved by their erstwhile emancipators:
Most of the more than 15,000 Blacks leaving the United States after the American Revolution went as the property of white loyalists to Florida or the British Caribbean, where they typically faced a slavery even harsher than before.
Whatever the ultimate impact of Dunmore’s proclamation, Larson supplies ample evidence that northerners and southerners had teamed up for revolutionary action well before it was issued. He explores the American response to a series of oppressive acts, from the early 1760s onward, that placed heavy burdens on the colonists, who chafed under the prospect of making payments to England without having political representation there. Here Larson treads on familiar territory, but his solid scholarship adds fresh background for the Sugar Act, the Stamp Act, and others. Every new law issued by the British fanned American outrage, first in the North and increasingly in the South. Larson demonstrates that the closing of Boston’s port to commercial traffic in 1774—not Dunmore’s emancipation proclamation a year later—was the most important factor that prompted formerly lukewarm southerners to join the North in the break with England. In September and October 1774, representatives from twelve colonies convened in Philadelphia at the First Continental Congress, which created an American army, navy, and currency while calling for a boycott of British goods. “By this point,” Larson writes,
the non-slaveholding delegates from Massachusetts had forged alliances with slaveholding ones from Virginia—particularly the Adamses and the Lees—with liberty for the colonies taking precedence over all else.”
Larson quotes many patriot leaders who compared themselves to people enslaved by the British. During the crisis over British taxation Samuel Adams asked, “Is it not High Time for the People of this Country explicitly to declare, whether they will be Freemen or Slaves?” Washington insisted that the English were “endeavoring by every piece of Art & despotism to fix the Shackles of Slavry upon us,” seeking to make colonists “as tame, & abject Slaves, as the Blacks we rule over with such arbitrary Sway.”
The slavery theme provided a dramatic buildup to Patrick Henry’s declaration about liberty and death in his speech at the Second Virginia Convention in March 1775:
There is no retreat, but in submission and slavery! Our chains are forged. Their clanking may be heard on the plains of Boston!…Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains, and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God!—I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!
Such statements are inspiring but ironic, given that Henry and several other leading patriots were enslavers. Half a century ago the historian Edmund Morgan identified “the American paradox”—the inconsistency of leaders of the American Revolution who fought for their own liberty while denying it to enslaved Blacks.3 Larson reveals details about the Founders that show their reliance on slavery: for instance, the complicated measures that Jefferson and Washington took while attending political conventions in antislavery Philadelphia to ensure that their enslaved servants were with them.
Other dimensions of Washington and Jefferson are probed in Larson’s discussion of each man’s relationship with the Black poet Phillis Wheatley. Brought from Africa in 1761 at age seven and enslaved as a house servant by the Boston merchant John Wheatley, whose surname she adopted, she mastered the rhymes, rhythms, and tropes of neoclassical poetry, applying them imaginatively in poems on many topics, including Washington. When she sent the general her glowing poem that praised him as a “great chief, with virtue on thy side,” he thanked her for her “elegant Lines” that “exhibit a striking proof of your great poetical Talents.” In his letter, he addressed her as “Mrs Phillis.” Larson tells us, “No other letter exists from Washington to a Black person, and none by Washington addressing any woman other than his relatives by their first names.”
Jefferson’s reaction to Wheatley was far chillier than Washington’s. Objecting to the pious tone of her verse, he wrote, “Religion indeed has produced a Phyllis Whately; but it could not produce a poet. The compositions published under her name are below the dignity of criticism.” Black people, he argued in Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), were equal to whites in memory but not in reason and imagination.
Larson shows that even the brilliant Black mathematician and almanac writer Benjamin Banneker drew no more than a tepid response from Jefferson, who becomes in Larson’s handling a prime example of the American paradox. Jefferson owned hundreds of people but considered slavery evil, saying that he trembled for his country when he reflected that God was just and His justice could not sleep forever. He envisaged eventual emancipation, which he hoped would be followed by the removal of Blacks to distant places. Although Jefferson sometimes exhibited racism when discussing Blacks, his pronouncement that “all men are created equal” in the Declaration of Independence proved to be one of the most influential statements on human rights ever penned, and he drafted the first version of the Ordinance of 1784, which banned slavery in states formed after 1800 from the western territories. Although this clause was removed from the bill’s final version, it paved the way for the Ordinance of 1787, which prohibited slavery in the territory north of the Ohio River and east of the Mississippi River—a provision that sparked decades of antislavery activism.
The movement toward antislavery reform, Larson shows, was diverse and multilayered. He provides a detailed discussion of the Somerset decision of 1772, a landmark ruling in England in which Lord Chief Justice Mansfield proclaimed that slavery was “so odious, that nothing can be suffered to support it, but positive law.” In other words, only statutes passed by legislatures could enforce slavery, which was repulsive according to natural law.
Although the Somerset decision had little immediate impact in America, other antislavery forces were at work in the colonies. Surprisingly, southern colonies like Virginia and Maryland called for the end of the international slave trade, which had brought millions of kidnapped Africans to the Americas on the horrific Middle Passage. Larson indicates that such southern opposition to the infamous trade was partly motivated by economics, because importing fewer Blacks would boost the value of people already enslaved in the South.
However, a moral protest against the slave trade also arose, sometimes accompanied by fervent calls for the abolition of slavery itself. The Boston Baptist minister John Allan, the Rhode Island clergyman Samuel Hopkins, Quaker abolitionists in Pennsylvania, and Scottish Calvinists in Georgia spoke out strongly against slavery. Allan summed up the religious viewpoint by asking how Americans could
look up to the ALMIGHTY and beg of him his aid and assistance in our political affairs, while we are oppressing our African brethren ten thousand times as much by keeping them in slavery for life?
This outlook held special poignancy coming from Lemuel Haynes, a free Black man from Massachusetts who joined the ministry after his military service was cut short by illness. In 1776 Haynes gave an antislavery address, unpublished in his lifetime, in which he asserted, “Liberty is Equally as precious to a Black Man, as it is to a white one.”
The parallel Haynes draws here between the impulses behind the American Revolution and the emancipation of enslaved Blacks was also recognized by some famous white patriots. The Philadelphia doctor Benjamin Rush asked how Americans could “reconcile the exercise of SLAVERY with our professions of freedom.” The Massachusetts firebrand James Otis maintained that abolition must be part of the revolutionary cause. His sister Mercy Otis Warren also linked the two causes by “speaking out against the enslavement of colonists by Britain and of Blacks by colonists,” as Larson tersely writes. Most forceful of all was Abigail Adams, who declared:
I wish more sincerely there was not a Slave in the province. It allways appeared a most iniquitous Scheme to me—fight ourselfs for what we are daily robbing and plundering from those who have as good a right to freedom as we have.
She was more outspoken on this point than her husband, John Adams, who, while opposed to slavery, did not call for its immediate abolition.
Often overlooked in histories of the Revolutionary period are the heroic efforts of Black people themselves to achieve emancipation. Larson points to several inspiring examples. Prince Whipple, who had been emancipated by the New Hampshire merchant William Whipple, fought in the American Revolution and then returned to his native state, where he and nineteen other Blacks wrote a petition demanding the abolition of slavery there. Although the state legislature did not act on it, New Hampshire soon joined its neighbor Vermont in passing an antislavery state constitution. Black-authored petitions made abolition a public issue in other northern states as well. Especially noteworthy was the freedom suit launched by the enslaved Massachusetts man Quock Walker, which resulted in the state’s supreme judicial court abolishing slavery there in 1783.
Larson fills out the picture of Black participation in the American Revolution by describing African Americans who fought on the patriot side. Although the patriots enlisted only a quarter as many Black people as the British did, there were some memorable standouts. Black minutemen served at the battles of Lexington and Concord. Several Blacks fought heroically at Bunker Hill, including Salem Poor, who received a citation for bravery. Washington, who at first balked at permitting Blacks in the Continental Army, changed course, and before long Blacks and whites were fighting together; Larson points out that the United States Army would not allow integrated military units until 1948.
One emerges from Larson’s book with the recognition that any simple statement about the effect of the American Revolution on slavery is misguided. He captures the complexity of the topic when he writes:
One way or another, the American Revolution resulted in the first great emancipation of enslaved Blacks in the New World, with some finding freedom under the British banner and others gaining it from a liberty-inspired retrenchment of slavery in the North. The outcome was far from uniform as northern states moved fitfully toward abolition and southern states doubled down on slavery.
It is the latter point—the South’s doubling down on slavery—that negates interpretations of the Revolution as opening a direct pathway to abolition. The North was forced to compromise with the South on slavery during the Constitutional Convention in 1787. Although the Constitution does not use the words “slave” or “slavery,” it can be interpreted as proslavery because it extended the importation of enslaved people to 1808, mandated returning fugitives from labor, and granted the South the three-fifths compromise, which accorded “all other persons” besides whites (meaning Blacks held in bondage) three-fifths representation, to be counted toward a state’s total population.
Larson could have pursued in more detail the long-term aftermath of the Revolution. He correctly shows how the nation emerged from the Revolutionary era deeply divided over slavery. He mentions that Lincoln expressed this national rift in his 1858 “house divided” speech and later promoted the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery. However, Larson might have completed his historical record of the contest between liberty and slavery by discussing how Lincoln used the Founders as his basis for pointing the nation in a new antislavery direction. Such an attentive analysis of Lincoln would have fit well into Larson’s examination of paradoxical Americans, because, like many of the Founders, Lincoln sometimes made bigoted pronouncements on race or Black removal, though he evolved and ultimately called for African American suffrage. It would be fascinating to hear Larson’s take on Lincoln’s argument in his Cooper Union Address, in February 1860, about the framers’ fundamentally antislavery position, or his emphasis in the Gettysburg Address on the Declaration’s message of human equality, or his invocation of a God-directed eternal war on slavery in his militantly emancipationist Second Inaugural Address.
But if Larson doesn’t fully explore the flowering of America’s ideals in Lincoln, he shows convincingly that the Founders reflected the customs and attitudes of their era while at the same time pushing the nation toward human rights. He makes them available for realistic praise at a moment when they are either too easily pushed aside or placed on too high a pedestal.
English (US) · 