"Historians have argued that the rise of liberty and equality in America, America's democratic experiment, was shadowed from its beginning by its dark obverse: slavery and racism. Slavery in the midst of freedom, Edmund Morgan writes, was the central paradox of the birth of America. The rapid expansion of opportunities for Europeans was made possible only by the enslavement and exploitation of African and Indian peoples. Non-Europeans were consigned to a permanent underclass excluded from the benefits of white society, while Europeans profited enormously from the fruits of the labors of those they oppressed. Arguably, then, 1619 marks the inception of the most important political development in American history, the rise of democracy, and the emergence of what would in time become one of the nation's greatest challenges: the corrosive legacy of racial stereotypes that continues to afflict our society today."
These words and this sharply-honed historical analysis are from the acclaimed historian James Horn who also serves as president of the Jamestown Recovery Foundation. This volume is the first and only book-length study of the far-reaching events and legacies of 1619. In that year, the Virginia Company of London, serving as the sponsor of the Jamestown colony in America, applauded those who set up a representative governing body with a rule of law, free and fair elections, equality before the law, and the people's right to possess and enjoy their property. The backers of this system had in mind a government which sought to encourage the common good.
During the same year, an English privateer sold 20 enslaved Africans to Virginia planters, an event that set in motion the social and economic inequality that has been and continues to be a blight upon the ideals and hopes of American democracy.
Horn hints that it is time to restore the importance of the common good in this land of the free and the home of the oppressed. He is right.
