Seeking the High Ground with Matt Mason

In 1764, the Bostonian Samuel Adams railed against Parliament’s new Sugar Act. The law actually lowered the customs duties that Americans paid on their imported sugar and molasses, but to Adams and others, it was a form of taxation without representation. By submitting to Parliament’s will, Adams asked, “are we not reduced from the character of free subjects to the miserable state of tributary slaves?”

To our modern ears, Adams’s words smack of hypocrisy. How could free Americans justify comparing themselves to slaves when many colonists held fellow human beings in bondage? Or, as the Englishman Dr. Samuel Johnson would ask in 1775, “how is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?” But as both sides knew, the politics of slavery were as powerful as slavery itself. For more than a century, British subjects throughout the Atlantic world had used the blurred lines between freedom and unfreedom to claim the moral high ground over their political opponents. And as a dispute over taxes erupted into the American Revolution, the politics of slavery and the prospect of abolition raised fundamental questions about the very meaning of the revolution itself.

In this episode, Dr. Jim Ambuske is joined by Dr. Matthew Mason to discuss his recent book, Seeking the High Ground: Slavery and Political Conflict in the British Atlantic World.

Hosted by Dr. Jim Ambuske. Executive producers are Dr. Lynn Price Robbins, Jeanette Patrick, and Patrick Long. Audio and video editing by Patrick Long. Revolutions in Retrospect is a joint production of Primary Source Media and Revolutionary Histories.