A01=Matthew Mason
atlantic history
Author_Matthew Mason
Barbados
british empire
British West Indies
Category=NHK
Category=NHTB
causes of the American Revolution
consequences of the American Revolution
dishonor
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
guy carleton
historiography of slavery
honor
imperialism
indentured servitude
lord dunmore's proclamation
loyalists
patriotism
patriots
political slavery
quakers
religious dissenters
sugar revolution
sugar trade
transatlantic abolitionism
Product details
- ISBN 9780813953427
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 21 Oct 2025
- Publisher: University of Virginia Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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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.
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.
Matthew Mason is Professor of History at Brigham Young University and the author of Slavery and Politics in the Early American Republic.
