What went wrong in Virginia, the postwar world, the Middle East

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In June 1586, Francis Drake's fleet arrived off Roanoke, Virginia, carrying several hundred blacks “liberated” in raids on Santo Domingo and Cartagena and an even larger contingent of Indians. Before these supposedly free workers could be put ashore to reinforce the young, struggling colony, a storm dispersed Drake's ships, and the discouraged settlers pulled up stakes.

The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia. By Edmund S. Morgan. 454 pp. New York: W. W. Norton & Co. $11.95.

More was lost at Roanoke than England's first effort at North American colonization. According to Edmund Morgan's impressive new book, prospects for a striking experiment in race relations were blown away as well. Within a hundred years Englishmen in the Virginia tidewater region and elsewhere were enmeshed in the most unliberating relationships with nonwhites, and the web of hostility was becoming central to the nature of American development.

It is only recently that colonial historians have begun to admit the full complexity and importance of that web. This has been due less to any reluctance about facing unpleasant facts than to an abiding preoccupation with New England, a region whose involvement with racial oppression seemed largely indirect in those early centuries.

Like so many of his best predecessors and colleagues, Morgan has devoted much of his own scholarly energies to society northeast of the Hudson River. More than two‐thirds of his numerous books deal directly with life in New England. But he is also an acknowledged master of the rich records of the Old Dominion. Now this respected historian of early America has created a thoughtful, suggestive and highly readable study of “the American paradox, the marriage of slavery and freedom,” as it evolved in the largest and most populous of the 13 colonies.

Morgan's book is, in his own words, “both more and less than” a history of early Virginia. It begins in the Elizabethan era with provocative speculation about the hope for interracial harmony at Roanoke. It ends two hundred years later with less encouraging, but no less interesting, observations about the founding of the nation. In between, the entire social evolution of the tobacco colony is sketched out around the two themes of rising racism and rising republicanism. These themes intersect forcibly in the late 17th century, half way between the crude optimism of the 1580's and the pained rationalization of the Revolutionary period, marked by a 1782 law authorizing the manumission of slaves.

It is here, during the period of Bacon's Rebellion (1676), when frontiersmen futilely contested the power of the tidewater aristocracy, followed by the rise of the colonial slave trade, that Morgan makes his strongest contribution. Traditional sources on the decline of tobacco prices, pressure for new land and unrest among the élite are supplemented by distinctive new material. Anthropological studies on local Indian groups are integrated into the text, and a lengthy appendix on population growth adds valuable demographic material. If the crucial shift to a labor force of enslaved Africans is still not totally explained, at least the broad variety of contributing factors is laid out clearly.

Yet the very type of discussion that Morgan's study will do so much to further, regarding the interplay between democracy and discrimination in early America, may eventually underscore the book's own shortcomings. If Virginia can still be seen rightly as “the place to begin” such a discussion, it is hardly the only place to examine. To equate Virginia slavery with American slavery, as the very title implicitly does, is to mistake a distinctive part for varied whole.

More troublesome than any geographic partiality is the fingering racial partiality. While Morgan is far from “biased” in any crude sense, many may find that he still writes too much from, and for, a white vantage point, that he again mistakes a part for the whole. He often uses the terms “Virginian” and “American” where he means only whites. For example: “To a large degree it may be said that Americans bought their independence with slave labor.” Finally, is it not a dubious and easy dialectic by which freedom must be set in opposition to slavery? Did the one depend so directly upon the other? Perhaps the “ordeal” of Morgan's subtitle still remains too much a white ordeal. ■