Solving the American Paradox: Contested Conceptions of Slavery, 1763-1776
The first 2025-2026 David Center for the American Revolution Seminar will take place October 15, 2025 at 3:00 p.m. ET on Zoom.
The speaker is Mark L. Thompson. Mark is Senior Lecturer in American Studies at the University of Groningen. He is the author of The Contest for the Delaware Valley: Allegiance, Identity, and Empire in the Seventeenth Century (2013). His next book, currently titled Land, Liberty & Property, is about colonial surveyors and the production of empire in British North America. In 2021 he founded the collaborative project H-GEAR (Historiographing the Era of the American Revolution), which uses digital methods to chart shifting networks of people, language, and concepts in early American texts.
The paper will be pre-circulated to registered participants in advance of the seminar meeting.
To attend the seminar and to receive a copy of the paper, please register via Zoom.
The David Center for the American Revolution Seminar serves as a forum for works-in-progress that explore topics in the era of the American Revolution (1750-1820). Questions about the series may be directed to Brenna Holland, Assistant Director of Library & Museum Programs, at [email protected].
NOTE: Seminars are designed as spaces for sharing ideas and works still in-progress. For this reason, this event will not be recorded.
Solving the American Paradox: Contested Conceptions of Slavery, 1763-1776
In a recent issue of the Journal of the Early Republic, five notable early American historians offered their thoughts about the current historiography of the American Revolution. While they all emphasized the new, expanded range of subjects and contexts that characterized recent work, it was less clear whether this wider scope had led to fundamentally new interpretations. More remarkably, there was virtually no discussion of new methods. To judge from their comments, the future historiography of the Revolution will likely be “vaster” in size but conceived and written in a manner much like its predecessors.
This paper addresses one of the key themes in the new Revolutionary historiography—the politics of slavery—by applying new methods to new materials. It offers, as well, a novel interpretation of the Revolution which considers slavery not merely as “part of the story,” as one JER contributor suggested, but as a central and constitutive element of it. Combining methods of “distant reading” of large textual corpora with close readings of key works, the paper argues that between 1763 and 1776 the “idea of slavery” experienced a “conceptual revelation”: political slavery became inextricably linked with the enslavement of Africans.
Using digital tools to chart changes in language across time, the paper demonstrates that this conceptual linkage first emerged in the early 1760s when transatlantic antislavery activists began contrasting colonists’ calls for “American liberty” with the “inconsistency,” “contradiction,” or “hypocrisy” of their involvement in practices of enslavement. This more expansive (and contested) conception of slavery only began to spread more widely once news of the Somerset decision reached North America in 1772, just as calls for non-importation focused public attention on the transatlantic slave trade. Stopping the slave trade, as the Continental Congress ordered in 1774, thus served a vital ideological function at a crucial revolutionary moment. It offered an innovative solution to what Edmund Morgan famously called the “American paradox of slavery and freedom, intertwined.” And it proved to the revolutionaries, if not to their critics, that their conduct would indeed match their ideas.