Edmund S. Morgan > Quotes

“The only way to make a library safe is to lock people out of it. As long as they are allowed to read the books 'any old time they have a mind to,' libraries will remain the nurseries of heresy and independence of thought. They will, in fact, preserve that freedom which is a far more important part of our lives than any ideology or orthodoxy, the freedom that dissolves orthodoxies and inspires solutions to the ever-changing challenges of the future. I hope that your library and mine will continue in this way to be dangerous for many years to come.”
― Edmund S. Morgan, American Heroes: Profiles of Men and Women Who Shaped Early America

“The Indians, keeping to themselves, laughed at your superior methods and lived from the land more abundantly and with less labor than you did... And when your own people started deserting in order to live with them, it was too much... So you killed the Indians, tortured them, burned their villages, burned their cornfields... But you still did not grow much corn.”
― edmund morgan

“I would say that my ideal of writing history is to give the reader vicarious experience. You’re born in one particular century at a particular time, and the only experience you can have directly is of the place you live and the time you live in. History is a way of giving you experience that you would otherwise be cut off from.”
― Edmund Sears Morgan

“What, then, of the liberated slaves and Indians? The saddest part of the story and perhaps the most revealing is that no one bothered to say. None of the accounts either of Drake’s voyage or of the Roanoke colony mentions what became of them.”
― Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom

“And he wanted no more of those other Puritan specialties: schools and books. In Virginia, he said, “I thank God, there are no free schools nor printing, and I hope we shall not have these hundred years; for learning has brought disobedience, and heresy, and sects into the world, and printing has divulged them, and libels against the best government. God keep us from both!”
― Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom

“These numbers gave Virginia’s population about six times as large a proportion of gentlemen as England had. Gentlemen, by definition, had no manual skill, nor could they be expected to work at ordinary labor.”
― Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom

“There is no denying that Francis Drake was a pirate and that the enterprise he conducted four years later in Panama was highway robbery, or at best, highjacking. But it was on the scale that transforms crime into politics.”
― Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom

“How, then, did Virginia gentlemen persuade the voters to return the right kind of people to the House of Burgesses? How could patricians win in populist politics? The question can lead us again to the paradox which has underlain our story, the union of freedom and slavery in Virginia and America.”
― Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom

“… the great and fundamental principles of their policy are, that every man is naturally free and independent, that no one … on earth has any right to deprive him of his freedom and independency, and that nothing can be a compensation for the loss of it.” Robert Rogers, A Concise Account of North America (London, 1765),”
― Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom

“Many of the persons convicted at Salem were found to have dolls in their possession, a piece of circumstantial evidence that in itself was almost sufficient to convict them. But there were other ways if determining whether a person was a witch or not.
Witches were thought to have witch-marks on some part of their bodies, an area of skin that was red or blue or in some way different from the rest. Furthermore, at some time during a twenty-four-hour period, it was thought, the devil or one of his imps would visit the witch and be visible to observers. He might come in the shape of a man or a woman or a child, or a cat, dog, rat, toad--indeed, any kind of creature. The devil could take nearly any shape he chose. So the usual procedure against a person accused of witchcraft was to search his or her belongings for dolls, search his or her body for witch-marks, and then keep watch over the person in the middle of the room for twenty-four hours. God help anyone who had an old doll in his possession and in addition had some skin blemish.”
― Edmund S. Morgan, American Heroes: Profiles of Men and Women Who Shaped Early America

“Libraries are the great hothouses of change, where new ideas are nursed into being and then turned loose to do their work.”
― Edmund S. Morgan, American Heroes: Profiles of Men and Women Who Shaped Early America

“The answer lies in the fact that slave labor, in spite of its seeming superiority, was actually not as advantageous as indentured labor the first half of the century. Because of the high mortality among immigrants to Virginia, there could be no great advantage in owning a man for a lifetime rather than a period of years, especially since a slave cost roughly twice as much as an indentured servant. If the chances of a man's dying during his first five years in Viriginia were fifty-fifty – and it seems apparent that they were- and if English servants could be made to work as hard as slaves, English servants for a five-year term were the better buy.”
― Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom

“Freedom, inefficiency, and prosperity are not in it frequently found together, and it is seldom easy to distinguish between the first two.”
― Edmund S Morgan

“...a man who values his historical reputation had better outlive his enemies.”
― Edmund S. Morgan, American Heroes: Profiles of Men and Women Who Shaped Early America

“Like other imperialists, Hakluyt was convinced that the world would be better off under his country’s dominion, and indeed that all good people would welcome it. Who would not gladly abandon the tyranny of Spain for the benevolence, the freedom of English rule?”
― Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom

“This diatribe was not mere youthful exuberance. In one of his last tracts, written when he was fifty-four, he described his opponent as a "snake-in-the-grass" and then specified what kind, a rattlesnake."
(William Penn)”
― Edmund S. Morgan, American Heroes: Profiles of Men and Women Who Shaped Early America

“The representative who loses touch with his constituents loses office, but the representative who sacrifices the national trust to local prejudice or to the changing winds of popular opinion betrays all the people for some of the people.”
― Edmund S. Morgan, The Genuine Article: A Historian Looks at Early America

“Every age has its own separatists. They are the intransigents, the undeviating purists who have to be right whatever the cost, who would sacrifice the world rather than compromise their own righteousness.”
― Edmund S. Morgan