Edmund S. Morgan Quotes

#1. 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

#2. 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

#3. 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

#4. 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

#5. 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

#6. 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