Edmund S. Morgan Quotes

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.

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.

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.

Freedom, inefficiency, and prosperity are not in it frequently found together, and it is seldom easy to distinguish between the first two.

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.

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.

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.