Today, we are happy to bring you our conversation with Matthew Mason, author of Seeking the High Ground: Slavery and Political Conflict in the British Atlantic World

What inspired you to write this book? 

This is part of my ongoing study of the Anglo-American politics of slavery across a long period, from the colonial era to past the American Civil War. I am fascinated by all the different ways in which Britons and Americans used slavery in their debates with each other, whether or not slavery was the subject at hand. I thought this volume might end with both nations abolishing participation in the transatlantic slave trade in 1807. But I end this study in 1783 with American independence, for two reasons. First, the material was so rich and varied in both the colonial and American Revolutionary periods that those chapters kept growing. Second, I feel some urgency to offer my intervention in historians’ ongoing and lively debates over the relationship between slavery and the American Revolution. Those debates have reached a point where I think a synthesis of the two sides is in order.

What did you learn and what are you hoping readers will learn from your book? 

One uncomfortable thing was that I learned I needed to revise myself! In my first book, Slavery and Politics in the Early American Republic, published in 2006, I argued that the politics of slavery in North America began in earnest with the American Revolution. In doing more research across the colonial period, I came to realize that as a whippersnapper I had defined politics too narrowly. I came to see the largely religious protests against slavery from both the metropolis and the colonies during that long era as political in many senses, especially in terms of their impact on enslavers. I also learned, and hope readers will learn, about how easily slavery implicated itself in all the debates during the imperial crisis and Revolutionary War. Debaters found it thoroughly natural to inject slavery into debates that historians have normally treated as straight-up political, such as over taxation and representation. Thus I hope readers will see how the historical literature on the politics of the Revolution and the historical literature on the politics of slavery should be connected, rather than separate.

What surprised you the most in the process of writing your book? 

Mostly that I had a book, so to speak, once I reached 1783 rather than 1807. That’s due to the things I said in relation to question 1 above. But also one of the joys of doing in-depth research into as many primary sources as possible is that authors and speakers and writers can often surprise you with the arguments they make. And working in the 17th- and 18th-century British Atlantic always offers wonderful surprises in terms of these writers’ variations in spelling, capitalization, etc. No one was going to tell them how to spell or capitalize! And to my mind, that leads to what my favorite author, George Eliot, called “that dear, old . . . inefficiency.”

What’s your favorite anecdote from your book?

That’s a tough one, but probably it’s the multiple occasions on which enslaved Black Americans appealed to British commanders to honor their wartime promises of freedom. These petitioners (most often Black women) demanded freedom (most often of Guy Carleton, commander in New York City at the end of the war) as something promised, rather than asking for it as a favor. But they also leveraged ideas of British paternalism in the process. It struck me as savvy playing of politics where many historians and readers may not expect to find politics in operation.

What’s next? 

As suggested above, this is part of a multi-volume project. I am currently at work on the period between 1783 and 1833. Much as with this book, I am using both key moments in the Anglo-American relationship and key moments in the history of Anglo-American slavery as mileposts. So in this next volume, key moments will include 1807 (slave trade abolition legislation in both the US and the British Empire) and 1833 (the Parliamentary act for gradual emancipation of about 800,000 enslaved people in the British Empire), but also the War of 1812 and other markers in the broader relationship. There’s so much going on in this study that I will happily have my hands full with it for years.