Join us in the History Program lounge on Monday, April 29^th at 2pm for

Holly Brewer on

Slavery and Sedition:  Rethinking Historical Silences through the mysterious death of Morgan Godwyn

In the spring of 1685, Morgan Godwyn, a minister who had served in Virginia and Barbados for more than 15 years, disappeared after publishing a book condemning the slave trade and the practice of slavery in those colonies. In 1687, he died. This paper attempts both to explain the mystery surrounding his death by providing a context for it, and to explore the limits of our vision as historians by examining how censorship and sedition worked in late seventeenth century England and its empire and how those restraints limit what we can see and hear as historians. I argue that Godwyn probably died for criticizing slavery in a world where the name of the King of England, James II, was synonymous with the slave trade. James II was personally responsible, as director of the Royal African Company which had a legal monopoly on the slave trade, for the importation of literally 100,000 souls from Africa to the new world in the decade of the 1680s alone. That same King believed he was God’s anointed servant, responsible to no-one, ruling by divine right. Godwyn’s public condemnation of the slave trade (at Westminster Abbey, in London, in 1685), a sermon he then had published–called the slave trade a bargain with the Devil; by implication, James II was Faustus, and urged to repent.  This paper uses Godwyn’s extraordinary act — and its consequences — to meditate on how power shaped what could be spoken and published, rendering many people “dumb” or mute, as Godwyn bemoaned, and for whom he tried to speak.  They are especially mute to our ears, which are attuned to the published past, from whence we tell our histories. Consequently we have failed to see how extensively slavery was debated before 1775, partly because we have not been looking in the right places, but mostly because we have not been reading through censorship’s veil.

Holly Brewer is Burke Professor of American History & Associate Professor at the University of Maryland.  She earned her Ph.D. from UCLA in 1994 in American History with specialties in Political Theory and British history, and her A.B. from Harvard College in 1986.  She specializes in Early American /Atlantic world history, cultural and intellectual history, and legal history.   Her first book By Birth or Consent: Children, Law, and the Anglo-American Revolution in Authority, which was published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and UNC Press in 2005, won three prizes, as did her 1997 article “Entailing Aristocracy in Colonial Virginia.” Professor Brewer serves as co-editor of the American Society for Legal History’s (ASLH) book series (which publishes with Cambridge University Press) and serves on the ASLH Board of Directors as well as the Council of the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture.