Stillbirth of A Nation is the story of America’s birth as a slave nation. Among the author’s startling claims are:
-Slavery in the English Colonies, from Carolina to Canada, did not have its origins in the transatlantic slave trade conducted by Portugal, Spain and Holland, but in England’s own ancient and rich history of child slavery, transformed into a hideous human trafficking industry with the criminalization of poverty in Elizabethan England.
-American notions of freedom, liberty and autonomy did not rise from a free pioneer society, but were learned from Native Americans.
-That the American tradition of bearing arms was a reaction against the enslavement of whites by whites, whose masters armed and paid Indian warriors to police the frontiers for runaways.
These three key concepts and many more fascinating facts about early American life are illuminated through the memoir of Scottish slave Peter Williamson, who had his freedom taken four times, by British, French and Indians.
