Seeking the High Ground with Matthew Mason

Join NACBS to celebrate the publication of Matthew Mason’s recent book Seeking the High Ground: Slavery and Political Conflict in the British Atlantic World. Eliga Gould will join Matthew in discussion.

Seeking the High Ground with Matthew Mason

March 5th at 12pm EST/ 11am CST/ 10am MST / 9am PST / 5pm GMT

"How is it, Samuel Johnson famously asked on the eve of the Revolution, that Americans could so vociferously demand freedom for themselves while so conspicuously continuing to deny it to those they held in slavery? With Seeking the High Ground, Matthew Mason helps answer that piercing question. As he shows, the language of slavery and freedom had long suffused Anglo-American political debates in the eighteenth century, with the Revolution emerging as one particularly hyperdramatic act during which combatants on both sides of the war of words connected the idea of slavery to the headline issues of the day. Mason details how Patriots and Loyalists alike deployed the rhetoric of slavery in their debates about all the crucial questions of the day, including republicanism, taxation and representation, and—by claiming the moral high ground—the nature of the Revolutionary War itself. These debates left complex rhetorical and political legacies for those seeking to abolish and defend slavery in both the new US and the remaining British Empire.”

Seeking the High Ground: Slavery and Conflict in the British Atlantic World (University of Virginia Press) 2025.

Matthew Mason is a professor of history at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah.  He teaches a variety of courses on the history of slavery, early America, and Britain. He has published articles in a variety of journals of national and international reach. His previous two books are Slavery and Politics in the Early American Republic (2006); and Apostle of Union: A Political Biography of Edward Everett (2016). He has co-edited books including John Quincy Adams and the Politics of Slavery: Selections from the Diary (2017); and Contesting Slavery: The Politics of Bondage and Freedom in the New American Nation (2008).

Eliga Gould is Professor of History at the University of New Hampshire.  During the 2025-26 academic year, he is Harmsworth Visiting Professor of American History at the University of Oxford.  His books include Among the Powers of the Earth: The American Revolution and the Making of a New World Empire (2012), winner of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic Book Prize and a finalist for the George Washington Book Prize, and volume one of The Cambridge History of America and the World (2021), co-edited with Paul Mapp and Carla Pestana.  He is currently writing Peace and Independence:  The Turbulent History of the United States’ Founding Treaty, about the peace that ended the War of American Independence.