Daniel Defoe's 1719 novel Robinson Crusoe is nothing less than a nationalist narrative that extols the burgeoning capitalism of eighteenth-century England. In this moving tale, a ship-wrecked slave trader, stranded on an island for twenty-four-years, single-handedly consolidates the arduous and multi-tasked feat of making bread – from planting the wheat to producing the finished product – into a one-person job. On a smaller but no less devastating scale, he also succeeds in replicating the process of colonization through his master–slave relationship with Friday. The novel thus popularizes the notion of self-sufficiency through the mechanisms of capitalism, conquest, and the transmission of hegemony.

On January 7, 1892, Forest and Stream – the magazine of “true sportsmen” – featured a photograph of wild mule deer taken by Fred Baker, a hunter from Wyoming. A doe and her two fawns rest peacefully in front of a patch of sagebrush, as the midday sun casts a bright light. “Here, by a piece of good fortune which might not come to a man once in a lifetime,” the editor George Bird Grinnell explained, “Mr. Baker discovered the deer, and creeping up to the edge of the ravine focussed his camera on them without disturbing their siesta.” Grinnell emphasized to readers the accuracy and details portrayed in the image – the large mule-like ears of the deer and the black tips of fur that marked their tails. But he also drew a moral message from this scene of tranquility. “The flesh of the mule deer is excellent eating,” Grinnell wrote, “far better in the estimation of some people than that of the Virginia deer; but we think a man would have to be pretty hungry or quite without soul who would be willing to disturb the charming family group which is shown in our illustration. As we grow older we incline more and more to the opinion that a camera is sometimes a more satisfactory implement to hunt with than a gun.”

Virginia, Britain's most populous and arguably most important North American colony, once seemed the perfect fit for the “consensus” interpretation of the War of Independence. Indeed, the percentage of white colonists who became loyalists was probably lower in Virginia than in any other rebelling colony. The widespread agreement on secession from Britain should not, however, be mistaken for social consensus. The reality was that revolutionary Virginia was frequently in turmoil. One of the most intriguing of the local insurrections broke out in the northern county of Loudoun just five months before the Declaration of Independence. In February 1776, the county erupted into a heated confrontation pitting gentlemen against their less wealthy neighbours. Lund Washington, who was managing Mount Vernon, warned his cousin, General George Washington, who was outside Boston training his fledgeling patriot army, that the “first Battle we have in this part of the Country will be in Loudon” – not against British soldiers, but against fellow patriots. Within a week, the revolutionary government in Williamsburg, the Committee of Safety, felt compelled to send troops to quell the disturbances. Yet, for months afterwards, gentry Virginians worried that their effort to suppress the rebellion had failed. In mid-May, Andrew Leitch told Leven Powell of Loudoun, “I really lament the torn and distracted condition of your County.” The “troublesome times,” as another gentleman called them, were slow to abate.

In 1825, Harriet Beecher Stowe's father, Lyman Beecher, gave a series of six sermons which helped to launch the temperance movement. In these sermons, published in 1826 and much reprinted thereafter, Beecher used the slave trade as a moral yardstick for the evils of intemperance. In doing so, he built on the moral outrage which brought an end to the legal importation of African slaves in 1808, and further criminalized the trade in 1820 when it was declared piracy. Beecher concluded that, morally reprehensible as the slave trade had been, intemperance was the greater evil, for it did greater damage to the individual soul, and cast a wider shadow of suffering. “We have heard of the horrors of the middle passage, the transportation of slaves, the chains, the darkness, the stench, the mortality and living madness of wo, and it is dreadful,” Beecher noted before counting the human cost of bondage to alcohol:

Yes, in this nation there is a middle passage of slavery, and darkness, and chains, and disease, and death. But it is a middle passage, not from Africa to America, but from time to eternity; and not of slaves whom death will release from suffering, but of those whose sufferings at death do but just begin. Could all the sighs of these captives be wafted on one breeze, it would be loud as thunder. Could all their tears be assembled, they would be like the sea.

Given the rhetorical power of the comparison between the evils of chattel slavery and the evils of alcohol dependency, it is hardly surprising that Lyman Beecher's daughter, writing some thirty years later, would build on her father's work, inverting, in Dred, the import of the comparison.

Slavery was not the most important issue for which George Washington is remembered; nor were his views on the institution as revealing as those of some of his fellow Founding Fathers. But Washington was a slaveowner for all of his adult life and he lived in Virginia, which was dominated by tobacco plantations based on slave labour. Slavery was central to the socio-economic life of the Old Dominion: after 1750 40 per cent of the North American slave population lived there and the first United States census of 1790 showed 300,000 slaves in Virginia. The tobacco they produced was the most valuable staple crop grown in North America. At his home Mount Vernon, situated on the upper Potomac river overlooking the Maryland shore, Washington created an estate, based on the latest agricultural practice, that was also a set of plantation farms centred around the work of enslaved Africans. Slavery, then, was clearly a persistent part of Washington's life and career. Because of this and his pre-eminent position in American public life, Washington's use of slave labour and his views on an important paradox of American history in the revolutionary era – the coexistence of slavery and liberty – deserve close attention. One man's dilemma in dealing with the morality of his own slaveholding was mirrored in the broader context of what the United States could or would do about the problem of slavery.

Ralph Ellison's career will undoubtedly provide students of American literature and biographers much to puzzle over in the coming years. He published his first novel, Invisible Man, in 1952 when he was 38, an age when Faulkner was in the midst of his great period and just poised to publish Absalom, Absalom! After the early 1950s, Ellison published two books of essays, Shadow and Act (1964) and Going to the Territory (1986), and a few excerpts from an ever more mythical work-in-progress. That work-in-progress, or some truncated version of it, has now appeared with the intriguing title, Juneteenth, which refers to the day, 19 June 1865, when the slaves in Texas learned they were free, some two months after the end of the Civil War.

Without a doubt, Ralph Ellison considered himself, above all, an American writer of the modernist persuasion; indeed, he was one of the most patriotic of writer-citizens in the republic of letters. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, he was attacked by anti-war forces for his qualified support for the Johnson administration's prosecution of the Vietnam War, and black radicals for insufficient militance about his “blackness.” Through it all, Ellison resolutely resisted the obligation to make his art explicitly political. It was precisely that which was at issue in his famous polemical exchanges with Irving Howe.

Yet, Ellison's writing always was political in at least two senses. First, as he asserted in 1964 before the civil rights movement gave way to Black Power and its cultural wing, the Black Arts movement: “protest is an element of all art, though it does not necessarily take the form of speaking for a political or social program.” In other words: art was political but not in the programmatic way demanded by others, whoever they might be.