arrival the Puritans changed membership to a gathered church composed exclusively of tested Saints. Morgan's 1958 book The Puritan Dilemma made him a star, becoming the most-assigned book in U.S. history survey courses, documenting the change in understanding among Puritans of what it means to be a member of a church, "doing right in a world that does wrong": "Caught between the ideals of God's Law and the practical needs of the people, John Winthrop walked a line few could tread." American Revolution In The Stamp Act Crisis (1953) and The Birth of the Republic (1956) Morgan rejected the Progressive interpretation of the American Revolution and its assumption that the rhetoric of the Patriots was mere claptrap. Instead Morgan returned to the interpretation first set out by George Bancroft a century before that the patriots were deeply motivated by a commitment to liberty. Historian Mark Egnal argues that: The leading neo-Whig historians, Edmund Morgan and Bernard Bailyn, underscore this dedication to whiggish principles, although with variant readings. For Morgan, the development of the patriots' beliefs was a rational, clearly defined process. Slavery In his seminal 1975 book American Slavery, American Freedom, Morgan explored "the American paradox, the marriage of slavery and freedom": Human relations among us still suffer from the former enslavement of a large portion of our predecessors. The freedom of the free, the growth of freedom experienced in the American Revolution depended more than we like to admit on the enslavement of more than 20 percent of us at that time. How republican freedom came to be supported, at least in large part, by its opposite, slavery, is the subject of this book. Morgan claimed that large Virginia plantation owners exerted an outsized influence on poorer white Virginians and their attitude toward the racial divide (color line) which made it possible for Virginian white men as a group to become more politically equal: ("Aristocrats could more safely preach equality in a slave society than in a free one"). In a controversial passage, Morgan suggests Virginia's poor whites felt no racial superiority to poor blacks. He does this by providing evidence that, in 17th-century Virginia, poor white indentured servants and black slaves frequently cooperated with each other and worked together. Morgan cites the 1676 Bacon’s Rebellion as evidence of a surprising racial egalitarianism among the poor, since Bacon incorporated runaway black slaves into his army. However, despite the assertions