Elite Virginians backed republicanism because slavery disenfranchised the poor

Evidence

By the period of the Revolution, white Virginian elites had traded their reliance on white laborers for the more economically profitable and less politically troublesome enslaved African labor. In 1776, Virginia held 40 percent of all enslaved people in the mainland colonies. As a result, white free laborers and tenant farmers numbered too few in Virginia to challenge the white men in power. The historian Edmund S. Morgan argues in his classic book American Slavery, American Freedom that well-off white Virginians, most of whom enslaved people, could champion a form of republican representative government defined by the absence of a formal ruling class or monarchy without threatening their own status as elites for one simple reason: they knew that the system of slavery meant that most of the poor in Virginia were enslaved, so they had no legal rights and could never participate in politics. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 111

Categorization

• XREF: This is Morgan’s argument that slavery made republican government safe for Virginia elites — core causal claim distinguishing reframing from mere narrative.