Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America

by Ira Berlin

Today most Americans, black and white, identify slavery with cotton, the deep South, and the African-American church. But at the beginning of the nineteenth century, after almost two hundred years of African-American life in mainland North America, few slaves grew cotton, lived in the deep South, or embraced Christianity. Many Thousands Gone traces the evolution of black society from the first arrivals in the early seventeenth century through the Revolution. In telling their story, Ira Berlin, a leading historian of southern and African-American life, reintegrates slaves into the history of the American working class and into the tapestry of our nation.

Laboring as field hands on tobacco and rice plantations, as skilled artisans in port cities, or soldiers along the frontier, generation after generation of African Americans struggled to create a world of their own in circumstances not of their own making. In a panoramic view that stretches from the North to the Chesapeake Bay and Carolina lowcountry to the Mississippi Valley, Many Thousands Gone reveals the diverse forms that slavery and freedom assumed before cotton was king. We witness the transformation that occurred as the first generations of creole slaves--who worked alongside their owners, free blacks, and indentured whites--gave way to the plantation generations, whose back-breaking labor was the sole engine of their society and whose physical and linguistic isolation sustained African traditions on American soil.

As the nature of the slaves' labor changed with place and time, so did the relationship between slave and master, and between slave and society. In this fresh and vivid interpretation, Berlin demonstrates that the meaning of slavery and of race itself was continually renegotiated and redefined, as the nation lurched toward political and economic independence and grappled with the Enlightenment ideals that had inspired its birth.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, American History, Race, African American, American, Social Justice

512 pages, Paperback

First published March 4, 1998

About the author

A historian of American slavery, Ira Berlin earned his BA in chemistry, and an MA and Ph.D. in history from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He taught at the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle and Federal City College in Washington, DC before moving to the University of Maryland in 1974, where he was Distinguished University Professor of History. A former president of the Organization of American Historians, Berlin was the founding editor of the Freedmen and Southern Society Project, which he directed until 1991.

Reviews

[Ebony Thomas · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the best accounts of slavery from the first North American colonies to the Revolutionary War. It upended some of what I've always believed about slavery in the United States and filled in many gaps in my historical knowledge. Berlin's distinctions between societies with slaves and slave societies; between Atlantic creoles and saltwater slaves; between creolization and Africanization; and discussion of the agency and sheer ingenuity displayed by the charter, plantation, and revolutionary generations of slaves in the United States provides a new metanarrative useful for talking about slavery in the United States. I was curious about what slavery looked like elsewhere; Berlin ignores what it was like in the Northwest Territories, but perhaps that's outside of the scope of this book. A magnificent and at times emotional read.

[Jerome Otte · Rating 4 out of 5]

A thorough, accessible and well-researched history of black slavery in colonial North America, prior to the Antebellum era. The book is divided by “generations”: charter, plantation, and revolutionary, as well as by region. Berlin does a fine job connecting all of these threads into a coherent narrative, and Berlin notes that there were more slaves in North America at the end of the revolutionary era than at the beginning. Also at this time, few slaves grew cotton, lived in the south or embraced Christian beliefs. Berlin does not find any particular region where slavery was “moderate” or where racism wasn’t prevalent. Although some slaves managed to make relative gains in improving their own condition, it was mostly by their own effort.

Berlin ably demonstrates the dynamics and diversity of the system and how it was affected by such factors as economic change, the American revolution, national politics, and international diplomacy. Berlin argues that slavery was less common in the north due to simple profit-related motives, rather than any notion that northerners were somehow “less” racist than southerners. He also emphasizes how slavery and racism fused into a relationship where one could not exist without the other, and how this resulted in more thorough exploitation of blacks from the colonial era all the way to the Civil War. He also finds little difference between slaves in the south and free blacks in the north, and emphasizes that conditions for slaves worsened as the institute expanded and became more systematic.

An interesting, rich and well-written volume with a strong if sometimes dry narrative.

[Kirk Battle · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's a good social history of slavery and breaks down a lot of nuances between the different regions, cultures, and periods while Atlantic slavery developed. It also totally ignores the economics and business side of this process, instead occasionally indicating that this was profitable or that plantation owners rarely had the money to actually feed and take care of their slave populations. It makes for a frustrating but solid read.

Written by Ira Berlin, the first 100 pages deal with distinguishing chattel slavery from other types of labor and even slavery. Horrific, violent work was always present and it was given out to indentured servants, prisoners, and slaves. He points out that race was a relatively undeveloped way of defining class because there were numerous other ways people identified themselves. Religion, social status, birthright, wealth, and education all did the job. In the initial colonization period all of these groups were lumped together, working various crops or performing ill labor.

What makes it different is when a social class, who Berlin calls the Planter class, seizes political control and codifies their position into society. Once they passed laws saying all black people were slaves for life and this was hereditary, everything changed. It's at this point I'm glad I've read Graeber's History of Debt or the Tombee memoirs. Without that context, Berlin mostly just leaves this group as a crazed bunch of paternalist ideologues.

Gets a bit repetitive because of how much the gains and losses follow boom-bust economic cycles. While it nicely details the constant feud between slave and master over control, like introducing task systems or allowing slave economies to form so they didn't have to absorb costs of food and clothing, he eventually got into the crop details enough to really open your eyes to how that could impact gender and class.

Rice was really complicated to grow. Eventually slaves would develop engineering and design schools working the flood system. Urban slaves usually picked up skills like carpentry or forge work. You can't really discipline a person in this position. Tobacco and Indigo were both labor intensive and also required a lot of skilled labor. You don't need slaves to grow wheat, one of the reasons the North gave up slavery was because you only needed someone to plant & harvest the stuff.

Cotton, on the other hand, is awful. Our idea of what a plantation was like basically comes from 19th Century cotton production. You did one job over and over. You had little to no variation or skill development. One person could do it as well as the next.

There's a lot of fascinating discussion about the apathy of free slaves to people still enslaved or even owning slaves themselves. Skin color as a status symbol, urban workers being richer than farmhands, and a lot of other complex explanations for the why and how of the world today. Great book. Very eye opening.

[Joseph Stieb · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ira Berlin’s expansive Many Thousands Gone surveys the history black slavery in North America in the 17th and 18th centuries. Berlin has three major goals in this book. His first goal is to account for the geographical variations in slavery over four major regions of North America. His second goal is to explain changes in slavery and slave culture in these regions over time by dividing the first two hundred years of slavery into three generations. He achieves these first two goals, painting a vivid and diverse portrait of slavery. His third goal is to show how slaves resisted and negotiated with their masters in order to earn more rights, independence, and occasionally their freedom. He achieves this objective less completely. Although he is right to show the agency of slaves, he subsumes too much diverse slave behavior under the category of resistance and often obscures the power of slave masters.
Berlin divides the slave experience into four regions: the northern and middle colonies, Virginia, southeastern colonies like South Carolina and Georgia, and the lower Mississippi Valley. He conveys a tremendous sense of variation in slavery based on the economic and social conditions of these regions. The North was a “society with slaves,” meaning that there were slaves, but they were neither the central labor force nor the defining aspect of the social hierarchy. The urban society and commercial economy explained this phenomenon, as did the lack of large-scale plantation farming. In contrast, Virginia and the Southeast became “slave societies” by the late seventeenth century because of the development of the plantation system and staple crops like tobacco and cotton. In these regions, slaves were the central labor force and the defining aspect of a highly racial social hierarchy. In the Mississippi Valley, slavery developed slowly and haphazardly because of widespread slave resistance, Indian Wars, and geopolitical instability. Overall, Berlin gives us a refined and varied portrait of slavery’s different impacts on different regional histories as well as the distinctive experiences of slaves.
Berlin further enhances our understanding of the first two centuries of slavery by three time periods that marked different slave experiences. The charter generation was the first arrivals and the first few generations of slaves, mostly in the seventeenth century. He defines many of these slaves as “Atlantic Creoles.” This fascinating concept portrays the charter generation slaves as cosmopolitan, linguistically and economically skilled, and excellent at “intercultural negotiation” given their diverse experiences in the Atlantic World. Because racism had not yet hardened into an explicit system yet, these slaves found tremendous leeway to negotiate their way in North America and create remarkable levels of independence, prosperity, and cultural autonomy. However, the coming of cash crops and plantation agriculture brought massive imports of slaves for hard labor during the plantation generation, which ran roughly from the late seventeenth century to the American Revolution. The Atlantic Creoles prominence and lifestyle faded, whites established far more systematic and racial hierarchies and methods of control, and life became much harsher for the average slave. Slavery changed again during the Revolutionary Generation when many slaves seized on revolutionary principles and the disruptions of the war in order to escape slavery or renegotiate better conditions and more privileges. Once again, Berlin shows the profound differences in slavery and the slave experience over time, helping us understand broad trends while pushing us away from inappropriate or lazy generalizations.
The heart of Berlin’s argument is his attempt to alter our understanding of the slave as a passive victim by showing slave agency through resistance, negotiation, and identity formation. He begins the book with a crucial statement in this regard:
Knowing that a person was a slave does not tell everything about him or her…slaveholders severely circumscribed the lives of enslaved people, but they never fully defined them…The slaves’ history-like all human history, was made not only by what was done to them but also by what they did to themselves (2).

One way Berlin demonstrates slave agency is by focusing on the strategies they used against their masters to negotiate better conditions, more independence, and more privileges. He shows how slaves could feign ignorance, fake illness, work too slowly, break tools, run away, threaten violence, or even employ violence as ways of protesting their conditions and acquiring new privileges. He claims that they also resisted in their cultures, often by maintaining African names, languages, and religions. Masters often had to acknowledge customary slave rights, such as the task system of labor or visiting rights to nearby family members, in order to keep their slaves under control. He portrays masters as frazzled patriarchs who had to choose between more discipline at the risk of provoking a backlash or more lenience at the risk of fostering a sense of independence and inviting more resistance. Slaves, in contrast, emerge as calculating agents who constantly leveraged a wide variety of strengths to protest their bondage and press for better lives.
The main problem with Berlin’s argument about resistance and agency is that he pushes these ideas too far and subsumes too much slave behavior under these concepts. Feigning stupidity or illness may have been a way of protesting slavery, but it also was probably a product of exhaustion or the simple desire to avoid heavy labor. Independent slave farming may have been an act of resistance in some ways, but it also may have been a survival strategy for malnourished people. All the negotiations slaves engaged in could have been as much about accommodating themselves to a rotten position in life as opposed to active attempts to resist or escape that life. Almost every slave action according to Berlin was a calculation, precluding the possibility that they may have acted impulsively or irrationally. For a book largely devoted to humanizing slaves, Berlin’s agents come across as strangely one-dimensional in their motivations. Berlin actually confines the agency of slaves by reducing so much of their behavior to resistance rather than a more diverse array of human motivations.

[Carl · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lots of information does not necessarily translate into an enjoyable reading experience. Berlin has a fixed analytical protocol which he applies across regions & time periods and the result is that the reading has a very repetitive quality to it. Still there is much to be learned here. Among the highlights: slavery was more widespread & persisted longer in the North than most people realize. It was limited by the fact that nowhere in the North did a plantation economy develop. Free blacks were not treated better in the North than in much of the South. The conditions attached to slavery deteriorated over time. In the earliest years of American slavery, it was not uncommon for slaves to work alongside white indentured servants & even owners. It was characterized in Berlin's terms as societies with slaves rather than societies of slaves. The years of the American Revolution with the pervasive hints of freedom in the air, did much to alleviate the conditions of slavery & many blacks people by various means were able to attain freedom but for those who remained enslaved, any gains were short lived as the attainment of American independence closed the door on the aspirations of slaves & free blacks too.

[Eric Burke · Rating 3 out of 5]

In American popular consciousness, the thought of African slavery consistently conjures a stable set of images: expansive fields of cotton, gin mills, whipping posts, and somber spirituals; the auction block, mounted horsewhip-toting overseers, and the humble slave cabin. In recent years even popular culture has returned to the drama of the antebellum “Old South” in films like 12 Years a Slave (2013) and best-selling novels like Toni Morrison's Beloved (2004). While the importance of engaging with the history of late antebellum American slavery is indeed of great importance, it can also generate the illusion of slavery as a timeless institution. By emphasizing but a single period in American slavery's long, tempestuous, dynamic, and ever-changing history, the popular imagination quickly loses track of how such a dismal state of affairs ever arose in the first place. Worse yet, as Americans continue to wrestle with the problems of racism, de-historicizing its roots in a particular breed of slavery can threaten to shroud any possibility for its eventual destruction.

With his award winning Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America, Ira Berlin attempts to reverse this phenomenon. Historicizing the nineteenth century “Old South” by engaging with the two centuries of American slavery preceding it, he illustrates clearly the highly nuanced and dynamic roots of the institution as Americans have come to think of it. “The first two centuries of African-American captivity were no prolegomenon to an antebellum quintessence,” he explains (365). Over the course of the two-hundred and fifty years preceding 1850, white Americans had, by and large, embraced the notion that “given an opportunity, black people would behave precisely like whites” (364). Though the experience both of “societies with slaves” and “slave societies” differed widely across time and place – a diversity described in detail through the book – prior to the adoption of “new racism” founded upon a “cult of whiteness,” notions of any biological or “natural inferiority” of blacks were absent from the white American psyche (363, 364).

To explain the origins and evolution of such beliefs, Berlin returns to the era of the “Charter Generations,” sharing the details of the lives of “Atlantic creoles” comprising the first generation of bonded and free Africans in the American colonies. Living in a “society with slaves,” as Berlin refers to the early seventeenth century Atlantic littoral, the Atlantic creoles enjoyed a certain control over their personal destinies and a flexibility in social status unmatched by succeeding generations. With the rise of staple crop agriculture and the slaveholders' transformations of society toward “capitalized production and monopolized resources,” things changed dramatically (9). As the number of “saltwater” slaves from the African interior increased exponentially, slaveholders began to consolidate their economic gains, seize political power, and push nonslaveholding whites “to the margins” (9). “In the absence of competitors,” Berlin explains, slaveholders were allowed to take control of the state and enact sweeping legislation that permanently secured their right to bonded African labor (9). Though the trajectory differed from region to region (and, as in the lower Mississippi valley, could even reverse itself), the conversion from the world of the Atlantic creole to full-fledged “slave societies” was complete by the turn of the eighteenth century in America.

Naturally, due to the inconvenient (in the eyes of slaveholders) fact that slaves are in fact human beings, the process of swift and efficient stripping of “natural” rights from an entire demographic proved anything but. “Such a social order required raw power to sustain it,” Berlin explains (115). The conversion to a “slave society” launched what essentially became a “never-ending war” between masters and slaves, where the “lines of battle changed constantly” (100, 167). “No matter how adamant the denials,” both parties were forced to recognize the existence and humanity of the other. This reality “necessitated a coexistence that fostered cooperation as well as contestation” (3). Berlin adeptly illustrates how slaves continued to exert agency in the limited parameters allotted them through acts ranging from truancy to outright physical violence and revolt.

Even more inconveniently, as the revolutionary era exploded across the Old World and the New during the late eighteenth century, white Americans were forced to wrestle with the inherent contradictions between a slave society and one founded upon universal human rights to freedom and personal liberty. While slaves seized upon revolutionary libertarian philosophies to bolster their own arguments for emancipation (some even taking their case to court), white masters performed mental gymnastics. Beyond stringent citations of sacred rights to property, slaveholders stressed perceptions of congenital differences between whites and blacks. These ideas rapidly gained traction. By the middle of the nineteenth century, Berlin explains, “many, perhaps most, believed that the inferiority of black people originated not in their circumstance – be it enslavement in the South or poverty in the North – but in their nature” (363). By 1850, the ideological “Old South” had officially been born and the flexible world of the Atlantic creole had been laid to rest.

Berlin's work is an imperative addition to early American slavery historiography in two major ways. Firstly, he has provided a coherent chronological structure for the evolution of “slave societies” on the American continent. Stressing the diversity of experience in each of several regions, he is able to illustrate difference and continuity simultaneously. Secondly, Berlin shows how slaves were not simply human tools in the hands of their angry masters, but that they were – across all times and places – able to effect their destiny in subtle (and less subtle) but powerful ways. This argument for slave agency begs all sorts of questions for future historians to wrestle with.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Atlantic Creole, first people of African descent to be brought as slaves to mainland America. Different from antebellum Cotton-growing slaves, they have participated in the Atlantic System. Arrive in mainland N. America at the same time as Unfree whites. Begin to integrate into new world society. Participate in mainland society. Worm their way out of slavery 1/3 - 1/4 gain slavery. Experience in slavery is radically different from what we think. They are critical to the Chesapeake to New Amsterdam different.

With the advent of plantation slavery, discipline changes. Atlantic Creoles ousted by new generation of slaves from Africa. Little knowledge of western world, don't participate in marginal economies. Work harder, die earlier, transforming slavery. It is this transformation that changes our definition of race.

Early Atlantic Creoles stereotyped as slippery characters, not to be trusted but cleaver. But not stereotyped as plantation generation, as dull, stupid, dirty and lazy. Imposition of the plantation transforms the very definition of race.

To be transformed again in the era of revolutions. Large numbers of blacks gain freedom and slavery is overthrown in the North. Bifurcation of American polity. Slaves even gain freedom in the south. Here again the definition of race changes again as free blacks create schools, churches and new wealth and institutions of their own. Richard Allan, Benjamin Bannaker, etc. as black leaders...

Slavery is a central institution in forming American life. The weight of this experience has weighed on our history - beyond the civil war, beyond reconstruction, beyond civil rights, into today's world. The color line is still the great question of the 21st century. We can benefit from an historicized understanding of these issues.

Part III: Slave and Free: The Revolutionary Generations

Introduction

One impact of the Revolution on slavery was to expose cracks in the "master class" as planters divided between patriot and loyalist. The masters' position eroded under the chaotic conditions of warfare, as the dual effects of revolutionary ideology and evangelical religion worked together to undermine the ideological underpinnings for slavery. Squeezed between the reforms of the Spaniards and the later French Revolution, plantation slavery in the south had external forces to contend with as well. Free slaves themselves agitated for abolition. Yet the forces working against freedom were also strong. As émigrés fled the events of Santo Domingo to the northern mainland, they brought with them renewed fears of slaves. Yet the slave trade was also reopened after the Revolution and slavery also found curious reinforcement from a take on revolutionary ideology that posited black slavery as ipso facto proof that slaves were, in fact, not men at all. The demographic affects of the revolution were in the opening up of western territories and the growing urbanization of the new nation. Slave began to work more in urban centers, which offered opportunities for greater liberty. The forms of slavery and mastery which emerged after the Revolution varied as to time, place and section. Much was determined by the particular circumstances of individual slaves and master. But above all, it was intensely regional.

Chapter 9: The Slow Death of Slavery in the North

The north became free states during the period from the end of the Revolution to the early 19th C (by 1804 every northern state had written manumission into law). Yet slavery died out from slow attrition rather than grand liberation. In the middle colonies especially, the impact of the Revolution's chaos had led slaves to run away and thereby reduce the actual slave population. In Philadelphia, this continued after the end of the war with slaves running away and setting fire to buildings on the seaboard. Progress in the North was very slow, as manumission proceeded slowing in rural areas and remained high in areas like Long Island with high percentages of slave holding families. Taking new names and migrating from the country to the city, freedmen took advantage of their freedom to carve out new lives for themselves. Arriving in cities of the north they took up menial labor positions unlike in the southern cities like Charles Town and New Orleans, they had a hard time carving out a niche for themselves. Encountering difficulties in finding work many black men became sailors. The ones who did find a niche did so in occupations like barbers and carters. Free blacks also went about the task of reconstructing family life in the new urban environment, often living several families to a dwelling. and increasingly living in concentrated areas. These new urban settlements saw the emergence of new African American institutions, among which the churches played a very strong role. A new leadership class arose to preach republican values to the free blacks. Men like Richard Allen and Prince Hall forged a new African American identity, making one of the many ethic divisions of the former slaves.

Chapter 10: The Union of African-American Society in the Upper South

Because the upper south did not enact manumission legislation, bondage not only remained but expanded into the western frontier. As a result of the revolution, however, many slaves had in fact achieved freedom. The society that emerged in the Chesapeake featured close association of free and slave blacks, with little of the class structure that emerged among free blacks in the north. Just as whites rallied around race in the upper south so too blacks.

During the Revolutionary War, Lord Dunmore had incited Virginia slaves to leave their masters and join the loyalist cause in exchange for freedom. Tories seized Patriots' slaves, British continentals took particular joy in freeing the slaves of Patriot leaders. Though as many as 5,000 upper south slaves gained freedom during the Revolution, natural increase easily made up for this allowing the planters of the upper south to emerge from the revolution as opponents of the slave trade adopting a contemptuous posture toward its anxious advocates to their south. After the war, a return to Tobacco from staple culture and the diversification tot wheat brought a new intensification of the labor requirements on slaves at the same time as the new "modern" agricultural approaches of planters required an increasing array of tasks be performed by slave labor, which grew to include work in iron forges and other proto-industrial tasks. Slave families achieved a measure of stability as masters increasingly sanctioned slave marriages, but it was always open to disruption through sale to the west. Slaves were also increasing brought into the cities to work in new occupations in transport and maritime industries. In the cities, however, black labor's competition with white caused conflict. Furthermore, the atmosphere of black life in the city fostered the growth of a type of communal life that evaded white supervision and caused great alarm. As slavery grew and expanded into frontier and urban setting, so too did manumission. An amalgam of free black labor and mobile slave black labor developed in the upper south. This created yet more space for blacks to pass from slave status to free, as they did through purchasing their own freedom or blending with free black population until they could forge papers attesting to their freedom. Free blacks took new names and moved increasingly to the cities. Here too an emergent class of black leaders appeared -- Daniel Coker in Baltimore and Christopher McPherson in Richmond. Here too the African American church played a large role in institution building. Yet the shadow of slavery worked against the emergence of class differences amongst free blacks in the Upper South.

Chapter 11: Fragmentation in the Lower South

Describes the emergence of three cast system -- black, white and brown. As the planters of the lower south moved to re-open the slave trade and primed the system for the expansive growth of slavery of the next half century, they would not even countenance slave manumission. Free blacks in urban areas sought to distance themselves from slaves. Many of them of mixed ancestry, Berlin refers to them as "brown."

The Revolution in the south was a true civil war, with loyalists and patriots squaring off amidst a large population that wanted nothing to do with either side. In this environment, disciple became much more severe for slaves. As fear of black insurrection unsettled whites, it empowered black slaves to desert their owners in droves. Thomas Pinckney of S. Carolina returned from the Continental Congress in 1779 to find all put a handful of his slaves gone. Many groups of slaves escaped to the British. Others escaped to the cities, where they tried to pass themselves off as free and put themselves out to hire. The British, for their part, vacillated on slave liberation. Seeking not to alienate slave-holding Loyalists, they also rounded up run away slaves in the cities and ran captured patriot plantations with slave labor. Slaves received inconsistent treatment at the hands of the Patriots as well, some of whom wanted to arm them to fight the British but others who refused to do so. In some cases Patriots even gave captured slaves to their troops as the spoils of war. Groups of bandits roamed the countryside stealing and looting amidst the chaos of warfare. As the British departed, slaves sought their freedom by departing with the British -- yet even the British ended up allowing Americans to reclaim their "property." The overall effect of the war was a decline in the slave population of the region, prompting the region to agitate for the reopening of the slave trade.

After the war, free blacks formed maroons and fought against the new American government to keep their freedom. In combination with the fears generated by Caribbean slave revolt in 1790s, this lead to an increasingly violent slave system. Cotton growing, which slaves had done on their own during the Revolution, grew tremendously with the introduction of the cotton gin and press. Between 1790 and 1800 cotton exports grew in S. Carolina from 10K lbs to 6 M lbs mostly from the back country! The need for black slave labor encouraged slave holders in the upper south to sell their slaves south before they were under legal obligation to manumit. The S. Carolina government opened the slave trade (1782-87), closed it briefly (1787-1803) and then reopened it again in (1803-1810) -- importing a total of 90K slaves during the period. Plantations became larger as grandees bought up departed loyalists property at bargain prices. Slavery moved west after the war, and cotton agriculture picked up in the back country. In this environment, the slave driver assumed greater prominence and stood as intermediary with the master. Slaves continued to develop their own economies by growing their own crops on small plots and selling their produce. Planters increasingly retreated to cities on the coast, leaving the running of plantations more and more to slave drivers and overseers. In these cities, black slaves worked as artisans and increasingly hired themselves out for wages. The black districts of these cities grew and the organizational infrastructure of black culture also expanded under leaders like the preacher Andrew Bryan in Georgia. In these areas, they mixed with free people of color who came as refugees from the Caribbean as well as escaped slaves. Yet the close ties between slaves who had been freed and their former masters insured that commercial bonds remained even in freedom, leading to a lack of solidarity between the slave and the free among black the black population. Not accepted in white society, but wishing to escape the association with bondage, free people of color formed their own benevolent associations to support burials, the indigent, widows, orphans, etc. The Brown Fellowship Society, founded in Charleston in 1790, acted to fragment black society rather than draw it closer together by excluding slaves and blacks with darker skin. This helped establish a "racial pecking order" in the lower south.

Chapter 12: Slavery and Freedom in the Lower Mississippi Valley

The context of worldwide revolution was most important for the Lower Mississippi Valley, due to its proximity to both Spanish and French colonial possessions. New Orleans, Mobile and Pensacola all became havens for refugees from the Caribbean. At the same time, as sugar and cotton cultivation expanded, this region quickly moved from being a society with slaves to a slave society. In the context of chaos created by war with the Spanish, slaves escaped their plantations to form maroon communities. The community of maroons worked with the slaves to get their goods to market. One community lead by St. Malo was particularly well developed in New Orleans and lead by a bold and audacious leader. The free blacks also fought in the Spanish army frequently. With the expansion of commerce in New Orleans, Mobile and Pensacola under Spanish rule, blacks increasingly found ways to buy their freedom. This trend ended with the Louisiana purchase. The flood of refugees from the Caribbean still continued to swell the ranks of the free black population which was generally lighter skinned and skewed toward females. As with the lower south, in the lower Mississippi Valley free blacks kept associations with their former masters, not hastily discarding their surnames or giving up the commercial links thus forged they were able to reach middling status in the Gulf ports. By owning slaves themselves they sought to enter the ranks of the ruling class.

After the settlement in 1787 between the British and Americans, rapid transformation took place in the Lower Mississippi. As settlers moved into the area with promises of economic opportunity and cultural freedom from the Spanish Crown, they demanded a more secure plantation labor force from the Spaniards. The Spaniards in turn began to enforce the Code Noir and attacked maroon settlements, hunting down and executing St. Malo and many of his followers. Fluctuating wildly between legality and illegality the slave trade on the Mississippi grew in fits and starts. In the 1790s, aided by Caribbean refugees the planters of the valley made the transition to sugar cane agriculture in Lower Louisiana. Further north at Natchez, entrepreneurial tinkerers produced cotton gins that could separate the seed from the fiber and launched the Cotton agricultural revolution around Natchez. Sugar and Cotton required large labor forces, thus the planters sought ever more slaves for their fields, eventually organizing them into work gangs and restricted the slaves' economic lives. Association between the slave black and the free black grew less frequent. Free urban blacks sought to distance themselves from slaves, many of whom were newly arrived from Africa. Prime among the free blacks who sought greater status were those who served in the militia. Carondelet, the Spanish governor of Louisiana, used them liberally and supported many of the blacks attempts to gain freedom. When America bought Louisiana, the free black militias were slowly disempowered and the regime of plantation slavery firmly fixed on the Lower Mississippi.

Epilogue: Making Race, Making Slavery

New racially based slavery of the 19th century is unique, not like the last two centuries. Free North and Slave South are creations of the 19th Century not natural outcomes of the last two hundred years. As labor moves west into the black belt, the south becomes the Cotton South. Slavery in made again through new racial ideas.

Racism infects the North as well, as slavery is seen by Free Labor as a threat to the white man, while black subjugation ignored. Interesting point to follow up on here is the exclusion of black labor from machine shops that Ira Berlin points to, speaks to the interaction of race and technology in the workplace. White male artisans being de-skilled by advancing mechanization of the workplace lash out at blacks? New York city draft riots during the Civil War happen when whites in that city are convinced this is a war to free the black slaves...

[Christine · Rating 4 out of 5]

In depth look at how slavery developed and was enforced in three areas. Well done and packed with infromation.

[Bean · Rating 5 out of 5]

"[...] binary opposites fit nicely the formulation of history as written, but they do little to capure the messy, inchoate reality of history as lived" (page 5)

On mainland North America, as in the Americas generally, slaves worked. New World slavery did not have its origins in a conspiracy to dishonor, shame, brutalize, or reduce slaves on some perverse scale of humanity--although it did all of those at one time or another. The stench from slavery's moral rot cannot mask the design of American captivity: the extraction of labor that allowed a small group of men to dominate all. In short, if slavery made race, its larger purpose was to make class, and the fact that the two were made simultaneously by the same process has mystified both." (page 5)

Like most people in the US, especially white, I grew up with a conception of American history that was oversimplified and fit neat narratives. Most of all, these narratives simplistically relied on assumed opposite binaries and obscured from my view the complicated reality. I of course grew up learning that, essentially, slavery was awful and thank goodness we've done away with it now. The simplified stories I learned made me absorb certain implicit assumptions about this period of our country's history: black=slave, white=master, slave=passive victim, master=aggressive oppressor.

From my school classrooms, I emerged into adulthood with an understanding of slavery that did not go past stereotyped images. Cotton. The South. Lines of black people toiling in the field. People trapped, trembling in a cargo hold. Slaves singing spirituals. Whipping.

Another implicit assumption I believe most of us have is that, the further back in history you go, the less free black people are, and the further forward you go, the more free (the dangerously false narrative that progress always keeps growing in a linear fashion).

However, as the author states so powerfully, this does little to actually capture history as it was lived. Through careful research and thorough explication, the author added so much nuance and reality to the story of this element of our American history. Which brings me to the second quote I added at the top....

Slavery is a crime that is intertwined with economics, power, and class. I use the present tense very intentionally here. I think a lot of us conceptualize slavery as a horrific boogeyman that is largely a disturbing relic of our embarrassing human past. We view it, especially in the United States experience, as a shameful result of racism and cruelty that was inside certain people. However, the truth is that slavery is just one form of labor among many. Some people in positions of economic and political power can and do, to this day, erode labor rights towards slavery-like conditions, and slavery is alive and well today globally and in our nation (one modern prison in Louisiana defies the limits of irony by actually being built on an old slave plantation and currently working its mostly black prisoners into heat stroke cultivating agricultural products in addition to rice, sugarcane and cotton.

"https://apnews.com/article/prison-to-...

Additionally, slavery by and large PRECEEDED systemic racism and racist pseudoscience that was created post facto to justify it. Slavery did not have to divide America's class lines along race, but that is indeed what it ended up doing. Berlin's book is NOT a classist or economic interpretation of slavery, it is merely a historical exploration of the facts of slavery. However, he shows clearly how slavery is not a random aberration in our history, but a result of economics and power structures, and so doing, he shows how slavery can either fade away or GROW in different areas at different times. This was eye-opening for me.

Things I learned from this book:
-Slavery can encompass different types of labor, not limited to chattel slavery but also indentured servitude.
-Slavery encompasses forms of forced or compulsory labor that also include people who technically have wages. Even those who are paid some small pittance still count as slaves if they do not have freedom of movement, freedom over their own bodily automony, freedom to work for a different employer, their employer holds their passport hostage, or their employer otherwise controls their daily lives.
-Large numbers of indentured servants were European, often English and Irish, who in the early days of the American colonies, worked alongside African slaves. Some Europeans signed contracts to do this, others did not.
-Native Americans were also used as slaves.
-Yes, slavery existed in the North, but was less significant in the economy. New York and New Jersey had significant slave holdings.
-Slavery in the early American colonies had a little more leeway than later on. It was easier to manumit slaves, and slaves could potentially buy their way out. It was only later, in the late 1600s and early 1700s, when slavery was more codified and harder to leave.
-Similarly, slavery wasn't synonymous with race until later. Prejudicies existed, but slavery wasn't exclusively black or African in the very beginning of the colonies. It later became that way.
-Free black people have always existed. As long as there has been slavery, there have been black people fighting directly or indirectly for any measure of independence and dignity that they could possibly gain. They did not passively receive injustice, they always resisted in ways big and small.
-Slaves in some circumstances tried to gain what power and advantage they could. If they couldn't free themselves, they tried to advance within the system that was limited for them. Some were overseers and drivers, and organized work for the plantation owner. If they were pushed too hard, they ran away (sometimes repeatedly), stole and broke tools, and sabotaged harvests.
-Slaves always attempted to have their own economies when possible. They negotiated for more days off, more free time, grew their own gardens and farms, and sold their own products.
-Contrary to the popular idea that slaves were mostly passive, slaves often attempted rebellion, including events like the Stono Rebellion, Nat Turner, Denmark Vesey, Harper's Ferry, the Creole and Amistad mutinies, the German Coast Uprising, San Miguel de Gualdape, The New York Slave Revolt, and other reports of conspiracies or poisoning of masters.
-Also contrary to popular belief which intertwines Christianity with black culture, I learned that as many as 20-30 percent of people kidnapped from Africa were actually Muslim. Slaves by and large resisted conversion efforts well into the 18th century. It was only later that significant numbers began to convert.
-Slaves used the American Revolution as one chance for freedom. Some ran away to British lines. Some stayed, not because they loved their masters, but because even their fate on British lines was uncertain. Some British officers helped former slaves flee, others resold them or used them for labor themselves.
-Many whites were of course not slaveholders. Many poor whites were pushed out economically because they could not compete with white landowners who commanded free or low cost labor. Some whites, especially on the frontiers, cared little for the planter class and harbored runaways. Other whites were frustrated that blacks were "taking their jobs" and clamored for discriminatory laws that would prevent blacks from competing with them.
-From the early days of the colonies, blacks attempted to gain some status and power through different means. For example, some men gained their own freedom and started successful businesses. Some joined black militias and got a uniform and some meager status in exchange for fighting Native Americans or hunting slave runaways. Any power gained was fickle and easily lost, such as in the case of successful businessman Thomas Jeremiah, who ended up being hanged and burned.
-The legacy of slavery is not over
-Slavery is not over.

[Joelle Lewis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Slavery is abhorrent; it is a blight upon every civilization that chooses to engage in it. There is no excuse, ever, for chattel bondage. None.

In the 21st century, as we face the reckonings of slavery and racism that still permeate our nation, there are often stereotypes that influence our views. The antebellum years, when cotton was king, are often all we are familiar with, and even then we are not truly aware.

Slavery was brutal. Slavery was nothing short of a dehumanizing existence for every person forced to endure it. However, because of the stereotypes that we often get in our glossy textbooks, we miss the true story.

The people who came as slaves may have been forced into chatted bondage, but they were not going to simply accept it. They fought back with everything they had. They formed economies. They forced their masters to concede to THEIR demands. They grew their own marketable items, such a tobacco. They created communities and families. They became knowledgeable, extremely knowledgeable, about the courts, utilizing them to win battles.

Does any of this, in any way, negate the absolute evil of slavery? NO. There is nothing that will ever negate that. What it does do is show an amazing resilience, and the incredible power of culture and community.

Through two centuries of abuse. Betrayal. Families being ripped apart. Death. Disease. Poverty. Disenfranchisement. Racism. Ignorance. Lust. War.

"Behind the most vicious assaults on the character of people of African descent during the two hundred years of slavery stood a firm belief that, given an opportunity, black people would behave precisely like whites - which was what made African and African - American slaves at once so valuable and so dangerous." pg 364

[Alessandra · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ira Berlin's "magisterial synthesis" of slavery in North America does the important work of historicizing and thus complicating the institution of slavery. By dividing slavery into three generations and across four different geographical terrains (North, Chesapeake, Lover Mississipi Valley and the Lowcountry (South Carolina, Georgia, Florida), Berlin reorients the historical narrative away from more popular discussions of the antebellum period, and places both slavery and constructions of race in time and space. The main quibble with this work would be his decision to narrate "two centuries of slavery in North America," while only focusing on the lands east of the Mississippi. This geographical choice was undoubtedly a practical one, but Berlin fails to address his decision to neglect the slaving practices of the French, Russians, and Native Americans in the American West. Overall, an insightful interpretation of both slaves and slaveholders across time and space.

[Kelli Peters · Rating 3 out of 5]

Slavery in North America was rebuilt throughout the first 200 years of its existence, and in turn, shaped race relations in the United States. Ira Berlin in her book Many Thousands Gone, argues that the system of slavery was constantly in flux and continually changed as new events impacted North America. Regions with slavery followed similar trajectories as colonies began to develop, but soon departed when new economic and political pressures increased differentiation among the colonies. The formation of slavery in these areas dictated how race relations would play out through the earliest years of America’s history and into present times. Political goals and economic ventures continually reimagined the system of slavery and African-American culture in North America.

[Bradley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Masterful synthesis. Enjoyed, in particular, the book's accounts of life along the West African coast and of urban slavery generally. Nevertheless, the central thesis of the book namely that negotiation was at work between slaves and masters is a bit overstated. We must not forget that the "negotiated" relationship was ever one-sided. Though I'm ecstatic that historians are returning agency to slaves, I worry that they do so at the expense of the brutal realities at work. Still, the treatment of the earlier unsung "charter generations" was fascinating.

[Karen · Rating 4 out of 5]

2014 - Seven years later this book holds up a bit better on second (albeit grad school style) reading. I guess I've had to plow through far more less compelling reads by this point. It's been interesting reading this in conjunction with:
-Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom
-Parent, Foul Means
-Hatfield, Atlantic Virginia
-Fischer, Suspect Relations

Eltis, The Rise of African Slavery is soon to follow...



2007 - Necessary background info, but not told in the most captivating manner...

[Beth · Rating 4 out of 5]

I came across this book while visiting the slavery museum in Charleston. It was fascinating and excruciatingly well-researched. I think I had always mistakenly thought of slavery as one universal experience, but there was a lot of diversity of experience over time and in different regions of the country. What surprised me the most was the resilience and competence of the generations of slaves, despite the horrible circumstances -- continually striving for whatever bit of freedom or independence they could get. This is an important and under-studied part of our country's history.

[Debbie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Easily one of the best histories of American slavery during colonial times. If your image of slavery is the plantation and the large cotton fields, pick this book up and read. Berlin reveals the complexities of slavery over time and place. He also has the virtue of being a clear and interesting writer.

[Anna · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best "had to" reads from college. Berlin is very well received in the antebellum history world. This book is a surprisingly informative and objective look at slavery in the United States. He also goes into great detail of the plight and success of free blacks before the Civil War.

[Kate · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really, a very good history book. Documents how slavery changed over several generations of British colonies and then American government: specifically, the rigidification of enslavement, and its link to race.

[John Beeler · Rating 5 out of 5]

Berlin captures the story of undocumented slaves. Sometimes he stretches what little sources exist, but I like stretching.

[Bfisher · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reminded me very much of "Albion's Seed" in the sense of telling the slave side of the colonial generations, as David Hackett Fischer told the story of the white colonists.

[Andrew Pemberton · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thousands of books on North American slavery have been published over the years, but the scope and detail of Many Thousands Gone truly make it stand out. Ira Berlin (1941-2018), once a distinguished professor at University Maryland and recipient of the AHA Award for Scholarly Distinction (2015), contributed some of the most vital works in American slavery historiography. In Many Thousands Gone, Berlin faces no small task: to recount the story of American slavery from its beginnings to the start of the nineteenth century, even going as far as the Civil War in his epilogue. Berlin demonstrates how the meaning of race developed parallel to the evolution of American slavery, as slaves and slaveowners continually negotiated the terms of bondage despite an uneven playing field and an unbalanced power dynamic. These changed relationships via slave-master negotiation are the key to Berlin’s argument.
Berlin asserts that the convoluted history of American slavery passed in three distinct experiences: that of charter generations, the planter generations, and the revolutionary generations (12). Zooming in further, Berlin depicts slavery in four spatial terms, what he calls “slave societies”: slavery in the Northern region, the Chesapeake region, the coastal lowcountry, and the lower Mississippi Valley (7). While this is certainly an observant and astute way to classify and divide up slavery, it presents some drawbacks to the book. While this system of organization makes reading the book easier for readers, the chapters often overlap. This leads to Berlin repeating some of the main points of his argument across different chapters, as many of slavery’s generational trends are regionally consistent, such as imbalanced sex ratios within slave communities. Nevertheless, these points are important to the book, and though the overlap adds additional pages, it behooves readers to be reminded of these points and it does not bog down the clarity of the text.
One of highlights of Many Thousands Gone is that it often provides relief from the traditional narrative of slavery. Americans widely believe that slavery was an inherently racialized system; that all slaves came from Africa; that slavery is a North versus South issue (often portraying the North as a bystander to slavery); or that from the beginning, slaves were commodities to the plantation class alone. From the start, Berlin proves all these misconceptions false with the introduction of the Atlantic Creoles. In the beginning, race was not as racialized as many believe. The “social cleavage,” as Berlin puts it, did not run between black and white, but free and unfree (60). The Atlantic Creoles, members of the charter generation and key players in Berlin’s narrative, acted as cultural brokers between Colonists and Africans, participating in a type of slavery that contradicts the institution impressed on the minds of today’s Americans. Atlantic Creoles had and seized opportunities to earn their freedom and were well versed in their new laws and culture, giving them some of the most room for negotiation.
This form of slavery was one of a society with slaves. Here lies one of the most important trends within Berlin’s book: the evolution, sometimes devolution, of slavery in response to societal changes. As societies with slaves slowly transformed into slave societies, race took on new meanings. The treatment of slaves worsened as more and more Africans were imported. As Native Americans slowly met their unfortunate demise by disease and conflict, amongst other factors, and as white indentured servants became limited in times of war, Africans replaced them and became representative of slavery. Soon, slavery and blackness became synonymous in slave societies, and with it came the dangerous and vicious cycle of racial conflict that has tainted American history ever since. Berlin consistently highlights this racial progression throughout his book.
Despite some constraints on Berlin’s narrative due to his organization of American slave history, Berlin once again presents a powerful display of scholarship. Particularly impressive is the array of primary sources, ranging from slave narratives, to European commentary, to audit records, to legislation. Though large in scope, this book’s worth comes from its discussion of the many facets of slavery presented in books throughout slavery historiography.

[Carly · Rating 3 out of 5]

The author, Ira Berlin, wrote this book, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America, as a comparative chronology of African American slavery in mainland North America during the first two centuries of colonial settlement. The author’s purpose is to exhibit “how slaves’ history was derived from experiences that differed from place to place and time to time and not from some unchanging transhistorical verity.” The author demonstrated how societies flowed between societies with slaves and slave societies from the seventeenth to nineteenth century.
The author proved his thesis by breaking the book down into three generations and in those three generational sections of the book he further sectioned mainland North America into four different regions: the North, Chesapeake, Lower Mississippi Valley and South Carolina low country. Berlin provides evidentiary support to show how slavery had its “own geography, demography, economy, society, and –of course—history.”
The notes section for this book shows a lack of primary source materials. Sources published 1930s and later represent many of the sources for this book, which is rather disappointing. Not personally knowing what resources are available, Berlin potentially missed an opportunity to gather primary resources from the slaves or planters’ perspectives. Additionally, in historiographical context, there is going to be a major difference in perspective on race and the study of African Americans between the 1930s-1950s and the 1970s-1980s due to the major historical turning point of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. With so many of Berlin’s sources being an analysis from other historians before and after this historical time, there could be a bias in the writing.
A strength in Berlin’s book Many Thousands Gone would be amount of information presented in 365 pages covering from 1619 to early 1800s. Berlin compared four different regions in multiple aspects of their societies, but then did that three separate times for three distinct generations. He discussed everything from slave families and economies to religious preference and practices.
A weakness in the work would be the very broad scope of work attempting to pack the history of all four regions into each generation. The author attempted to tackle a huge feat of comparing over two-hundred years of societal history of four different regions in one book. This does not allow for multiple perspectives or sharing of many personal accounts. This book could have been broken down into a three-book series with the focus on the diverse societies based on regions. This would allow a closer view of each region. Additionally, the author was somewhat of a sesquipedalian and made many assumptions of the reader’s knowledge of this period. The author did not use common lexicon which then loses the reader’s overall understanding of what they are reading. The author did not explain some of the historical events presented in the book and therefore created confusion for a reader that is not well-informed in lesser known colonial America events.
Overall, Berlin’s book supported his thesis on comparing how slavery differed based on location and time and how they could transition from being societies with slaves to a slave society or reverse. The author had distinct comparisons between regions and generations to show how they evolved from Atlantic Creoles and Africans to eventually African Americans whether slave or free.

[Matthias]

The definitive work on the subject - which means that, like most books that prioritize objectivity and breadth, it's a bit like a textbook: often dull (even when the underlying content isn't!) and reliant on secondary sources (even though, unlike textbooks, it actually does cite them.)

Although said priorities of objectivity and breadth give it a someone rigid structure that doesn't lend itself to a single story - sections organized by time period, then by region - there is a central story buried beneath this: the transformation of "societies with slaves" (social formations where slavery formed only a minor part) to "slave societies" (those where the primary mode of production was slavery.) This happened in everywhere in colonial eastern North America except north of Virginia, and was delayed significantly in New Orleans; it was driven by international factors (supply of slaves and demand for cash crops) and the domestic factor of the degree of organized resistance. Elaborated racial ideology (as opposed to the kind of crude, vague prejudice that every proto-national group held for each other, and for their lower classes) emerged as an ideological superstructure to accompany this.

Alongside this central story, however, there's a lot of spadework done to collate such matters as: how work organization was affected by what crop enslaved workers were producing, the role of cities, money economies, and violent borderlands as avenues of partial or total liberation, the spread of Christianity (or lack of it) among the enslaved, naming patterns and what they imply, and so on. The structure of the book didn't leave me feeling like I understood all of these at a level other than an accumulation of facts and patterns, but perhaps no book - not even The Definitive Work On the Subject - can do that.

(I should perhaps also say that I took a seminar with the late Dr. Berlin and he was probably the most animated and riveting people I've seen lead a classroom - so if the book is a bit dry, it's not because he was.)

Recommended for your reference shelf.

[Ariel · Rating 4 out of 5]

The most important concept explored in this book is the distinction between "societies with slaves," in which slavery was not the dominant means of production, and "slave societies" that depended on plantation or mining. This turns out to be a distinction taken from studies of the ancient world. In the end, even societies with slaves turn out to be more deeply and pervasively influenced by the evils of slavery when we look at them closely. But it's still an important distinction.

I was hoping for more information about New England slavery and what prompted the region's transition from apologists of slavery and grocers to the West Indian slave society to a hotbed of abolitionism and I didn't get it. Berlin lumps in New England with the Middle Atlantic which was not so helpful to my research, but there is no doubt that this is a very powerful and informative book.

The part that surprised me the most was Berlin's assertion that the first Africans brought to N. America in chains were mostly creole. They lived on the edges of the Atlantic. They found it easier to navigate the system of slavery (which was in itself far less codified and not so cruelly well organized as it later became). Some of these early enslaved people were able to win their freedom and a few eventually even owned slaves themselves. Apparently later generations of captives were drawn from the hinterlands and forced to march en masse to the slave markets of Whydah and other port cities. So instead of North American slavery going from African to creole, in many places it went from creole to African.

I really couldn't read the book as closely as it deserved. I mostly stuck to the geographic region I was researching. The reason is simple: it is so painful and stomach-churning to hear about the sufferings of these vast groups of individuals, I just want to curl into a foetal ball and hide instead of reading.

[Jan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Most of us were taught that slaves were brought from Africa, lived on plantations, and were treated well or poorly based on the nature of their Masters. Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America, debunks our received wisdom about slaves and slavery. He argues that slavery was “constantly made and remade” (p. 4) by the slaves themselves through negotiations with their masters regarding the terms of their servitude. Slaves also negotiated within the legal system, with merchants, craftsmen, sympathetic whites, and even other slaves. These social, cultural, and economic negotiations were broadened or narrowed depending on whether a slave lived in a “society with slaves,” or a “slave society.”

Berlin organizes his book along two dimensions: geography and slave experiences. He divides North America into 4 regions: the North, the Chesapeake, the Lowcountry, and the lower Mississippi valley. Then, for each region, he describes three different types of “slave experiences” that occurred over time: the charter generations, the plantation generations, and the revolutionary generations (p. 12). Berlin posits that the charter generations lived in societies with slaves, the plantation generations lived in slave societies, and the revolutionary generations lived in both.
Berlin uses the distinction between societies with slaves and slave societies to frame the scope and kind of negotiations available to and employed by slaves in various regions of the country at different times. For example, in the North, the first slaves (what Berlin calls the charter generations) had wide latitude for negotiating because they lived in a society with slaves. Slavery was only one of many types of labor: indentured servants, paid laborers, apprentices, family members, etc. The charter generations were multi-lingual, cosmopolitan, mixed-heritage, business-savvy, culturally mobile creoles. The creoles could negotiate with the local courts to establish their rights in terms of property or status. They could negotiate with their masters over work conditions, hours, wages, time off, “jobbing” or work outside the master’s purview. They could negotiate with sympathetic whites to sell goods and services, rent accommodations, and secure transportation. They could have patrons negotiate on their behalf for their freedom. Accordingly, the line between slavery and freedom was porous and easily crossed.

Alternately, in the Chesapeake during the plantation generations, slavery replaced other types of labor. The new generation African slaves didn’t speak the language, understand the laws, or precedents, and customs forged by the creole generation. But most importantly to Berlin, the plantation generations in the Chesapeake lived in a slave society. The defining feature of a slave society is “the presence of a planter class able to command the region’s resources, mobilize the power of the state, and vanquish competitors” (p.10.) Slaveholders controlled all the avenues that were previously open to slaves for negotiation. Slaveholders controlled the laws and statues defining what slaves could and could not do, where they could go, with whom they could do business. The line between slavery and freedom for the plantation generations was nearly solid.
The strength of Berlin’s book is its breadth. It covers two hundred years, two hemispheres, multiple generations of slaves, and the ideologies that drove societies with slaves versus those that drove slave societies. He documents the ways that slaves resisted their masters, negotiated the terms of their bondage, and eventually achieved freedom, or dropped back into slavery He describes the slaves’ family arrangements, economies, religions, cultures, values, and aspirations. He successfully synthesizes a huge array of secondary sources and some primary sources to write a well-organized social and economic history of slavery in North America.

The weakness of Berlin’s book is its lack of cohesion. There are many points in his narrative where he seems to contradict himself. For example, in discussing the plantation generations in the lowcountry, he paints a picture of slaves working in malarial swamps “under the direction of black drivers with rarely a white man in residence” (p. 171.) He emphasizes that “[m]any slaves, particularly the newly arrived Africans, hardly knew their owners or any other white person, for that matter” and that they were “walled off from whites… by the barrier of language” (ibid.) Yet his main thesis is that slaves were constantly changing the nature of their bondage by negotiating with their masters. If the masters were absent, and the people overseeing them were black, and they did not speak the language, negotiation, in the case of plantation generation slaves in the lowcountry, seems out of the question.

Berlin introduces several other puzzling contradictions: if the male slaves of the plantation generations were polygamous, then why his emphasis on the importance of forming families (pp. 149-151)? If the slaves in the lowcountry rejected Christianity (pp 171-175), then how could they be inspired by the Christian message of salvation and deliverance (p. 176)? If “[p]lanters cared little about the origins, color and nationality of those who worked the cane and processed its juices” (p. 97) then how does it follow that “[w]hite supremacy demoted people of color not merely to the base of the life cycle as children, but to the base of civilization as savages” (p. 99)?

In addition to the contradictions present throughout the book, Berlin fails in many cases to explain some important concepts and issues. For example, what is the “sickle-cell trait” (p. 83)? Why did the wealthiest Philadelphians shed their slaves and the middle class artisans pick them up, even in the face of complaints from free white artisans (pp 179-180)? What is the task system (p. 166)? If slaves could successfully flee bondage “by the thousands” during the Revolutionary War, and after the war “many slave simply abandoned their owners” why couldn’t or didn’t they do that before the war (p. 230-233)?

Overall, Berlin does a wonderful job of introducing the reader to the different ways slavery evolved in North America. His organization by geography and type of slave experience adds fascinating dimensions to his argument that slaves continuously negotiated their social, economic and cultural boundaries in a number of ways to a variety of audiences. This is an excellent gateway book for students new to the study of slavery. Berlin’s extensive footnotes provide vital jumping-off points for issues that pique the reader’s interest.

[Nathan Albright · Rating 3 out of 5]

It is a regret that I read this book when I did. After all, in the order of Berlin's books, this one comes before Generations Of Captivity, which substantially copies much of the language of this book and carries it further to Emancipation. Reading this book, therefore, felt like reading a self-plagiarized work that was simply not all that original in light of having read the later work. Of course, had I read the later work in order of publication rather than in order of the size of the book, as I did, I would have been equally disappointed with its lack of originality as well. This lack of transparency about the self-plagiarism is all the more notable because both books present themselves as being original and new works, this one published first in 1998, and Generations of Captivity in 2003. Nor am I aware of a great deal of controversy about the obvious self-plagiarism and the copying of whole passages and even pages from this book to the later one, suggesting that those who would have been critical about this practice have likely not read the books in the first place, and that those who read both books and gave approving blurbs about them wished to avoid drawing attention to something unpleasant.

This book is a hefty one at more than 350 pages. The book is divided into three parts and twelve chapters along with other supplementary material. The author begins with a prologue about the making of slavery and race as a simultaneous process. The first part of the book discusses the charter generations of North American blacks as living in societies with slaves (I), discussing the emergence of Atlantic creoles in the Chesapeake Bay area (1), the expansion of creole society in the North (2), the divergent paths of blacks in the low country of South Carolina and nearby areas (3), and the devolution of slavery in the Lower Mississippi Valley (4). After that there is a look at the development of slave societies (II), including the tobacco revolution in the Chesapeake (5), the rice revolution in the low country (6), the growth and transformation of black life in the North (7), and stagnation in the lower Mississippi valley (8). Finally, the author discusses the divergent fate of the North and South in the revolutionary generation (III), with chapters on the slow death of slavery in the North (9), the union of African-American society in the Chesapeake (10), the fragmentation and division of black society in the lowlands (11), and the growth of both slavery and freedom in the Lower Mississippi valley (12), after which there is an epilogue that talks about the making of race and slavery, tables, abbreviations, notes, acknowledgements, and an index.

Unfortunately, at least for me as a reader, the lack of originality I found this in this book greatly detracted from my enjoyment of reading it. Indeed, the originality of the author's discussion of the agency and perspective of slaves vis-a-vis their masters and the internal divisions among blacks is among the factors that make the author's work worth reading, even if the author has somewhat problematic views when it comes to trying to separate the agency of slaves and free blacks from their responsibility for their own life achievements. Yet when one realizes that this book is not original at all, and that this may have been a more common element of Berlin's writing than has previously been acknowledged, then what should be a triumphant discussion of the agency and humanity of slaves and free blacks even in the face of their pressures and internal divisions as a community ends up being a work that one has to read critically with attention to the fact that the author copies large portions of his previous work into future ones as a way of padding his reputation as a preeminent scholar of slavery when simply publishing updated version of previously published books would have been a far more honest approach.

[Josh · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you stepped ashore in Charles Town, South Carolina during the early eighteenth century you would have seen black women hawking their wares, black stevedores unloading and loading ships, and other black men tending the forge, repairing ships, and cobbling fine shoes. You might have also noticed a variety of Africans donning the sartorial appearance of Anglo-Americans—displaying pocket watches, gowns, and wigs. Despite their skilled craft and sophisticated appearance many of these men and women would have been urban slaves—rented out by their masters to complete various skilled jobs or distinguishing themselves from plantation slaves dressed in loin clothes. The mental picture of these urban slaves does not resonate well with the usual image of the South Carolina low and upper country being one of the harshest plantation regimes in nineteenth century America. Ira Berlin’s Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America demonstrates that before the nineteenth century the “peculiar institution” was fluid, constantly contested by slaves, and that it made possible discrete, albeit liminal, spaces for African slaves to exercise autonomy.
Ira Berlin illustrates the vacillating fortunes of African slaves through his generational narrative that he conceptually organizes into the “Charter Generations,” the “Plantation Generations,” and the “Revolutionary Generations” (12). Aside from being the first forced immigrants into the British colonies, the “Charter Generations” exhibited a particular cosmopolitanism and connection with the Caribbean and Atlantic littoral. These first arrivals were often what Berlin calls “Atlantic Creoles” or African and mixed African-Portuguese descendants that commanded several Atlantic languages, knowledge of law, and a cultural fluency of European dress and etiquette (29). “Plantation Generations” comprised few creoles and many African slaves from West Africa and Angola whose labor satisfied the plantation revolution occurring south of Maryland. Finally, the slaves who lived during the American, French, and Haitian revolutions often imbibed and wielded natural rights’ philosophy to acquire their freedom during the “Revolutionary Generation,” but more often than not found themselves mired in an increasingly exploitative plantation economy.
While Berlin analyzes these three generations of slavery, he consistently stresses regional differences between the North and Middle Colonies, the Upper South, the Low Country, and the Lower Mississippi Valley and charts how each either transitioned from “societies with slaves” to “slave societies” or vacillated between the two economic and social systems (8-9). Slaves were marginal to the productive process and one among many forms of indentured and free labor in “societies with slaves.” In “slave societies” the master-slave relationship structured all social relationships, slaves were integral to economic productivity, and the slaveholding caste could marshal economic, political, and social capital to dominate slaves. Berlin draws on Karl Marx to explain that changes in the modes of production (e.g. the introduction or removal of a cash crop) had significant social, political, and legal ramifications for African slaves. Because the Lower Mississippi Valley was governed alternatively by the Spanish, the French, and the United States it exemplified how slave societies reverted to societies with slaves and oscillated back toward slave societies, again, based on the fortunes of plantation economies beleaguered by Native American-African maroon hostilities and imperial rivalries.
Slaves engaged in various forms of resistance once they found themselves alienated from the means of production—and their resistance was proportional to the severity of the regime. Slaves took the initiative, negotiated the terms of enslavement and won significant concessions from their masters such as semi-autonomous or autonomous economic subsistence and urban trade. While some urban slaves donned European apparel and converted to Christianity, rural slaves might express cultural autonomy by rejecting all things European and cultivating a coherent African and later African-American culture on the plantation.
Even in the most repressive plantation system slaves and masters engaged in a constant dialectic or “dance” that constantly revised the terms of enslavement (p.4). When cotton, indigo, or rice cultures increased the physical hardships associated with plantation life, slaves engaged in various forms of resistance proportional to the severity of the regime. Slaves broke tools, slowed work, learned skilled crafts, changed their name, and fled to maroon societies in the Carolina low country or Spanish Florida, and camouflaged themselves among free blacks.
Ira Berlin’s emphasis on agency is his greatest contribution to a historiography long concerned with the extent of planter hegemony, on one hand, and the resilience and agency of slaves on the other. By siding with Herbert G. Gutman’s emphasis on slave autonomy and agency, Berlin responds to Eugene D. Genovese’s argument in Roll, Jordan Roll: The World That the Slaves Made (1976) that southern planters alternatively wielded the carrot and the stick to dominate slaves. When brutal punishment did not create docile slaves, masters turned toward a cultural ethos of “paternalism” within which slaves bought into the hegemonic system by seizing concessions of religious and cultural autonomy from their master. Herbert Gutman’s lifework emphasized slave autonomy and stressed resistance where Genovese tended to find planter domination. Hence, Gutman argued that it was slaves’ actions that maintained the autonomous, persistent slave family under slavery in The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom (1977). Ira Berlin’s volume suggests the endurance of the Gutman’s ideas.

[Dan Gorman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ira Berlin masterfully demonstrates the ways that black slaves in America gained and expressed agency, despite the power of slave-owners. Rather than assuming that slavery is the same everywhere, Berlin contrasts the evolution of slavery in four regions — the Northern commercial economy, the Chespeake tobacco economy, the lowcountry rice and indigo plantations, and the Mississippi Valley cotton and sugar plantations. The author also details the importance of revolutionary political theory on black Americans in the late eighteenth century. Some of the material will seem familiar to people who have recent (2000–present) books on slavery, but Berlin helped to synthesize and interpret the existing literature on slavery while adding a new attention to sectional differences. Awesome book!

[Danny · Rating 4 out of 5]

I first picked this book up when a history professor of mine said that if they could only recommend one book for President Trump to read, it would be this one. While I believe there are books I would probably recommend before this one (why don't you actually read that Bible, Trump, you so haughtily waved for a photo op), I definitely could see it making the shortlist. Understanding that the history of racism in our own country has two hundred years prior to the United States becoming a nation, it could be said the USA has a stronger footing in slavery and racism then it's supposed "Christian Nation" background that I hear so often. Definitely would recommend this book.

[Bruce · Rating 3 out of 5]

It is an interesting book on the different shapes slavery took in different parts of the colonies/United States at different times in the first two centuries of US history. At times there are redundancies but they serve to emphasize some points. Prof. Berlin notes differences between slave societies and societies with slaves. The development of African-American culture occurred at different rates and different times in the various parts of the US and in some cases there was a little back-sliding. All in all it is an interesting read.