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Books
by Ira Berlin
Slaves without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South
/
Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation
Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of
Slavery in Mainland North America /
Slaves without Masters
/
Free at Last
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Generations
of Captivity
A History of African American Slaves
By Ira Berlin
The History of a Monstrous Enterprise
By Charles B. Dew
Ira Berlin has
written what will undoubtedly become one of the indispensable
books on North American slavery. ''Generations
of Captivity''
traces the history of this dismal institution from its
17th-century origins to its 19th-century destruction in the
maelstrom of civil war. He comes closer than any other
contemporary historian to giving us an opportunity -- in a
single, readable volume -- to come to grips with a subject very
few of us wish to think about but which all of us surely need to
consider: how millions of white Americans over the course of
three centuries came to hold millions of black Americans in
chattel bondage while managing to lose nary a moment's sleep
over their complicity in this monstrous enterprise.
And a monstrous
enterprise it certainly was. ''Slavery, of necessity, rested on
force,'' Berlin writes in his prologue, and he weaves together
the critical, interrelated themes of ''violence, power and
labor.'' Chapter by chapter, he illuminates the changes that
occurred in slavery over time. At any given moment, bondage
meant different things to different people across the various
regions of North America. Berlin's perceptive discussion of
regional distinctiveness and his nuanced analysis of how slavery
was transformed over the course of 300 years are two of his
signal achievements.
Berlin, who teaches
history at the University of Maryland, College Park, begins with
what he calls the ''charter generations.'' These 17th-century
black settlers entered areas like Dutch New Netherland, the
English Chesapeake, French Louisiana or Spanish Florida with an
indeterminate status that only gradually evolved into slavery.
Their debasement was driven by the European demand for workers
who could be used to exploit the economic opportunities offered
by the New World. But Berlin argues that the slaves who formed
the core of these ''charter generations'' were often able to
escape a bondage that had not yet rigidified into an
all-encompassing institution. In Florida, for example, militia
service offered slaves a pathway to freedom.
Their successors
were not so fortunate. As money-making crops like tobacco
sparked the growth of large-scale commercial agriculture, the
''plantation generations'' began to emerge in the Chesapeake
region. What had once been a ''society with slaves'' was
transformed into a ''slave society,'' where the institution took
its place ''at the center of economic production.'' The arrival
of tens of thousands of slaves in the late 17th century and
early 18th century redefined the meaning of race, heightened the
level of violence and led to ''a sharp deterioration in the
conditions of slave life.'' The Chesapeake plantations
established a pattern for low-country South Carolina, Georgia
and East Florida, with consequences that would extend deep into
the 18th century.
Hope for the
enslaved did not arrive until the American Revolution. In the
South, thousands of slaves in the ''Revolutionary generations''
found freedom in the turbulence of war. In the North,
Revolutionary ideology, the relatively small numbers of slaves
and their marginal economic significance combined to produce
eventual emancipation. But Southern masters held their ground,
and with the restoration of peace they carried the plantation
system west. In the lower Mississippi Valley, the Louisiana
Purchase led to the dramatic growth of slavery in that region.
''At the end of the Revolutionary era, there were many more
black people enslaved than at the beginning,'' Berlin notes. The
promise of the Revolution for the vast majority of slaves had
come to naught.
The stage was now
set for the ''migration generations.'' From the late 18th
century until the eve of the Civil War, slaves were caught in
the vise of a mass movement Berlin refers to as a Second Middle
Passage. More than one million slaves were transported from the
Eastern Seaboard states to the cotton and sugar areas of the
Deep South, a process ''dwarfing the trans-Atlantic slave trade
that had carried Africans to the mainland.'' Black families were
regularly torn apart, and longstanding slave communities were
devastated as traders sought to meet this voracious demand.
''The internal slave trade became the largest enterprise in the
South outside of the plantation itself,'' Berlin writes, ''and
probably the most advanced in its employment of modern
transportation, finance and publicity.''
Slaves fought back
as best they could. They built new families in the developing
regions and turned to Christianity as a faith that offered hope
for eventual salvation. They used the critical leverage they
possessed -- the masters' dependence on their labor -- to demand
better living conditions, payment for work on Sundays and
evenings, and the right to till their own gardens and raise
poultry and livestock for their own use. ''Despite their
enormous power, slaveholders found such compromises prudent,''
Berlin notes, and slave men and women used the space they carved
out for themselves to create a culture that reflected their
religious and secular values. Their success in resisting the
dehumanizing effects of their bondage is one of the few bright
threads in the gloomy tapestry of slavery.
Slave owners, in
the end, felt no guilt over what they had done and were doing.
It was all part of God's plan, they told themselves, and they
insisted that they -- the masters and mistresses -- shouldered
the real burdens of slavery, looking out for a childlike people
who needed white guidance and discipline. But then came the
Civil War, and the slaves shattered their owners' illusions and
wrote the final chapter in the tragedy that was the American
slave system. They sought and gained their freedom by the tens
of thousands as federal forces approached, and over 200,000
blacks served in the Union Army and Navy. It was ''a social
revolution of mammoth proportions,'' Berlin concludes, and black
men and women were active agents in destroying the institution
that had held them in bondage for so long.
Berlin has given us
a moving, insightful account of slavery in the United States.
Readers will not soon forget the story he has told, nor should
they. We still live with the consequences of this institution,
and we should understand what slavery meant to the generations
of captivity who lived it.
* *
* * *
Charles B. Dew teaches Southern
history at Williams College and is the author of ''Bond of Iron:
Master and Slave at Buffalo Forge.''
posted
23 March 2003
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