Many thousands gone : the first two centuries of slavery in North America

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.