Berlin Notes
Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998) ISBN: 9780674002111 – 98
Post 1
Ira Berlin’s book, Many Thousands Gone: The First two Centuries of Slavery in North America and Leon Litwacks, “Making of an Historian” are quite complimentary to each other. When it come to race and class, Litwack provided somewhat of a macro version that resembles somewhat of a summary or overview. Berlin’s book provided more of a detailed micro version of race and class. Litwack makes an interesting point when he states, “How free was free? To what could a freed black man or woman aspire in a society where whites owned the land, the tools, the crops, and the law. (23) While freedom was a new a terrifying concept to those that were previously enslaved, it was a necessity in order to recover the black voice. For slave owners, the truth came out after the Civil War. (24) While slave owners thought they understood black men and women, they realized that the slaves were submissive as opposed to being obedient.
Post 2
In Many Thousands Gone Ira Berlin argues for a more nuanced understanding of the slavery prevalent in North America by exposing the regional differences in slavery throughout three different generations. These generations were impacted both by the time in which they were enslaved as well as the region, as the differences from region to region drastically shaped ideas of freedom, social mobility, and their rights as slaves. In addition to slavery looking different depending on the time period and region Berlin also argues that at times the line between freedom and slavery was permeable enough for people to pass through, in multiple directions, multiple times in their life. Additionally, Berlin is clear that at no point was the slave owner or masters rule absolute. Slavery was always a negotiation with an uneven playing field, and Black slaves were never entirely controlled or defined by their status as enslaved or free. This is a point of Gomez that Berlin expounds on, and Berlin is able to prove another of their shared arguments: that slavery was never a stable system.
Part 1 of Berlin’s work focuses on her “Charter” Generation, those first Africans or, as Berlin exposes, Atlantic Creoles who arrived to the North American continent as slaves. Berlin exposes how in three of the four regions she covers, the first group of enslaved peoples were actually Atlantic Creoles already familiar with the language, work, and customs of the new world. These were people who knew their legal options and pursued their rights in court. In some regions the possibility of emancipation and gaining equality seemed, and at times was, feasible. In other regions escaping from slavery was only possible by joining dangerous maroon communities or heading south to join the Spanish, who were not always true to their promises of freedom. This generation is bookended by the plantation revolution Berlin focuses on in Part 2. This first section of Berlin’s work is highly informative, yet clearly ties to her overall argument. Each paragraph in these chapters relates to her thesis and bolsters her argument. One of the most useful features, both for the reader and her overall argument, is that each chapter is formatted in roughly the same manner. This ensures that the topics covered in the first chapter on the Charter Generation were also covered in the following three chapters. This allows for a clear comparison between the regions and provides the reader with a solid base understanding of each of the regions she covers.
Part 2 mimics Part 1’s cohesive style and covers the Plantation Generation in each of the four regions. Though Berlin addresses the regions in a different order than she did in Part 1, the chapters are just as clear. As she did in the first part, Berlin is careful to address all of the same themes (language, religion, workload, Africanization, Creolization, etc…) in each chapter in order to show the similarities as well as the differences between the regions. This part was most surprising, to me at least, in presenting the two extraordinarily different classifications of Black people within the low country. I had never read about the “urban sophisticates” who’s “task system” based lives resembled those of the Charter Generation more than their own Plantation Generation. (This was especially shocking growing up learning Florida, and subsequently Georgian, History.) Was there a particular part of this first half of Berlin’s work that shocked or surprised you?
Post 3
Ira Berlin’s Many Thousands Gone is an excellent example of the critical, “unsanitary” history that Litwack describes in “The Making of a Historian.” Many Thousands Gone also superbly complements the historiography and the content of Reversing Sail, as Berlin, like Gomez, examines how black men and women interacted within the emerging transatlantic political, economic, cultural, and social exchanges as active actors and, approaches the men and women trafficked in the transatlantic slave trade as “first and foremost as human beings with families, cultures, and sensibilities- no different from anyone else. They were neither animals nor objects, nor were they simply ‘slaves’” (Gomez 64). In other words, both Berlin and Gomez remain entirely consciousness of the human elements of transatlantic and American slavery and regard the ways in which enslaved men and women made sense of this new world and these new identities into which they were thrust. In the first two sections of this monograph, Berlin details how Africans and African creoles acted as knowledgeable and active actors in an increasingly interconnected and cosmopolitan transatlantic world. For instance, Berlin writes that African creole slaves in the Chesapeake colonies in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries drew upon “knowledge gained in the larger Atlantic world and exhibit[ed] a sure-handed understanding of patron-client relations, they searched the seams of a society whose commitment to chattel bondage had yet to become an all-absorbing obsession,” as demonstrated in Chesapeake slaves’ independent economic activities that often existed in tandem with those of their masters (Berlin 34, 41). In the second part of Many Thousands Gone, Berlin examines how such opportunities available to African-Atlantic creoles in the early colonial period gradually diminished as racialized chattel slavery and social, political, and economic institutions became further ingrained. As societies with slaves transformed into slave societies amid the growing lucrativeness of producing rice, tobacco, and other cash crops, slave-owning planters amassed greater fortunes and greater political power, race became more strictly defined based on skin tone, and “the meaning of race” acquired “a far greater weight in defining status than ever before,” with slavery becoming “color-coded” and “novel notions of race accompanied the imposition of a plantation regime”
Post 4
Ira Berlin’s work explored the evolution of a society with slaves to a slave society, while displaying the levels of negotiations between a slave holder and an enslaved person. Berlin began the first chapters of her book discussing how enslaved people of all areas of North America resisted slavery in small ways through making negotiations with their slave holder, joining a militia, utilizing laws, converting to Christianity, and much more. The way the chapters were formed assisted readers in clearly noting the similarities and differences in how enslaved people resisted slavery and adapted to different parts of North America. Berlin also noted how enslaved African people sought to form communities with other people of color and sometimes white indentured servants, resulting in a new culture that was intertwined. The mentioning of these intertwined communities formed throughout the early years of slavery was super interesting because typical history classes seem to focus solely on African enslaved people, not Native Americans and other groups who were forced into slavery. In addition to African enslaved people’s experiences and their resilience to slavery, I think it is important to include all people who were subjected to slavery in teaching slavery in school.
Berlin then explained the evolution from a society with slaves to a slave society, which was defined by violence, racism, and plantation heirarchies. A huge difference that Berlin stated between the two societies was that, “Without question, members of the plantation generations worked longer, harder, and with less control over their own lives than did the members of the mixed labor force of slaves, servants, and wage workers who had preceded them.” (106) Berlin described an aspect of a slave society by stating, “As the “fathers” of their vast plantation families, paternalists granted themselves the right to enter into the slaves’ most intimate affairs, demanded the complete obedience due a father, and cosigned slaves to a permanent childhood.” (99) Berlin notes that plantation heirarchies and laws altered how a slave could respond to slavery, especially when the planter had put himself/herself as the ultimate boss where “slaves stand in awe of their owners.” (98) An extreme version of slavery emerged from the plantation revolution where enslaved people suddenly had to adapt to the new society in order to survive and navigate ways in order to gain a sense of freedom. I noticed that in part two Berlin constructed her chapters to focus on each section of North America and how enslaved peoples experiences through this slave society had similiarties and differences.
Finally, Berlin’s work further emphasized how the history of African Americans is a complex one that stretches around the world, resulting in African culture embedded throughout the world. Gomez emphasized the same idea in his book while he explored the contributions of African people and how African unity was maintained through major developments around the world. Even though Berlin focuses on North America mainly, this idea of perseverance through tough times and the preservation of African culture is communicated through his arguments.
Post 5
Berlin brought attention to the revolutionary generation of the enslaved people and their relationship with enslavers and the American north side. He also arranged the sections in geographical locations and documented the similarities and differences in each region’s legal, social, political and economic aspects. However, each region showed injustice and subordination of law by the enslavers. For example, the Pennsylvanian laws freed enslaved individuals born before March 1780 but kept their offspring born after the said date until they turned twenty-eight. Berlin noted that some enslaved people sought judicial help through courts in the upper south. In many cases, several enslaved people scourged their past, seeking any link to Native Americans or white ancestors as proof of being a non-black descendant.
In combination, the readings teach that white people used an interesting method to preserve white supremacy even after freeing black people. For example, the north against slavery in the later decades maintained the status quo by giving freed black people menial jobs such as cooking, cutting hair, driving coaches and removing soot from chimneys. The statement shows the white effort to maintain supremacy and the hierarchy over black civilians.
Besides, Berlin discusses evangelical movements and their spread in the eighteenth century which gave the enslaved hope of freedom and eternal life. The spread of Christianity and its promises created tension between the owners and the enslaved. The movements created black churches and cemeteries. The movements also created aid societies.
Berlin’s account of slavery illuminates the reader on the events of slavery from its onset to the eve of the civil war. It is interesting to learn that enslaved black people born in America perceived enslaved from Africa differently. The skin was a determining factor among enslaved people; some adopted the owners’ names and used them for endorsement after freedom.
Post 6
Ira Berlin’s Many Thousands Gone is an insightful text detailing how black identity in America emerged from the frequently-evolving landscape of chattel slavery and racial conceptualizations of white and black. Berlin writes that the revolutionary generations of Black American society evolved in “regionally distinctive ways” reflecting geopolitical and geoeconomic realities and examine how these regional distinctions manifested in the context of democratic, revolutionary developments (Berlin 226). Berlin writes that in the North, the American Revolution “reversed the development of northern slavery,” resulting in the gradual manumission of enslaved men and women that eventually transformed the northern society with slaves into a free society (Berlin 228). In the Upper South, the revolutionary generations of enslaved men and women were “awakened to the possibility of freedom” and were able to negotiate their freedom through legal means and by running away, sabotaging their work, and engaging in independent economic enterprises; though “slavery did not crack” in the Upper South, “thousands of slaves gained their freedom…and the greatly enlarged free black population began to reconstruct black life in freedom,” providing these men and women opportunities to pursue many of the freedoms espoused during the Revolution (Berlin 256, 280-1). The Lower South provided much fewer opportunities for Black men and women, free and enslaved alike, to pursue and assert their freedom. Berlin writes, “although the War of Independence greatly disrupted slavery, the Patriot victory affirmed the power of the planter class and armed slave-owners with new weapons to protect and expand slavery,” effectively asserting a “three-caste society of white, black, and brown” into the firmly-ingrained slave society of the Lower South (Berlin 290-1). Moving on to the Lower Mississippi Valley, Berlin writes that this region was both “transformed to a slave society” and saw a signigicant growth in wealthy “urban colored communities” advocating for equality in the 1790s, leading Berlin to note that “the distance between the African plantation slaves and the assimilationist-minded urban people of color reflected the explosive convergence of the plantation revolution with the Age of Revolution in the Lower Mississippi Valley….simultaneously increasing the possibilities for racial alliance and expanding the social distance between slave and free” (Berlin 325-6). Berlin, then, details how the revolutionary generation of free and enslaved African Americans reacted to and were a part of social, political, and economic transformations that defined the parameters of freedom and the institutional borders of belonging.
In the introduction of his book, Berlin notes the on-going discussions regarding approaching race as a social construct, and he endeavors to add to this discussion by addressing how these discussions fail to “demonstrate how race is continually redefined, who does the defining, and how” (Berlin 1). Berlin’s approach to this subject is effective, as his geographical and chronological exploration of the evolving conceptualizations of race and subsequent evolutions in black societies allows his readers to get a more thorough and nuanced grasp of the “who, what, and how” of race in colonial and early America and the roots of contemporary racial thought in America. Berlin’s analysis of the historicity of race in America is rather reminiscent of Gomez’s text Reversing Sail. Both Many Thousands Gone and Reversing Sail testify to the agency Black men and women asserted and pursued amid the growing Eurocentricity of societal institutions in the Americas. When placing these texts in conversation with each other, one can garner a greater understanding of how our notions of race and belonging have been rooted in colonial- and Early Republic-era social, political, economic, and cultural structures.
Post 7
The second half of Ira Berlin’s Book focused on the Revolutionary generation of enslaved peoples and their relationship with slaveholders and North America. Berlin continued to organize each section based on geographic locations, revealing how economic, geographic, social, legal, and political waves in certain locations had some differences and similarities to one another. Throughout each region, a pattern of manipulation of law by slaveholders was consistent. For example, in Pennsylvania the law freed slaves born after March 1, 1780, but slaveholders “kept the children of slaves born thereafter locked in bondage until age twenty-eight.” (232) Regarding the law, in the upper South, Berlin noted that “a few slaves sought liberation through the courts.” (281) Berlin expanded on this statement to discuss how slaves dug into their past to try to detect a Native American or white ancestor to prove that they were a descendant of a non black person. Kaci discussed how African people had an important position in creating genealogy and I was hoping he would expand on this.
I also noticed specific ways in which slaveholders sought to preserve white supremacist ideologies. Berlin stated, “In the North, catering food, cutting hair, cleaning chimneys, and driving coaches seemed fitting roles for newly freed black men and women, since it kept people at the service of white people in many of the very jobs where they had labored as slaves.” (247) This statement demonstrates how white civilians strove to preserve the slave society created heirarchy by placing black civilians below white civilians.
The Revolutionary enslaved generation had similarities to early enslaved generations, especially in the upper South. Berlin noted that slaves began to work alongside their white owners stating, “The re-creation of a mixed labor force returned the Chesapeake to its seventeenth-century agricultural beginnings when white and black worked side by side.” (268) This was interesting information to absorb because you can see connections with each generation within Berlin’s findings.
Post 8
The dynamic and contingent character of history is certainly a theme that I’ve caught onto from part III of Berlin’s book as well. Berlin perhaps best summarized the incredible complexity of slaves and masters negotiating the cataclysmic tumult of overlapping revolutions and their contradictory ideas when he notes “The seeming opposition of freedom and slavery dissolved in the contradictions of the slaveholders’ war for liberty (emphasis mine). The very same slaveholders who liberated their slaves often purchased new ones, and the very same slaves who shed their shackles sometimes manacled others. Manumission, even emancipation, served masters as well as slaves, giving masters new weapons to discipline their bondpeople, extract their labor, and maintain their subordination. As in earlier eras, the transit between slavery and freedom was neither direct nor linear” (Berlin, 224). While parts I and II of Berlin’s work were certainly complex in their description of the evolving relationship between master and slave in colonial society, here this relationship enters an entirely unprecedented level of catastrophic uncertainty. Northern slavery reverses course and slowly (but also unevenly) atrophies into oblivion with the closing of the transatlantic slave trade, the Upper South unifies free and enslaved blacks, and further south people experience the ossification and expansion of slave society. The picture Berlin presents is thus uneven in both the geographic and temporal senses of the word. Gomez has similar notions in a few places when he discusses the overlapping diasporas and their eflorescence from Africa, also greatly divided in experience by time and space. Berlin’s account here made me think back yet again to the American Civil War. On the eve of secession, northern states were largely ambiguous toward the idea of emancipation while still retaining a general distaste for slavery. The lower south was prepared to do everything in its power to maintain its slave society, up to and including full-scale rebellion. The upper south occupied the uncomfortable middle ground between the two, only splitting definitively after Lincoln’s call for volunteers to put down the rebellion in the lower south. It seems to me that many of the regional dynamics that Berlin talks about were predictive even on the eve of slavery’s demise in the United States, albeit with some qualifications, as Berlin notes in the epilogue.