Many Thousands Gone

The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America

Ira Berlin

• Publisher: Belknap Press
• Year: 2000
• ISBN:
  9780674252455
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

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.

Notes

Prologue: Making Slavery, Making Race

1. For a powerful statement, see Barbara Jeanne Fields, “Race and Ideology in American History,” in J. Morgan Kousser and James M. McPherson, eds., Region, Race, and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward (New York, 1982), 143–77. Also see Henry Louis Gates, Jr., ed., “Race,” Writing, and Difference (Chicago, 1986), 1–20; Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” in Jonathan Rutherford, ed., Identity (London, 1990), 222–37; and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, “African-American Women’s History and the Metalanguage of Race,” Signs, 17 (1992), 251–74. A handy discussion of the new biology can be found in Jonathan M. Marks, Human Biodiversity: Genes, Race, and History (New York, 1995); also see Steven Jay Gould, “Why We Should Not Name Races—A Biological View,” in Gould, Ever Since Darwin: Reflections on Natural History (New York, 1977).

2. Although Barbara Fields’s original formulation and later elaborations on the meaning of “race” (“Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United States of America,” NLR, 181 [1990], 85–118) were aggressively historical, not all scholars have taken that tack. See, for example, Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1980s (London, 1986), which situates race in a specific historical setting but ignores the processes that are continually transforming it.

3. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York, 1964), 9.

4. Claude Meillassoux, Anthropologie de l’esclavage: le ventre de fer et argent (Paris, 1986), translated as The Anthropology of Slavery: The Womb of Iron and Gold, trans. Alide Dasnois (Chicago, 1991), 99–100; Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, Mass., 1982), 5–6; M. I. Finley, Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology (New York, 1980), 74–75; Stanley M. Elkins, Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (Chicago, 1959).

5. Any discussion of slavery which emphasizes the doubleness of slavery—as property and person—must begin with Georg Wilhelm Hegel, Phenomenology of the Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (New York, 1977), and continue though the work of David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca, N.Y., 1966).

6. The literature on paternalism is vast, even when confined to the master–slave relationship, but the contemporary debate starts with Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York, 1974). For the struggle against slavery and the development of capitalism, see David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1975).

7. Herbert G. Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750–1925 (New York, 1976), 335.

8. The same point has been made about the relationship between race and gender; see Kathleen M. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1996).

9. Keith Hopkins, Conquerors and Slaves: Sociological Studies in Roman History (Cambridge, UK, 1978), 99; Moses I. Finley, “Slavery,” International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (New York, 1968), and Finley, Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology (New York, 1980), 79–80.

10. Anne Grant, Memoirs of an American Lady (New York, 1809), 26–29.

11. Frank Tannenbaum, Slave and Citizen: The Negro in the Americas (New York, 1946), 117.

12. Although they differ in their emphases, two particularly clear statements are Richard S. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624–1713 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1972), and Richard B. Sheridan, Sugar and Slavery: An Economic History of the British West Indies, 1623–1775 (Baltimore, 1973).

13. Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York, 1975), ch. 13.

14. Peter Kolchin, Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom (Cambridge, Mass., 1987), 170.

15. The debate over the origins of the plantation revolution is reviewed by Barbara Solow, “The Transition to Plantation Slavery: The Case of the British West Indies,” in Serge Daget, ed., De la traite a l’esclavage: Actes du Colloque International sur la traite des Noirs, Nantes, 1985, 2 vols. (Nantes, 1988), 1: 89–110.

16. In the nineteenth-century North American South, small holders grew cotton, but large planters dominated its cultivation. The critical importance of the planter to the maintenance of plantation production has led some scholars to argue for a plantation mode of production which encompassed slavery but superseded it as well outlasting chattel bondage. See, in particular, the work of Jay R. Mandle, “The Plantation Economy: An Essay in Definition,” in Eugene D. Genovese, ed., The Slave Economies, 2 vols. (New York, 1973), 1: 214–28.

17. Much of what follows draws from the papers and discussions at the “Cultivation and Culture” conference held at the University of Maryland in the spring of 1989. Many of those papers have subsequently been published in Ira Berlin and Philip D. Morgan, eds., The Slaves’ Economy: Independent Production by Slaves in the Americas (London, 1991), and Cultivation and Culture: Labor and the Shaping of Slave Life in the Americas (Charlottesville, Va., 1993). My ideas have been especially influenced by Philip D. Morgan and are elaborated in a somewhat different form in the jointly written introductions of those two volumes. The centrality of labor in the formation of slave life was made forcefully in Stuart B. Schwartz, Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society (Cambridge, UK, 1986).

18. While there has been little study of the ways in which slaves worked and the relationship between work process and slave culture, those connections have been much at issue in the study of wage workers. On the debate over the role of work process and workingclass activism, see David Montgomery, Workers’ Control in America: Studies in the History of Work, Technology, and Labor Struggles (Cambridge, UK, 1987), and The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865–1925 (Cambridge, UK, 1987); Patrick Joyce, Work, Society and Politics: The Culture of the Factory in Later Victorian England (New Brunswick, N.J., 1980); Bryan Palmer, Skilled Workers and Industrial Capitalism in Hamilton, Ontario, 1860–1914 (Toronto, 1979); and Richard Price, “The Labour Process and Labour History,” SH, 8 (1983), 57–75, and the subsequent exchange between Price and Patrick Joyce.

19. Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution; Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery (London, 1988); David Barry Gaspar and David Patrick Geggus, eds., A Turbulent Time: The French Revolution and the Greater Caribbean (Bloomington, Ind., 1997).

Part I. Societies with Slaves: The Charter Generations

1. In studies of the acculturation of peoples in the New World, “creole” has been used to distinguish those of native American birth from those of foreign, generally European, birth. But the use of the term has taken on various other meanings and been applied, for example, to people of mixed racial descent, non-English descent (as in the creoles of Louisiana), and even African people who had some experience in the New World—the so-called recaptives or liberated “Africans”—in Sierra Leone. It has also been extended to animals, things, and processes: “sugar cane, rats, styles of cooking, among other things,” Philip Curtin notes. Philip Curtin, Economic Change in Precolonial Africa: Senegambia in the Era of the Slave Trade (Madison, Wisc., 1975), 138-39 n5. The term is thus mined with difficulties, since there is no universally accepted usage.

In the United States, “Afro-American” and more recently “African American” have come into common usage as synonyms for “black” and “Negro” in referring to people of African descent. “Creole” derives from the Portuguese word “crioulo,” meaning a slave of African descent born in the New World. It has been extended to native-born free people of many national origins, including both Europeans and Africans, and diverse social standing. It has also been applied to people of partly European, but mixed racial and national origins in various European colonies and to Africans who entered Europe. In the United States, “creole” has also been specifically applied to people of mixed but usually non-African origins in Louisiana.

Staying within the bounds of the broadest definition of “creole” and the literal definition of “African American,” I have used both terms to refer to black people of Native American birth, and I have adopted the term “Atlantic creole” to refer to those of African descent but connected to the larger Atlantic world. John A. Holm, Pidgins and Creoles: Theory and Structure, 2 vols. (Cambridge, UK, 1988–89), 1: 9. On the complex and often contradictory usages in a single place, see Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Baton Rouge, 1992), 157–59; Joseph G. Tregle, Jr., “On that Word ‘Creole’ Again: A Note,” LH, 23 (1982), 193–98.

Part I is based upon “From Creoles to African: Atlantic Creoles and the Origins of African-American Society in Mainland North America.” These notes provide only essential references; for full citations see WMQ, 53 (1996), 251–88.

2. For a ground-breaking work which argues for the unity of the Atlantic world, see Peter Linebaugh, “All the Atlantic Mountains Shook,” LL 10 (1982), 82–121, and Marcus Rediker and Peter Linebaugh, “The Many Headed Hydra,” Journal of Historical Sociology, 3 (1990), 225–53. From the perspective of the making of African-American culture, see John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World (Cambridge, UK, 1992). A larger Atlantic perspective for the formation of black culture is posed in Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass., 1993).

3. A. C. de C. M. Saunders, A Social History of Black Slaves and Freedmen in Portugal, 1441–1555 (Cambridge, UK, 1982), 11–12, 145, 197 n52, 215 n73; G. R. Crone, ed., The Voyages of Cadamosto and Other Documents on West Africa in the Second Half of the Fifteenth Century (1937, rpt. New York, 1967), 55, 61; P. E. H. Hair, “The Use of African Languages in Afro-European Contacts in Guinea, 1440–1560,” Sierra Leone La...