Many Thousands Gone
Berlin traces the evolution of black society from the first arrivals in the early seventeenth century through the American Revolution, reintegrates slaves into the history of the American working class, and reveals the diverse forms that slavery and freedom assumed before cotton was the mainstay of the slave economy. You witness the transformation that occurred as the first generations of Creole slaves, free blacks, and indentured whites gave way to the plantation generations, whose exhausting labor was the sole engine of their society and whose physical and linguistic seclusion sustained African traditions on American soil. Berlin demonstrates that the meaning of slavery and of race itself was continually redefined, as the nation moved toward political and economic independence.Berlin argues that despite an inherent power imbalance, slavery was a negotiated relationship between slave and owner. Even in the worst of circumstances, slaves always held a strong card: the threat of rebellion. Through this negotiation, slaves not only carved out an independent social sphere from sundown to sunup, they created their own world under the owners' noses from sunup to sundown as well.
The first was the Plantation Revolution. The Cotton Revolution dramatically undercut the illusion that slavery was a dying institution. Worse, the plantation took slavery's already established color-coding and naturalized and rationalized the existing order through the use of racial ideologies. Berlin argues that the north did not have fewer slaves because northerners were more conscientious or less racist than southerners (as many would like to think), but because the majority of them simply could not profit as well from slave labor. Berlin found out that the process of dehumanizing slaves was one that took time and varied from region to region, and he goes into specific economic and cultural factors that played the role in establishing and keeping slavery in the states. Berlin also divides his study socio-economically into societies with slaves and slave societies. Even the North, for unique economic reasons, developed slave society attributes before the institution finally died there, with a resultant permanent loss of status by all blacks in the region, slave and free alike. In the former, slaves, mainly multinational, multilingual Atlantic Creoles, were marginal to the region's central production processes, and slavery was one form of lower labor among many. All the regions examined by Berlin evolved from societies with slaves into slave societies, with the change occurring as early as the turn of the 18th century in the Chesapeake and low country regions and as late as the 1790s in the lower Mississippi Valley. This book added a great deal to my knowledge of the first two centuries of slavery in North America. Beginning in Barbados, where tobacco cultivation gave way to sugar production and the slave system overwhelmed indentured servitude and wage labor, planters consolidated their economic and political power. In slave societies, slavery stood at the very center of economic production, with a domineering and patriarchal master-slave relationship serving as the model for all social relationships, including father and child and husband and wife. The Enlightenment and the evangelical religious movement led to the first sustained opposition to slavery. itionally, slavery itself continually changed, and hence the terms of the relationship frequently had to be renegotiated.
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Acceptance Essays
