Many Thousands Gone

by Berlin, Ira

• ISBN13: 9780674002111
• ISBN10: 0674002113
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2000-03-01
• Publisher: Belknap Pr

Summary

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.

Author Biography

Ira Berlin is Professor of History at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Table of Contents

Prologue: Making Slavery, Making Race	1	(15)
I. SOCIETIES WITH SLAVES: The Charter Generations	15	(78)
Emergence of Atlantic Creoles in the Chesapeake	29	(18)
Expansion of Creole Society in the North	47	(17)
Divergent Paths in the Lowcountry	64	(13)
Devolution in the Lower Mississippi Valley	77	(16)
II. SLAVE SOCIETIES: The Plantation Generations	93	(124)
The Tobacco Revolution in the Chesapeake	109	(33)
The Rice Revolution in the Lowcountry	142	(35)
Growth and the Transformation of Black Life in the North	177	(18)
Stagnation and Transformation in the Lower Mississippi Valley	195	(22)
III. SLAVE AND FREE: The Revolutionary Generations	217	(141)
The Slow Death of Slavery in the North	228	(28)
The Union of African-American Society in the Upper South	256	(34)
Fragmentation in the Lower South	290	(35)
Slavery and Freedom in the Lower Mississippi Valley	325	(33)
Epilogue: Making Race, Making Slavery	358	(11)
Tables	369	(7)
Abbreviations	376	(3)
Notes	379	(107)
Acknowledgments	486	(4)
Index	490