Generations of Captivity

Yet even when their power was reduced to a mere trifle, slaves still had enough to threaten their owners—a last card, which, as their owners well understood, they might play at any time.” 

One of the most important themes in the book is slave resistance and the related concept of slave agency. Slaves acted; they were not merely acted upon. Slaves managed different types of negotiations at different historical moments. Sometimes, their negotiations had the potential to result in freedom for an individual or an entire family. At other moments, a successful negotiation might involve selling married slaves to the same new owner. Always, slaveowners had to entertain their slaves’ demands or risk slave revolt by not compromising. Because slaveowners feared insurrections so much, and because they relied on their slaves to maintain their wealth, they continually made concessions and compromised with slave demands. 

“The slaves’ history—like all human history—was made not only by what was done to them but also by what they did for themselves.” 

A constant throughout the monograph is Berlin’s exposition of slave agency in the face of extreme oppression. This means that he reveals how slaves directed the course of their own lives even within significant structural confines. Commitment to the slave’s perspective and acknowledgment of his/her agency imbibes the history with humanity that is easily overlooked when students or scholars focus only on the actions and power of white slaveowners.

“Black life on mainland North America originated not in Africa or America but in the nether world between the two continents.” 

Berlin situates the contingent history of black people in North America within a larger context of meeting and exchange between Africa, Europe, and the Americas in a world of culture and commerce negotiated across the Atlantic Ocean. The origin that Berlin refers to in this massage is the experience of mixed-ancestry (Euro-African) populations that sophisticatedly navigated the multi-continental systems of languages, trades, and cultures. Their position as intermediaries and their intimate knowledge of the new “Atlantic World” (a term used regularly by modern scholars to describe this network) allowed them to strategically negotiate their position in society and leave a lasting imprint on New World societies.

“Along the edges of the North American continent, creoles found that their cultural and social marginality was an asset.” 

The ability to derive benefits from social marginality was very different from the possibilities for ensuing generations of slaves. For Atlantic creoles, degrees of foreignness were valuable assets beyond their labor. As time went on, slavery moved into the American interior and away from the access points to transatlantic systems of exchange.

“In their rush to seize the main chance, planters might trample their workers, but they made little distinction among their subordinates by age, sex, nation, or race. While the advantages of this peculiar brand of equality may have been lost on its beneficiaries, it was precisely the shared labor regimen of African, European, and Native American that allowed some black men like Anthony Johnson to escape bondage and join the scramble that characterized life in the seventeenth-century Chesapeake.” 

This passage follows an account of a legal battle between planters to determine the fate of a single black laborer. A freed-slave-turned-slave-owner named Anthony Johnson fought to maintain control over his property, the slave John Casar. This example illustrates the relative complexity of race in the early generations of slavery on mainland America. With the possibility of social class ascendancy and a mixed-race class of laborers, these societies with slaves did not establish firm race-based hierarchies that articulated whiteness and blackness as fixed categories that would determine a person’s legal status. This type of “scramble” for power would cease to exist as plantation economies reorganized regional economies and social hierarchies. Whites would be the sole demographic to emerge victorious in the new power system. 

“Atlantic creoles’ ability to trade freely, profess Christianity, gain access to the law, secure freedom, and enjoy a modest prosperity shaped popular understandings of black life in the era prior to the plantation. But the possibilities of large-scale commodity production threatened the open, porous slave system that developed in the early years of European and African settlement.” 

This statement summarizes Berlin’s analysis of the charter generations of American slaves. They had integrated themselves into mainstream society and constructed their own communities via observable channels of religion, law, and commerce, despite their bondage. The catalyzing event that ended the charter generations and ushered in a new era of American slavery was the ascendancy of the plantation system, which Berlin calls the “plantation revolution.” This development rewrote the institution of slavery as it transformed society. Ensuing generations of black laborers, though they would continue to negotiate positions and opportunities in society, would be constrained by hardening legal prohibitions and new societal conceptions of race and blackness. 

“In the very stereotype of the dumb, brutish African that planters voiced so loudly, newly arrived slaves found protection, as they used their apparent ignorance of the language, landscape, and work routines of the Chesapeake to their own benefit.” 

Berlin continually stresses the ingenuity and nuance of slave resistance to their dehumanization and working conditions. This passage refers to the influx of slaves from the African interior that went to Southern slave societies after the plantation revolution. Tuned in to masters’ low expectations of their intelligence, slaves could stage delays in the production process that temporarily eased their work burdens. Berlin calls this a “subtle strategy” (65), more practical in most cases than violent resistance.  

“Planters may have designed their estates, but slaves built them—literally.” 

In the countryside of the Southeast, where plantation slaves faced some of the worst conditions and inhumanity, they built personal spaces (houses within the slave quarter of plantations) that mimicked African villages. The process of building this space and the nature of its separation from other plantation residences provided a site for the development of a sense of community, a prospect that terrified slaveowners in constant fear of insurrection. This quote represents another example of the ways that slaves exercised agency and humanity in every corner of their existence. 

“The age of the great democratic revolutions—the American, the French, and the Haitian—marked a third transformation in the lives of black people in mainland North America, propelling some slaves to freedom and dooming others to nearly another century of captivity.” 

Each of the revolutions Berlin mentions in this quotation brought freedom to some people in society. Slaves knew of and sought to replicate that freedom for themselves, again drawing on information from a wider Atlantic network beyond their homes and workplaces. Like earlier transformations, slaves in different geographies and at different times met different outcomes. In illustrating these dynamics, Berlin again stresses historical contingency while also complicating the notion of freedom not as a single moment in the history of American slavery, but instead as another variable force with unequal historical applications. 

“It was precisely the determination of newly freed slaves to aid those still in bondage—particularly their kin—that made them untrustworthy in the eyes of slaveholders and their white allies.” 

This quotation reveals the steady fear and distrust with which upper-class whites regarded free black people. As abolitionist sentiment grew and collected crusaders in slave family circles and religious groups, slaveowners feared a collapse of the entire institution of slavery. Slaveowners could not always curtail the number and influence of free people of color in any given region (this example comes from the post-revolution Chesapeake), but legislators, planters, and whites unwilling to share freedom all routinely sought to silence and limit the agency of free people of color by and large. 

“The collapse of the free people’s struggle for equality cleared the way for the expansion of slavery.” 

Berlin makes this statement in reference to the revolutionary generation in the Lower Mississippi Country, but it displays a larger theme of the relationship between slavery and freedom in black life in the long age of slavery. When societies successfully degraded the lives of free people of color, they strengthened a color line that placed all whites above all blacks and, in this period, equated blackness with servitude regardless of legal status. Freedom did not automatically grant privileges and unleash forces that halted slavery in its tracks. Freedom had to be negotiated and met resistance from a class of powerful whites committed to white supremacy. 

“The Second Middle Passage was the central even in the lives of African-American people between the American Revolution and slavery’s final demise in December 1865.” 

Berlin emphasizes the Second Middle Passage, or the internal American slave trade, as the most definitive development in nearly a century of early American history. He notes that it profoundly affected African-American people by and large—it transcended boundaries of free and unfree, even though the development itself was a part of the institution of slavery. The horrors of the forced migration and new plantations in the Southern interior fueled abolitionist sentiment on the eve of the Civil War.

“Without exception, territorial governors were appointed from the ranks of the planter class or those who would soon enter the planter class, and slaveholders populated the territorial and state legislatures as well as county courthouses and sheriffs’ offices.” 

As slavery expanded westward into American territories yet to obtain statehood in the late-18th and early-19th centuries, government agencies ensured the continuation and expansion of the institution. During the charter generations, the law had provided a tool with which slaves could advocate for themselves and win rights and freedom. Centuries later, lawmakers ensured the exact opposite: that policy would strip slaves of all power rather than provide avenues by which they could gain power.

“The internal slave trade became the largest enterprise in the South outside of the plantation itself, and probably the most advanced in its employment of modern transportation, finance, and publicity.” 

Though Berlin stresses the importance and impact of the Second Middle Passages at many points throughout the book, in this excerpt, he communicates the sophistication of its organization and operation. American slave traders applied modern business savvy to their project, rendering it an advanced mechanism by which to support slavery. Berlin goes on to explain the scope of the trade routes and the lexicon participants developed. The formality and methodical approach made the internal trade very difficult to combat and end.

“As rice cultivators, slaves generally worked by the task, under the immediate supervision of a black driver. Control over the allocation of labor allowed black supervisors to protect the weakest members of the plantation, particularly women and children. On the cotton frontier, by contrast, the lock-step discipline of the plantation gang forced all slaves to work at the mater’s pace and introduced a new, foreign mode of discipline.” 

In part, Generations of Captivity is a labor history. Berlin often compares labor regimes and explains their implications for slaves’ lives. The manner of work slaves had to undertake always had profound social effects centered on public health and the use of free time (often devoted to maintaining an independent slave economy). This example comes from the Southern Interior of the Antebellum period. 

“They remained trapped between the planters who feared and despised them and slaves with whom they dared not identify.” 

Every chapter includes a discussion of free people of color alongside slaves. In the North, free men and women openly opposed slavery. Such behavior in the South (the site of this example) was dangerous because planters regarded free people of color as a threat to slavery and could stamp out their freedom in a variety of ways through both legal and illegal channels. From the perspective of free people of color, they best protected their freedom by disassociating with slaves so as not to present a unified front and so as not to be so close to sites of slavery themselves. 

“They discovered in Christianity a new means to advocate their people and themselves.” 

Christianity played into the long history of American slavery in many ways. Earlier generations of slaves that strived to uphold African cultures had little interest in Christian faiths. As black communities adopted African-American identities, many embraced Christianity and utilized religion as an outpost for social connections often denied them in their working and living conditions. The story of Exodus offered an alternative fate for slaves than their daily suffering: They could win freedom in God’s good favor. Free people of color also utilized the Church as the center of black communities committed to freeing slaves and establishing institutions that supported freed people. Both the faith and the organizing structures associated with church membership significantly shaped the lives and minds of black people in the 19th century. 

“Slaves put up for sale championed their spouses and children to their potential buyers, boasting of their value and fidelity to slave traders while none too subtly hinting to their owners that their worth would decrease if they were separated from their loved ones.” 

While the Second Middle Passage ripped apart families, slaves continued to negotiate the best situations possible within the existing parameters. This example reveals the agency and acts of resistance that slaves carried out even in the grimmest circumstances. It also communicates just how devastating slave life was in the regions that supplied the internal slave trade. In other historical examples, slaves made reasonable bids for freedom. On the cusp of sale, they hoped only to be sold and marched west alongside loved ones. 

“Social divisions within black society bred intense suspicions and animosities. The aspiring gentlemen and ladies feared the black poor would confirm the worst racial stereotypes, and the poor remained profoundly distrustful of those who acted like white people.” 

Berlin makes this comment in reference to societies in the North in the 19th century, but the sentiment discussed emerged in many pockets, particularly throughout the Eastern seaboard. Class divisions drew fissures in the black communities, often delineated by who had been enslaved and who had accumulated some wealth as long-time free people. These divisions disrupted the potential for solidarity in the face of white supremacy and racism. Factions differed on the most efficient ways to pursue full equality, including the degree to which black activists should enlist the help of white allies or keep their activism internal to the black community. 

“By mid-century, African-American civic life extended across the Atlantic. Traveling as abolitionist emissaries, Christian missionaries, African colonizers, and, most commonly, salt-water sailors, African Americans reentered the Atlantic and restored the cosmopolitan world of the charter generations.” 

The positions that free people of color in Northern society held in the Antebellum period rebuilt a transatlantic network of informed, multiracial exchange that had been lost for over a century since the early plantation revolutions sequestered slaves in the American hinterlands. The character of these travelers was very different from that of their Atlantic creole predecessors, though. Nineteenth-century Atlantic travelers represented members of the African-American diaspora, products of generations and conditions in North America, steeped in Christianity, the English language, and political ideology born of republicanism and the pursuit of full equality through citizenship.

“Black people had drunk deeply from the republican culture that surrounded them for more than a century. Perhaps no Americans more fully understood the rights of citizens than those who had been forced to protest their exclusion.” 

Though the analysis in the book is divided by generation, significant continuities develop and persist throughout the history. On the eve of the Civil War, the Second Middle Passage and worsening plantation conditions dictated most slaves’ immediate circumstances. A century earlier, the American Revolution and accompanying ideology loomed large in the lives of slaves. As the generations passed, however, major events in the entire timeline of the history of slavery continued to inform slaves’ mental worlds and visions of the future.  

“For slaves and free people of color, the destruction of slavery was only the first step toward securing freedom and citizenship.” 

Berlin illustrated throughout the book that the mere absence of slavery did not create or secure freedom, even though the two concepts are essentially opposites. Shedding chains of bondage was only one part of a long process that could result in full social and legal equality for people of color. Explaining that process and the many obstacles in place illustrates the long freedom struggle that began with race-making and slavery in the 17th century in the lands that would become the United States. The Civil War and resulting constitutional amendments significantly accelerated the path towards full black liberation, but the privileges of citizenship would remain elusive to people of color in the United States beyond the freedom generations of the mid-19th century. 

“Slavery collapsed under the pounding of federal troops from the outside and the subversion of plantation-bound black men and women from the inside.” 

Berlin credits black people with critical elements of the destruction of slavery during the Civil War. Military success depended on the actions of both free people of color working for the Union Army and also slaves that remained in bondage but weakened planters’ power over production and politics through acts of resistance and negotiation.