Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America

by Ira Berlin

Book Overview

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...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0674002113
• ISBN13: 9780674002111
• Release Date: March 2000
• Publisher: Belknap Press
• Length: 512 Pages
• Weight: 1.01 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 6.0" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

Important Synthesis of Early Enslavement

Ira Berlin in "Many Thousands Gone" has made a very important contribution to the growing literature attempting to understand both the big picture and the daily details of slavery. As his subtitle suggests, his work focuses on the first two centuries of slavery in North America. Berlin's primary (and well-documented) thesis is that slave culture was not one monolithic culture, but several different cultures depending upon the era and the area of North American enslavement. Additionally, Berlin highlights that slavery was racist and classist, an interpretation which does not minimize the evils of racism, but also exposes the evils of classism. Though in other works by the same author, readers find first-hand accounts of the horrors of slavery in the words of the enslaved, such documentation is less evident in this work. An increase in such documentation would have strengthened the already excellent "Many Thousand Gone." Still, the overall message and "feel" of "Many Thousands Gone" does accurately and powerfully depict the agony and inhumanity of African American slavery. Berlin engages the important issue of the slave's choice of or refusal to choose the master's religion. Including a small sampling of the slave narratives (the majority of which evidence acceptance of Christianity) and the myriad slave conversion accounts, would have provided added depth to this fine book. Converting slaves, by their own accounts, did not see themselves as converting to their masters' religion. Instead, they saw themselves rejecting their masters' hypocritical distortion of Christianity and receiving Christ and Christianity, cleansed of lies and replete with the message of eternal freedom spirituality and internal freedom in Christ. For the broad panorama of early enslavement, look no further than "Many Thousands Gone." Reviewer: Bob Kellemen, Ph.D., is the author of Beyond the Suffering: Embracing the Legacy of African American Soul Care and Spiritual Direction , Soul Physicians, and Spiritual Friends.

Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America

Brought for college class. Arrived in excellent condition. Purchased new book at great price. Better then campus store prices.

American Slavery Was Local

The myth of slavery derives from the powerful images of the miniseries Roots; the notion that black people were simply swept out of their African lives, degraded and sometimes killed on the harsh way to America and then put to work on a cotton plantation without power of any sort. Ira Berlin, in this beautifully written and thoroughly researched history of the first two hundred years of American slavery, "Many Thousands Gone", blows apart that myth. He says that slavery had great variety, based on geographic, economic and generational factors. The first generation of slaves in America were creoles, born of white and African American parents. They frequently lived along the sea and interacted with people of all walks of life, were traders and often spoke multiple languages. These slaves frequently stayed with their families, knew and utilized the courts to petition for freedom, they worked with their slave-owners to grow crops and to negotiate payment for their eventual freedom. This changed with subsequent generations who were plucked from central Africa and did not have the same experience with the white world. While slaves in these subsequent generations lost the power to negotiate the terms of their slavery with their slaveholders, they were able to grab autonomy in other ways. They grew and sold goods in cities, they purchased their freedom, though often at a high price. They escaped and formed maroon armed communities. A few other factors also played a significant role in determining the virulence of slavery, specifically geography and economics. Some crops like cotton and tobacco were well suited to the plantation systems and in areas where those crops grew well, the slave system was particularly harsh. History was another factor. In the form of the American Revolution it disrupted the plantation system, because the plantation owners, who were often patriots with strong beliefs in the rights of man, also owned slaves and defended their right to do so. The loyalists took advantage of this dilemma and often had the plantation slaves fighting on the loyalist side in exchange for the promise of becoming free men. Sometimes they even delivered on that promise. My only criticism is that I wanted more of a narrative that would bring together the various aspects of slavery. I was left with the feeling that American slavery was really Mississippi slavery or South Carolina slavery or New York slavery. The legacy of slavery appears to be monolithic even if the experience of slavery was not.

Nuanced Analysis of Important Topic

To most Americans, including most scholars, slavery in the USA is usually thought of as chattel slavery associated with the plantation economies of the Antebellum South. This is a book on slavery in North America in the two centuries prior to the antebellum period. Berlin takes pains to present slavery over this extended period of time as historically dynamic and regionally diverse. Berlin is excellent at showing how changes in the Atlantic economy, political events such as the American Revolution, and international diplomacy all contributed to changes in the world experienced by slaves and slaveholders. This is true history from below emphasizing the experience of slaves. Berlin is particularly good at exploring the rich regional diversity of the slave experience in North America. This will simply be the standard book on this topic for decades to come. Written with grace, some passion, and an excellent bibliography.

Perhaps the finest book on American slavery ever written.

The academic world has been waiting for this book for the last eighteen years. Berlin, already one of the dean's of slavery studies in America, has written a masterful study of the entire evolution of American slavery from it's very beginings to it's terrible highpoint, during the Ante-Bellum period in the South. The Genius of Berlin, however, is to understand this development in a way in which both the location of a slave and the time in which he or she lived affected his or her life. People who have studied slavery for too long have described it as a static experience, one that never elvolved, changed, or got better or worse. With his wonderful book, Berlin has ended all this and brought us into a new era of slavery studies. Many Thousands Gone is a fine book to take us into the next century as we continue to try to understand America.