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

Ira Berlin argues that race is not merely a social construction but a historical construction, one continually remade through the institution of slavery across two centuries of settlement in mainland North America. Rather than treat slavery as a static condition, Berlin insists it was a negotiated relationship shaped by ongoing contests between masters and slaves whose terms shifted by place and generation. He examines four distinct regions: the North; the Chesapeake; the coastal lowcountry of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida; and the lower Mississippi Valley. The book is organized around three successive generational experiences: the charter generations (the first Black arrivals and their descendants), the plantation generations (those forced to grow the great staple crops), and the revolutionary generations (those who confronted revolutionary promises of freedom alongside a resurgent slave regime).

Two analytical markers anchor the study. The first distinguishes "societies with slaves," where slavery was one labor form among many, from "slave societies," where slavery stood at the center of economic production and the master-slave relationship became the model for all social relations. The second is the democratic revolutions of the late eighteenth century, which challenged slavery's foundations but whose impact varied enormously by region.

Berlin begins with the charter generations, tracing their origins to "Atlantic creoles" who emerged from the encounter of Europeans and Africans along the west African coast. These cosmopolitan intermediaries, many of mixed European and African parentage, served as brokers in the coastal trading factories, or feitorias, that European powers established beginning in the fifteenth century. They spoke pidgin languages, navigated multiple legal and commercial systems, and possessed cultural flexibility that made them valuable throughout the Atlantic world. When enslaved, their sophistication made them undesirable to sugar planters, who feared knowledgeable slaves, so Atlantic creoles were frequently diverted to the marginal slave societies of mainland North America.

In the Chesapeake, Berlin traces how these first arrivals exploited the fluidity of colonial society. Anthony Johnson, sold at Jamestown in 1621 as "Antonio a Negro," farmed independently while still enslaved, gained freedom, accumulated 250 acres, held slaves himself, and successfully sued white neighbors in court. Because tobacco required no elaborate division of labor, masters, servants, and slaves worked side by side, and the boundary between slavery and freedom remained porous. By midcentury, free Black people made up about one-fifth of Northampton County's Black population, rising to nearly 30 percent by 1668. They cultivated patron-client relationships, intermarried with whites, and proved litigious in defending their rights.

A similar pattern unfolded in the northern colonies. In New Netherland, the Dutch West India Company's dependence on slave labor allowed some slaves to live independently, join the Reformed Church, and win "half-freedom," a status requiring annual tribute but permitting autonomous households. By the English conquest of 1664, about one Black person in five had gained freedom. Throughout the North, slaves worked alongside white laborers and established the graveyard as the first truly African-American institution on the mainland.

The lowcountry followed divergent paths. In South Carolina, rice cultivation quickly ended the charter generations' brief openness. In Spanish Florida, the Crown offered freedom to fugitives who converted to Catholicism, and former Carolina slaves like Francisco Menéndez rose through militia service. Menéndez commanded the fortified Black settlement of Mose, north of St. Augustine. In the lower Mississippi Valley, French settlers imported nearly 6,000 Africans, many of them Bambaras from Senegambia, during the 1720s, but the Natchez rebellion of 1729, in which Natchez Indians and Bambara slaves massacred over 200 French settlers, shattered the nascent slave society. Louisiana devolved into a society with slaves, and creole culture belatedly took root.

The book's second part examines the plantation generations. Berlin argues that the plantation revolution transformed societies with slaves into slave societies. Planters monopolized the best land, imported thousands of Africans directly from the interior, enacted comprehensive slave codes, and elaborated paternalist ideologies casting themselves as metaphorical fathers over permanent dependents. Violence became systematic, and racial ideologies naturalized the existing order in ways not seen in societies with slaves.

In the Chesapeake, planters turned to the African interior for labor after legalizing chattel bondage in the 1660s, stripping newly arrived Africans of their names, identities, and autonomy. Mortality soared: Within a year of arrival, one-quarter of newly imported Africans died. The slaves' independent economy shriveled as planters issued rations and confiscated slave-owned livestock. By the 1730s, however, a native-born African-American majority emerged. These creoles reestablished family life, won individual cabins, and regained control of the naming process. The evangelical Great Awakening drew Black converts beginning at midcentury, and the shift from tobacco to mixed farming expanded demand for skilled slave labor.

In the lowcountry, the rice revolution produced the most extreme slave society on the continent. By the 1720s, slaves outnumbered whites two to one. Planters retreated to cities, ruling through drivers (plantation-based Black foremen) and the task system, which defined a precise daily output and left the remainder of the day to the slave. Plantation slaves maintained African languages, religions, and naming practices far more fully than Black people elsewhere. Urban slaves hired out their labor and kept part of the earnings, monopolized the public markets, and lived in a world apart. This fracture between cosmopolitan urban creoles and plantation-bound Africans became a defining feature of lowcountry Black life.

In the North, slavery grew more economically important after 1725 without producing a full plantation revolution. Negro Election Day in New England and Pinkster Day in New York and New Jersey emerged as distinctive festivals through which Black communities honored their own leaders. In the lower Mississippi Valley, the slaves' economy flourished under Spanish rule, and the coartación, a legal mechanism allowing slaves to initiate self-purchase, opened new avenues to freedom.

The book's final part addresses the revolutionary generations. The American, French, and Haitian Revolutions challenged slavery throughout the continent, but outcomes varied dramatically. In the North, every state enacted some form of emancipation, though the process was painfully slow: Pennsylvania's 1780 law freed no slave born before emancipation day and kept children in bondage until age 28. Former slaves celebrated liberation by taking new names, migrating to cities, and building institutions. Richard Allen founded Mother Bethel of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church in Philadelphia, and the nearly universal adoption of "African" in institutional names marked the creation of a unified African-American identity.

In the Upper South, Virginia repealed its prohibition on private manumission in 1782, and Maryland's free Black population surged from about 8,000 in 1790 to nearly 34,000 by 1810. Yet an estimated 115,000 slaves were relocated south and west through sale and forced migration between 1780 and 1810, dismembering thousands of families. The continued presence of slavery muted divisions within Black society, as free and enslaved people married one another, worshipped together, and shared institutions. In the Lower South, planters reasserted control and reopened the African trade, while free people of color aligned with the slaveholding class to protect their precarious status. In the lower Mississippi Valley, sugar and cotton production surged after the Haitian Revolution removed Saint Domingue from the international sugar market, and maroon communities, settlements established by fugitive slaves, flourished amid the upheaval. After the United States purchased Louisiana in 1803, the planter-dominated legislature moved to restrict free people of color and entrench slavery.

Berlin concludes that the division into free and slave states created a base for eventual abolition but also enabled planters to elaborate a new racial ideology. Where earlier generations of whites had attributed Black people's alleged deficiencies to circumstance, nineteenth-century racial thought located inferiority in biology. The cotton revolution carried over a million slaves from the seaboard to the blackbelt, the arc of plantation territory stretching from Georgia to the Mississippi Valley, even as slaves rebuilt families, communities, and the African-American church. The history of the "many thousands gone" would inform African-American life long after emancipation.