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