On Generations of Captivity

This book is such a breath air after reading Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made and Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South. Both authors of those works come from the perspective that slavery was such a rigid and unchanging institution that time during the antebellum era could effectively be “flattened.” It didn’t matter if you look at slavery in the 1820s or in the 1850s, it’s all the same. Ira Berlin offers a grand overview of the history of slavery in the United States from the angle that slavery was an institution in motion.

In doing so, he argues that there were five periods or categories, which he calls “generations,” of slavery in the United States. Moreover, each generation also had its own internal transformation. Naturally, these generations overlap significantly, and some people may have experienced life in two or more.

The first generation of African slaves, which he calls the “Charter Generation,” entered North America at approximately the same time as European colonizers. This is the generation that the 1619 Project uses as its starting point. The Charter Generation mainly consisted of peoples who were enslaved from coastal areas of West Africa, sometimes the children of mixed-race pairings between Africans and Europeans from countries like Portugal. The Charter Generation had very strong ability in a wide variety of languages and produced a truly transatlantic lingua franca. These individuals could transition easily between social spaces and saw equitable arrivals between men and women, allowing slave families to emerge. Moreover, approximately 20% of the Charter Generation was manumitted and came to live in the United States as freedmen and freedwomen.

Because slavery as an institution is fundamentally rooted in coercion, conditions were always bad for the Charter Generation. However, the second generation, the Plantation Generation, faced conditions far worse than the Charter Generation. The plantation revolution, or the rationalization of plantation life and increasing brutality, forced the utter degradation of enslaved peoples. The vast majority of Africans who entered the United States as slaves made up the Plantation Generation. In fact, by the eighteenth century, 90% of all arrivals were members of the Plantation Generation. Most of these slaves were brought from the interior of Africa and knew little about the Atlantic world—they nearly exclusively spoke African languages (especially Igbo and related dialects) and maintained African cultural processes in North America. We can look at this as a source of resistance, I certainly do, but it was this generation that ultimately led the groundwork for a unique “African American” society. At the same time, Berlin argues that it was under this generation that the United States transitioned from being a “society with slaves” to a “slave society.” The distinction is subtle but important. A society with slaves is one where enslavement is just one of many forms of labor that give a nation its productive quality. A slave society, on the other hand, is one where slavery is the cornerstone of economic production. This is best illustrated by the flourishing of “slave codes” throughout the United States. Although this is unquantifiable given the lack of data, it makes sense to me.

The third generation saw conditions improve in comparison to the Plantation Generation. As a result of egalitarian revolutions around the Atlantic, the “Revolutionary Generation” saw increased rates of liberation throughout the United States. Britain, for instance, promised the liberation of slaves during the American Revolution, should they opt to rally to the British cause. While most did not, in large part due to coercion from planters, some did, and the majority of these were shipped back to Sierra Leone. However, the American Revolution forced leading thinkers and white political actors to think closely about “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” In northern states, they abolished slavery and formerly enslaved peoples became freedmen and women. To Berlin, this constitutes America’s “first emancipation.”

The fourth generation saw conditions deteriorate once more and is what Berlin calls the “Migration Generation.” During the colonial and revolutionary periods, slavery was generally restricted to coastal areas, where enslaved peoples cultivated rice, tobacco, and other crops. The Migration Generation saw the movement of planters from South Carolina and Georgia into what we will come to call the “Deep South”—especially Alabama and Mississippi. Slavery also extended to territories like Texas, Louisiana (in which the plantation revolution was earlier unsuccessful), Florida, and more. The Migration Generation saw the further solidification of the institution and represented what Berlin calls “the Second Middle Passage.” This is the generation most familiar to us today.

The final generation, which Berlin argues experienced the “second emancipation” is called the Liberation Generation. This is the generation that experienced freedom for the first time in 1863-65 (although some of this freedom would be withdrawn in the decades to come—Berlin doesn’t talk about this, but it’s only because the narrative ends with emancipation).

The beauty of the book is that Ira Berlin takes seriously the role of slaves’ agency. While earlier historical scholarship looks at enslaved people for what they were (“slaves”), newer scholarship shows us what enslaved people did, and Berlin is no exception. There are all sorts of interesting characters in here, from Francisco Menéndez—who repelled English attacks on St. Augustine after he fled South Carolina and was given a captaincy by the Spanish Empire—to Henry “Box” Brown—who shipped himself northward in a crate during the antebellum period. In doing so, Berlin shows us that slavery “made both race and class” while “intertwining them together.”

Honestly, I love this book so much. My only regret is not having more time to spend with it.